by Anna Ford
December 2011
The same company responsible for melamine tainted milk in 2008 which killed 6 children and sickened 300,000 is back in the news with a new scandal.
December 25th, 2011 Mengniu Dairy Co. says is has destroyed milk products found to be contaminated with a carcinogenic substance called aflatoxin M1 which is highly correlated with liver cancer. Mengniu has also issued an apology stating “We will earnestly draw lessons from this incident a major, national authorities and sincerely accept the supervision of the whole society, strict implementation of the quality of the state and enterprises and testing standards, from every of starting, really good quality.” This news comes on the heels of Mengniu beginning the redistribution of their dairy products in Hong Kong where they previously had been banned since the 2008 melamine milk scandal.
Typical milk products are allowed to have 0.5 micrograms of aflatoxin M1 per kilogram, the contaminated products contained 140% more than the maximum allowable per kilogram. Aflatoxin M1 is created by lactating animals that are typically fed harvested grains that have either molded during storage or before harvesting due to adverse weather and improper drying after harvesting. Unfortunately, the toxin cannot be destroyed by using higher temperatures during the pasteurization process and so the milk must be destroyed.
Additionally, Rich Dairy Co. also had milk products that were found to be contaminated with aflatoxin M1 with 0.9 micrograms per kilogram found in a test batch.
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I’ve just been to the fridge and found Mengniu yogurt – it’s now in the bin. Hard to know what to look for, though as the packaging was just characters, but there was some cello tape on the outside with the name in Pinyin. It’s really hard to know which brands to trust with Chinese milk! I’m starting to understand why so many friends use UHT foreign milk instead.
We just buy Bright milk and yogurt with a sprinkling of Yakult…I can recognize the characters for Bright, as well it comes in a 1.5L size so that’s good with the amount of milk we drink in a day.
Mengniu makes Pure Milk in the green packages like in the photo above. The other thing to consider is that the contaminated milk was packaged in 250ml Tetra-Pak pouches. But who is to say that there aren’t other types from the same manufacter that either haven’t been tested or slipped by.
One of my concerns as a previous science teacher is the idea of biomagnification…we consume a toxin from a food source (dairy cows) that consumes it from a food source (moldy corn theoretically) and along the way because it cannot be processed and passed out I wonder if the effects of the toxin are magnified like with DDT and mercury.
This toxin is naturally occuing in nature…it just happens but how can it be prevented in the future and will Mengniu make the right steps to use clean feed in the future.
FYI Mengniu stock dropped 66% today after the story broke yesterday.