China to shut nearly 50% of dairies after safety audit

[Viva_La_Revolution]

Source: BBC

Nearly half of China's 1,176 dairies are being shut down after failing to obtain new licences, the country's quality inspection agency says.

It says that 533 dairy producers have been ordered to halt productions after a government safety audit.

The announcement comes as China tries to shore up its milk industry after a baby milk health scandal in 2008.

At least six babies died and another 300,000 were made ill by drinking infant formula tainted with melamine.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12947213?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[CountAllVotes]

1. and China is the new #1 economy in the world supposedly

and still their babies drink toxic milk laced with melamine? :wtf:

:kick: & recommend!

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. That is not all. Have you of scandal of "leather milk" in China???

"For years Chinese dairy producers have been making trips to the local tannery, collecting the chemical scraps left over from the leather softening process, putting it into milk, and thereby boosting the milk’s protein content as measured in tests.
But the chemicals they are adding—hydrolyzed leather proteins, sodium and potassium dichromate, the chemical hexavalent chromium (CrVI)—cause cancer.
China State Council Food Safety Administration issued a notice on Feb. 13 that since July 2010 they have uncovered 40 illegal dairy product manufacturing and sales facilities. A total of 2,131 tons of tainted milk powder were confiscated."
and
n March 2009, the Chenyuan Dairy Company in central China's Zhejiang province was shut down by authorities after leather protein was found in its products, the official China Daily newspaper reported Friday. It didn't say if anyone was sickened in that case.

Peter Leedham, a China-based food testing executive, said leather protein emerged as a dairy additive in the wake of the deadly melamine scandal.

"When the melamine issue broke and everybody started being able to detect melamine in milk, unscrupulous producers tried to find an alternative way, something that supplemented the protein in milk, so what they used, very cleverly, was the hydrolyzate of bovine leather," Leedham said. "Because it's actually protein and derived from a cow, it's almost impossible to detect as an additive."

Google "leather milk" and all sorts of the stories will pop up. China now claims it has shut down the offending factories, but since the protein is so hard to detect, they can't be sure they have them all shut down.

[saras]

3. Ick.

Although the protein is hard to detect, it should be easy enough to detect the impurities characteristic of leather processing. Chromium, in particular, can be detected in minute quantities, and shouldn't be in the milk normally.

[TheMadMonk]

4. Hence I suspect what gets turned into "leather milk" is the scraps...

...and trimmings taken from the hides BEFORE they are tanned. The risk is that tanneries are not set up for food handling and that there are no propper barriers in place to prevent low level contamination.

Properly made, there is no reason why such a "protein booster" can't be a safe product. However, I can not see any way in which it could ever possibly be an ethical one.