The exploited weak spot in the U.S. food and product safety system is the border crossings.  We made food safety progress in the last 100 years.  The next several years need to shore up that progress by an intense focus on imported products, because those imports are destroying our safety net.  This is not a theoretical exercise.  It is practical and deadly serious.

700 tons of Chinese baby formula is being recalled in China for causing one death and kidney failure in at least 50 infants.  This is inside China, not in the U.S. 

The culprit is melamine contamination.  Melamine is an industrial chemical, the same chemical that killed U.S. pets last year when Chinese pet food contained it. 

Infant formula has to have protein in it, among other nutrients, to be nutritionally useful.  Food and animal feed is commonly tested in a laboratory for protein content.  The test looks for the element nitrogen, which is unique to protein. 

Melamine has a lot of nitrogen.  Thus, if you stick the industrial chemical melamine in the food, then you fool the lab test into thinking there is plenty of protein in it.

But mammalian kidneys, say in a human infant, do not think melamine is the same as protein.  The difference is between health and growth... and disability and death.

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