Reports Suggest Gov. Officials Knew "Weeks Or Months" Of Melamine Milk Before Closing Dairy - WSJ

SHANGHAI -- New signs emerged that Chinese health authorities suspected a Shanghai dairy was producing milk tainted with deadly melamine well before the first public announcements last week that it had been shut.

State media announced on New Year's Eve that Shanghai Panda Dairy Co. had been closed, its milk products recalled from around the country and three top executives arrested.

Tuesday, local media reports and remarks by industry executives suggested that authorities were aware of problem milk at Shanghai Panda weeks or months before the recall.

The use of melamine, a pesticide that can mimic the properties of protein in milk, was long an open secret in China's dairy industry. But after six babies died and 300,000 were poisoned from melamine-tainted milk in 2008, authorities pledged that food safety would be a priority. Since then, Chinese courts sentenced two people involved in tainted-milk incidents to death and several others to lengthy jail terms.

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