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Getbig Misc Discussion Boards => Pet Board => Topic started by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 06:12:51 AM

Title: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 06:12:51 AM
Please check this thread for updates on the continuing recall - it appears it is going to get worse before it gets better.

Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 06:13:33 AM
From: FDA Recalls
To: FDA-RECALLS-L@LIST.NIH.GOV
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 3:09 PM
Subject: Hills Pet Nutrition, Inc. Voluntarily Recalls Single Product, Prescription DietT m/dT Feline Dry Food, Only Product Containing Wheat Gluten

Recall -- Firm Press Release

FDA posts press releases and other notices of recalls and market withdrawals from the firms involved as a service to consumers, the media, and other interested parties. FDA does not endorse either the product or the company. This listserv covers mainly Class I (life-threatening) recalls. A complete listing of recalls can be found in the FDA Enforcement Report at: http://www.fda.gov/opacom/Enforce.html

Hills Pet Nutrition, Inc. Voluntarily Recalls Single Product, Prescription DietT m/dT Feline Dry Food, Only Product Containing Wheat Gluten
Contact: Amy Thompson
785-368-5016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- Topeka, KS -- March 30, 2007 -- In accordance with its over-riding commitment to pet health and well-being, Hill's Pet Nutrition, Inc. is voluntarily recalling Prescription Diet m/d Feline dry food from the market. Hill's is taking this precautionary action because during a two-month period in early 2007, wheat gluten for this product was provided by a company that also supplied wheat gluten to Menu Foods. U.S. Food and Drug Administration tests of wheat gluten samples from this period show the presence of a small amount of melamine. Prescription Diet m/d Feline Dry represents less than one half of one percent of all Hill's products.

This is the only product Hill's currently sells in the United States that contains wheat gluten from any supplier. No other Hill's Prescription Diet® or Science Diet® products are affected by this voluntary recall. Hill's Science Diet Savory Cuts Feline canned cat foods, manufactured by Menu Foods, were previously withdrawn from the market as a precaution. Together with this earlier withdrawal, less than 1% of all Hill's products have been affected.

The voluntary recall of Hill's Prescription Diet m/d Feline dry food involves discontinuation of all retail sales and product retrieval from sellers. This recall does not include Prescription Diet m/d Feline canned food which contains no wheat gluten.

Consumers should stop using this product and return it for a refund. All Hill's products carry a 100 percent guarantee, and consumers can receive a refund for recalled product.

Hill's expects to resume shipment shortly of a reformulated version of this highly beneficial product that will not contain wheat gluten. Please check with your veterinarian for an alternative Prescription Diet until m/d Feline dry is reformulated and made available again.

Following is a list of Prescription Diet m/d Feline dry products included in this recall:

Recalled product
U.S. & Canada UPC
Size

Prescription DietT m/dT Feline dry food
52742 42770
(all lot numbers)
4 lb. bag

Prescription DietT m/dT Feline dry food
52742 42790
(all lot numbers)
10 lb. bag


Hill's has been fully cooperating with the FDA since the outset of its investigation and made the decision to voluntarily recall these products in consultation with the FDA. We deeply regret any concern that this has caused our valued customers.

For more information, consumers can contact the company at 1-800-445-5777 or visit www.HillsPet.com for details
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 06:14:40 AM
REMARKS BY PAUL K. HENDERSON
PRESIDENT AND CEO, MENU FOODS INCOME FUND
TO A NEWS CONFERENCE
MARCH 30, 2007  TORONTO
                                                                                                             Ladies and gentlemen:

Thank you for your attendance, and for your continuing dedication to this disturbing and emotional story.

I am Paul Henderson, President and CEO of Menu Foods. With me today is Randall Copeland, Executive Vice-President of Sales and Marketing, and a thirty-year veteran of the pet food industry, having spent a good portion of that time in plant operations.
 
This afternoon, I have a brief opening statement and then we will take a limited number of questions. For the sake of those listening in by phone, please do not begin asking your question until you have a microphone in hand.

One week ago, some of the dedicated researchers who had been investigating this matter reported the discovery of a single, toxic compound in our pet food. That, seemingly, cleared the way for us to address the problem, deal fairly with the pet-owners who had been injured, put our business back together, and move on.

In the intervening week, other top scientists have been unable to validate the findings.  That is, they were unable to find the toxin – called aminopterin – in our pet food, or in any of the component ingredients. It was also brought to our attention that some veterinary experts held the view that aminopterin was inconsistent with what was being observed in dogs and cats.

