After enlisting more than 369,000 inspectors, the Chinese government has also closed 238 illegal feed manufacturers, which have been supplying companies across the world with food products, including milk, eggs, candy and animal feed laced with melamine, a chemical usually found in fertilizer and plastic kitchenware.

The government is also investigating 278 other feed-manufacturers and breeding-farms suspected of illegal activity, the Xinhua news agency has reported.

So far, some 22,700 batches of animal feed have been checked for melamine and nearly 98 percent have met government standards, Xinhua reported, citing the Agriculture Ministry.

Melamine's presence in pet food killed some 1,500 dogs in China bred for fur over the past two months. It also proved deadly last year for more than 1,500 pets in the U.S. that ate food manufactured by the Ontario-based Menu Foods Income Fund, as Pet Pulse previously reported.

Incidentally, a little more than a year ago, China vowed to minimize the use of melamine after it was found in pet food exports that killed dogs and cats in North America in 2007.

The chemical is sometimes added to food as a cheap solution to forge levels of nitrogen, making products appear to contain higher levels of protein.

The scandal has recently extended to the human-side of commercial consumption, after melamine-tainted milk supplies were blamed in September for sickening more than 50,000 children in China and killing at least four.

Eggs produced in three different Chinese provinces were also found to be tainted with high levels of melamine over the past few weeks.

Now the Chinese government has also located six tons of melamine-tainted animal feed in the southern province of Guangdong.

While China's Agriculture Ministry official Wang Zhicai said on Saturday that the government will now work to eradicate all sources of melamine-laced food production, he also spoke to the relatively low rate of the chemical's detection in eggs.

Four brands of Chinese eggs were found last week to be laced with melamine. Agriculture officials speculated that the cause was tainted feed given to hens.

Source: www.zootoo.com