Macau, China, 10 Oct – The Macau Department of Health said that it has identified three more students with kidney stones after testing around 12,000 that drank milk products that were possibly contaminated.
A statement issued Wednesday by the Macau Department of Health, also known as the Health Bureau, said “three female students were definitively diagnosed with small kidney stones and the possibility that these cases are linked to melamine has not been ruled out.”
The government decided to test all students of primary schools and day care centres that took part in the Macau Department of Education’s milk programme for the 2007/2008 school year where contaminated milk products were found.
The milk given to the children and contaminated with melamine was produced by Chinese brand Yili.
In a statement issued by Macau’s Government Information Bureau, the Department of Health said that the three children are now being treated at the nephrology services of Macau’s state hospital, though noted that the kidney stones are small and surgery is not necessary.
The statement added that the urine tests being carried out on the students that took part in the milk programme are expected to end soon.
With these three new cases, Macau has a total of four cases of children with kidney stones, and in one of these cases the child was only 16 months old.
Meanwhile, the Macau Health Bureau also confirmed Thursday that it found another type of Nestlé powdered milk with melamine on sale in Macau, increasing the total number of contaminated products on sale in the region to 21, after testing 196 products.
In China, 47,000 cases of melamine in milk or milk products have been identified, which has hospitalised 10,666 children and claimed the life of four children.
(MacauNews)
