Melamine – it’s what’s for breakfast!
The Food and Drug Administration said it found “trace levels” of the industrial chemical melamine in one sample of U.S.-made infant formula and in a few samples of other products like nutritional and medical supplements made by U.S. manufacturers of infant formula.
The FDA said, however, the formula and the supplements were safe to consume. “These are extremely low levels,” Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said. “It didn’t cause any concern at all, not from a health standpoint.”
[From FDA Tests Find Melamine Traces in Baby Formula – WSJ.com]
Yeah, why don’t you drink a big glass of melamine then, and we’ll watch.
Eight years (or longer, really) of downsizing the FDA, and similar watchdog agencies has had a real effect: the FDA doesn’t even pretend to be on the side of consumers anymore.
Dr. Sundloff said the melamine detected was tiny. Out of 87 samples, it found one sample with 0.137 parts per million and 0.140 parts per million on a verification test.
Even so, the findings are likely to upset parents who feed formula to their babies. But just how much is at stake for the manufacturers isn’t certain. Infant nutritional businesses are lucrative properties for some big U.S. drug makers, including Abbott, Wyeth and Bristol-Myers, though Wyeth doesn’t make or market its infant formula in the U.S. Mead Johnson’s revenue from its Enfamil infant formula has totaled $872 million so far this year.
Money over public health.