Daily Lessons from Life 10 July 2010 - Toxic milk powder scandal hits China - again

Was in China and could not access Google Blog site from 03-09 July 2010!!

"Toxic milk powder scandal hits China - again Sat, Jul 10, 2010 Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities seized 64 tonnes of milk powder and products laced with the same deadly toxic additive that sparked an uproar in 2008, officials and state media said, underscoring the persistence of food safety breaches.

Samples of milk powder found in northwest China's Gansu and Qinghai provinces had levels of the chemical melamine up to 500 times the permitted limit, and suspected tainted powder also turned up in the country's northeast, said a report from the Xinhua news agency on Friday."

Well, the key point is: AGAIN!!

It shows how unscrupulous profit-seeking business people can be when they CONTINUED to engage in dangerous production of products that were proven 'poison' to unsuspecting consumers! It cannot be due to lack of knowledge but lack to ethical consideration and conscience! May be also due to insufficient enforcement and punishment?

Lessons for me are:

1. we must continue to teach, preach, and exhort business people on the need to be ethical - new and old. This is the only insurance we have if the busines people are people with integrity!;

2. while we can only hope that people want to be ethical, there will always be some 'I want to make a lot of money devil may care' group of people who will do it and hope that their misdeeds will never be caught before they made their millions and fled to a 'safe place' to enjoy their fruits of 'evil'! For such people, we simply have to adopt a very dragonian and merciless punishment when we get them! Some of them were executed in 2008 after they gone through the Chinese judiciary process;

3. the consumers must be vigilant and be educated on how to distinguish good and poisonous products. They must be roped in to be the 'whistler blowers' to report any such incidents they came across. Of course, there is this concerns about 'vigilantees go wild' and many 'poison letters' instead of real informants of 'posioned products'. This is a risk we have to take. It will be tracked and balanced to assess if indeed the vigilantees had gone out of control or otherwise.

May the PRC business people continue to work hard on improving their image on food safety. May all involved stakeholders realize that each of them have to play their parts. The only guarantee is when everyone is COMMITTED to food safety where Commitment = Doing the Right Things when NO ONE is watching!!