Posted on Sunday, October 12, 2008 - 7:14 pm:

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IONIA — Michigan State Police confiscated some contaminated, unrefrigerated food headed to Grand Rapids stores from Chicago, police say.

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Saturday, October 4, 2008

FDA: Traces of melamine are not harmful in foods

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar / Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Tiny traces of melamine, the chemical that has set off a global food safety scare, are not harmful in most foods, except baby formula, government experts said Friday.

The Food and Drug Administration said Friday its safety experts have concluded that eating a minuscule amount of melamine -- 2.5 parts per million -- would not raise health concerns, even if a person ate food every day that was tainted with the chemical.

"It would be like if you had a million grains of sand and they were all white, and you had two or three that were black, that's kind of the magnitude," said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's food safety program.

The FDA guideline is meant to help federal and state investigators checking for contaminated foods from China at ports of entry and in Asian community groceries around the country. "We are trying to identify products that have levels we are really concerned about, rather than trying to find the last molecule," said Sundlof. For example, melamine levels in imported Chinese candies recalled last week in California were as high as 520 parts per million, about 200 times greater than the level set on Friday by the FDA for "tolerable" risk.