It has happened again.

A Chinese baby - a precious little girl about six months old - has been starving to death.

Health officials say the girl is dangerously ill. Her head is swollen and her tiny stomach distended. She weighs no more than five kilograms, and doctors say her life may have been altered forever by not having received vital nutrition when she needed it most.

But she is not a victim of natural disaster or disease sweeping through Zhuzhou in Central China's Hunan Province.

She's a victim of human greed.

It is yet another example of the so-called "big-head syndrome", much like the case exposed in May 2003, when news accounts revealed that a dozen babies had died and 200 others were severely harmed in East China's Anhui Province. All had been fed "fake" milk powder and suffered from malnutrition.

In this latest case, Qi Yongming, the little girl's father, had became so worried about his baby he brought her to see doctors at the Zhuzhou Women's and Children's Healthcare Centre last week. He told nurses his child had cried continuously for the past month. More alarming, she had been gradually losing her energy and had begun to lose her hair.

Physicians were no doubt shocked to see the child's tiny arms and legs did not match the size of her enlarged head. It didn't take long to reach a diagnosis.

"The baby is suffering from severe malnutrition," said Liao Jiren, a doctor with the hospital.

Authorities tested a sample of the milk powder the baby had been fed. While normal milk should contain 12.8 per cent protein, hers contained 1.74 per cent. Normal milk should contain 20 per cent fat, and the milk powder the child had been fed contained 12.8 per cent, the Zhuzhou Centre for Disease Control said.

The infant was fed about 20 bags of the fake milk powder beginning last December.

Though an "all-round, anti-fake food campaign" had been conducted across Hunan Province by health supervision, industrial and commercial departments and the public security authorities, it appears that at least one slippery operator fell through the cracks.

Officials were led to the merchant who sold the powder to the girl's father. He is He Xuehui, and he told authorities he made a secret deal to purchase five large boxes of the powder - each containing 20 bags - from a vendor at the Gaoqiao Market in the capital city Changsha. Gaoqiao is the biggest wholesale food market in the province.

Yet the supplier in Gaoqiao, who had been warned about not selling fake powder previously, has vanished. Authorities are searching for him now, Guo Jun'an, deputy director of the Healthcare Supervision Institute under the Zhuzhou Health Bureau, told the China Daily.

He said his motives for the crime of selling the milk powder were strictly economic. He admitted buying each box of the counterfeit powder for just 110 yuan (US$13.40) from the dealer, while selling the bags for as much as 16 yuan (US$1.90). Such a profit is outrageous.

Investigators have found that the milk powder apparently was made in East China's Zhejiang Province, Guo said.

The co-founder of that sordid dairy operation, Sha Changban, produced and sold the infant milk powder with 55 different brand names throughout 10 provinces, all without completing official quality control tests. A crackdown by the Fuyang government led to as many as 100,000 bags of substandard milk powder being seized, with four illegal production sites ordered shut down.

Sha was convicted of producing and selling hygienically substandard food and sentenced to seven years in jail, and was fined 50,000 yuan (US$6,050) when he appeared in the Yingdong District People's Court of Fuyang in East China's Anhui Province. Sha's cohorts also received virtual non-punishments for their crimes - just four- to eight-year terms.

These sentences were nothing, when compared to the suffering the culprits caused families who have lost their children. What about the 200 children who will never grow to reach their full height, their stunted growth a constant reminder of what could have been?

He and his co-conspirator should've known better, after what happened to the criminals before them. Yet their lust for money and callous disregard for humanity blinded them.

That's why some economic crimes qualify for the death penalty in China. And this case seems a perfect candidate for the country to send a message that all will hear: It will not tolerate this evil aimed at its children.