PET FOOD ALERT

FDA Awareness of Dangers to Food Prior to Outbreaks
I watched the congressional hearing on C-SPAN yesterday. There was agreement that the FDA must do more testing and become more active in protecting the human and animal food supply. ---BBB

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

FDA Awareness of Dangers to Food Prior to Outbreaks

Article in the Washington Post -- FDA Was Aware of Dangers To Food: Outbreaks Were Not Preventable, Officials Say, by Elizabeth Williamson. Here's an excerpt:

The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show.

Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.

Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply.

FDA officials conceded that the agency's system needs to be overhauled to meet today's demands, but contended that the agency could not have done anything to prevent either contamination episode.
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April 25, 2007 in E Coli, FDA

FDA to Test Imported Food Additives to Detect Melamine
Article in the Washington Post -- FDA to Test Imported Additives for Melamine, by Marc Kaufman and Rick Weiss. Here's an excerpt:

Concerned that a wide variety of Chinese vegetable protein products may be contaminated with the harmful compound melamine, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that it will begin testing batches of six imported ingredients used in pet foods and livestock feed, as well as additives to human food.

Officials have not found the substance in food products for people but detected it in two imported ingredients widely used in pet food: wheat gluten and rice protein. The agency said that imported corn gluten, corn meal, soy protein and rice bran will also be tested. The vegetable proteins are used in bread, pizza, baby food and many vegetarian dishes.

Tainted Hogs Enter Human Food Supply
2007-04-27
Tainted Hogs Enter Human Food Supply
By ANDREW BRIDGES - AP

Several hundred of the 6,000 hogs that may have eaten contaminated pet food are believed to have entered the food supply for humans, the government said Thursday. The potential risk to human health was said to be very low.

Contaminated Pet Food Hits Farms

The government told the three states involved it would not allow meat from any of the hogs that ate the feed to enter the food supply.

No more than 345 hogs from farms in California, New York and South Carolina are involved, according to the Agriculture Department. It appears the large majority of the hogs that may have been exposed are still on the farms where they are being raised, spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said.

Salvaged pet food from companies known or suspected of using a tainted ingredient was shipped to hog farms in seven states for use as feed.

The government will compensate farmers if they kill those hogs, said Kenneth Peterson of department's Food Safety and Inspection Service. The department knew of no countries moving to suspend imports of U.S. pork products.

Also, a poultry feed mill in an eighth state, Missouri, also received possibly contaminated pet food scraps left over from production. The fate of the feed made from that waste was under investigation.

The pet food sent to the farms later was discovered to have an ingredient, rice protein concentrate, imported from China that was tainted by an industrial chemical, melamine. Testing also revealed other related and similarly banned compounds, including cyanuric acid. Food and Drug Administration inspectors were preparing to visit China as part of the agency's investigation.

Melamine is not considered a human health concern. But there is no scientific data on the health effects of melamine combined with the other compounds, said David Elder, director of enforcement for the FDA.

Still, the FDA and Agriculture Department believe the likelihood of someone becoming ill after eating pork from hogs fed contaminated feed is very low. Meanwhile, the University of California, Davis, is developing a test to measure melamine levels in tissue, Andrews said.

Since mid-March, pet food companies have recalled more than 100 brands of dog and cat food and treats; more recalls were announced Thursday. An unknown number of cats and dogs have fallen ill or died after eating products made with contaminated rice protein concentrate or a second tainted ingredient, wheat gluten.

Some pet food, while unsuitable for sale for that purpose, was still considered safe for animals to eat as it had not been recalled at the time it was forwarded to hog farms. Its use at hog farms raised the possibility that melamine entered the human food supply.

The department on Thursday released the following state-by-state breakdown of its investigation into farms thought to have received the contaminated pet food for use as hog feed. The farms were not identified.

CALIFORNIA: State officials are working to contact the purchasers of 50 whole hogs raised on a single farm.

NEW YORK: A breeder farm's 125 to 140 swine are under quarantine pending the results of urine and manure tests. None of the hogs went to slaughter.

SOUTH CAROLINA: Urine tests done on some of the 800 hogs now quarantined at a farm have tested positive for low levels of melamine. None went to slaughter. According to the state veterinarian, none of the suspect feed was fed to the hogs. Federal tests on the feed have come up negative. The positive urine tests could not be immediately explained, although contaminated feed could have escaped detection during tests, the FDA said.

NORTH CAROLINA: A farm with 1,400 hogs is under quarantine. It shipped 54 animals to a slaughterhouse, where they are on voluntary hold.

UTAH: Eight hogs sent to slaughter by one farm remain on hold. Also on hold are 3,300 hogs at a second farm, as well as 40 to 50 carcasses at a slaughterhouse supplied by that producer. Meat from no more than 100 other hogs from the producer, all processed earlier by that same plant, may have entered the food supply, Andrews said.

KANSAS: Meat from 195 hogs from a single producer may have entered the food supply via a Nebraska slaughterhouse. The farm is holding another 150 hogs.

OKLAHOMA: A show hog operation purchased contaminated feed but no hogs have gone to slaughter.

In addition, an Ohio hog farm has been cleared.

Each year, about 105 million hogs are slaughtered and processed in the United States.

I guess this is as good a reason as any to buy locally as much as possible. I buy meats and poultry from local farmers...eggs too. This is too frightening. BBB.

We know a person who did work for the FDA with meat inspecting. The staff has been gutted by this administration.

Imported food can sometimes arrive with danger
Posted on Sun, Apr. 29, 2007

Imported food can sometimes arrive with danger
By Deb Kollars, Jim Downing and Dorsey Griffith
McClatchy Newspapers

Recent spate of food scares has China on edge

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - With food coming in from all corners of the earth, the simple, necessary, daily act of eating in America has become not just an exercise in the delicious, but also the awe-inspiring:

Peaches in the dead of winter. Golden curries from Asia. Cookies that stay fresh for months. Powders that turn a morning smoothie into fuel for a marathoner.

But the global dinner plate also comes with dangers, as has been painfully demonstrated in the recent scare from the discovery of the industrial chemical melamine in pet food - and now, with experts warning it may have spread to the human food chain.

"This whole debacle where you've got a plastic getting into a food supply shines a huge spotlight on a broken, broken system," said Elisa Odabashian, director of food safety for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports.

According to consumer and food safety experts, a vast array of foods and ingredients pours into the United States every year with little or no scrutiny. Much of the food comes from countries with less stringent regulations on pesticides, processing and sanitation.

In the past, grapes from Chile, raspberries from Guatemala and onions from Mexico have sickened or even led to the deaths of consumers.

In recent days consumers learned that pet food contaminated with the melamine was fed to hogs destined for market.

The revelations pushed worries over imported foods and ingredients to a new level and forced consumers to ask troubling questions about aspects of the food supply they may have taken for granted:

Who's making all the ingredients and additives going into food these days? What's going into products whose names we often can't even pronounce? Who's keeping an eye on safety?

Only about 1 percent of food from other countries undergoes inspection at U.S. points of entry. Often, reviews include little more than a paperwork check.

"The big red strawberries in the middle of gloomy January are very pretty," Odabashian said. "But they're very likely being produced in countries with far less regulation than what we have here."

For years, the United States exported more food than it imported. Recently that balance shifted. In 2006, the nation exported $62.6 billion in food items and imported $75.1 billion from 175 countries, a jump of more than 60 percent in the last decade, according to inflation-adjusted trade data from the U.S. Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service.

The bulk of what Americans eat still is produced in this country. About 15 percent comes from other countries, said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. For some categories imports run higher, he noted. For example, 80 percent of seafood, 50 percent of tree nuts and 45 percent of fruits eaten in this country come from elsewhere.

In addition, a growing portion of foods processed here contain ingredients of foreign origin, with China an emerging major supplier.

How much arrives from abroad is anyone's guess. Currently, seafood is the only food required to carry a label showing the country of origin.

Packages of processed foods must only list where the "final transformation" of the product took place, according to Allen Matthys, a regulatory specialist at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Food companies must keep records on their ingredient suppliers, but they don't have to disclose that information to the public - or even the government - unless regulators suspect public health is at risk, said Benjamin England, an attorney who worked at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 17 years.

The nation's food inspection system is disjointed and inadequate, consumer and food safety experts said. Recent U.S. outbreaks of E. coli from contaminated spinach and salmonella from tainted peanut butter illustrate the need for a stronger food safety network, they said.

The FDA has jurisdiction over 80 percent of food produced in this country, including seafood, fresh produce and processed foods.

Yet it has only several hundred inspectors for at least 60,000 food processing plants across the nation, Doyle said. In contrast, the USDA, which oversees meat and poultry, has 7,600 inspectors for 7,000 U.S. plants.

When it comes to imports, the inspection picture is even worse.

The FDA is charged with assuring the safety of roughly 17 million product shipments each year, about two-thirds of them food. The volume has more than tripled since 1999, while the nation's inspection force has remained static in size. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government created new food safety measures, but it has followed through on few.

Under agency targets, about 1 percent of import shipments are supposed to get a close look from FDA officials. Such inspections can range from simply reviewing paperwork to actually sending a product to a lab for testing, England said.

Inspecting the food coming into this country is a worthwhile effort, FDA records show.

In March, FDA inspectors rejected 1,526 shipments - mostly food but also drugs and medical devices - from 75 countries.

China had 215 rejected shipments and India 279. A shipment of "Chilli" powder from Bangladesh was ruled "to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food."

The problems aren't limited to Asian exporters. A load of smoked salmon from Norway tested positive for Listeria, an often-lethal bacteria.

Many food contamination problems come from unsanitary or faulty processing.

But last week's revelation about melamine and related chemicals turning up in two commonly used protein ingredients - wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate - raised a different specter: deliberate contamination. Federal officials are investigating whether the proteins were spiked with the chemicals to make them appear to have higher protein content.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer group in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday called for a ban on imports of wheat gluten, rice protein and other grain products from China until the FDA can certify their safety.

"This is a warning sign our system is really vulnerable," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the center.

Protein sources are so widely sprinkled across Americans' diets in products with long shelf lives that it would be impossible to do an effective recall if the human food supply got contaminated, DeWaal said.

In an unprecedented move, the FDA announced last week it would start testing imports of six proteins that are used not only in pet foods, but in breads, baby formulas, protein bars, and a huge array of other foods.

Targeted proteins are mostly used to make foods more nutritionally functional and appealing to consumers.

A creamier soup, a sturdier meatless sausage, a more nutritious baby formula - all can be achieved with ingredients made from soy, wheat or corn.

With constant pressure to cut costs, U.S. food companies increasingly turn to foreign suppliers for lower priced soy, corn and wheat protein ingredients.

"It's cheaper, and some places do an excellent job of marketing," Rushing said.

Consumer watchdogs believe labels should carry more information about where ingredients originate. But some industry experts said it would be impractical to do so.

"The label would be as long as your arm," said Daniel Fabricant, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Natural Products Association in Washington, D.C.

Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China
April 30, 2007
Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China
By DAVID BARBOZA and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
New York Times

ZHANGQIU, China ?- As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ?'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."

Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.

No one knows exactly how melamine (which is not believed to be particularly toxic) became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal.

The link to China has set off concerns among critics of the Food and Drug Administration that ingredients in pet food as well as human food, which are increasingly coming from abroad, are not being adequately screened.

"They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. "Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional."

Now, with evidence mounting that the tainted wheat gluten came from China, American regulators have been granted permission to visit the region to conduct inspections of food treatment facilities.

The Food and Drug Administration has already banned imports of wheat gluten from China after it received more than 14,000 reports of pets believed to have been sickened by packaged food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The Department of Agriculture has also stepped in. On Thursday, the agency ordered more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.

The pet food case is also putting China's agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

For their part, Chinese officials dispute any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But regulators here on Friday banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies.

Yet what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Many animal feed operators here advertise on the Internet, seeking to purchase melamine scrap. The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, one of the companies that American regulators named as having shipped melamine-tainted wheat gluten to the United States, had posted such a notice on the Internet last March.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is then used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, golf ball-size chunks of white rock, is sometimes being sold to local agricultural entrepreneurs, who say they mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that is high in protein.

"It just saves money if you add melamine scrap," said the manager of an animal feed factory here.

Last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, two animal feed producers explained in great detail how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, whose chemical properties help the feed register an inflated protein level.

Melamine is the new scam of choice, they say, because urea ?- another nitrogen-rich chemical ?- is illegal for use in pig and poultry feed and can be easily detected in China as well as in the United States.

"People use melamine scrap to boost nitrogen levels for the tests," said the manager of the animal feed factory. "If you add it in small quantities, it won't hurt the animals."

The manager, who works at a small animal feed operation here that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas, said he has mixed melamine scrap into animal feed for years.

He said he was not currently using melamine. But he then pulled out a plastic bag containing what he said was melamine powder and said he could dye it any color to match the right feed stock.

He said that melamine used in pet food would probably not be harmful. "Pets are not like pigs or chickens," he said casually, explaining that they can afford to eat less protein. "They don't need to grow fast."

The resulting melamine-tainted feed would be weak in protein, he acknowledged, which means the feed is less nutritious.

But, by using the melamine additive, the feed seller makes a heftier profit because melamine scrap is much cheaper than soy, wheat or corn protein.

"It's true you can make a lot more profit by putting melamine in," said another animal feed seller here in Zhangqiu. "Melamine will cost you about $1.20 for each protein count per ton whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference."

Feed producers who use melamine here say the tainted feed is often shipped to feed mills in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai, or down to Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. They also said they knew that some melamine-laced feed had been exported to other parts of Asia, including South Korea, North Korea, Indonesia and Thailand.

Evidence is mounting that Chinese protein exports have been tainted with melamine and that its use in agricultural regions like this one is widespread. But the government has issued no recall of any food or feed product here in China.

Indeed, few people outside the agriculture business know about the use of melamine scrap. The Chinese news media ?- which is strictly censored ?- has not reported much about the country's ties to the pet food recall in the United States. And few in agriculture here see any harm in using melamine in small doses; they simply see it as cheating a little on protein, not harming animals or pets.

As for the sale of melamine scrap, it is increasingly popular as a fake ingredient in feed, traders and workers here say.

At the Hebei Haixing Insect Net Factory in nearby Hebei Province, which makes animal feed, a manager named Guo Qingyin said: "In the past melamine scrap was free, but the price has been going up in the past few years. Consumption of melamine scrap is probably bigger than that of urea in the animal feed industry now."

And so melamine producers like the ones here in Zhangqiu are busy.

A man named Jing, who works in the sales department at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory here, said on Friday that prices have been rising, but he said that he had no idea how the company's melamine scrap is used.

"We have an auction for melamine scrap every three months," he said. "I haven't heard of it being added to animal feed. It's not for animal feed."
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David Barboza reported from Zhangqiu and Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Chicago. Rujun Shen also contributed reporting from Zhangqiu.

Federal agents search pet food manufacturing facilities
D.C.: Federal agents search pet food manufacturing facilities as part of investigation
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)
4/28/07

Federal agents searched facilities of a pet food manufacturer and one of its suppliers as part of an investigation into the widening recall of products made with ingredients contaminated by an industrial chemical, the firms disclosed today.

Food and Drug Administration officials searched an Emporia, Kan., pet food plant operated by Menu Foods and the Las Vegas offices of ChemNutra Inc., the supplier of one of two ingredients suspected in the contamination of millions of cans of recalled dog and cat food, according to the companies.

Menu Foods also said the U.S. Attorney's offices in Kansas and the western district of Missouri have targeted the company as part of misdemeanor investigations into whether it violated the federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act. The sale of adulterated or contaminated food is a misdemeanor. A Justice Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

"Menu Foods has been doing everything it can to cooperate with the FDA," company chief executive officer Paul Henderson said in a statement. "Even before commencement of this investigation we have given the FDA full access to our plant and our records, have answered questions and provided documents to them any time they have asked."

FDA spokeswoman Julie Zawisza would not confirm or deny that a search warrant was executed. "We have a strict policy of not discussing activities of our Office of Criminal Investigations," she said.

ChemNutra said it had been informed the company could be held accountable because it imported the melamine-adulterated wheat gluten used in the tainted pet food even though the company had no knowledge that its Chinese supplier had introduced melamine into the product.

