Resident Fellow Roger Bate

With over 53,000 children sickened from contaminated milk, the head of China's standards watchdog stepped down last week. Meanwhile Prime Minister Wen Jiabao apologized to the public for the four deaths, 104 seriously ill and the 13,000 hospitalized children across China. As confectioner Cadbury is pulling some of its dairy products from as far afield as Europe, the company at the center of the scandal is reported in the official People's Daily as having demanded a cover up from the Shijiazuang city government.

Beijing is attempting to address this latest food scandal to rock China and the cabinet has said that all affected children will get free check-ups and treatment. But countries from around the world are demanding action to prevent the spread of contamination and to demand that future problems are not exported.

Regional nations, notably Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines are testing all and banning many dairy imports from China. The EU has banned milk products from China and countries as far afield as Bangladesh, Brunei, Gabon and Burundi are testing all Chinese dairy imports and banning many.

So while Beijing does all it can to help the sick, makes strong statements about prosecuting the guilty and demands more milk screening in remote areas, the key issue is whether Beijing can do anything to limit future contaminated product scandals?

China's food scandals have generally followed a similar pattern. Someone cuts a corner substituting an unsafe illegal product for a safe legal one; the legal entities trading in the product, which are often unaware of the illegal substitution, at first ignore the problem and then become embarrassed into a recall, often after pressure from foreign governments on Beijing. While Beijing threatens sanctions against the liable companies, including occasionally executing the guiltiest actors, it does little to change the likelihood of another scandal occurring.

This latest scandal follows this worrying tradition. Milk products have been contaminated with melamine. Melamine is normally used in industrial processes, mainly in the manufacturing of plastics. It is rich in nitrogen and since all proteins contain nitrogen, testing for the chemical is the cheapest way to assess whether protein, such as milk protein, is present in significant amounts. Adding melamine to watered down milk can fool the test, providing a very cheap but highly dangerous product masquerading as milk. Unless more sophisticated tests are done by authorities or corporations trading in milk products, melamine contamination will continue to pass unnoticed, until of course it kills.

Melamine contamination of food products is not new. In addition to causing the death of 13 babies in China in 2004, it has also been added to toothpaste and pet food over the past few years, causing sickness in humans and animal deaths around the world.

Yet Chinese food manufacturers still do not routinely test for the product. But even when they do test they do not act. The Sanlu Group, knew for perhaps six months about the current milk contamination and did nothing, and tried to enlist the city of Shijiazhuang in its cover up. When the problem finally came to life three weeks ago it was thanks to a New Zealand company Fonterra, which has a stake in Sanlu, asking the New Zealand Prime Minister to contact the Chinese authorities.

At least 22 other companies have since become involved in the scandal, and milk products made by the Yili, Mengniu and other large groups have been recalled from retailers in China and many other countries. And while Beijing did at least react fairly quickly, its officials incorrectly said none of the products had been exported – delaying any useful response in affected places.

So far 22 people have been arrested, given recent scandals some may well be executed.

EU and U.S. officials are demanding an explanation as to how this problem was allowed to escalate without action. Beijing has reassured Washington and Brussels that it takes the situation seriously, and standards chief Li Changjiang was the first central government official to lose his job over the scandal. His resignation follows the firing of several local officials. But if the Chinese government is serious about combating future problems the first thing it needs to do is improve testing. Accurate results can be achieved quickly with the use of handheld spectrometers, which can assess product veracity within 30 seconds. The Truscan spectrometer produced by Ahura Scientific of Boston in the U.S. is robust and can easily be deployed. Given how many lives are at stake, Chinese authorities should be distributing such devices to their key regulators and demanding Chinese corporations use them or alternative devices to stop problems before they cause more death.

If there is one silver lining to this recent scandal, it is that the Prime Minister and President Hu Jintao have made public statements of sympathy to the afflicted, rather than simply ignoring public concern. The President even blamed some of his officials for turning a blind eye to people's hardships. This is progress. With the previous melamine food scandals and the SARS outbreak, Beijing only issued denials.

But it will still take time for Chinese business to voluntarily withdraw dangerous products, in the mean time, produced in China needs to come with a health warning.

Roger Bate is a resident fellow at AEI.