Why put melamine in milk

How did melamine find its way in infants' milk? This story of sick Chinese infants isn't the first fatal health issue in China. If you can remember about a year ago, United States had a pet food scare when it was found out that dogs and cats' food contained melamine. It was told that this chemical is to be blamed for the death of some and sickness of thousands of pets. The FDA has identified some of the ingredients were made in China (Source).

According to New York Times Beijing, melamine was added to foods to make them appear higher in protein and have more nutritional value. 

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Producers trying to cut costs often dilute milk with water, which lowers the nutrition level. But the addition of melamine, which is high in nitrogen, helps the milk appear to meet nutrition standards by artificially raising its protein count.

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The University of Maine Food Science and Human Nutrition Department's Brian Perkins said that 

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“In the late 1970's, Italian researches completed a study that showed that 70 percent of fish and meat meal contained melamine,” Perkins explained. “By 1988 these researchers showed the number of melamine-positive fish and meat meals was reduced to about 5 percent. This indicates that melamine may have been in our animal feeds for some time, but hopefully not in food for human consumption.”

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I am quite confused. If melamine in food is nothing new, then, relatively, it might not be toxic or else, these fatalities could have occured during the last three decades that the tainting is being done. There are a lot of newspapers that identified (directly or indirectly) melamine to be the culprit in these deaths and illness but I have never read any report that actually identified the actual concentration of melamine in any these food products. 

Image from University of Guelph

The electron microscope image above shows crystals of the type found in the urinary tracts of cats affected by pet food contaminants. The report I read in an article from Cornell University, there was no direct link between melamine and what happened to the pets.

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Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine Dean Donald Smith joined a panel of experts at a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) March 30 press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce that both Cornell and the FDA had independently identified a contaminant called melamine in samples of recalled pet food and in suspect wheat gluten used in its manufacture. Melamine is a chemical used in plastics.

During the press conference, which was shown on CNN, Smith displayed photographs of the urinary tract crystals from affected animals that have been seen by clinicians and pathologists in many parts of the country, and he also showed a microscopic image of an affected kidney. However, Smith emphasized, Cornell researchers have not been able to match the known toxic effects of melamine with all of the clinical and pathologic signs observed in affected cats and dogs. He specifically referred to signs of acute damage to the tubules and the characteristic pattern of cellular inflammation that have been seen in affected kidneys.

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