All attempts so far by Snow Brand Milk Products Co. have failed to deal satisfactorily with the mass food-poisoning outbreak caused by bacterial contamination at the company's Osaka production facility. In the two weeks since the outbreak was first detected, over 13,000 people in nine prefectures in western Japan have become ill -- the largest such incident of food poisoning since the end of World War II. Yet throughout the early days of growing public concern, the company's senior executives reacted as if it was a minor matter and their first priority was corporate damage control.

As they now know, they could not have been more wrong. As the nation's largest dairy-products manufacturer, Snow Brand's main duty was to ease public fear by quickly learning and explaining all the facts, taking immediate steps to shut down the offending plant and seeing to it that potentially dangerous products were removed from stores. Instead, it delayed in all of these actions. As the number of reported victims rose, company officials continued to issue statements that were only partially accurate and sometimes even contradictory.

Their efforts to make it seem that only a single product -- the low-fat milk that caused the first cases of illness -- was at fault, and that staphylococcus bacteria were found only in a coin-size lump of solidified milk inside an unwashed valve on a tank at the Osaka plant were being proved fruitless even as they were being made. In fact, the inside of that valve was entirely covered with solidified milk and had not been cleaned for three weeks, although it was supposed to be washed and disinfected weekly. Gross negligence is too mild a term to describe the slapdash supervision that apparently was common practice at the plant.