China has stepped up its drive for safer food with a set of new rules prioritising the monitoring of baby products, after the re-emergence of tainted milk responsible for the deaths of six infants in 2008.
The government regulations set out five areas of priority, with special attention to be paid to food products targeted at babies, pregnant women and older people, as well as those affected by previous safety scares.
The health ministry rules come after revelations that milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which was supposed to have been destroyed after the 2008 scandal, had reappeared in stores around the country.
Six babies died and 300,000 others fell ill that year after they were fed contaminated dairy products.
The new rules also stipulate that every September, the health ministry and other government departments must draw up a national food safety monitoring plan for the year ahead, the ministry said Thursday.
China's food industry is notoriously scandal-prone, and the re-emergence of tainted milk has triggered concern at the highest levels of government.
On Tuesday, a meeting of a Cabinet-level food safety committee chaired by Vice Premier Li Keqiang ordered the government to "adopt effective measures to firmly strike down all kinds of dangerous conduct in the food safety sphere."
A string of recent reports in Chinese media have said that a number of firms have been shut down and several people arrested over the new milk scare.
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