Officials said that about 20% of the dairy companies tested nationwide had sold products tainted with melamine. Suppliers to the companies are thought to have added the banned chemical, normally used in plastics, to raw milk to make the milk appear higher in protein.
The companies included Mengniu Dairy, China's biggest milk company, which said Wednesday it was recalling its baby formula after government tests found melamine in the product. The announcement said the recall covers three batches of formula made in January but gave no details on how much product will be affected. It did not say whether any of Mengniu's baby formula was exported.
Health Minister Chen Zhu told a televised news conference that 6,244 babies had been sickened after being feed tainted milk formula, and that 158 were suffering from acute kidney failure.
The head of China's quality watchdog, Li Changjiang, said that in addition to the company at the heart of the food scandal, Sanlu, and Mengniu, two other companies, Guangdong-based Yashili and Qingdao-based Suncare, were recalling their products.
Zhang Zhenling, Sanlu's vice president, has apologized but did not explain why the company took so long to inform the public about the contamination despite receiving complaints as early as March and having tests confirm the presence of the chemical in early August.
The company went public last week with the information after its New Zealand stakeholder, Fonterra, told the New Zealand government, which then informed the Chinese government.
The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine had already reported that its inspectors had found melamine "in 69 batches of milk powder manufactured by 22 companies".
The nationwide inspection by China's quality watchdog agency took test samples from 109 companies that produce baby milk powder in China. Li said another 66 companies had stopped production before the melamine problem emerged.
Yashili exported its products to Bangladesh, Yemen and Myanmar, but AQSIQ said initial testing of samples of the company's exports turned up no trace of melamine.
In Hong Kong, food inspectors ordered a recall after melamine was found in an ice cream bar made by Shanghai Yili AB Foods. The amounts of the chemical found "would not pose major health effects from normal consumption of the bar, however, small children should not eat it", the Center for Food Safety said in a notice posted on its Web site.
Sanlu's General Manager Tian Wenhua was fired and dismissed from the company's board of directors as a result of the scandal, the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Communist Party officials as saying in the northern city of Shijiazhuang in Hebei province, where the company is based. Tian was also removed from a Communist Party position, it said.
Four other Hebei officials were fired Tuesday. They included Zhang Fawang, the agricultural production head in Shijiazhuang, and the city's Food and Drug Administration Bureau director Zhang Yi and the city's Quality and Technical Inspection Bureau chief Li Zhiguo, Xinhua said.
