The Power of Messaging

Did you receive the sms below on the recent china milk scare today?

The following items have been recalled due 2 china's milk situation. This is real. M&M's, snickers, mento's yogurt bottle, dov choc, oreo wafer sticks, monmilk, dutchlady sterilised milk, wall's all natural mango, mini poppers ice-cream, magnum ice-cream, moo sandwich ice-cream, mini cornetto n youcan ice cream. We've been asked by AVA 2 remove them from our stores(robinsons). If u have any of these items in yr hse, don't eat them.

A fast check during lunch and all of us colleagues on the table had received the sms. That's the power of technology!

In actual fact, only 3 items up to date has been confirmed by the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority(AVA) to have contain the melamine, a chemical normally used to make plastics, added to make the products seem richer in proteins. They are:
1) Yili Brand Choice Dairy Fruit Bar Yogurt Flavoured Ice Confection,
2) Dutch Lady Brand of strawberry flavoured milk (We drink this brand of milk!!), and
3) White Rabbit Creamy Candy (Quite sad about this as I like this candy since young!)

All the affected products have been recalled earlier and since Sept 19, 2008, AVA has suspended the import and sale of all milk and milk products from China.

Although it was said that the tainted products have to be consumed over a prolonged period of time before one gets really sick as the body of an adult can safely take in and purge some amount of melamine (the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) of melamine as established by the US Food and Drug Administration is 0.63 mg/kg body weight.), now with AVA widening checks to include products made in other countries but may contain China milk-based ingredients, who dares to drink milk now when health is at stake? don't want to have kidney stones...

Will the consumers lose the confidence in this brand? I guess the Chinese will have to work doubly hard to woo them back...

Over the years, we've seen too many of similar occurrences from China and lately even Japan (yes, Japan!?!).

Mar 2007 - Poisoned Pet Food from China where a rat poison called aminopterin was found in United States
Jun 2007 - Toothpaste with prensence of discovered formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax
Jul 2007 - Buns made from cardboards from China
Aug 2007 - Famous Japanese cookies Shiroi Koibito recalled due to falsified expiry dates, hence contaminated either with coliform bacteria in excess of the food sanitation standard or staphylococcus aureus
Jan 2008 - Chinese dumplings with traces of methamidophos, an organic phosphorus insecticide detected in Japan
Mar 2008 - A rat head was found in China-made Shrimp Cracker in South Korea
Sep 2008 - Milk and milk products tainted with melamine from China
Sep 2008 - Rice contaminated with two times the permitted level of toxic pesticide methamidophos from Japan


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