A Formula for Disaster

Melamine: Good for sturdy plastic plates, bad to ingest. And I'm very worried that my two daughters have been exposed to huge doses of it, courtesy of tainted formula in China. So I've been spending a lot of time bugging my pediatrician, trolling boards and contacting international adoption physicians (this is actually a specialty) to see what we should do.

Our youngest, just home, was on a formula that has been declared safe, though the melamine also showed up in rice cereals, and I don't know which cereal they were feeding her. Her bloodwork came back fine; we're doing the urinalysis next week. And since she needs a renal ultrasound anyway to rule out a congenital condition, we were guaranteed to get all the necessary tests for her anyway.

But I had to fight a little harder to get the tests for my oldest daughter. I know that she was on Sanlu, the formula that started the whole ball rolling (and is behind the majority of the sick kids...I just looked at a site that showed the concentrations of melamine, and was horrified by how far ahead of the "acceptable" amount of melamine it was). On a board dedicated to the melamine problem, I've seen reports from parents that their children, of the same age as our oldest, have had serious kidney trouble, or have had no symptoms but discovered the stones with an ultrasound. And our pediatrician agreed that since this is a huge question mark, we do need to get her tested. The girls will have back-to-back ultrasounds in two weeks. Until then, I'm holding my breath.

If they do find something, the melamine complicates matters. Because these aren't your standard-issue kidney stones, you can't "blast" them, as they do with the calcium ones. They need to be surgically removed because you don't want the melamine poison to go out into the bloodstream. And if they do find something, it could just be damage already done. Which would be the worst thing altogether.

The trouble is that this is a huge question mark. Nobody knows what ingesting huge levels of melamine as a baby can do to a person (melamine can be a carcinogen, and can affect reproduction as well). We will probably worry for the rest of our lives that there is this ticking time bomb inside each of our beloved girls.

I just really wonder how the people who poured this poison into milk destined for babies slept well at night.

Comments

[Kelly]

Amen on that last line. Evil. Just evil. Saying a prayer for the girls and sending hugs to you and Mike.

[Kelly]

Amen on that last line. Evil. Just evil. Saying a prayer for the girls and sending jugs to you and Mike.

[Lisa Milbrand]

There are some who find it with blood tests and urinalysis. But most families are finding it through the ultrasounds, on kids with normal blood and urine results. (CT scans are also a possibility, but not recommended because of the high radiation levels.)

[K]

According to news reports, melamine doesn't show up in blood or urine tests. The only way to see if your children have been harmed is to do a kidney ultrasound. If this information isn't correct, please let me know.