How Much Melamine is Too Much Melamine?

The World Health Organization has tossed its own melamine opinion into the ring. You really shouldn’t have melamine at all, it says — but if you have to have melamine, don’t have more than 0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day.

It gets harder and harder to believe that anyone knows what they’re talking about. The EU’s daily limit is 0.5 mg per kg of body weight, and the U.S. FDA set the limit at 0.63 mg and then revised it to 0.063 mg, “an additional 10-fold safety factor… to compensate for … uncertainties.”

But this was only after melamine was discovered in infant formula in the United States. When the problem was confined to China, the FDA was “currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns.” Then days after melamine showed up in U.S. infant formula — in much smaller amounts than was found in China — the FDA decided trace amounts were okay.

Of course, the melamine levels in Chinese products were around 10,000 times higher than those found in U.S. Here products were possibly tainted through contact with packaging (melamine is used in plastics and some cleaning solutions) whereas Chinese producers dumped melamine into their milk deliberately to fool nutrition tests into reading a higher protein content.

But we don’t know how bad the problem will turn out to be in China. First it was less than 10,000 babies sick and maybe a hundred hospitalized; then it was 50,000 sick and four dead; now it’s 294,000 sick and six dead.

So far there are no reported cases of humans getting sick from melamine in the U.S., and the World Health Organization’s newly issued guidelines are probably a better alternative to widespread panic and the destruction of all milk products everywhere. Still, it’s hard to take comfort in WHO’s 0.2 mg figure when the food safety director then clarifies that it’s still

not a “safe” level for melamine, but merely the amount a human being can consume without higher health risk.

Thank you, WHO; that makes everything clearer.