Melamine - Tainted Food. How Could it be so Pervasive?

Have you followed the current melamine scandal from China? The first scandal involved pet food.

Melamine was first discovered in food during the pet food scandal in 2004 (and again in 2007), which caused the death of many animals in the United States.

The new scandal started with baby milk contamination that hospitalized a bunch of kids.

The scandal broke on 16 July, after sixteen infants in Gansu Province who had been fed on milk powder produced by Shijiazhuang-based Sanlu Group were diagnosed with kidney stones.

The milk was contaminated with melamine. What is melamine?

Melamine is sometimes illegally added to food products in order to increase the apparent protein content. Standard tests such as the Kjeldahl and Dumas tests estimate protein levels by measuring the nitrogen content, so they can be misled by adding nitrogen-rich compounds such as melamine.

In other words, melamine is sometimes added to milk to make the milk appear to be a higher grade or to allow diluting to stretch the milk and earn more profit. (Same reason it was added to pet food)

Over the course of a few weeks melamine was found throughout the Chinese milk supply. Then it was found is many products that contain milk in China. Then it was found on products outside of China that contained Chinese milk products.

Now.... it seems meat may be contaminated.

In an AFP news report, Zhang Zhongjun, programme officer with the Food and Agricultural Organisation, said China’s agriculture ministry was investigating the possibility that melamine had been added to animal feed.
“If the feed is found to be contaminated, then there is the possibility (that pork, chicken, fish and beef could also be contaminated),” he said.
Zhang believed that feed producers could have laced their products with melamine to falsely boost protein content, similar to the methods of milk producers.

The question that I have is, how can melamine be so pervasively used, by so many companies, and so many employees, and there is no whistle blown? How likely do you think it would be for some illegal or immoral practice to be conducted in your plant without someone alerting authorities?