Melamine – First China’s Pet Food Calamity and Now a Baby Formula Crisis

According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, “Melamine is combined with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, a very durable thermosetting plastic, and melamine foam, a polymeric cleaning product.”  In other words, it is the stuff your picnic plastic-wear is made of. It also happens to bond nitrogen in the same way that proteins do, so when companies test the protein content of a food by proxy (via the amount of nitrogen fixed) melamine masks the true amount of protein. Thus, melamine is cheap adulteration material. And, it was used as such when it was put into pet food a while back, and then more recently into milk that consequently was turned into baby formula.

Alone and in small-doses melamine is essentially non-toxic. However, problems surface when it combines with another non-toxic material, cyanuric acid. In the US, the FDA allows cyanuric acid to be sold as supplemental protein for animal feed because some ruminant animals can ferment the acid into protein.

When cyanuric acid comes into contact with melamine it forms melamine cyanurate, which can cause major kidney damage. Melamine cyanurate forms crystals in the renal tubes of the kidneys, causing “damage, failure, and sometimes death“.

China promised to overhaul its food inspection legislation after the pet food scandal. Now, they’ve gone and further stirred up the emotions of the global audience by hurting babies. At least 4 have died and 54,000 are sick, with 13,000 hospitalized for kidney stones.

The question is, though, will China finally get the message about the necessity for manufacturing oversight? Those who have read And the Band Played On are well aware that the Reagan administration was slow to act during the AIDS epidemic until babies were born already infected. Will the people of China be able to demand changes? Will the outside community have to rely on economics to force change? It would be a sad state of affairs if China only focused on retooling their governmental oversight on account of a drop in exports.

What hasn’t been talked about is that the baby formula catastrophe could have been a lot worse. According to one study, breast-feeding is on an upward trend in China, having fell sharply in 70’s and picked up in popularity again, especially in the 90’s. Still, exclusive breastfeeding is only as high as 60% in the first month. Exclusive breastfeeding drops to nearly 0% by the fifth month of the child’s life, but some breast-feeding is stable at 80% throughout the five months.

Unfortunately, we don’t know how much melamine contaminated formula was drunk by the sickened babies. We do know that the melamine crisis has caused a resurgence in breast-feeding in at least some countries.

November 2, 2008  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Health, Politics

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