Poisoned Milk, and poisoned trust

This is doubly sad, first because there are again reports of intentionally poisoned milk being sold in China, and second because it comes not three years after the first tainted milk scandal.

Two and a half years ago, in September following the Beijing Olympics, it was revealed that SanLu (Three Deers) corporation had been knowingly selling milk tainted with melamine. Melamine is a poisonous chemical which when ingested can cause kidney damage and death. The milk which had been most affected was powdered infant formula.



How does a consumer product company come to knowingly sell poisoned baby formula? Well it seems that suppliers of the raw milk had been watering down their product so as to increase the volume and get more money. Since this was a known practice the milk being purchased was tested for its protein content. Too much water, not enough protein, your milk won't be bought. So unscrupulous milk suppliers started adding a chemical to their watered down milk which would trick the tests into registering a high protein content. And thus that the milk was good.

When this came out it was a huge shock. Infants were getting sick and dying and everyone with young children in the country was justifiably worried. One of my friends in Kaifeng, an assistant professor, has a young daughter who he told me he took to the emergency room to get her checked out just in case. The whole event had a crazy feel to it. It all just seemed too much. The people clamored for justice and retribution. Who could have done such a thing!?

One of the most damning things in this calamity was that the authorities knew about the practice and about the deaths of the children from the melamine laced milk. They had held on to the news and not alerted consumers and parents or tried to pull the contaminated products off the shelves until after the Olympics were over.

All of this deception and destruction has a heavy cost which is not even limited to the deaths and sickenings of thousands of people. The faith in the government to tell the truth has eroded so far in the minds of many Chinese people. I only pointed out the most egregious of the tainted food scandals, which  include everything from sale of used cooking oil to tainted pork to buns filled with ground newspaper to claims of "fake eggs" on sale. Each lie and cover-up only exacerbates the problem. Its hard not to see contemporary China's food scandals and not think of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Will China develop an FDA with real independent power. I hope so but I'm not holding my breath.