"We have cooperated and complied fully with FDA investigators both prior to and since being served with today's search warrant, and will continue to do so," Steve Miller, chief executive officer of ChemNutra, said in a statement. "We keep very good records, which has made it relatively easy for the investigators to retrieve what they needed."

ChemNutra spokesman Steve Stern said FDA agents arrived at the company's offices in the late afternoon and stayed until late in the evening. They copied computer hard drives, Stern said, adding, "we complied completely with the FDA."

Menu Foods Midwest, an affiliate of Menu Foods, the company that last month recalled 60 million cans of pet food, earlier this week filed a lawsuit that seeks to have ChemNutra pay the costs of the recall plus damages.

ChemNutra maintains Menu Foods waited several weeks before notifying it about the problem. ChemNutra also says Menu Foods had other suppliers of wheat gluten.

Menu Foods, based in Streetsville, Ontario, recalled its products after 16 pets, mostly cats, died from eating contaminated food. Other manufacturers continue to recall pet food, with the FDA announcing the latest today.

The lawsuit, which lists Menu Foods Midwest, Menu Foods Ltd., Menu Foods Holdings Inc. and Menu Foods Inc. as plaintiffs, accuses ChemNutra of breach of contract and breach of implied warranties about the safety of the wheat gluten and its fitness for use in pet food. It said each shipment of wheat gluten came with a certificate saying it met Menu Foods' requirements.

"ChemNutra knew that Menu Foods was relying on ChemNutra's skill and judgment to supply high-quality wheat gluten," the lawsuit said.

Menu Foods said it faces more than 50 lawsuits.

Ill bet that melamine can be detected like an explosive. With all that Nitrogen by weight, a detector ought to go off while protein would go right through.

Im amazed at how callous the Chinese are about this. I read a summary article in the papere this AM that said a Chinese food inductry spokesman said that the stuff is safe.

Next time some Chinese kids want to know about a Western Style breakfast, lets tell em that we had "melamine tainted pork" two eggs with about 2% melamine residue and toast (made with flour containing 5% melamine dopin agent)


Thanks China, for caring about how we all eat.

Farmerman, I think we can thank the FDA and the USDA...and Bush's gutting of government. I am incensed! First it was our pets and now we find our food supply is in more jeopardy than we thought. I read "Fast Food Nation" and stopped eating at fast food places and started reading labels. I stopped eating most processed foods...

I think we need a big investigation...I bet it isn't just China.

Probably so. Sadly, I dont think anyone at FDA remains that isnt a political hack. I saw an article about the "benign nature of melamine" from an FDA researcher. So much bullshit has gone beyond mere acceptance of bad govt that now we have actual "advocacy" of bad government.
Sorry to sidetrack my own thread but you hit a nerve. I wish someone would start a thread about "WHAT WILL BE GW's LEGACY"

Melamine plates...

Reforming the F.D.A.
May 3, 2007
New York Times Editorial
Reforming the F.D.A.

A bill headed for a vote in the Senate would usher in much needed reforms at the Food and Drug Administration. But it also risks making the agency even more dependent on funds from the industry it regulates.

The measure, sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Michael Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, would help rectify the agency's most glaring weakness: an inability to crack down on dangerous prescription drugs whose adverse effects are discovered only after they have been widely used and many people have been harmed. The F.D.A. currently puts far more money and staff into approving new drugs than it does into monitoring them after they are on the market, and it lacks the legal authority to do much about hazards discovered at that stage.

So it is salutary that the new bill would pump more money into postmarketing regulation and push the agency into a more active role in searching vast databases for adverse drug effects. For the first time, the agency would be given the power to require postmarketing studies, and it could fine companies that refused to comply.

These and other improvements, however, would come at a stiff price: an ever greater reliance on the user fees paid by the companies. The fees were first imposed in 1992 so the agency could hire additional staff members to speed up the approval process and reduce a backlog of applications. In that respect, they were a rousing success. But over the years the fees have increased at a faster rate than appropriations. Today industry pays more than half of the cost of the agency's drug reviews. And the new bill would set the fees on a trajectory that could reach 70 percent in coming years.

This is a dangerous dependency for an agency that regulates such a critical part of the nation's health care system. It's as if the nuclear utilities paid for oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The potential for abuse in a such a chummy atmosphere is clearly there.

Industry representatives have enormous say in confidential meetings over how high the fees will be and what activities they will support. The tight deadlines for agency action set by the user fee law have sucked money and staff from important research and training. One recent study found that drugs approved in a rush to meet deadlines subsequently encountered more safety problems than drugs approved with less deadline pressure.

Unfortunately, the fees have become such a big part of the overall F.D.A. budget ?- roughly 20 percent of the total ?- that it would be difficult to eliminate them without making budget deficits worse. Perhaps the best course would be to reauthorize the fees for two years, not the five written into the current Senate bill. The F.D.A., the White House and Congress should then use the time to figure out a way to wean the F.D.A. from its risky dependency.

China Food Mislabeled, U.S. Says
May 3, 2007
China Food Mislabeled, U.S. Says
By DAVID BARBOZA
New York Times

SHANGHAI ?- A Chinese company accused of selling contaminated wheat gluten to American pet food suppliers avoided inspections partly because it did not correctly disclose its shipping contents to Chinese export authorities, according to American regulators.

The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, one of two Chinese companies at the center of the huge recall of pet food that has killed or sickened thousands of animals, shipped more than 700 tons of wheat gluten labeled as nonfood products this year through a third-party Chinese textile company.

By listing the goods as nonfood items, the company's shipments were not subject to mandatory inspection by the Chinese government. Though a possible violation of export policies, such mislabeling is thought to be widespread in China.

The details of the case, some of them disclosed on Friday in a circular released by the Food and Drug Administration, are just the latest clues that Chinese feed suppliers may have been intentionally disguising the contents of their goods.

F.D.A. officials are now visiting China to seek more information about how and why an industrial chemical used in plastics and fertilizer got mixed into pet food ingredients.

American regulators admit that six weeks after one of the biggest pet food recalls in United States history, they still do not know who in China manufactured the contaminated pet food ingredients or where in China the contamination took place.

Though the agency has named two Chinese companies as the suppliers of the tainted vegetable protein sent to the United States, regulators suspect the companies may not have been manufacturing the feed, but buying it from dozens of other feed manufacturers in China.

Those feed producers, regulators say they believe, may have intentionally mixed melamine into the feed to inflate artificially the level of protein in the bags to meet pet food requirements.

"Records relating to the importation of these products indicate that these two firms had manufactured the ingredients in question," the F.D.A. said in an import alert released last Friday. "There is strong evidence, however, that these firms are not the actual manufacturers. Moreover, despite many weeks of investigation, it is still unknown who the actual manufacturer or manufacturers of the contaminated products imported from China are."

Worried that the contaminant may continue to enter the United States and also seep into the human food supply through food additives, regulators have blocked all Chinese imports of wheat gluten and warned importers to screen nearly every other kind of food and feed additive entering the United States from China, including corn gluten and soy protein.

Last week, the F.D.A. and the Agriculture Department issued a joint warning to consumers saying that melamine has found its way into hog and chicken feed, encouraging producers to destroy the animals, even though there is no clear evidence that consuming meat from the animals is a danger to human health.

American regulators are now under growing pressure to ensure the safety of human and pet food and to get to the bottom of the melamine scare.

But what began as a pet food recall on March 16 involving two factories working for a single pet food maker, Menu Foods, has now expanded to include some of America's leading pet food brands and over 60 million pet food packages.

The two Chinese companies named by American regulators last month have said little publicly since the recall. Both companies are based in eastern China, near one of the country's biggest wheat-growing regions and also one of the centers of melamine production.

Melamine is an industrial chemical that animal feed producers here say has been intentionally mixed into feed to trick farmers into thinking they are buying higher protein meal, even though the chemical has no nutritional value.

A similar practice once took place in the United States and in China involving a related compound called urea, but that compound is now more widely tested for and is banned from certain feeds in the United States.

"This was standard stuff after World War II, when animal feed was adulterated with urea," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food and public health at New York University. "This is simple greed. It's like they're adding water to the wheat gluten."

The Chinese government has told American regulators that Xuzhou is not a manufacturer of wheat gluten but purchased its products from 25 manufacturers.

