By Elizabeth John

BY the time babies in China were falling ill and dying from the effects of melamine-tainted infant formula, the synthetic chemical had been in use for well over a century.

And during all that time, melamine, present in everything from fertilisers to cookware, carried nothing but a good name. Packed with nitrogen, it had been used to enrich crops since the 1850s, it was mixed with other chemicals to form flame retardant materials that kept firemen safe and finally, it went into the formulation for kitchenware and countertops used in millions of shops and homes across the globe.

It was safe. It was reliable. It was useful.

Then in 2007 came the first chink in its armour - the pet food scare of 2007 when thousands of beloved family cats and dogs died a sudden and painful death as a result of eating contaminated feed. In that episode, melamine was singled out and the spotlight trained on the darker side of its use and abuse.

When melamine began affecting people - the youngest and most vulnerable - this year, its dependable little chemical friend image completely and finally gave way to suspicion and the bad-guy reputation that dogs it today.

From the first episode, experts learnt that melamine wasn-t working on its own.

What they discovered since the 2007 pet food scare is that small amounts of melamine in the body in it self isn-t toxic, says Professor Dr Mustafa Al Mohd.

But when it combines in the body with another chemical known as cyanuric acid, it forms a lethal bond.

This combination is insoluble in blood. It creates crystals, induces precipitation in the kidney and blocks this organ the way deposits of sand or rust would block a pipe, explained the deputy dean of Universiti Malaya Medical Centre.

Probing the dangerous combinations

An expanded lab with staff looking specifically at food quality and safety issues . This is what the Shimadzu-UMMC Centre for Xenobiotic Studies is planning following its recent involvement in the testing of food samples for melamine.

Professor Dr Mustafa Ali Mohd, who heads this laboratory which is based at the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre said the move would answer the growing need for research on food. The centre has also embarked on several research projects revolving around the melamine scare.

These included looking at whether the melamine-cyanuric acid combination that caused kidney problems in pets in 2007 and in babies who consumed melamine tainted milk, was the only dangerous combination of melamine. Other research will also look at how melamine behaves when it stays in milk for a long period of time and what melamine does to the body when different amounts are consumed.

The university has also begun a study on a much-debated topic: just how much of the chemical leaches into food from melamine tableware. As a precautionary measure, Mustafa advises that consumers avoid serving hot food in these melamine bowls and plates until research can prove that it is safe or otherwise.

"There's so much research that needs to be done. So it is our intention to develop a food quality laboratory in Universiti Malaya." says Mustafa. "We're studying how we can expand our lab and focus it on food and drink," The lab previously concentrated more on studies about the environment and toxic chemicals.

This acid is used in the making of melamine. "In the factory nitrogen is added to cyanuric acid to make melamine. It is supposed to be converted to melamine but sometimes it doesn't do so completely.

"Some might stay in its original form. So when you take in melamine, you could be taking in a small amount of cyanuric acid as well."

Sometimes melamine breaks down to form cyanuric acid in the blood. The acid can also come from other plant materials - because the plant had been fed a melamine-based fertiliser. The plant would take up the melamine and convert it into cyanuric acid.

Widely used and considered non-toxic, the acid can even be found swimming pools where it is used to prevent the disinfectant chlorine, from evaporating. "In the case of babies in China, they were hit both by the very high level of melamine and the combination of the melamine and cyanuric in the body," says Mustafa.

Another discovery happened purely by chance. During the most recent scare when the Universiti Malaya labs were asked to help test biscuit samples for melamine contamination, a hunch Mustafa had, turned out to be right. Mustafa, who heads the Shimadzu-UMMC Centre for Xenobiotics Studies, had been trawling the Net since news of the melamine-related deaths first surfaced.

From his searches, he found that many of the factories that produced melamine, also made other things like pesticides, fertilisers and pharmaceutical products. So instead of testing the biscuits, Mustafa suggested that manufacturers send all their raw materials for testing.

The results showed that, large quantities of melamine was found in the ammonium bicarbonate or baking soda, which had been imported from China.

"When we checked the factory's website, we found that it also produced melamine, pesticides and fertilisers. We suspect that's how the contamination happened.

