Category: Health and Medicine

UPDATED UPDATE: Two men have been served a death sentence for their involvement in China’s melamine contaminated milk scandal. The former boss of the Sanlu dairy at the centre of the scandal was given life imprisonment. 19 other sentences handed down by the court in northern China, where Sanlu is based, are of lower severity.

More than 200 families whose babies were hospitalised after drinking infant milk formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine are taking their case to China’s highest court after being repeatedly ignored by lower courts, according to an AP report.

An earlier report revealed that the parents of an infant who died after drinking melamine milk have been paid 200,000 yuan (about $30,000) in compensation by the dairy company at the heart of the scandal, New Zealand owned Sanlu.

A report from Reuters says that the contaminated milk powder killed at least six children and sickened almost 300,000 last year. Many parents whose children were affected are hoping those responsible for the contamination will face the death penalty.

Now that the scandal is not so prominent in the media, investors are moving back in on China, Farming UK reports that Henry George Roberts company KKR & Co intend to invest US$100 million into the dairy industry in China. “Investing in China’s largest producer and distributor of fresh milk, the American company are gambling on the recent melamine scandal being behind them,” the magazine says. “The recent scandal in China over the use of melamine in milk, to raise the protein levels, has seen the values in the industry plummet.”

Reuters and others report that China now plans to impose production controls on melamine so that the melamine in milk scandal may never happen again. At the height of the debacle hundreds of products, not just infant formula, on supermarket shelves across the globe were tainted with the “Made in China” label. Thousands of visitors to the Sciencebase site over the last few months have arrived to get more information as the story unfolded. I will report on any subsequent developments as soon as they happen.

I’m forever fending off the alternative medicine brigade who seem to clump around this website and email me all kinds of supposed miracle cures that will spell the end of all health ills. One herbal remedy I recently focused on is Rhodiola rosea, in which I critiqued a promotional email from a vested interest in the product. They made all kinds of claims for this material on the back of very limited clinical trials. Needless to say advocates of alternative medicine commented aplenty.

As a chemist, I take what I hope is a healthy and skeptical view of all the biochemical and physiological claims these people make for their products. I’m just worried that there are so many people who are perhaps desperate to fix their lives that they become easy prey for such marketing. Anyway, for those who feel a chemist has no place criticising their beloved remedy, I turned to a pharmaceutical expert in Sheryl Torr-Brown of the Future Trends in Health blog to provide some additional support for my argument. She has many years experience in pharmaceutical science and has no axe to grind and offers an honest appraisal of my original post and some of the comments left by Sciencebase readers.

A glance at the scientific literature covering this herb seems to be minimal and biased in the main, she told me, and as such she agrees with my argument.

“When dealing with alternative medicine,” she says, “it is not enough to be right if you want to avoid the attacks. You also have to be sensitive to the highly personal views of those who find benefit in the drug albeit most likely due to placebo effect.”

This is perhaps an important point. Yes, the placebo effect is valid, but these remedies are usually very expensive and people are often spending their hard-earned money on what amounts to sugar pills, something that should be avoided perhaps especially in the current economic climate when every penny counts.

“A major point that most of the non-scientific public do not understand is that there is no such thing as a safe drug, natural or not,” adds Torr-Brown, “The dose is the poison, as the father of modern toxicology, Paracelsus said in the fifteenth century. Anything and everything will be toxic if you have enough of it or it gets into the wrong place. Unfortunately, people are tired of Big Pharma advertising and the media frenzy around drug withdrawals.”

She points out that ‘natural’ is sounding better and better to many folks, despite the existence of natural belladonna, natural cobra venom, oh, and natural background radiation. In the age of the Internet, it is now very easy to get positive anecdotes about anything. “Basically, one can decide what one wants to believe and then go find the evidence to support it,” Torr-Brown adds, “For scientists, we look for controlled studies to prove a point, whereas the general public are happy with a personal story or two of success.”

Many people, including several of the original, negative commenters on my R rosea post, are grasping to find something that works for them. “You cannot discount [some of these views] from a human perspective, but it makes no sense scientifically, adds Torr-Brown, “I am shocked by the number of people I know who pay huge amounts of money for the latest panacea only to give it up after a couple of months, usually due to lack of interest.”

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The melamine in milk scandal continues to draw interest. You recall, across Asia, in particularly in China, infant formula milk was discovered to be contaminated with a starting material for making plastics and fire retardant materials, melamine. Thousands of babies were hospitalised with possible renal failure, and several died.

But, could some good have come out of this scandal? Apparently, breast-feeding rates have bounced back across Asia, according to some reports and a roundtable, Secure nutritious diet: Save children’s lives, organised jointly by Save the Children UK and others is using the melamine scare to help promote the breast is best message. It has been demonstrated time and again that breastfeeding reduces infant mortality rates particularly in the developing world. One wit even suggested that the melamine contamination was done deliberately to promote breastfeeding, a nonsense, obviously.

Others are now reporting that the formula manufacturers are hoping to restrict this renewed enthusiasm for breastfeeding by heavy promotion of their products even if they are in breach of WHO guidelines on marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Others benefiting from the melamine scandal, although not in the same cynical way are chemical analysis companies, who, according to the Boston Globe are seeing improved business as food safety scares raise the profile of state-of-the-art testing equipments, including melamine test kits. The Gainesville Sun even reported on a woman who had developed her own testing kit for melamine.

As was mentioned in a comment on a previous melamine post, the US FDA has updated its import alert on melamine: “Detention without physical examination of all milk products, milk derived ingredients and finished food products containing milk from china due to the presence of melamine and/or melamine analogs.”