There is an entirely different story today.

 As you heard earlier from the FDA and Cornell University, a compound called melamine has been identified as being present in the food that caused the pet illnesses and deaths.

Melamine has been found in the finished product that was the subject of recall and has not been found in other Menu Foods pet food outside of the recall. Menu Foods only manufactures wet pet food.

Melamine has been found in the wheat gluten from a new supplier in the United States, who sourced this wheat gluten in China. This is the same ingredient that Menu Foods made reference to in its recall press release of March 16.  Melamine has not been found in the wheat gluten that we obtain from our other suppliers.

The recalled product is unfit for consumption by pets. It contains melamine.


The pet food that we have manufactured after March 6 is safe and healthy. How do we know this?
 

First, it contains no melamine. Secondly, it contains none of the suspect wheat gluten.

Thirdly, all of the testing that has been conducted, including the routine taste tests that were underway prior to the discovery of this problem, have demonstrated that those products not associated with the suspect wheat gluten performed very well and in a manner consistent with historic norms.

Menu Foods has been in operation for more than 35 years. Our plants are modern, run by dedicated, experienced and well-trained employees.  We operated with good manufacturing practices and are routinely audited by well recognized, independent experts on food safety and sanitation. It’s clear from our customer base that we must meet the most rigorous quality standards in the industry in order to be allowed to produce these products for some of the world’s largest brands.  That is how we have confidence in our abilities to produce quality products.

With all of these quality standards, how did this happen?  Quite simply, one supplier’s product was adulterated with a material that is not part of any known screening procedure for wheat gluten.  The important point today is that the source of the adulteration has been identified and removed from our system. 

Needless to say, we have a great deal of interest in finding out why we were supplied with this kind of product. This is a subject of very great interest to us and our lawyers and you can expect that we will be following up. For litigation purposes, we cannot elaborate at this time.

Let me be clear on this - we have removed that problem from our system.  Our recall is well underway and products produced today are being made with known, quality and tested raw materials.

As a result, I can say with complete confidence today – to consumers, to our customers, to governments – that Menu Foods continues to uphold the high standards for which we have been known since 1971.

Our products are safe. We continue to engage in the highest levels of monitoring and testing in the pet food industry. These tests will be expanded as a result of this experience.

A final word on melamine. We have had correspondence with the FDA and we know that they are diligently following-up on the supply of the suspect wheat gluten.  It is not our place to name the supplier as we do not want to interfere in any way with the important investigation they are conducting.

What we know today is that the products made by Menu Foods are of the highest quality, are safe, and will be returning to store shelves across North America in the coming weeks and months.

Now, as we did last time, I think we can anticipate some of your questions.

Does Menu have something it wants to say to any pet owners who have suffered a loss?

All of us at Menu Foods want to express our sympathy to those people who have suffered with sickness and loss of pets.

We are pet-people and we have almost 1,000 caring employees who are dedicated to making food that is safe, nutritious and palatable.

We are proud of our employees and the hard work, loyalty and diligence they have demonstrated in these trying times

We are angered that a source outside of the company has apparently adulterated the product causing this regrettable loss.

We are grateful to our customers and retailers who have been so responsible in the quick removal of affected product from the market and ask their continued diligence to assure that affected product is not accidentally restocked in their systems.


What is your reaction to the FDA’s Announcement earlier today?



We believe the announcement today by the FDA supports the products and the procedures used by Menu Foods in the recall.  We are pleased that they have acknowledged that the nature of the adulteration could not have been identified by detection methods used by the industry and by their acknowledgement that no violations occurred.

One area that has made this recall particularly confusing is that Menu Foods executed the recall before there was a known scientific cause for the illness experienced by pets and with very few reported incidents from the field.  We believe today’s press announcement by the FDA again supports our actions. The actions we took out of an abundance of caution undoubtedly saved many lives.

The FDA has reported that the adulterant found in the wheat gluten has only been found in wheat gluten from one specific supplier of that ingredient.  This is the ingredient referenced in our recall announcement of March 16.

What is the immediate priority for Menu Foods?


Our first priority is the recall.  We have implemented procedures to work with our retail customers to effectively clear all recalled product from the supply chain before each customer can receive new products.  These new products have ingredients that we know are clear of the adulterant that was found in the single source of wheat gluten.

In light of the FDA’s findings, what are Menu’s next steps for getting back to business?

