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SANLU Group, the Chinese company accused of selling tainted infant formula milk, was reportedly trying to cover up the scandal for months. Chinese websites show leaked documents, apparently prepared by Sanlu’s PR company, outlining ways of suppressing the news.

    So far, five babies have died and 6244 babies were hospitalised, including 158 with acute kidney failure. The babies fell ill after drinking Sanlu Baby Powdered Milk, which had been laced with melamine, a tasteless crystal which boosts the nitrogen content of foods. This in turn fools standard tests for crude protein content (Kjeldahl method and Dumas method) into registering a higher protein level than the milk actually has. Long-term consumption causes babies to develop kidney stones and could cause permanent damage.

    Since the scandal broke on 11 September, Sanlu has halted production and started a massive recall of infant formula. However, there is evidence that Sanlu received calls from parents worried that their children were passing abnormally-coloured urine that sometimes contained grains as far back as March. Hospitals also reported an unusual rise in the number of infants developing kidney stones but had been reluctant to publicly make the connection with Sanlu formula, because this is a top brand in China.

    Now a two-page scanned file, which is said to have been prepared by Teller, Sanlu’s advertising and PR company, has surfaced online in China. In the file, the firm suggested three ways to manage the crisis. The first option was to release the news during the Olympic Games, when the Chinese government imposed strict controls on negative news about food and other sensitive topics. The second option was to pay 3m yuan to the popular Chinese search engine Baidu to control and delete most of the negative news. In the meantime, Teller suggested Sanlu lobby the government whenever negative news appeared. The third option was to collect “kidney stone” news and facts about other dairy producers in China in order to convince the public and government that the illegal addition of melamine was not an isolated event but common practice in the industry.

    Sanlu, Teller and Baidu all deny that the file ever existed. However, practical experiments show that on 12 September, the keywords of “Sanlu tainted baby formula” turned up only 11 news items on Baidu, while the same search on Google returned 11,400 news items.

    Sanlu also denies that it was responsible for adding melamine, blaming the milk suppliers and farmers instead. Police have interrogated 78 milk suppliers and detained 19 of them as a result.

    Some Chinese experts doubt that the farmers could be to blame, because it would not have been profitable or practical for them to add melamine. They say that since melamine is only poorly soluble in water, its presence in fresh milk would have been glaringly obvious. They also claim that it would be inconceivable that the 1100 tests that Sanlu (according to its own advertising) carries out on crude milk before processing would not have detected the melamine crystals in the fresh milk. Furthermore, since milk powder is typically produced by spray drying, insoluble melamine in the fresh milk would have jammed the spray nozzle atomiser or rotary atomiser and brought the entire production line to a halt. Lastly they say that melamine is expensive and it is unlikely that milk farmers could have afforded to add to their milk in the first place.

    Comprehensive tests of baby formula carried out since the scandal came to light revealed that samples 22 of China’s 109 baby formula factories were tainted with melamine, equivalent to almost 20%.

    Following a similar scandal in 2007, when thousands of cats and dogs in the US died after eating melamine-laced pet food imported from China, a toxicology study conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration concluded that the combination of melamine and cyanuric acid can cause acute renal failure in cats. Chronic exposure can cause reproductive damage and bladder or kidney stones, which can ultimately cause bladder cancer. Wilson Rumbeiha, an associate professor at Michigan State University’s Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health, says: "Unfortunately, these melamine cyanurate crystals don’t dissolve easily. They go away slowly, if at all, so there is the potential for chronic toxicity.”

    All of the hospitalised infants have difficulty urinating. The No. 1 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army in Lanzhou city, Gansu province, removed uric acid stones from eight babies. The kidney stones were nearly 1 cm in diameter, a rare size even in adults.

    A ten-month-old infant boy in Hubei was sent to the hospital for emergency treatment after being unable to urinate for four days. When he was sent in, his abdomen had reportedly swollen to the size of a melon and he was diagnosed with acute renal failure.

    SAQSIQ, the Chinese safety watchdog, on 17 September launched a nationwide food safety inspection and cancelled all exemptions previously given to certain renowned food producers, including Sanlu. Meanwhile, Tian Wenhua, chair and general manager of Sanlu, has been fired, detained, and taken in for questioning along with 28 others by local police.

    The Health Ministry has dispatched medical specialists to hospitals nationwide to help treat sick babies. Medical institutions have been required to provide infant patients with free treatment and to report the number of tainted milk powder victims on a daily basis. Detailed compensation plans have yet to be released.

    The Health Minister Chen Zhu said, "We are sparing no efforts in providing top medical treatment for the infant patients. Generally speaking, these efforts have proven to be orderly and effective."

    Sanlu, which is 43% owned by the New Zealand dairy company Fonterra, is China’s largest producer of powdered milk with an 18% market share. In the overall dairy market it is third, after Yili and Mengniu, which were both also found to have added melamine to some batches of their baby formula, along with liquid milk and ice creams.

    A comment on a Chinese website read: “To achieve 14.9b yuan [Sanlu’s value before the scandal broke] took half a century; for the same number to drop to zero or even less, it only took a few days.”