A Hopeful Solution to the Poisonous Milk Case

A collective lawsuit is to be filed against Sanlu, but the better solution, according to Chinese lawyers volunteering to represent the victims of poisonous milk meeting yesterday, is a settlement.

The lawyers, lead by Dr. Xu Zhiyuan and Dr. Teng Biao, will send the letter to Sanlu on Friday morning and a press conference will be held in the afternoon.

In meeting yesterday, Guo Yushan, lawyer and President of Transition Institute, suggested a settlement case modeled after the German case in which babies of morbidity were born as a result of a certain ingredient in the maternal drugs. A foundation is to be established using the funds of the company, the government, and the public. Instead of dragging the company down, in which case still not enough compansation could be milked out from the sinking ship, the lawyers are hopeful of this settlement: to reestabilish the company's credibility and let its profit pay off the victims in the long run. The foundation will be estabilished as a branch or sub-foundation of a well-known and credible foundation.

The Communist Politics and Law Committee already has specific orders for local courts not to take the milk cases under several excuses: one, the victims cannot be counted because some report to villages, some to cities, some to provincial offices, some do all of the above; two, "it's a deep water" according to Guo recounting a conversation with a government official.

For the first excuse, the solution now is to ask Chinese citizens to request their local government to disclose the information.

For the second, "deep water" means the officials are aware of the scale of the issue - according to the door-to-door investigation by Shanghai government, 2.94% of all babies has kidney stones larger than 0.4 cm (the current bar of baby's kidney stone reporting in China); if we take that percentage to a national level (despite the fact that Shanghai has a much higher living standards so they probably use more foreign-produced milk; and despite the fact that the government figure tends to be conservative), the 2006 national census puts the number of babies under 3 to 700 million, by now, it is safe to estimate the number of babies under 4 at 770 million, which means the number of severely sick children would be 226.38 million.

The entire milk industry in China would not be able to compensate for all these babies. It is rasional, therefore, to push for the settlement solution.