Philippines bans China's milk products

Liquid and powdered milk, candy, biscuits, chocolate bars and drinks, and yogurt with dairy components from China are now banned in the country.

An analyst at the Bureau of Food and Drugs is set to extract samples from milks products from China. The BFAD refuses to give a list of other products to be tested including those originating from other countries like candies that used milk products from China as ingredients.

The Bureau of Food and Drugs (BFAD) Tuesday imposed the ban amid growing fears over the safety of dairy products made in China where four children have died and more than 50,000 have fallen ill after drinking milk tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Melamine has been found in infant formula and other milk products from 22 of China’s dairy companies. Suppliers trying to cut costs are believed to have added it to watered-down milk because its high nitrogen content masks the resulting protein deficiency.

In an advisory, BFAD Director Leticia Gutierrez directed all importers and distributors of “registered milk products from China to immediately stop temporarily from further importing, distributing, selling and offering for sale the aforesaid products.”

The ban stays “until it is assured that (these) are safe for human consumption,” Virginia Francia Laboy, BFAD Policy, Planning and Advocacy Division officer in charge, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net).

The BFAD refused to give a list of the products to be tested. But the Inquirer saw the names of popular chocolate and candy brands in the matrix being drafted at the agency’s main office in Muntinlupa City.

Though milk and milk products from China would be easy to spot, Laboy acknowledged it would be harder to list food products that might have originated from other countries but used milk-products from China as ingredients.

“We have the records of all registered products. We will have to check them one by one,” she said.

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source: newsinfo.inquirer.net