Milk centers targeted in probe

SHIJIAZHUANG: The 19 people detained in the Sanlu milk food contamination case are from private milk collecting stations, the country's top quality control official said yesterday.

Dairy farmers are not likely to be responsible for the contamination that caused kidney stones in about 580 infants, one of who died on Thursday, he said.

"It's unlikely that dairy farmers mixed the industrial chemical melamine in fresh milk. We believe the contamination is more likely to have occurred at milk collecting stations," Li Changjiang, minister of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), told China Daily on a train to Shijiazhuang.