Tainted Baby Milk

It's very disturbing to learn that 1/5 of companies producing milk in China had melamine in their products to water down milk to cover up the resulting protein deficiency. Melamine is a toxic chemical without nutritional value but is high in nitrogen making products appear higher in protein. The chemical is actually used in plastics and fertilizers. The baby milk powder with melamine has been blamed in the deaths of four babies and more than 6,000 others have been sickened while some 1,300 babies, mostly newborns, remain hospitalized with 158 suffering from acute kidney failure. There had been questions about how Sanlu Group Co. and the Chinese government officials are handling this milk scandal. Apparently the company already received complaints about its formula as early as March and tests revealed the contamination by early August, just before the Olympics but only went public on September 11 after its New Zealand stakeholder told the New Zealand government, which then informed Chinese government.

A generation ago, women had little choices besides breast-feeding, now Chinese women who try to make a living and work outside of home after giving birth have dozens of brands of formula to choose from in the supermarket, not knowing that they can be harmful to their babies. An 11-month old baby with two large kidney stones, had been drinking Sanlu formula since she was born because both her parents work. The parents became puzzled by their baby's fever and dark urine, but it never occurred to them that she had kidney stones from drinking the baby formula. Now hundreds of Chinese parents are demanding refunds and asking what they can safely feed their children.

In my opinion, this is an outright case of greed where bottom line figures are more taken into consideration than the welfare of the consumers. Now how do we know which baby formula to trust? Maybe we should now scrutinize the ingredients in some other baby milk product coming from China. What do you think?