While consumers in Asia are worried about the health impact of food products containing milk, food safety regulators are scrambling about setting standards for melamine in food.

Melamine has once again become the focal point of a global food safety scare. The first reported incident happened in 2007 when pet food produced in China was found to have been contaminated with melamine. The second incident reported happened only a few weeks ago when melamine contaminated infant formula caused death and illness among Chinese infants. How could something like this have happened and what are the risks associated with consumption of products containing melamine?

Milk suppliers, in China as well as in many other countries, are paid according to the volume and protein content of the milk they sell. Unscrupulous traders have added melamine to watered-down milk to fool tests into believing that the product contains more protein, thus securing more profit from the food manufacturers that buy their products. The deaths and illness caused by this inexcusable act is truly despicable and my heart goes out to those families that have been affected by the deliberate adulteration of infant formula.

The situation is even more complicated by the fact that trace elements of melamine are very often found throughout the global food chain posing no risk to human health. Therefore, one of the challenges is distinguishing between existing traces of melamine, which pose no harm, and melamine which has been intentionally added into the food chain.

Understanding these facts is important in order to avoid panicking consumers. A risk assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), for example, concluded that melamine contaminated food products such as biscuits and confectionery products posed very low health risk even if consumed in vast quantities.

To illustrate, EFSA derived a Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) for melamine (and its analogous) of 0.5mg of melamine per kilogram of body weight per day. For a person weighing 70kg this would mean a daily intake of 35mg. The TDI applied by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is similar in magnitude of the EFSA limit at 0.63 mg/kg body weight/day. By using a worse case scenario, the U.S. FDA derived at the conclusion that levels of melamine and melamine-related compounds below 2.5 ppm do not raise public health concerns.

Subsequently, the European and U.S. reporting standard of 2.5 parts per million (ppm) in general food products is often taken as the international accepted reporting standard in countries across the world (including China which has set a reporting standard of 2.5ppm in milk products but does not yet have a reporting standard for other products).

Consumption of food at or below the reporting standards of 2.5 ppm would result in melamine exposures well below the TDI, meaning that even if a product is declared to contain melamine it does not mean that consumption of that product is necessarily unsafe. A risk assessment such as carried out by the EFSA and U.S. FDA provides guidance on the potential health risks associated with consuming food stuffs containing melamine (whether as a result of adulteration or other sources).

With regard to the content of melamine and its analogous in infant formula the risk of adverse health effects is considerably higher because the infant formula makes up 100 percent of an infant's diet and because the renal systems of infant and toddlers are not yet fully developed. The reporting standard for melamine and its analogous in these products should therefore be lower than the level of other food products.

Because today's supply chain is truly global, it is important to gain an international consensus on melamine reporting levels and safety thresholds. As governments in Asia and across the globe look to step-up their melamine monitoring and enforcement systems, studies performed by the EFSA, U.S. FDA and WHO / FAO are great places to start. It would be prudent to make 2.5ppm the globally recognized reporting level for melamine, in order to distinguish potentially harmful amounts of melamine from insignificant trace amounts.

Together, the EFSA, U.S. FDA and WHO/FAO consensus allows for efficient product analysis in a systematic and timely manner and can allow governments to keep their citizens safe while working to identify the unscrupulous traders who have deliberately tainted the food supply chain.

The writer is the Food Quality and Safety Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok, Thailand.

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