Melamine tests are conducted at a Hanoi-based laboratory. The Ministry of Health will appoint three agencies to act as arbitrators in case of controversial melamine test results.

The maximum allowable amount of “unavoidable contamination” of industrial chemical melamine in cooking for human consumption will be 2.5 milligrams per kilogram, the Ministry of Health (MOH) announced Friday.

The ratios are based on the tolerable melamine rates announced by the World Health Organization (WHO) last Friday, the Administration for Food Safety and Hygiene head Nguyen Cong Khan said Friday.

The limits were also approved by WHO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the country’s leading experts in nutrition and toxicology, Khan said.

Khan said “unavoidable contamination” of melamine was often caused by packaging or preservation devices during the manufacturing process.

This is different from the deliberate contamination by manufacturers to increase the amount of protein in milk and other dairy products, as occurred in China earlier this year, he said.

In China since September, at least six children died and a further 294,000 fell sick after consuming melamine-contaminated milk products.

MOH has proposed WHO provide information specifying what rate of melamine contamination can cause kidney stones, according to Khan.

However, he said food would have to have substantially more melamine than the new allowable limit to cause health problems.

“So far melamine-contaminated milk discovered in Vietnam has all been imported,” he said, adding that no local raw material milk had been found to be tainted with melamine, an industrial chemical used to make plastic.

MOH will appoint three agencies to act as arbitrators in case of controversial melamine tests. “If needed, [the ministry] will have products tested abroad.”

The ministry and related ministries have also proposed policies to support businesses which accidentally imported melamine-tainted milk, he said.

At a meeting held in Ottawa in Canada last week, WHO set the tolerable daily intake (TDI) of melamine at 0.2 mg/kg body weight. This means a 50 kilogram person could tolerate 10 mg melamine per day.

“TDI represents the tolerable amount of unavoidable contaminant in food that a person can ingest on a daily basis without appreciable health risk,” international experts said at the meeting.

Reported by Lien Chau