BEIJING — Chinese authorities in a southern boomtown have detected a cancer-causing toxin in peanuts and cooking oil that was only recently discovered in milk, in the nation’s latest food safety scandal.

(Reuters) - A Chinese court has jailed six people for producing and selling chemical-tainted pork, state media said on Wednesday, the latest ruling in a food safety scandal.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police have arrested 52 people for making and selling cooking oil dredged up from restaurant gutters, state media reported on Tuesday, in the latest food safety scandal to hit the country.

IBM is helping a Chinese state-owned firm to monitor food safety in the country, by building a new system meant to prevent tainted products from being sold to consumers.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the world’s largest computer-services company, won a contract to build a food-monitoring system in China as the nation toughens supervision of food safety after scandals.

A ten-year-old boy in north-eastern China died on Tuesday of apparent pesticide poisoning from a tainted bottle of strawberry yoghurt drink, bringing renewed attention to the country’s persistent problems with dairy safety. China Daily published an account of the incident from the boy’s father, Chu Shiwei:

BEIJING (AP) — More than 100 people, including over a dozen Chinese government employees, have been sentenced over chemical-laced pork that caused a food safety scandal earlier this year, state media said Saturday. One person was given the death penalty.

China’s food safety standards are under fire again as a 4-year-old boy lies dead, and his mother in a coma, after drinking a bottle of Minute Maid strawberry-flavored milk last Tuesday that police say was laced with toxic pesticide. The incident has drawn attention to the country’s weak – and possibly weakening – standards for safe milk, and raised the specter of powerful special interests. In doing so, it has also created a political opportunity to level accusations at large Chinese companies unconnected with the latest case of poison milk.

China said on Monday Johnson & Johnson should “practise morality”, a week after the U.S. consumer and healthcare group was accused of continuing to sell baby shampoo with a possible cancer-causing ingredient.

Fifteen percent of the food Americans eat is imported, including 80 percent of the seafood, and two-thirds of the fruit and vegetables. Our current food safety system can’t even begin to keep tabs on the 24 million shipping containers loaded with food that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates arrived this year from overseas. Increasingly, that food is coming from China, which has suffered a series of scandals involving tainted food.