Melamine:
Good for sturdy plastic plates, bad to ingest. And I'm very worried
that my two daughters have been exposed to huge doses of it, courtesy
of tainted formula
in China. So I've been spending a lot of time bugging my pediatrician,
trolling boards and contacting international adoption physicians (this
is actually a specialty) to see what we should do.

Our youngest, just home, was on a formula that has been declared
safe, though the melamine also showed up in rice cereals, and I don't
know which cereal they were feeding her. Her bloodwork came back fine;
we're doing the urinalysis next week. And since she needs a renal
ultrasound anyway to rule out a congenital condition, we were
guaranteed to get all the necessary tests for her anyway.

But I had to fight a little harder to get the tests for my oldest
daughter. I know that she was on Sanlu, the formula that started the
whole ball rolling (and is behind the majority of the sick kids...I
just looked at a site that showed the concentrations of melamine, and
was horrified by how far ahead of the "acceptable" amount of melamine
it was). On a board dedicated to the melamine problem, I've seen
reports from parents that their children, of the same age as our
oldest, have had serious kidney trouble, or have had no symptoms but
discovered the stones with an ultrasound. And our pediatrician agreed
that since this is a huge question mark, we do need to get her tested.
The girls will have back-to-back ultrasounds in two weeks. Until then,
I'm holding my breath.

If they do find something, the melamine complicates matters. Because
these aren't your standard-issue kidney stones, you can't "blast" them,
as they do with the calcium ones. They need to be surgically removed
because you don't want the melamine poison to go out into the
bloodstream. And if they do find something, it could just be damage
already done. Which would be the worst thing altogether.

The
trouble is that this is a huge question mark. Nobody knows what
ingesting huge levels of melamine as a baby can do to a person
(melamine can be a carcinogen, and can affect reproduction as well). We
will probably worry for the rest of our lives that there is this
ticking time bomb inside each of our beloved girls.

I just really wonder how the people who poured this poison into milk destined for babies slept well at night.