IT SEEMS the hard lessons for the Chinese food industry in 2008 following the horrendous scale of the melamine food contamination will take some time to accept.

Some of the cheats keep risking the safety of Chinese consumers and the Government has continued to let down its own people with poor standards of monitoring and ineffectual follow-up.

Two new cases of melamine-tainted milk have emerged in the past month, more than a year after a milk powder laced with melamine killed six people and sickened an estimated 300,000.

It is unclear whether these events are new issues or the hangover from the original problems that have been covered up.

The cases come after company executives involved in earlier systematic tainting practices were executed.

Shanghai Panda, one of 22 companies originally implicated in the 2008 scandal, was shut down last week after further problems were found.

The Chinese authorities made much of the Panda discoveries but since the news broke, the developments have backfired on them.

So lax was the new inspection and monitoring regime slapped into place after the alleged revamp of arrangements in 2009, that the Shanghai Panda company was able to get away with recycling - rather than destroying - the condensed milk products found earlier to have been tainted with melamine.

Officials have been reported as having been aware of further breaches by the company about 11 months ago but failed to take sufficient action to halt further problems, continuing to put lives at risk after sweeping changes were promised.

The regulators were very slow to make the necessary product recalls.

Several days after the new case was revealed, Panda products were still on the shelves in some Chinese stores.

These sorts of delays were part of the original food safety inspection breakdowns in 2008.

Chinese media reported in December that three people from another company in northern Shaanxi province were accused of producing and selling more than five tonnes of melamine-tainted milk powder.

It goes to show that cheating the system is a cultural problem in China that will take years to fully weed out.

It's a challenge to put in place effective measures such as inspectors to give consumers confidence.

Meanwhile lives will be risked.