Stores across China rushed to take Sanlu baby milk powder off shelves on Friday after a late Thursday announcement by the company and the Ministry of Health confirmed consumers' widespread suspicion that the product was to blame for dozens of infant kidney stone cases and one death.

Sanlu Group, a leading Chinese dairy producer, said it discovered its baby milk powder products were contaminated by the chemical melamine. It decided to recall an estimated 700 tons of the problematic formula produced before August 6.

Already, dozens of babies had fallen ill in at least eight provincial areas and one of them, in the northwest Gansu Province, had died.

In Gansu alone, 59 babies, mostly under a year old, were hospitalized after consuming the bad powder.

No one can tell at this stage how many new cases will be reported. However, similar numbers are popping up across China, in Shaanxi Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in the northwest, Shandong, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces in the east and in the central provinces of Hubei and Hunan.

All the babies are from rural areas and are bottle-fed either because their mothers don't have enough milk for health reasons, or because their parents are away working in cities and have left them under someone else's care.

Families say they chose Sanlu because it is one of the biggest domestic milk brands, and because its price, 18 yuan (US$2.6) for a 400g pack, is quite reasonable.

In 2004, 13 babies died of malnutrition in Anhui and another 171 were hospitalized after consuming shoddy infant milk powder that contained too little protein.

In the latest scandal, all the victims' families claimed they bought the big brand from big stores. So what went wrong?

"My son is eight months old and consumed 44 packs of Sanlu milk powder so far," said Cui Wenhong, a peasant woman from Wuwei, a city in Gansu.

Her son, Meng Fanwen, had undergone surgery to remove stones in both kidneys. The family spent 12,000 yuan in medical expenses, three times their annual income. Expenses continued to mount.

With stones in their kidneys or urinary tract, the babies couldn't urinate for three to four days, and suffered fever and vomiting.

The No. 1 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army in the Gansu capital Lanzhou, removed uric acid stones from eight babies. The kidney stones were nearly 1 cm in diameter, something rare even in adults.

The local Shijiazhuang government claimed melamine was added to raw milk, which Sanlu bought from dairy farms to produce its powder. The chemical would make the milk look good even though it had been diluted with water.

Melamine, also known as tripolycyanamide, is a chemical frequently used to produce low-end furniture and to make plastic. It is considered slightly toxic, therefore all kitchen utensils containing it state clearly "not suitable for microwave."

Health experts say constant exposure to the chemical could cause kidney dysfunction even in adults.

But melamine has one advantage: it is nitrogen rich, which leads chemists to suspect it was added to dairy foods to make it seem full of protein.

The current standard tests for protein in bulk food ingredients measure only nitrogen levels.

Despite Chinese support for domestic brands, society cannot help getting angry at Sanlu and the quality watchdog. When problems arise it's always easy to blame someone else the way Sanlu has done to dairy farmers and milk dealers. But isn't the company itself to blame for the tragedy? Those children could be healthy had the company conducted its own quality control.

Yet, until Friday afternoon, not a word was said of the incident on the company's website, let alone an apology.

The quality inspection administration, too, has a larger role to play in facing the country's abundance of product safety problems, ranging from milk powder, seafood, pork and duck eggs to toothpaste and children's wear, among others, in recent years.

In an internal meeting on Thursday, a Gansu provincial health department spokesman said he received reports from a hospital on July 16 of the rare kidney disease among infants.

"Sixteen babies were hospitalized in the first half of this year, all aged between five to 11 months," the spokesman said. "All of them had drunk Sanlu milk powder for months."

He said the problem was immediately reported to the Ministry of Health and an "epidemic survey" was conducted accordingly.

However, there seemed no food and safety survey had been done. Otherwise, the health, and even lives, of many infants could have been saved.

Now that China's economy is growing by double digits year after year and the overall quality of people's life is improving, the crucial and pressing question is how the children, who are actually the country's future, are fed.

Better governance, plus more responsibility are called for to solve China's food safety problems.

(Xinhua News Agency September 13, 2008)