Green Daily

On Friday, The FDA announced a melamine threshold of one part per million for infant formula, provided a related chemical isn't present also. This comes less than two months after they said they were unable to set a safety threshold for melamine in infant formula.

According to Dr. Stephen Sundlof, FDA director of food safety, lack of dual contamination is key because studies show danger to health only when both chemicals are present, melamine and cyanuric acid. Neither of the two U.S. infant formula samples that were found to be contaminated contained both.

While some of the companies are claiming that these trace contaminants came from the manufacturing process, the expected contamination from such a source is 15 parts per billion, or about one-tenth of the amount detected.

In other scary news, on Friday, Nestle put out a statement saying that contaminated animal feed was responsible for the levels of melamine found in two brands of formula in South Africa. Nestle found that contaminated animal feed was fed to the animals, and then got into the milk which was eventually sold for human consumption, some of which ended up in the formula. This finding gives evidence to the possibility that melamine may be able to cross from animal feed to the food chain. A truly scary thought.