From China - "Got Milk?" Careful, It may be poison.

[rdean]

Infant formula tainted with melamine killed six children in China in 2008 and sickened more than 300,000.

Leedham said leather protein was also more likely to show up in milk powder and other processed dairy than in raw milk.

"I would have thought that the adulteration, if it happens, would happen in the processing later on," he said. "If it's going to be used as a fraudulent way of increasing protein levels, then the big benefits would be in the food processing downstream and it would be much easier to add hydrolyzed protein to a powder mix than to liquid milk."

He also said 6,450 tests in one year didn't seem sufficient for a country China's size.

China On Alert For Leather Protein In Milk

The right wing wants to get rid of regulations in this country so we could be "More Like China". I just don't get it. China now has the biggest rate of birth defects in the world. It's because of their pollution.

 

[strollingbones]

to understand this problem....one must look at the quota system imposed by the government of china on farmers....forcing farmers to go to extreme measures...one stretches the milk with water and then is forced to add a supplement to get the watered down milk to pass tests.....

just another reason to buy american....i was using sil pats made in china but decided to retire them for fear of what is leeching out of them

 

[rdean]

to understand this problem....one must look at the quota system imposed by the government of china on farmers....forcing farmers to go to extreme measures...one stretches the milk with water and then is forced to add a supplement to get the watered down milk to pass tests.....

just another reason to buy american....i was using sil pats made in china but decided to retire them for fear of what is leeching out of them

China is a communist country. Even their unions are "government" sponsored. Talk about government control. And many right wingers, who hate government, view China as a "role model". Maybe they just hate "democratic" government. I don't know what else it could be?

 

[waltky]

Chinese melamine kidney stone milk scandal...

Clues to why most survived China melamine scandal
2/13/13 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Scientists wondering why some children and not others survived one of China's worst food safety scandals have uncovered a suspect: germs that live in the gut.

In 2008, at least six babies died and 300,000 became sick after being fed infant formula that had been deliberately and illegally tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. There were some lingering puzzles: How did it cause kidney failure, and why wasn't everyone equally at risk? A team of researchers from the U.S. and China re-examined those questions in a series of studies in rats. In findings released Wednesday, they reported that certain intestinal bacteria play a crucial role in how the body handles melamine.

The intestines of all mammals teem with different species of bacteria that perform different jobs. To see if one of those activities involves processing melamine, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Shanghai Jiao Tong University gave lab rats antibiotics to kill off some of the germs - and then fed them melamine. The antibiotic-treated rats excreted twice as much of the melamine as rats that didn't get antibiotics, and they experienced fewer kidney stones and other damage.

A closer look identified why: A particular intestinal germ - named Klebsiella terrigena - was metabolizing melamine to create a more toxic byproduct, the team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Previous studies have estimated that fewer than 1 percent of healthy people harbor that bacteria species. A similar fraction of melamine-exposed children in China got sick, the researchers wrote. But proving that link would require studying stool samples preserved from affected children, they cautioned.

Still, the research is pretty strong, said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the new study. More importantly, "this paper adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that microbes in the body play a significant role in our response to toxicity and in our health in general," Gilbert said.

Source

 

[waltky]

Got milk?...

Serbian Scandal Highlights Fungal Poison Danger
March 02, 2013 WASHINGTON — A scandal over contaminated milk in the Balkans highlights a global threat to food safety: Aflatoxins are naturally occurring poisons produced by fungi that infect many food crops worldwide.

Serbian Agriculture Minister Goran Knezevic says the country’s milk is safe to drink. Tests late last month had found aflatoxins in some milk at levels higher than permitted under a law passed two years ago. The government has now raised those limits ten-fold. But Knezevic notes that this higher level is considered safe in the United States and many other countries. Aflatoxins can get into milk through contaminated animal feed. Keeping it out of feed has been a challenge recently, and not just in Serbia, says U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher Peter Cotty. “We have seen increased levels of aflatoxins this year associated with the very hot, dry conditions we had, particularly in our maize production regions in the U.S," he said.

Heat and drought put stress on crops, making it easier for the fungi that produce aflatoxin to move in. Cotty says while high levels of the chemical in any food are a concern. “We’re more concerned when aflatoxins occur in a staple food that people consume a great deal [of]," he said. For example, in parts of Africa, people eat maize at every meal. And the warm environment and poor drying and storage practices make aflatoxin a perennial threat. There was a major outbreak in 2004, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture’s Ranajit Bandyopadhyay. “More than 200 people in Kenya died due to aflatoxin poisoning. However, even more dangerous is its slow poisoning effect," he said.

The poisonous fungi growing on peanuts, maize and other crops in these areas are a leading cause of cancer and more, says Peter Cotty. “They’re also associated with stunting in humans, reduced development in children. They’re also associated with reduced functioning of the immune system. And they can actually cause your liver to die,” he said. To lower the risk, farmers in Africa, the U.S. and elsewhere are fighting fungus with fungus.

In a natural method Cotty and Bandyopadhyay developed, farmers spread their fields with grain infected with fungi very similar to those producing aflatoxin. “And those fungi compete with aflatoxin producers and displace them in the environment. And that results in 80 to 90 percent reduction in toxin in crops with a single application,” said Cotty. But testing for the toxin along the supply chain is the last line of defense. And it’s a test Serbia’s dairy farmers insist they’ve passed.

Video Source

 

[hjmick]

I just waned to check this thread to see if and how Deanny boy linked the story to to Republicans...

He didn't fail us...


Christ, boy, you're like a broken record...