Tainted milk may have sickened Taiwanese

An official says three Taiwanese children and a woman who have consumed Chinese milk formula have kidney stones. Liu Yi-lien, health chief of the Ilan County government in eastern Taiwan, says the two three-year-old girls and a one-year-old boy all had been traveling frequently between Taiwan and China with their parents. One of the children's mothers also has kidney stones. If a link is established between these kidney problems and melamine-tainted milk, they would be the first such cases diagnosed outside of China or its territories of Hong Kong and Macau since the contaminated milk scandal erupted this month.

However, the infants may have been consuming formula purchased in China, not Taiwan. Mr Liu said they all consumed Chinese milk, but that more tests were needed to establish a link to their kidney stones. So far, baby formula tainted with melamine has sickened nearly 53,000 Chinese infants and killed four. The list of products caught up in the tainted milk scandal also continued to grow yesterday, with the government in the Chinese territory of Macau saying they had found levels of melamine at 24 times the safety limit in Koala's March cookies made by Japan's Lotte China Foods Co. * AP