Melamine products found in China

Beijing - Melamine-tainted dairy 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 spokesperson said on 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 spokesperson.

She 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 on Monday.

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 fertiliser.

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. Both melamine and protein are high in nitrogen. 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 distributors, who had been arrested for selling 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 example of how difficult it has been for the government to ensure the safety of food products. Earlier this month, government officials said the Shanghai Panda Dairy had been under a secret investigation for nearly a year before announcing they had been producing melamine-tainted milk.

- AP