YONG’AN VILLAGE, China — At the height of the corn harvest in the muggy days of August, 10-month-old Zhang Peng began refusing to drink his milk, crying at night as he struggled to sleep. Soon his twin sister, Zhang Xue, fell ill too.
Several times, their parents brought the sick babies, who had trouble urinating, to the nearest hospital 20 miles from their farming village. Doctors could not diagnose the problem but gave the children herbal powder and injections.
Then last month, Chinese media revealed that infant formula contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical used to make fertilizer and plastics, was sickening babies nationwide.
The news shocked the Zhang family and so began a month- long ordeal that would see them shuttling back and forth between their home in Shandong province and a hospital in Beijing, 450 miles away.
“We had no idea what was wrong. We were so frightened and worried,” the children’s mother, Liao Shanfang, told The Associated Press last week from the family’s house in this village in eastern China’s corn belt. “Even when I saw the news that milk powder had been poisoned, I could not believe it. We never imagined that would be the problem.”
Amid China’s worst food- safety crisis in years, thousands of parents have jammed into hospital emergency rooms. More than 50,000 children have been treated for kidney ailments, and nearly 6,000 remain hospitalized, the Health Ministry said. Four deaths have been linked to the toxic milk.
After the tainted-milk scandal broke in mid-September, Liao and her husband, Zhang Rongwei, took their twins yet again to their local hospital in Linyi. This time, Zhang Peng, the boy, was admitted for a five-day stay, but he only got worse. He began vomiting, and when he could urinate, it came out in a thin, blood-tinged stream. His sister’s symptoms weren’t as serious; she had sporadic fevers.
From birth, both babies had been given breast milk and formula. The Zhangs first used a cheaper brand that gave the children diarrhea, then switched to one made by Sanlu Group Co. It cost almost twice as much.
Sanlu was the first company implicated in the scandal, going public with word of contamination Sept. 11, and the Chinese government later confirmed it was widespread.
Doctors in Linyi told the Zhangs to seek treatment in Beijing. The couple hastily arranged for a car ride — at a cost of 300 yuan, about $45, a small fortune — to the Children’s Hospital in the capital, where they arrived Sept. 23.
Hours later, Zhang Peng was diagnosed with two large kidney stones that needed surgery. His sister had a single stone the size of a grain of rice — not serious enough to warrant a hospital stay.
With no choice but to split their lives — and their children — the couple brought their daughter home to her paternal grandmother. Then they returned to Beijing, where they spent the next three weeks.
Despite the weeks of heartache, the twins, who turn 1 this month, are recovering. Zhang Peng was discharged from the hospital Monday; his sister was treated with a remedy prescribed by a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. The toddlers still drink milk but only brands unaffected by the scandal, although they cost nearly five times what Sanlu milk cost.
