1500 dogs dead

[Ed62]

This is just a warning. Please don't make it political. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081020/...a_tainted_milk

Ed

[MikeMcCoy]

We keep seeing articles like this but I haven't read anything about how melamine gets from synthetic products to food products.

I can honestly say I've never seen chocolate body spread.

[cabinetman]

I would rather read about something else.
.

[Gator95]

Melamine contamination is not an accident, it is intentional.

Most assays for protein just measure nitrogen. Nitrogen content is used as quality control for a variety of food goods. Any cheap, odorless nitrogen compound can be sued to fool the assay, and it looks like this is happening.

[jackellis]

Melamine is added to milk and other food products by unscrupulous processors. Apparently certain kinds of tests for protein content are fooled by the presence of the stuff, which is how it ended up in baby formula.

[dlminehart]

Apparently melamine is cheap and readily available in China, since it's used as a source of nitrogen in fertilizer.

[dbhost]

How could this be political? It's internal to China, it's business to business, and it's tainted products. I have no idea how industrial chemicals such as this get into food supplies, but it happens a lot. Consumers simply need to be on the lookout for this garbage.

Ah, others answered my question while I was posting it...

I guess to be safest, just don't buy Chinese products. Kind of hard to do these days though...

[Uncle Cracker]

To amplify what was said above, many producers of milk and other food products routinely "water down" their product to produce a higher yield. Since the protein-content tests are put in place to determine whether this has been done, those greedy ones who really want to "lean out" the product must falsely elevate the protein content to compensate and conceal their fraud. Melamine is a cheap additive which serves this purpose. The problems have only recently come to the surface because the suppliers have become greedier and greedier, and have elevated the practice to toxic levels. It seems there are always those for which enough is not enough...

[LCHIEN]

remember last year, all the dogs and cats that died in the us when they ate pet food with wheat gluten contaminated with melamine.

That episode, the baby-milk issue and this dog issue are basically a fraud issue compounded by simple quality control not intended to catch fraud where simple watering down has been elevated to techniques of additives designed to fool the QC.