HONG KONG
—China's tainted milk scandal showed no signs of abating this month, with dozens of new cases of kidney stones reported and the authorities investigating two milk powder manufacturers.
"As of today, we have received details of 81 new cases of children with kidney stones," a spokeswoman for the parents of victims in the southwestern province of Guizhou said.
"The youngest among them is less than three months old," Jiang Yalin said.
Chinese officials said they were investigating the safety of milk products produced by one of the country's largest dairies, Mengniu.
It also said it would probe factories producing Dumex formula. Dumex is a unit of France's Groupe Danone. Both companies insisted there were no problems.
Jiang said many parents had taken their children for checks after hearing reports about Dumex formula.
But on Friday, a government laboratory probing the safety of Chinese-made Dumex brand milk powder said it found no evidence of industrial chemical contamination, official media reported.
The tests, carried out by Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision, found no chemical contamination in any of the more than 30,000 tonnes of powder from which samples had been taken, Xinhua news agency said.
Dumex said in a statement on its Chinese-language Web site that after the milk scandal erupted last September, government-certified laboratories conducted spot checks on 2,651 batches of Dumex products made since April 2007.
None was found to be contaminated with melamine, it said.
But cases of kidney stones continued to be reported across China.
The mother of a child in Chuzhou city in the eastern province of Anhui said her baby was nearly eight months old, and had fallen sick after drinking Dumex infant formula, which is now under investigation by food safety officials.
"Our child...had been drinking Dumex Gold Shield...and had vomiting, stomach-ache and diarrhea around Lunar New Year," the woman, surnamed Shen, said.
"Yesterday we got an ultrasound and they found a stone measuring two mm across in the left kidney."
And a mother in the eastern province of Jiangsu surnamed Bai said her six-month-old son had developed kidney stones just two months after drinking Dumex milk powder.
"We didn't even know, and then later we heard the reports and went to get him checked out," the woman said.
"They found a kidney stone of 0.2 grams on Feb. 12. He has been drinking Dumex milk since December. He drinks a lot, and has been getting through about a tin every three to four days."
Bai said her son had drunk nothing but Dumex milk and water.
Melamine lawsuits
Angry parents have repeatedly tried to file complaints and lawsuits with the courts over the melamine scandal, but with no success reported to date.
Lin Zheng, a member of the legal team representing more than 200 families of children with kidney stones, said the families had filed a lawsuit at the Supreme People's Court in Beijing.
"According to China's Constitution, the court must reply to such lawsuits within seven working days of their being filed, with a decision about whether it has accepted the case or not," Lin said.
The court had not yet responded, he said.
"It is our inalienable right to file such a lawsuit," he said, adding that the next step would be begin back down at the district court level until they found a court that would accept the case.
Spokeswoman Jiang in Guizhou said the parents of affected children were full of "grief and outrage" over the renewed scandal.
"Nobody is investigating why so many of our children have developed kidney stones at such a young age, and yet the authorities have come out with a so-called report into the incident," she said.
"This is all wrong."
Original reporting in Mandarin by Qiao Long and in Cantonese by Fung Yat-yiu. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated by Jia Yuan. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
