by Marianne Barriaux

BEIJING, Oct 6, 2008 (AFP) - China has deployed more than 5,000 inspectors to its dairy factories to improve food safety, state media reported Monday, as authorities said more children had been sickened by contaminated milk.

The nation's food safety watchdog dispatched inspectors across the country to make sure dairy products complied with food safety standards, the People's Daily reported.

So far, the tainted milk has sickened more than 53,000 children and killed four in China as well as exposing the nation's lax food safety standards - leading to import curbs on some Chinese products as far away as South America.

Melamine, when added to watered-down milk, makes it look richer in protein than it really is.

In the capital Beijing, 382 new cases linked to melamine-tainted milk were diagnosed in the past week alone, the state-run Beijing News reported, giving an indication of the ongoing scale of the problem.

A health ministry spokesman suggested the number of children affected with kidney stones could go up.

"We have the latest number of cases around the nation," he told AFP, "but for the time being, we are not releasing it to the public and the press." He refused to give a reason.

The dairy inspectors will check how raw materials and food additives are used, supervise sample testing and do quality control, the People's Daily said.

State media meanwhile urged authorities to dole out harsher penalties for those implicated in the milk scandal and in any other food safety issue that might arise in the future.

"From this and many other previous scandals, we see a need for the authorities to be harsher toward violators," the China Daily said in an editorial.

The newspaper said the government should come up with stern measures to teach businesses the "significance of being honest."

So far, at least 27 people have been arrested over the scandal, according to previous reports by the official Xinhua news agency.

Six more suspects in the case were detained over the weekend in northern China's Inner Mongolia, a key milk production base, it added.

The Beijing News called for the public to play a part in supervising food safety.

"It is only with the eagerness of public supervision that one can make up for the potential oversight of government monitoring and the unreliability of companies' self-discipline," the paper said in an editorial.

It suggested, for example, that testing labs be further opened up to members of the public.

The milk scandal continued to make waves around the world, with a number of countries banning or restricting milk products from China, and companies still discovering high levels of melamine in their products.

Iran became the latest country to ban imports of Chinese milk products, two days after Guyana pulled its Chinese-made dairy items off the market.

The European Union also recently banned all imports of Chinese milk-related products for children such as biscuits and chocolate on top of a long-standing embargo on Chinese dairy products like milk and yoghurt.

In Hong Kong, two Chinese-made chocolate products sold by the British sweet maker Cadbury were found to contain dangerous amounts of melamine.

South Korea, for its part, declared a large amount of Chinese-made kimchi, or spicy fermented cabbage, to be inedible due to banned or harmful additives, further adding to concerns over Chinese food.