South Korea?s food watchdog has ordered China-manufactured snacks from Nestle SA and Mars Inc to be taken off shelves after detecting melamine in their samples, it said on Saturday. The Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) said 2.38 parts per million (ppm) and 1.78 ppm of the substance were found in M&M?s milk chocolate snack and Snickers peanut Fun Size, both produced by Mars and manufactured in China.

?We are urgently recalling the products due to melamine detection,? KFDA said in a statement. Mars said it was temporarily withdrawing the products from the Korean market because it was legally obliged to do so and that the melamine levels announced by the KFDA did not pose a health risk.

Kit Kat bars from Nestle were also found carrying 2.89 ppm of melamine, bringing the total number of melamine-detected items to 10 in Seoul. Nestle said the KFDA asked it to withdraw one batch of mini Kit Kat made in China from the market, after their tests detected minute traces of melamine in a single batch out of eight Nestle confectionery items tested. No melamine was detected in the other seven products, the company said.

?No regulations on maximum levels?

?The company immediately complied with the authorities? request, even though this product is absolutely safe by recognized international standards,? Nestle said in a statement. ?South Korea has no regulations on maximum levels of melamine in food, and the conditions under which the South Korean authorities conducted their tests are unclear,? it added.

Melamine, widely used in kitchen utensils, can pose serious health risks if consumed in large quantities. KFDA said it is currently examining 428 processed products manufactured in China. It had completed checks on 288 items as of Saturday.

Meanwhile, mired in the health scandal over contaminated dairy products at home and abroad, China said new tests had revealed no melamine in liquid milk on the home market. It was the second time in days China has tried to repair confidence in its dairy products, saying also on Thursday the latest chemical tests had come back clean.

Thousands of children in China have fallen sick and four have died after drinking melamine-laced milk. The dairy scare, China's latest in a long line of food safety problems, also prompted mounting recalls and warnings abroad. Samples of 609 batches of liquid, as opposed to powdered, milk from 27 cities across China were found free of melamine, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) announced on Saturday. The test was the sixth in China after the tainted milk powder scandal erupted last month. 2,093 batches of liquid milk under 115 brands, among other dairy products, had been checked since then, Xinhua news agency said, citing the AQSIQ.

There was no clean bill of health, though, for powdered milk. The food safety watchdog said on Wednesday that 31 more batches had tested positive for melamine, which has been added to cheat nutrition tests. The Ministry of Agriculture said Saturday it had developed an emergency rescue plan with the Ministry of Finance to give special subsidies to dairy farmers who have suffered from shrinking demand.

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Millions to die from lung disease

■ Tens of millions of people will die from respiratory illness and lung cancer over the next 25 years in China if nothing is done to reduce smoking and fuel burning indoors, scientists warned. In an article published in ?The Lancet?, they predicted 65 m deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and 18 m deaths from lung cancer between 2003 and 2033 from smoking and biomass burning at home. Those figures would account for 19 and 5 % respectively of all deaths in China during that period, said the researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. However, interventions to reduce smoking and household use of biomass ? like wood, charcoal, crop residues and dung ? for cooking and heating could reduce the number of deaths. Using mathematical models, they said gradual elimination of smoking and biomass burning would avoid 26 million deaths from COPD and 6.3 million deaths from lung cancer by 2033. Interventions include building proper chimneys, air circular stoves with chimneys ending outside the house and ventilated ground stoves to cut respirable particulates, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide circulating indoors. Respiratory diseases are among the 10 leading causes of deaths in China. About half of Chinese men smoke and biomass is used in more than 70 % of homes.