Tens of thousands of infants are sick after drinking tainted baby milk. But this isn’t an ordinary health disaster – the authorities colluded with the companies who deliberately contaminated their products and failed to warn the public.
Disaster befell the parents of Jiao Zizhou because, poor as they were, they could afford baby milk. What they could not afford were hospital fees. Visitors to China often look at its diversity, its grand civic buildings, its sweatshops, its new rich, its desperate poor, and compare it to Dickens, and talk about the growing pains of developing societies. Jiao Zizhou, a 10-month-old baby from southern China, gives growing pains a name.
Zizhou’s parents fed him on baby milk from a company called Sanlu, which means Three Deer in Chinese. At just under ?3 for a 400g bag, it was cheap but reputable. Produced by the biggest formula manufacturer in China, it was consumed by babies from north to south, even in rural areas like the village in impoverished Guizhou province where Zizhou’s parents live.