Two China-made milk products sold in the Philippines have tested positive for melamine, health officials said yesterday, ordering that they be removed from store shelves immediately.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque said authorities suspect the products, under the brand names Yili and Mengniu, were illegally smuggled into the country as they do not have labels in English.
Duque played down any fears of a public health scare stemming from consumption of the products — Green Food Yili fresh milk and a Mengniu milk drink.
“There have been no reports coming from our hospitals, whom we ordered to report to us cases of kidney problems that may have some associations with the intake of milk tainted with melamine,” Duque said.
The government has shut down a Manila supermarket found to be selling the two brands, Duque said.
Last month, the government ordered Chinese-made milk products to be removed from grocery shelves after tests revealed widespread contamination with the industrial chemical melamine, which makes products appear to have more protein.
Such products have killed at least four children and sickened 53,000 in mainland China, officials have said.
The health department’s Bureau of Food and Drugs has cleared 28 other China-made products for sale in the Philippines after they tested negative for melamine content, said its laboratory chief, Maria Lourdes Santiago.
The bureau is testing a second batch of 200 mostly Chinese-made dairy products, with results expected next week, Santiago said.
Meanwhile, Vietnam’s health ministry has discovered melamine in 18 products and has ordered importers to recall and destroy them, officials said yesterday.
Recent tests found melamine in dairy products and biscuits imported from China, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, a statement on the Ministry of Health’s Web site said.
The Vietnamese statement did not list all the brand names that tested positive for melamine, but among them were five different varieties of Yili milk from China.
“We will intensify our inspections for melamine contamination to ensure the safety of consumers,” said Nguyen Thi Khanh Tram, vice director of Vietnam’s food safety administration.
Most of the contaminated items were milk and dairy products from China, the ministry said.
However, they also included biscuits imported from Malaysia and Indonesia as well as a powdered dairy creamer imported from Thailand. It was not clear whether the products had been produced in those countries or simply shipped to Vietnam from warehouses there.
Even before the test results were announced, retailers across Vietnam had begun removing tons of Chinese dairy products from their shelves and importers have been destroying them, Vietnamese media has reported.
In South America, Uruguay’s public health ministry banned all dairy imports from China on Thursday, including baby formula.
Health authorities said they have decided to impose “analytical control of all product shipments from China that contain milk or dairy products,” a statement said.
They said “baby feeding formulas from China do not have marketing licenses in Uruguay,” and that Chinese imports in the past year “did not include baby formula.”
Nonetheless, the ban includes baby formula as a health precaution for the population, and both the customs department and the country’s Technological Laboratory have been informed of the instructions, the statement said.
China, trying to limit the damage to its dairy industry, said some dairy products from companies including China Mengniu Dairy Co and Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co were free of melamine.
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS