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.

It is no wonder that it fell to the Osaka Municipal Government to order immediate suspension of production and the recall of the contaminated low-fat milk, as well as of two other products prepared on the same production line. Any such demonstration of responsibility by the company, at least beyond the limited steps first taken, was unlikely, given that workers at the Osaka plant reportedly told police that cleaning procedures prescribed in the plant's manual had been ignored for years. Some allegedly said they were unaware of the potential danger implicit in their carelessness. Under the circumstances, it is miraculous that food poisoning did not occur earlier.

What all this means is that Snow Brand Milk Products Co., possibly as part of cost-cutting measures, was gambling with the public's health -- and lost. It is not surprising that one reported reaction at the senior executive level to the first cases of illness was to minimize the issue with the thought that, after all, low-fat milk was not one of the company's high-profit items. However, the revelation Monday that the company's Osaka plant had actually recycled some of the milk products recalled earlier in the emergency really pushed the bounds of credibility.

The decision of company President Tetsuro Ishikawa and three other senior executives to resign in September to apologize to the public and "take responsibility" for the mass food poisoning is the typical Japanese method of dealing with such incidents. With the removal from their shelves by stores nationwide of all Snow Brand milk products, not only those from the Osaka plant, and moves by schools and prefectural government offices to stop using the company's products, Mr. Ishikawa and his colleagues indeed have much to answer for.

The dairy producer had previously announced an anticipated annual profit of 12.5 billion yen for the current fiscal year ending next March 31. Clearly, actual results will be far different. Employees at Snow Brand company headquarters in Tokyo, as well as throughout Japan, are said to be disillusioned and in a state of near panic about their future prospects. The company is not alone in suffering the consequences of its arrogance. Its home-delivery distributors have also been badly affected, as have farmers who supply raw milk to the company and the dairy industry as a whole.

The popularization of dairy products for daily consumption has been a long, slow process in Japan, where the traditional diet includes no such items. Even today, many Japanese shun cheese and butter and find milk unpalatable. Yet Snow Brand Milk Products Co., tracing its history back to a Hokkaido dairy cooperative established in 1925, has managed to change the nation's dietary preferences and attain the commanding position in the industry. With 6,700 employees, sales in the last fiscal year of 544 billion yen and 35 production facilities nationwide, it faces an uncertain future as a result of cutting corners in a way that risked the public's health.