Well, possibly. I wonder what percentage of U.S. rice is imported from China these days?
Move aside, melamine. Cadmium-tainted rice might be China’s new scare of the season.
In a recent study, researchers from the Nanjing Agricultural University found 10 to 60 percent of the rice sold in markets in six regions contained cadmium, a heavy metal associated with high blood pressure, fluid accumulation in the lungs and a potentially fatal softening of the bones.
In some samples, the cadmium level was found to be equal to five times of the legal maximum, the researchers said.
A China Daily report on the discovery is careful to include caveats.
For one thing, the report says, the pollution is confined to a few, mostly southern, regions. For another, the samples were taken in 2007 and 2008, according to the findings, originally published in Century Weekly magazine.
(click here to continue reading China’s Newest Food Scare? Cadmium-Tainted Rice – China Real Time Report – WSJ.)