PETALING JAYA, MALAYSIA: Melamine is safe unless taken in excessive amounts and it will be expelled by the body in less than four hours.
University College London trained chemist Datuk Dr Neoh Soon Bin said the controversial compound was at least two times less toxic than aspirin used in painkillers, 16 times less than coffee and 63 times less than nicotine if consumed at the same levels.
"This means that a 15kg child would have to take 9.5mg of melamine for it to have toxic effects," he said during a media briefing jointly organised by various biscuit manufacturers yesterday.
He said that if a 70kg adult ate 44kg of biscuits in a day, it would still be within the international safety limits of melamine intake.
"If you ate that much biscuits in a day, you could die from a heart attack, not from melamine," he said, adding that the average Malay?sian ate only 2.1kg of biscuits per year.
On whether melamine was poisonous by itself, he said it was not.
Neoh added that the US Food and Drug Administration had also found that pork, chicken, fish and eggs from animals fed with melamine-contaminated feed were unlikely to be a health risk to humans.
However, he urged the Government and food industry players to set up more stringent risk-analysis programmes to screen threats to the country's food sources.
This, he said, included requiring certificates of analysis and letters of guarantee of ingredients, packaging material and manufacturing processes of food products from outside the country.
In Kuching, Sarawak Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr George Chan Hong Nam said food manufacturers and processors were duty-bound to produce food that met minimum safety standards.
Many of them still took food quality and safety for granted, he said when opening a good manufacturing practices seminar here yesterday.
