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BEIJING: China has ordered more than 5,000 inspectors to be posted at its dairy factories, state media said Monday, as the tainted milk scandal continued to impact countries as far away as South America.
The nation's food safety watchdog dispatched the round-the-clock inspectors to dairy factories across the country to make sure produce complied with food safety standards, the People's Daily reported.
The measure is the latest in a series aimed at containing the scandal, which erupted when Chinese milk was found to be tainted with melamine, an industrial chemical normally used to make plastic and fertilisers.
Melamine, when added to watered-down milk, makes it appear richer in proteins than it really is.
So far, tainted milk has sickened 53,000 children and killed four in China, and has put a spotlight on the country's lax food safety standards.
In Beijing, 382 new cases linked to melamine-tainted milk - which can cause kidney stones - were diagnosed during a week-long holiday to mark the founding of communist China, the state-run Beijing News reported.
State media on Monday also called for authorities to dole out harsher penalties for those implicated in the milk scandal, and any other food safety scandal that might arise in the future.
"From this and many other previous scandals, we see a need for the authorities to be harsher toward violators," the state-run China Daily said in an editorial.
The newspaper said the government should come up with stern measures to teach businesses the "significance of being honest."
The Beijing News, meanwhile, called for the public to play a part in supervising food safety.
"It is only with the eagerness of public supervision that one can make up for the potential oversight of government monitoring and the unreliability of companies' self-discipline," the paper said in an editorial.
It suggested, for example, that testing labs be further opened up to members of the public.
The milk scandal meanwhile continued to make waves around the world, with various countries banning or restricting milk products from China, and companies continuing to discover high levels of melamine in their products.
In Hong Kong, two Chinese-made chocolate products sold by British sweet maker Cadbury were found to contain dangerous amounts of melamine on Sunday.
Myanmar became the latest country to warn its population against using Chinese milk and dairy products, and Guyana pulled Chinese dairy products off the market.
South Korea, meanwhile, declared a large amount of Chinese-made kimchi, or spicy fermented cabbage, to be inedible due to banned or harmful additives found in it, further adding to Chinese food safety concerns.
- AFP/yb
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