A hospital has received 14 kidney stone patients in the past two months, all were infants below 11 months, and the milk powder they drank was of the same brand, said a doctor with the hospital in Lanzhou of northwest China's Gansu Province Wednesday.

These infants shared the symptoms of being unable to pass urine, accompanied by vomiting, Zhang Wei, chief urology doctor of the No.1 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), told Xinhua.

"it was rare for babies to get kidney stones, let alone so many babies at the same time," said Zhang, a doctor with 22 years experience in urology, who received the first case on June 28.

The infants, all from the remote countryside, drank the same brand of milk powder, much cheaper than the one on the market, said their parents.

The provincial Public Health Bureau told Xinhua that it had investigated, but didn't give specific figure of how many infants were involved.

The bureau said further investigation would be made to find if there were any connection between the incident and the milk powder.

In 2004, 13 infants in east Anhui Province died of nutritional deficiencies from consuming substandard milk powder, 171 infants suffered from malnutrition after being fed with milk powder deficient in protein and other nutrients.

The majority of them lived in rural areas in Fuyang City. The parents bought cheap milk powder which contained little nutritional ingredients at rural shops. The children displayed swollen heads, while their bodies failed to grow properly.

(Xinhua News Agency September 10, 2008)