China's Milk Scandal

Due to the infamous China's Milk Scandal, I've been getting emails and smses of reminders and warnings. Among the items banned/recalled are:

• M&M's
• Snickers
• Mento's Yoghurt bottle
• Dove choc
• Oreo wafer sticks
• Monmilk
• Dutchlady sterilised milk(strawberry flavoured)
• Wall's all natural mango, mini poppers ice-cream
• Magnum ice cream
• Mini Cornetto ice cream

In case you were still wondering, there had been a sudden rise in infants turning up at hospitals in China with kidney stones after drinking formula milk.
In the past three years, prices for feed, fuel and other costs rose — feed by as much as 30 percent. Further pressures came last year when Beijing enacted price controls to tame double-digit inflation for food.

Melamine, a relatively cheap binding agent used in plastics and as a flame retardant, is rich in nitrogen, fooling widely used tests that check for protein. When mixed with formaldehyde, it dissolves in water.

Milk collectors found themselves squeezed between the farmers asking for more money and the processors who demanded that prices be held down.That squeeze gave suppliers incentives to tamper with the raw milk, watering it down and then adding Melamine to avoid detection of the watered down milk.

It is kind of sad to learn that human beings have gone to that level of not caring about another life, especially babies' in this case. More than 50,000 babies were affected, accompanied with cases of death.
- source: yahoo news