China investigates tainted eggs in new food scare

By GILLIAN WONG, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 3:36 PM CDT

BEIJING - Chinese authorities said Wednesday they were investigating how eggs became contaminated with the same industrial chemical at the center of a milk scandal that sickened thousands of babies, as more tainted eggs turned up in Hong Kong and the mainland.

The action follows a brand of chicken eggs produced by China’s Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group being pulled from some stores in the country after Hong Kong food safety regulators found excessive levels of melamine in eggs from the company.

The widening food scare has exposed the inability of Chinese authorities to keep the food production process clean of melamine, the chemical that sparked the recent dairy crisis, despite official vows to raise food safety standards.

The government of Dalian, the northeastern port city where Hanwei is based, said in a notice dated Wednesday that it was first alerted to the problem of melamine-tainted eggs more than a month ago — but it did not explain the apparent delay in publicly reporting the problem.

The notice said that Dalian authorities were notified Sept. 27 of tests by the customs bureau of Liaoning province that had found melamine in a batch of export-bound eggs produced by Hanwei.

The city government said it immediately ordered Hanwei to recall the eggs deemed “problematic” and temporarily halt its egg exports. By Oct. 5, seven shipping containers that had reached Hong Kong carrying Hanwei’s eggs had been recalled, while two other containers that stayed in Hong Kong were sealed off.

It is unclear which overseas markets Chinese eggs are exported to, and the Commerce Ministry did not respond to a faxed list of questions.

The recalled eggs were destroyed to prevent them from entering the domestic market, the notice said, while further tests on other batches of eggs from the company did not detect melamine.

The Hong Kong government said late Tuesday that tests on a second batch of eggs, processed by Jingshan Pengchang Agricultural Product Co. of China’s central Hubei province, also found an excessive amount of melamine.

Pan Fengxia, the company’s manager, said a retailer had notified her of the Hong Kong test result and said she was sending another sample of eggs to be tested by the Hubei provincial food safety authority.

The Hong Kong eggs from Jingshan contained melamine with a concentration of 2.9 parts per million. The legal limit for melamine in foodstuffs in Hong Kong is 2.5 parts per million.

The Hong Kong-tested Hanwei eggs contained 4.7 ppm of melamine.

Authorities in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou meanwhile found melamine in eggs produced by a Shanxi company, the official Hangzhou Daily newspaper reported. Phone calls to the company and to Hangzhou government offices rang unanswered Wednesday.

It remains unclear what eating melamine-tainted eggs would do to humans, but in the recent milk products scandal, milk formula heavily contaminated with the chemical caused kidney stones in babies. It was blamed for sickening 54,000 children and linked to the deaths of four infants.

More than 3,600 children remain sick, health officials say.

It was unclear how the chemical got into eggs. But a Chinese agriculture official, Wang Zhicai, was quoted by the Beijing News newspaper Tuesday saying it was highly likely that melamine had been added to the feed given to the chickens that laid the eggs. Melamine is not an animal feed additive and is banned from being mixed in, Wang said.

Associated Press researcher Xi Yue contributed to this report in Beijing.

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