ChemNutra, the Las Vegas pet food supplier that bought the wheat gluten from Xuzhou and then resold it to pet food makers in North America, also said it was led to believe Xuzhou was the manufacturer of the product.

But ChemNutra officials also say that they received the shipments of wheat gluten through a third party, a company called Suzhou Textiles Silk Light and Industrial Products.

A spokesman for Suzhou Textiles denied that the company exported any wheat gluten to the United States

The other supplier of contaminated protein named by regulators is Binzhou Futian Biology Technology, which says that it supplies soy, corn and other proteins and has strong sales in the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. The company also declined to comment.

The Chinese government said last week that it was unlikely melamine could have harmed so many pets in the United States. But on Friday, China banned melamine from use in any vegetable protein for export or for use in the domestic food market.

The F.D.A. says that it has received reports that more than 4,000 cats and dogs died as a result of eating pet food that may have been laced with melamine.

Scientists are now struggling to determine why melamine, a chemical that is not believed to be toxic, may have turned poisonous.

Some scientists theorize that melamine mixed with other melaminelike compounds, like cyanuric acid, created a poisonous substance.

And that possibility may be all the more likely because many animal feed producers in China are not using pure melamine but impure melamine scrap that is sold more cheaply as the waste product after melamine is produced by chemical and fertilizer factories here.

"It's possible the other stuff they were left with was the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, leftover melamine and possibly cyanuric acid," said Richard Goldstein, an assistant professor at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. "I think it's this melamine with other compounds that is toxic."

I thought the Dept of Agriculture would be in charge of inspecting pet food products. What's the connection between pet food safety and the FDA?

More pet fod brands added to recall list
Here is the latest list of pet food recall from the FDA. More brands of food have been added.

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/petfoodrecall/#All

grrrr

I looked up both the FDA and the USDA and both are researching what has happened to the food supply to pets and humans. I have a lawyer friend that I called who is in the FDA and am waiting to hear if there is a clear definition between the two departments.

Littlek: I agree it is bad. If you haven't read "Fast Food Nation", do so. This has been coming for some time, but with the gutting of the government regs with this administration, I am not surprised, just disgusted and depressed.

I know that I have lost pets to the food. I just lost two cats to kidney and immunodeficient disease all of a sudden. I have no proof, but I now feed my animals on diets that have no ingredients that read animal byproducts...what the .... does that mean? I feed raw diet to my dogs and Innova Evo dry food with Wellness canned food to the cats, who also eat some raw food. They are thriving.

I am mad as h...!

I heard that a number of chicken producers in the Delmarva peninsula have had chickens and hogs (for human consumption) fed some of the recaled pet foods mixed in with grain rations.

Ive seen that the metabolic pathway involves the adsorption of the melamine onto surfaces of oxalic acid "stones" via Triazine breakdown and formation of Ammonia which speeds up kidney stone formation. I cant follow this process without opening up some old textbooks but it was reported to me as coming from a techy line freom the Food Chem Literature

Thanks, Farmerman...I am avoiding Del Marva chickens now...getting locally grown on farms nearby.

VietnamNurse - I's so sorry to hear about your cats! I fear we will all know someone who's pets were affected by this mess. I am mad as hell with you.

lad I'm (mostly) vegetarian right now. Though, I wasn't so glad during the spinach e-coli thing.

Food recall update
Food recall update 5/14/07
by Dr. Jeff Nichol, Albuquerque Vet
Albuquerque Journal

Investigations into the causes of the kidney disease of cats and dogs who consumed pet foods contaminated by melamine are pushing ahead. It turns out that the crystals that form in the kidneys of affected pets are a combination of melamine and another chemical called cyanuric acid. It was a difficult puzzle to solve because postmortem samples are usually preserved in formalin which, we have learned, dissolves the crystals, making them impossible to find.

A postmortem exam (necropsy) is a hard subject to broach with a grieving pet owner but tissues from the body of a dead pet can help save other lives. If your cat or dog has died of suspected poisoning from contaminated food you are urged to have the body necropsied with kidney samples submitted in a different approved preservative.

This disaster has been stressful for us pet lovers. The good news is that, according to the AVMA, more than 98 percent of pet foods are still deemed safe and haven't been recalled. I'll continue to keep you posted.