China's biggest dairy companies the Mengniu Dairy Co. said over the Christmas holiday that its products at a plant in Sichuan province were found by the government quality watchdog to contain over the limits of aflatoxin M1 (AFM1), a substance that can cause severe liver damage, including liver cancer. The company lost almost one-fourth of its value on Wednesday after its shares plunged 26 percent to their lowest level in more than two years. The discovery of the toxins is the latest of several safety scares to hit China's dairy industry in recent years.
In 2008, at least six children died and nearly 300,000 became ill from powdered milk laced with melamine, an industrial chemical added to low-quality or diluted milk to give misleadingly high readings of protein levels.