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Apparently someone at Sanlu must have been paying attention in their Managerial Accounting class but skipped the whole ethics semester!

This past summer, as I am sure we all remember, there was a recall of nearly all fresh tomatoes available. I could not tell you how many times I was asked if the tomatoes we were selling where I work were involved in the recall due to the finding of salmonella on a bunch of bad fruit.

I realize that as U.S. consumers go, tomatoes are near the top of produce sales nearly everywhere in the country, but it takes something like a government recall to really show you just how popular an item is, especially when people are told that they should not buy them. (Some people braved the storm and bought them anyway, which turned out to be a fluke because tomatoes were never proven to be the root cause of the problem. As of the time of this printing, the FDA still has not found a definitive answer for what caused the salmonella outbreak.)

If only this were the case currently troubling thousands of Chinese families. Due to lax governmental standards for food safety and a number of high-up government officials responsible for food testing, nearly 53,000 Chinese infants and toddlers have had to be hospitalized and four have died due to baby formula tainted with melamine. Let’s put that into a perspective we can understand: imagine nearly the entire city of Wauwatosa suddenly having to be hospitalized. More than 50,000 people is more than the multitude of fans that crammed inside Miller Park this past Sunday to see the Brewer’s clinch a playoff spot for the first time since this writer was three.

Now for those of us who are not chemistry majors, melamine is an organic compound that, when combined with formaldehyde, creates melamine resin, a very durable plastic which would not be good for anyone to ingest. I can already hear you asking, “So why in the world is it in the baby formula in the first place?” Well, apparently to attempt cutting costs and to make a few more bucks off the billions of Chinese people who use this formula, the owners of the dairy production facilities. Also in this case, Sanlu, the largest dairy supplier of milk for baby formula used in China, decided to add the melamine to some watered-down milk for two reasons. First, when there is melamine present when it is tested, the nitrogen level reads a false positive so that it looks like there is enough protein in the milk and no one will suspect that anything has been altered. And second, by watering down their milk supply there is more “milk” to send to the formula company. The Chinese government is now estimating that nearly 20 percent of the current supply of baby formula has been tainted with this chemical. Apparently someone at Sanlu must have been paying attention in their Managerial Accounting class but skipped the whole ethics semester!

Due to the toxic effects of the melamine, there could very well be a population crash in China during the lifetime of the children who survive this ghastly ordeal. For the most part, there was not enough of the melamine to cause a widespread loss of life, and while there have been four deaths already, we can only hope that the rest of these 53,000 infants and toddlers will make as full a recovery as they are able to. Most of the medical problems facing these little ones now include reproductive system damage, kidney damage and failure, kidney stones and a higher potential for bladder cancer.

So where do we go from here? Obviously the United States is not in dire enough need of formula that we are importing these products, so the possible threat of children here in the States becoming poisoned from tainted formula is slim to none. Is this just another prime example of how the Chinese are emerging as a major world player and how they have been more or less sucked into the 21st century?

But they are still dealing with turn-of-the-19th-century cultural issues, an evolving culture that is trying to keep up with the times and the rest of the world, but that still has some things to learn. Yes, their technological advances have been phenomenal, as is evident by the recent explosion of advances in their space program. But they are trying to “keep up with the Joneses” while more than half of the citizens of their own nation are still living in sustainable farming communities.

Even if they try to focus the blame of this problem on “not knowing any better,” they still have a gigantic problem to deal with. Granted that the number of children affected by this equates to .0003 percent of the overall population of China, 53,000 people is nevertheless far too many people to go unnoticed by the world stage. The firing of a few government officials (which has already happened) will not solve this, and I don’t think that there will really be a workable solution. I think that ultimately this is one of those horrific historical events that will probably be forgotten by Christmas. All we can hope is that we learn that poisoning a bunch of people is not a good way to make a quick Yuan.

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