China on Monday vowed to clean up its scandal-plagued dairy industry, admitting a grave lack of supervision as authorities said more children had been sickened by tainted milk products.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao presided over a meeting of the cabinet, which called for immediate efforts to clean up the nation's "chaotic" dairy industry as more than 5,000 food safety inspectors were deployed, state press said.
Authorities in Beijing are struggling to contain the fallout from the scandal that erupted when Chinese milk powder was found to be contaminated with the toxic chemical melamine. Four children have died from drinking the milk.
"The direct cause of this incident is illegal production, greed and ignoring of people's lives," the cabinet said in a statement after the meeting, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
"Order in China's dairy production and distribution has been chaotic and supervision has been gravely absent." China's food safety watchdog has dispatched inspectors across the country to make sure dairy products complied with food safety standards, the People's Daily reported.
So far, the tainted milk has sickened more than 53,000 children and exposed the nation's lax food safety standards - leading to import curbs on some Chinese products in countries around the world.
Melamine, when added to watered-down milk, makes it appear to be richer in protein than it is. In the capital Beijing, 382 new illnesses linked to melamine-tainted milk were diagnosed in the past week alone, the state-run Beijing News reported, indicating the problem is far from being solved.
A health ministry spokesman suggested the number of children affected with kidney stones, caused by ingesting melamine, could go up. Iran became the latest country to ban imports of Chinese dairy products, two days after Guyana pulled its Chinese-made dairy items off the market.
The European Union recently banned all imports of Chinese milk-related products for children such as biscuits and chocolate on top of a long-standing embargo on Chinese dairy products like milk and yoghurt. In Hong Kong, two Chinese-made chocolate products sold by the British sweet maker Cadbury were found to contain dangerous amounts of melamine.
South Korea, for its part, declared a large amount of Chinese-made kimchi, or spicy fermented cabbage, to be inedible due to banned or harmful additives, further adding to concerns over Chinese food.