Published: Wednesday October 29, 2008 MYT 1:09:00 PM
Second batch of Chinese eggs in Hong Kong tainted
HONG KONG (AP) - A second batch of Chinese eggs has been found to contain an excessive amount of the industrial chemical melamine, the Hong Kong government said, as a new food safety problem on the mainland expanded.
Melamine was recently detected in Chinese dairy products blamed for sickening 54,000 children and linked to the deaths of four infants. More than 3,600 children remain sick, health officials say.
The same problem surfaced in Chinese eggs over the weekend when tests by the Hong Kong government found the chemical in egg imports from the mainland.
The latest batch of eggs found to be tainted, taken from a local restaurant, were processed by Jingshan Pengchang Agricultural Product Co. in China's central Hubei province, the Hong Kong government said in a statement late Tuesday.
The eggs contained melamine with a concentration of 2.9 parts per million. The legal limit for melamine in foodstuffs in Hong Kong is 2.5 parts per million, the government statement said.
Calls to a company official listed on the Web site of Jingshan Pengchang Agricultural Product Co. went unanswered.
An earlier batch of eggs, produced by China's Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group in the northeastern port city Dalian, was found to contain 4.7 ppm of melamine.
Commenting on that batch, Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow said the melamine may have come from chicken feed given to the chickens that laid the eggs.
A Chinese agricultural official, Wang Zhicai, was quoted as echoing that theory in the Beijing News newspaper on Tuesday. Wang reportedly said melamine is not an animal feed additive and is banned from being mixed in.
In the scandal involving dairy products, authorities say middlemen apparently added melamine to milk they collected from farmers to sell to large dairy companies. The suppliers are accused of watering down the milk and then adding the nitrogen-rich chemical to make it seem higher in protein when tested.
Melamine is used in the manufacturing of plastics, fertilizer, paint and adhesives.
Health experts say ingesting a small amount poses no danger, but in larger doses, the chemical can cause kidney stones and lead to kidney failure. Infants are particularly vulnerable.
A 10-kilogram (22-pound) child would have to eat 24 of the eggs and a 60-kilogram (132-pound) adult 283 eggs to reach their daily tolerable intake of melamine, the Hong Kong government said. - AP
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