Possibly the melamine contamination is partially due to the fact that there really isn't a lot of evidence re melamine toxicity. Ironic, because the reason there isn't that much evidence is that nobody dreamed it would be something that humans would be consuming.

Don't eat babies who have eaten dog food.

because it's not an option. There's been an increase in formula use in China because more and more women are being forced to leave home to look for work, leaving their very young infants with their own mothers. It's not a capricious choice, as it's not a choice at all.

I'm glad someone brought that up. For a column that is pro-woman, that last sentence reeked of shaming.

According to the Washington Post, only 47% of Chinese women breastfeed, and rate around Beijing is 13%. It seems likely that rather than being solely driven by women's employment, low breastfeeding rates are at least partially driven by current desires to be "modern." There is NO excuse for selling tainted baby formula, and guilt tripping women about using formula is unproductive. However, it is true that breastfeeding would eliminate the risk of illness from formula contamination, as well as all the other health risks associated with formula use. In addition to outrage about lack of regulation of formula companies, how about some outrage about short maternity leaves and lack of resources for pumping? Or about lack of education about the importance of breastfeeding? Or about the promotion of formula in the first place? Though formula may be necessary for a limited number of babies, it's still a second-class food.

Adulterated, poisonous food products? Check.

Rampant pollution? Check.

Poor working conditions and workplace safety? Check.

Destroying beloved natural landmarks in the name of progress? Check.

Institutionalized corruption? Check.

Lack of government oversight? Check.

Sounds like they are heading at full steam back to the McKinley era.

This is what I was posting about a few weeks back, when someone was "concerned" about toxins building up in breast milk.

I'm quite confident breast feeding women will never add melamine to their milk while in the breast. And I'm reasonably sure a woman would need to ingest an alarming amount of melamine before it showed up in dangerous quantities in her milk.

Here's the question, though: how much melamine have various manufacturers managed to sneak into formula *before* going this step too far??

- Melamine. yum.

- Shrimp grown literally in shit and antibiotic soaked waters in China.

- Fruit and veg grown in Mexico and South America with cancer causing pesticides.

- Chickens grown their whole lives in trap cages in Arkansas.

- Ocean fish teeming with mercury and heavy metals.

- Amazon rainforest destroying beef.

- Hmm, the GM corn being fed people is killing insects. Wonder what it does to HUMANS...

- Oh yeah, nobody is allowed to test for mad cow disease. Out of sight, out of mind.

- Let's not even get into the tens of thousands of SECRET compounds food companies are ALLOWED to adulterate food with.

We are batting 1000 here with the food, huh? I'm about forgetting what skinny people looked like anymore, everyone is so fat from their bodies fighting off the constant onslaughts of the poisons in the food supply.

What shocked me was hearing last week that the FDA increased its employee count by 1800 people, or 10%.

TEN FUCKING PERCENT???!?!?

What in tarnation does an organization that is willfully and neglectfully poisoning Americans NEED 18 freaking thousand people for????

I guess every employee of the FDA is entitled to line up for their lobbyist handout from the evil food and big pharma companies.

They ought to just open teller windows up front at the FDA, like a bank.

EAT LOCAL. EAT ORGANIC. At least when you can.

Quit supporting the evil food companies.

I agree with Nancy above--China is repeating a number of mistakes it probably didn't have to repeat if it weren't for its desire to climb the economic power ladder as quickly as posible. Maybe with 1.3 billion people, they don't care so much about losing a few dozen kids.

I'm hoping things will improve with time. In the beginning, Japan was also a shame in terms of development--remember when Japanese products used to be worse than anybody else's? No longer so. Maybe China will learn too, in due time. Especially if people keep pressuring the government to do things right. I'm glad at least this is possible, if not other kinds of political activism.

I don't know why anyone would knowingly contaminate babies' milk (and other milk, liquid milk, now it comes out). But, also, 'Chinese authorities' have confessed to having known about this at least one month before they blew the whistle -- or before the whistle was blown.

Continually, and no doubt back centuries, Chinese seem to be run on the avoidance of shame. Do anything to prevent someone else knowing about something (even something pretty tangential) which might make someone disrespect one's 'family'. So the whole of China was made to cow tow, to fall into step, during the Olympic games, and any dissenters were arrested. (Even two elderly women, who had only applied for permission to protest -- in a special protest pen three miles away from the games -- were arrested for their application and sentenced to a year at hard labor. If someone protests, this reflects badly upon the family, and this is disallowed.)

This position, avoidance of shame, is something pervasive in Chinese society. My grandmother and mother, daughters of medical and teaching missionaries, who were brought up in Nanking, ran the family on this premise, that no one should do anything outside the family's rules -- especially if it had to do with sex. And no one could protest. Both activities were punished (my aunt, who ran away with a boy at 16 was made to marry him when they returned after a week, on the chance she might be pregnant, and thus the family would be humiliated -- and likely shunned, set apart from society -- she did get pregnant, over a year later, then divorced, leaving a lonely child; and my own face was slapped when I protested my mother's unjust actions).

China's avoidance of shame has reached shameful proportions. No one will admit a mistake. No one can name a mistake that has been made by an authority. Authorities in China continually insist that they have -- or are still trying to -- recover from the shaming they incurred in the first half of the 20th century, shame of being second-class citizens in their own country, while foreign (U.S., British, other) 'legations', the carving up of their cities, held sway (signs which read 'no dogs or Chinese here' -- in China. But that disappeared in 1949, with the revolution ('liberation'). There have been years to get over it, to become 'OK', to stand up and not feel ashamed of one's past.

I doubt Chinese authorities, or many other Chinese, can even see that this inverted, suffocatingly dysfunctional pattern has become more than dysfunctional, but borders on the psychotic, certainly the criminal. To allow babies to get sick and die due to milk contamination should alert them, but will it? This tragic news SHOULD alert Chinese officials to the extremity and weakness of their dysfunctional Pride.