International experts have set an amount of melamine that people can eat daily without "appreciable" health risk, the World Health Organization said Friday.

The amount is lower than previous tolerable daily intake levels set by some national food authorities, the international body said.

"We expect this could better guide the authorities in protecting the health of their public," said the WHO's director for food safety, Dr. Jorgen Schlundt, at the closing of a WHO meeting of toxicology experts in Ottawa.

Melamine is a contaminant that should not be in food, but is sometimes unavoidable, the WHO said.

The tolerable daily intake or TDI represents the tolerable amount of unavoidable contaminant in food that a person can ingest on a daily basis without appreciable health risk.

The experts set the TDI for melamine at 0.2 mg/kg body weight. Based on this, a 50-kilogram or 110-pound person could tolerate 10 milligrams of melamine per day.

"At the same time the limits for melamine in infant formula (one part per million or ppm) and in other foods (2.5 ppm) introduced by many countries provide a sufficient margin of safety as compared to the TDI," Schlundt added in a statement.

Those levels are the same as Health Canada's interim standard for melamine in foods including infant formula.

On Monday, China's health ministry said six babies might have died after consuming milk powder tainted with melamine, up from a previous official total of three. The number of infants sickened in the scandal was officially raised to 294,000, up from a previous total of about 50,000.

Melamine can cause kidney stones if consumed in excessive amounts.

Chinese authorities are taking steps to improve safety in the country's dairy industry. The scandal exposed the practice of adding melamine to watered down milk to boost the apparent protein content in routine tests.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have both said they are working to verify the safety of imported products containing milk from China.