"Maybe they wanted to fully utilise factory but did not wash the machinery thoroughly before they made a different product. That's a possible reason." But the main problem was that melamine was everywhere, in so many products.

Farmers diluted milk to increase the volume of what they sold to factories. Then they added melamine to increase the level of nitrogen it in because that's what factories would test for to check if the milk had been diluted. Melamine was also widely added to fertiliser to increase its nitrogen content.

(Page 1 of 2)"Between 1990 and 2000 the melamine production in China grew massively. In fact there was a surplus in 2000.

"This overproduction may have made melamine very cheap. More people used and did so excessively.

"This could be one reason why the chemical was very widely abused - more than in previous times." The scare has also left labs like UM's bogged down with testing and analysis and the realisation that there just aren't enough hands or specialised machines to go around when it comes to this kind of work.

"Malaysia is luckier than many other countries in that know we what the problem is, what to do about it.

"But melamine is tough to analyse and there aren't many labs that do it here," says Mustafa. His lab received some 2,000 samples to test. The UM lab carried out its tests on an LC/MS/MS machine recommended by the World Health Organisation. It had just purchased the machine the week before the bad news came out of China.

Real lucky timing, says Mustafa. The squarish machine about the size of a 32-inch TV, manufactured by Applied Biosystems, can run a test in just 10 minutes, but its cost runs into the millions.

"This isn't a plug-and-play machine. We're not talking about a DVD player. It takes a lot of training to be able to run the analysis and get the machine to do what you want it to, accurately."

Even if all the labs and machinery were in place, says Mustafa, there wouldn't be enough manpower, especially to delve deeper into problems. Those who are working on the testing are so bogged down by their daily routine work that there's no time to look into research, he says.

And there's a great deal of research to do yet, says the professor, because of the many shortcuts industry takes. For instance, studies on the safety of additives and flavours, colours and preservatives that are widely used today, says Mustafa who considers the melamine problem as just the tip of the iceberg.

"If you buy a butter biscuit today, the ingredients list may say butter and the biscuits may taste buttery but I'm not so sure it's really butter.

"Butter is expensive. So you wonder how a local manufacturer can afford to sell the biscuit at such a cheap price." Food producers don't need to use many materials these days - cocoa, coffee, butter - they just need flavouring, says Mustafa.

It's the same with food colouring. There's an abundance of natural plants that can produce a brilliant red colour but it's easier to use imported food colouring that costs just RM2.

"How much of an orange juice drink is real orange and where is the vitamin C?" he asks. "Do those fish balls really contain fish?" Economic considerations and general public indifference means these issues get little attention, argues Mustafa.

But it's the food we eat everyday, colouring and all, that will determine what sort of population we will have in 50 years' time, he says. It will also determine the kinds of diseases the country's healthcare will have to deal with, he adds.

"The melamine scare was a timely wake up call. It shouldn't be wasted. An expanded lab with staff looking specifically at food quality and safety issues. This is what the Shimadzu-UMMC Centre for Xenobiotic Studies is planning following its recent involvement in the testing of food samples for melamine.

Professor Dr Mustafa Ali Mohd, who heads this laboratory which is based at the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre said the move would answer the growing need for research on food.

The centre has also embarked on several research projects revolving around the melamine scare. These included looking at whether the melamine-cyanuric acid combination that caused kidney problems in pets in 2007 and in babies who consumed melamine tainted milk, was the only dangerous combination of melamine.

Other research will also look at how melamine behaves when it stays in milk for a long period of time and what melamine does to the body when different amounts are consumed. The university has also begun a study on a much-debated topic: just how much of the chemical leaches into food from melamine tableware.

As a precautionary measure, Mustafa advises that consumers avoid serving hot food in these melamine bowls and plates until research can prove that it is safe or otherwise. "There's so much research that needs to be done. So it is our intention to develop a food quality laboratory in Universiti Malaya." says Mustafa.

"We're studying how we can expand our lab and focus it on food and drink," The lab previously concentrated more on studies about the environment and toxic chemicals.

This story was first published in the New Straits Times on Dec 7, 2008.

New Straits Times/Asia News Network