Milk Products

The number of children sickened by tainted milk in China has jumped to nearly 53,000, the government said Sunday as it vowed to crack down on those responsible. More than 80% of the 12,892 children hospitalized in recent weeks were 2 years old or younger, the Health Ministry said in a statement posted on its website. It said most consumed infant formula from the Sanlu Group. An additional 39,965 children received outpatient treatment and were considered "basically recovered," the ministry said.

China's product-quality chief resigned Monday as the government sought to contain a national crisis over tainted baby formula that has sickened 53,000 children and implicated the biggest dairy producers in the country. The official New China News Agency said without explanation that Li Changjiang had stepped down as director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

Even after regulators assured the public that all contaminated baby formula was off the shelves, B.X. Wei wasn't going to feed his 2-month-old son anything that came out of a can. Especially not one made in China. But his wife didn't have enough breast milk for the baby. Then the 30-year-old businessman from Jiangsu province remembered that during his childhood, women would nurse each other's babies if one ran out of milk.

Have you checked out the price of milk lately? Be prepared to be confused, baffled and amazed. What people pay for milk in California is based upon a complex combination of state regulations and retailing strategy. The state determines the minimum price that milk processors -- the companies that bottle milk or turn it into cheese and ice cream -- must pay farmers. The price fluctuates monthly based upon what butter, cheese and powdered milk sell for on commodity exchanges.

Not milk? U.S. food regulators have signaled that they are likely to change the rules on what ingredients can go into 70 styles of cheese, letting a substance called ultra-filtered milk be used to make more products. But one farming group says that ultra-filtered milk isn't enough like milk to use for cheese and could threaten the livelihood of small dairies.

Researchers at UC Davis have genetically engineered goats to produce an antibacterial milk that could eventually help protect children from diarrheal diseases, according to a report released today. The goat milk was engineered to contain lysozyme, an important antibacterial enzyme in human breast milk that is substantially lacking in the milk of dairy animals.

NOTE to the lactose intolerant: When it comes to milk, don't stray far from the federal food guidelines. A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, published in the September issue of Pediatrics, says that even children who can't easily digest lactose should consume some dairy foods to make sure they get enough calcium, vitamin D and other nutrients for healthy growth. "A lot of people say they are lactose intolerant, so they can't have any dairy products," said Dr.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday formally endorsed the meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats as safe, but the agency's 678-page report failed to satisfy critics who cite concerns rooted in ethics, not science. "Neither the agency nor animal scientists are qualified to tell us whether and when it is ethically acceptable for humans to alter the essential nature of animals," said Carol Tucker Foreman of Washington-based Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute.

Inside a courthouse cordoned off by yellow tape and a phalanx of police, the alleged perpetrators of China's tainted-milk scandal are being brought to trial here. But the sensational consumer safety case has been shrouded in so much secrecy that it is hard to say whether justice is in fact being done.

A court handed down a death sentence today to a man who manufactured a milk additive that caused thousands of Chinese babies to develop kidney stones, some of them fatal. The defendant, Zhang Yujun, was the first of 21 defendants to be sentenced by the provincial court in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, in China's most famous product tainting case. Another defendant, Zhang Yanzhang, received a life sentence.