Thursday, Chinese authorities announced that due to traces of cyanuramide found in milk formula, one baby died and more than a dozen others developed kidney stones.

The Chinese Ministry of Health stated that the milk powder responsible was a product of the Sanlu Group, one of the country’s leading dairy producers, which is now facing a second major scandal. The first one took place in 2005, when Tianjin authorities reported finding hundreds of cases of mislabeled yoghurt. The Sanlu Group is owned, in part, by Fonterra Co-operative Group Limited, the sixth largest dairy company worldwide, but the most influential when it comes to international dairy trade.

A statement released by the company informed that Sanlu would be taking the necessary steps in order to ensure that its products are safe to consume.

Gansu Province doctors have revealed that the fourteen infants who developed kidney stones, all of which are under eleven months old, had been fed the Sanlu-brand milk formula. They all came from poor families, living in peripheral areas, who had paid much less than usual for the product.

On July 16, a number of sixteen babies were reported suffering from kidney stones, but authorities failed to inform the public on the matter at that time. Recently, cases of infants with renal calculi have been registered in hospitals in Gansu, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hunan, Anhui, Ningxia and Shaanxi.

In 2004, the death of thirteen babies in the Anhui province who had been fed milk formula that had no nutritional value gave rise to painstaking investigations into food safety.

Let’s just hope recent events will not come to be a re-enactment of that grueling scandal.