The melamine-tainted food scandal has taken a couple of bizarre twists.
First, Britain’s Food Standards Agency said late last week that a Chinese-made novelty food product sold in U.K. sex shops has been taken off the shelves after being found to be contaminated with melamine. A FSA spokesperson said: “This is a first. We’ve never had to put out an alert before on “willy spread” – chocolate-flavoured or otherwise.” I think that is what is the known as British understatement.
Second, 1,500 dogs being bred for their fur have died after eating contaminated feed. The deaths are thought to have occurred over the past two months on a raccoon dog farm in Liaoning. The AP quotes Zhang Wenkui, a veterinary professor at Shenyang Agriculture University and who performed autopsies on a dozen of the dogs, as saying, “First, we found melamine in the dogs’ feed, and second, I found that 25 percent of the stones in the dogs’ kidneys were made up of melamine.”
Last year, dozens of dogs and cats in the U.S. died after eating melamine-tainted pet food and this year a lion cub and two baby orangutans developed kidney stones after being fed with milk powder made by the Sanlu Group, which is at the center of the tainted diary products crisis that has left four people dead and hospitalized more than 50,000 children.
The two incidents only raise more questions about how far melamine has penetrated the food chain and whether the effort to regulate it is being overwhelmed.
China Bystander 