From Natural News:
Up to 90 percent of the infant formula sold in the United States may be contaminated with trace amounts of melamine, the toxic chemical linked to kidney damage, according to recent tests. The FDA’s test results, which the agency hid from the public and only released after the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that Nestle, Mead Johnson and Enfamil infant formula products were all contaminated with melamine. . . .
Prior to these test results being made public, the FDA had published a document on its website that explained there was no safe level of melamine contamination in infant formula. Specifically, the FDA stated, “FDA is currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns.”
Once tests found melamine in U.S.-made formula products, however, the FDA changed its story. As of today, the FDA has now officially declared melamine to be safe in infant formula as long as the contamination level is less than one part per million (1 ppm).
Astonishingly: The FDA has no new science to justify its abrupt decision declaring melamine to be safe!
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when that decision was made.
I am surprised that with all the things you have to do, you still have time to read a lot. How do you have time to juggle all the stuff you have to do? I always wondered ever since I read “self experimentation” because you were able to have a life and record a lot of stuff about yourself for your research.
China Admits Nearly 300,000 Infants Hurt by Melamine
https://genevievelong.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/china-admits-nearly-300000-infants-hurt-by-melamine
It stands to reason that there is some level of melamine that is safe. For instance, one molecule per lifetime is probably safe. Two is probably safe. And how many babies have died? Six, the Chinese say. So let’s say it’s really 60. And let’s say that 6,000 received some meaningful injury of some sort that will manifest itself in the future. No, let’s make that 60,000. How many babies drank the milk? Probably 60 million. So the conclusion is that only 1 in 1,000 babies was harmed by the melamine in Chinese milk. So there is in fact a safe level, and it seems to be way more than 2 molecules per lifetime.
I like the fact that the FDA is coming up with some number, however much of a guesstimate it is. The alternative is to give activists ammunition to make unreasonable demands to make the milk 100.0000 percent free of anything that might speculatively shorten your life by 1 second.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine because of mercury-in-fish activism by ocean conservationists. As a resident of Japan it is bumblebees-can-fly clear that eating an order of magnitude more fish than anyone ever eats in the U.S. is not harmful (and you should probably be reaching the same conclusion in China by now). Yet the FDA’s previous screwup in pulling a low methyl mercury number out of a hat has caused fish eaters/sellers no end of problems and has scared the public away from eating a very beneficial food in favor of manufactured soyburgers.
[Exercise left to the student: Try to follow up on Genevieve’s source in the previous comment. You’ll learn a lot about activist misinformation tactics.]
breastmilk has no melamine.