Melamine: If only Journalists would read more blogs...

Today's BBC news-links include a report on "Toxic Milk Trials in China".

That News article says:

When the scandal broke in September, a chain of melamine producers and middlemen was found to have been supplying milk dealers with the product.

The dealers added melamine to boost the apparent protein content of milk, which had often been watered down to spread the raw product further.

Major dairy companies bought the milk from such dealers, failing to test the milk for purity and nutritional value.

Notice the two things I've highlighted in red.

First, the phrase "when the scandal broke in September"

A casual reader of this story might believe that only AFTER children's deaths and hospitalizations were being traced back to melamine were people aware of the use of melamine in dairy production.

The Blog, Small Dead Animals, made a post dated April 30, 2007 entitled "Melamine Spiking Longstanding Practice" The BLOG article tells us that melamine is mixed with animal feed to artificially enhance protein levels when it is mixed with low-grade wheat, soy, etc. The most chilling quote in there (remembering that it was April 2007) is:

“If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt the animals,” said one animal feed entrepreneur whose name is being withheld to protect him from prosecution. (emphasis mine)

This is one year and five months BEFORE the scandal "Broke" in September of 2008, as reported by the BBC.

To recap:
traditional journalism leaves us wondering how melamine found it's way into milk, how widespread the risk is, how long this risk has been present. The sense one gets is that there are a few people who somehow, and for unclear reasons, did something, or failed to do something that resulted in people dying.

A blogger told us in a surprisingly short article, WHAT melamine was doing in the food chain, HOW it got there, WHY it was put there, something about WHO was putting it there, "longstanding practice" implies a WHEN it was happening, China (including a particular region) was the WHERE...

It leaves me to ask, WHO still remembers the 'five W's plus H' of journalism, and Why?

Are there any investigative reporters still out there? (I mean besides the bloggers.)

[supplemental: the source Small Dead Animals linked from was here. They in turn cited sources that described this practice some 15 years earlier in China, as well as the banning of this practice in the US in 1975. The story then was related to the tainted animal food that affected a major US pet food company in 2007.]