Following the recent milk scare in China, Hong Kong's Centre for Food Safety announced this last weekend that some eggs produced in northeast China (Dalian) contained unacceptable (but lower range) limits of melamine, as allowed by the HK authorities. They have also said that a 10-kg or three-year-old child would have to eat 24 of the eggs and a 60-kg adult 283 eggs to reach their daily tolerable intake of the chemical. Happy eating!
A food safety official in Dalian city near where the tainted Hong Kong eggs were produced said melamine had been detected in eggs last month. The tainted eggs were destroyed and eggs were checked in September and again in October, and no melamine was found. Since then there has been mention of another few brands of eggs in China that were found to be contaminated with melamine.
The media has reported that an important brand of eggs supplied by China's Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group, and suspected of being tainted with melamine, was pulled from shelves of a major retailer in China earlier this week. It should be emphasized that this was done as a precautionary measure and that the products had not yet been found to be contaminated.
At this stage no one knows how much melamine is absorbed into raw foods like meat and vegetables, although animal tests in the United States concluded in 2007 that consuming "pork, chicken, fish and eggs from animals that had inadvertently been fed animal feed contaminated with melamine ... was very unlikely to pose a human health risk". It is improbable that there would be any issues if melamine is consumed in small amounts either from foods with dairy as a minor ingredient and/or where the food is consumed in small and infrequent amounts.
If consumed in higher quantities over a long period melamine may, in some individuals, cause health problems such as kidney stones or kidney disease. The reason why infants in China were particularly affected is that they were consuming significant amounts of contaminated milk formula on a daily basis. To date there has been no evidence that this current scare has been responsible for any medical issues, and foods with potentially low levels of melamine, such as eggs, biscuits, candies etc., are more likely to be infrequently consumed and in smaller amounts; as such they are not considered high-risk foods for dietary exposure to melamine.
Let common sense prevail when shoppping and eating and put everything into perspective as you are unlikely to survive either on marginally contaminated air and water alone.
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