Ten years after China’s infant milk tragedy, parents still won’t trust their babies to local formula
In late June 2008, urology doctor Zhang Wei treated four babies within 10 days—one just 10-
months old—for kidney stones. It’s a condition that rarely occurs in children and can cause unbearable pain when it does. “This made me tremble as a doctor, I felt there might be a common reason behind these cases,” Zhang told a Chinese newspaper (link in Chinese) later. Zhang was among the first people in China to get an inkling of a growing national disaster that would take the lives of six infants and sicken more than 300,000 babies. On July 16 that year, as Beijing was gearing up to hold the Summer Olympics, Zhang flagged the sudden increase of infant cases to his hospital’s dean, who then reported them to the local health bureau in the northwestern province of Gansu, which in turn took the matter to the national health bureau. But no one could figure out what happened. All the milk powder samples passed qualification tests. It was only two months later, when China declared a national food-safety emergency (link in Chinese), that Zhang found out the culprit was a chemical compound called melamine, used in plastic and fertilizer production, that had made its way into baby formula….. Read