HEALTH WATCH: MELAMINE ON MILK ON NESTLE

Taiwan: Melamine Found in Nestle Milk Powder

Two of the six banned Nestle milk powder products, KLIM and Nespray, are seen in a trolley after they were removed from the shelves of a supermarket in Taipei TODAY.

Taiwan health officials ordered stores around the island to remove six types of Nestle dairy products after tests found traces of MELAMINE contamination from China.

However, Nestle reconfirmed its products are safe, but it would continue to remove them from stores in Taiwan to obey the government order.

KLIM is a brand of milk under the Nestlé stable. Nestlé is a multinational packaged food company founded and headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland. It resulted from a merger in 1905 between the Anglo-Swiss Milk Company for milk products established in 1866 by the Page Brothers in Cham, Switzerland and the Farine Lactée Henri Nestlé Company set up in 1867 by Henri Nestlé to provide an infant food product. The KLIM brand was acquired in 1998 from Borden, popular in Central America and elsewhere and incorporated in Hispanic recipes as a staple in the United States. Its name comes from spelling the word "milk" backwards.

KLIM was developed as a dehydrated whole milk powder for use in tropical regions, where ordinary milk tended to quickly spoil. It soon became a staple of scientific explorers, geologists, soldiers, and other jungle travelers who needed a lightweight dry ration that would keep for several days in high heat and humidity, even when decanted from its container.

During World War II, KLIM was initially adopted as part of the U.S. Army Jungle ration. As one officer noted, "That quite dense milk powder kept safely for years if its stout can was unopened, and for at least a week in jungle heat if taken out and kept in a waterproof bag. KLIM was later issued by the Red Cross to prisoners of war, particularly those held in German prison camps, in order to increase calories.

The Culprit

Tests in Taiwan have found minor doses of the industrial chemical melamine in milk powders produced in China by the European food giant Nestlé, the Taiwanese health minister said Thursday. The products are being pulled from shelves as China's tainted milk scandal continues to spread. Taiwanese authorities have launched a sweeping inspection of milk powders and related products, including instant coffee, milk tea and baked goods, withdrawing more than 160 products containing Chinese milk. Melamine-contaminated milk has killed four babies and sickened more than 50,000 children in mainland China.

Melamine is an organic base and a trimer of cyanamide. Like cyanamide, it contains 66% nitrogen by mass and, if mixed with resins, has fire retardant properties due to its release of nitrogen gas when burned or charred. Melamine combines with cyanuric acid to form melamine cyanurate, which has been implicated in the Chinese protein export contaminations. Melamine cyanurate, also known as melamine-cyanuric acid adduct or melamine-cyanuric acid complex, is a crystalline complex formed from a 1:1 mixture of melamine and cyanuric acid. Melamine cyanurate is commonly used as a fire retardant. Melamine is also a metabolite of cyromazine, a pesticide.

The Victims Poisoning And Kidney Failure Caused By Melamine Cyanurate

In 2007 a pet food recall was initiated by Menu Foods and other pet food manufacturers who had found their products had been contaminated and caused serious illnesses or deaths in some of the animals that had eaten them. The same year, the US Food and Drug Administration reported finding white granular melamine in the pet food, in samples of white granular wheat gluten imported from a single source in China, as well as in crystalline form in the kidneys and in urine of affected animals. In April 2007, The New York Times reported that the addition of "melamine scrap" into fish and livestock feed to give the false appearance of a higher level of protein. Four days later, the New York Times reported that, despite the widely reported ban on melamine use in vegetable proteins in mainland China, some chemical manufacturers continued to report selling it for use in animal feed and in products for human consumption.

In September 2008, some companies were implicated in a scandal involving milk and infant formula which had been adulterated with melamine, leading to kidney stones and other renal failure, especially among young children. By 22 September, nearly 53,000 people had become ill, 12,800 hospitalized and four infant deaths. Children in Hong Kong and Taiwan have also fallen ill with kidney stones after consuming Chinese dairy products.


Taiwan became the latest to find melamine in imported products, detecting the chemical in six milk products made by Nestle, the Swiss food giant, and banning these from sale on Thursday. Likewise, South Korea said it had banned the import of milk products from New Zealand which were used in baby formula after discovering traces of melamine. Government officials said it was the first case of melamine-tainted food from a country other than China. The Laos government's Food and Drugs Department found two brands of Chinese-made milk powder sold at a market in Vientiane, the capital, to be contaminated with melamine, the country's KPL state news agency said Thursday.

Officials estimate that about 20 percent of the dairy companies tested in China sell products tainted with melamine. First appearing in baby milk formula, melamine has now been found in a range of products containing Chinese milk in what is arguably the worst in a litany of product safety scandals involving Chinese-made goods in recent years. Melamine may have been added to fool government quality tests after water was added to fraudulently increase the milk's volume, since melamine will cause a false increase in the measurement of protein by increasing the nitrogen levels in the milk.

But in an update on Thursday, watchdogs said that no melamine had been found in 418 samples of liquid milk newly produced by the China's major brands. However, as a precautionary measure, perhaps these governments' health ministry would like to consider looking into products such as sweets, breads, biscuits and others manufactured with milk from China before the fraud was brought to the attention of the global community. For sure, these items are already displayed in supermarkets and schools, packed in warehouses and containers, in transit or some still in packaging conveyors. Others may have been consumed . . . who knows.

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