Cadbury recall products made with Chinese milk products

British chocolate maker Cadbury yesterday said it is recalling 11 types of Chinese-made chocolates found to contain melamine, as police in northern China raided a network accused of adding the banned chemical to milk.

A Cadbury spokesman said it as yet unable to say how much of the chemical was in the chocolates made at its Beijing plant.

“It’s too early to say where the source was or the extent of it,” said the spokesman, who declined to be identified because of company policy.

The company said its dairy suppliers were cleared by government testing.

Meanwhile, police in Hebei province arrested 22 people and seized more than 480 pounds of industrial chemical melamine in the raids, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The report said the chemical was produced in illicit plants and sold to breeding farms and purchasing stations.

Xinhua said 19 of the 22 detainees were managers of pastures, breeding farms and purchasing stations.

The scandal broke earlier this month when authorities said infant formula produced by the Sanlu Group was causing kidney stones in babies and young children.

Four infants have died and some 54,000 have become ill after drinking the contaminated baby formula.

Subsequent tests revealed melamine contamination in products ranging from yoghurt to candy to pastries.

Authorities believe suppliers added melamine, which is rich in nitrogen, to watered-down milk to deceive the results of quality tests for protein.

Cadbury said the 11 recalled chocolate products were distributed in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia.

US companies Kraft Foods Inc and Mars In. said they would adhere to a recall order of Chinese-made Oreos, M&Ms and Snickers in Indonesia, but said that they wanted to conduct their own tests with outside experts.

So far only a local agency has checked the products for melamine, but the levels found were considered very high.

“We have asked our trade partners and retailers to suspend the sales of our products in accordance to the agency’s order,” Mars Indonesia spokesman Bondan Ardi said.

Hong Kong supermarket chain ParknShop also pulled its Chinese-made Oreo, M&M and Snickers products as a precaution, a spokeswoman said.

Countries around the world have removed items containing Chinese milk ingredients from store shelves or banned them outright.

Authorities in China had previously arrested at least 18 people and detained more than two dozen suspects in connection with the scandal.