New melamine-tainted milk products pulled from shelves in southern China

Melamine-tainted milk products found in China

BEIJING — Melamine-tainted milk products have been pulled from convenience store shelves in southern China more than a year after hundreds of thousands of children were sickened in a massive milk safety scandal, a government spokeswoman said Monday.

Frozen milk products and cartons of milk dating from early 2009 were taken off the shelves after health inspectors tested them and found them positive for the toxic chemical melamine, said Ling Hu, a Guizhou provincial government spokeswoman.

Tainted products from three companies, Shandong Zibo Lusaier Dairy, Liaoning Tieling Wuzhou Food and Laoting Kaida Refrigeration were found in more than a dozen convenience stores around the province, Ling said.

Laoting Kaida Refrigeration was among companies named in the original melamine scandal in 2008, when six children died and 300,000 were sickened after drinking baby formula contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical used in the manufacture of plastics and fertilizer.

Investigators found that melamine, which can cause kidney stones and kidney failure, had been added to watered-down milk to fool inspectors testing for protein. Dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers were punished.

Since the scandal broke, China vowed to implement stricter safety measures and step up inspections on the dairy industry. Ling said health officials have continued to crack down on distributors who sell melamine-tainted milk to stores, but some distributors, wrongly assuming that the government has scaled back its crackdown, continue to sell it.

Ling said the provincial health bureau was checking to see why the products were not pulled from the shelves earlier. Calls to the Guizhou health bureau ran unanswered Monday.

Ling said distributors who had been arrested for selling the tainted milk had likely led authorities to the convenience stores where the product was found. She had no other details and said the investigation was still under way.

The case was the latest showing how difficult it has been for the government to police the industry. Earlier this month, government officials said the Shanghai Panda Dairy Co. had been under a secret investigation for nearly a year before announcing they had been producing melamine-tainted milk.