We look forward to returning to supplying safe, palatable “cuts and gravy” product for consumers.  Our traditional loaf products do not contain any of the suspect ingredients and only two of Menu’s four plants have ever had the suspect ingredient in use at any time.  All of our products produced after March 6 have been clear of the suspect wheat gluten.

We are working with our partners to help make it easy for consumers to know that they are purchasing only products that are clear of the suspect wheat gluten, in order to ease their mind and provide assurance of safety.
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 06:18:06 AM
Anyone who has had a pet eat this food should print this out and speak to your vet.


Updated information for veterinarians
Content on this page has been provided by the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine.

AMERICAN COLLEGE OF VETERINARY
INTERNAL MEDICINE (ACVIM)
1997 Wadsworth Blvd., Suite A
Lakewood, CO 80214-5293
http://www.acvim.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 21, 2007
MEDIA CONTACT:
Jenn Armbruster
Communications & Media Relations Manager
303.231.9933 or Jennifer@ACVIM.org


PET FOOD RECALL: UPDATED INFORMATION FOR VETERINARIANS
LAKEWOOD, Colo. – In response to the recent national pet food recall, the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) has collected the following information for veterinarians in regards to the treatment of animals that have ingested the recalled food.

a.. Menu Foods of Ontario, Canada has initiated a North American Recall of its "Cuts and Gravy" format dog and cat food manufactured in its Kansas and New Jersey facilities between December 3, 2006 and March 6, 2007. See www.menufoods.com/recall for list of recalled food. Also consult www.avma.org for the most up to date information.

b.. According to an FDA press release dated March 16, 2007, some dogs and cats refused further feedings following feeding of the product, while others exhibited signs of renal failure (including loss of appetite, lethargy and vomiting).

c.. Veterinarians should examine and perform screening blood work and urinalysis on all patients who have consumed the recalled foods, symptomatic patients that have eaten recalled foods, and generally on all patients.

d.. Veterinary experience with affected pets is still limited. Colleagues are reporting that pets having confirmed exposure to the diet have a wild spectrum of presentations. Some animals exhibit signs of mild renal insufficiency developing over days to weeks while others rapidly exhibit signs and acute renal failure. Most clinical cases have been cats. Anecdotal information suggests that many cats respond to standard fluid therapy and recover. Animals treated aggressively, even those with severe azotemia, seem to have a fair prognosis based on evidence to date.

e.. Veterinarians should take a dietary history with each pet. After a thorough physical examination, the minimal data base of a comprehensive blood panel and a urinalysis should be performed to screen for causes of clinical signs including renal disease. It is important to screen for all diseases because this recall will bring in clients whose pets had preexisting diseases or coincidentally have developed an unrelated illness at the time of the recall. If renal disease is diagnosed, additional tests such as a urine culture and imaging should be considered to rule out causes of renal disease other than a toxicant.

f.. Patients with renal disease should be managed with appropriate fluid therapy including an assessment of electrolyte status and administration of medications to treat gastrointestinal signs. If the patient is in acute renal failure and anuric or oliguric, additional considerations to acid-base status, and diuretic therapy (including lasix, mannitol and/or dopamine) may be required, necessitating a careful monitoring of fluid rates, vital parameters such as CVP, and urine production.

g.. If a patient with anuric or oliguric acute renal failure is not responding to appropriate therapy, veterinarians should promptly consider contacting a small animal internist with the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (www.ACVIM.org) in their local community for case consultation and possible referral. Hemodialysis can be utilized for severely affected patients and is available at a limited number of veterinary teaching hospitals.

h.. Duration of treatment in patients which may have renal failure due to ingestion of the recalled food is unknown at this time and obviously will vary between patients. Long term effects on renal function are unknown. Patients succumbing to illness should be necropsied and tissues saved in formalin for histopathology to determine cause of death.

i.. The Iowa State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory reports that autopsy and microscopic examination of tissues from affected animals indicate acute renal toxicosis including the presence of birefringent crystals, as well as other crystal formations. The Iowa State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory has the capability to analyze pet food for the suspected toxic agents described above and examine tissues from animals that have died. More information is available at www.vdpam.iastate.edu.

j.. The Animal Health Diagnostic Center (AHDC) at Cornell University will also receive food samples for testing and tissue samples for histopathology. For more information, see www.diag.center.vetcorne ll.edu. According to the AHDC, substances that have been preliminarily ruled out are: ethylene glycol, cholecalciferol, other glycols including diethylene glycol, propylene glycol, heavy metals, ochratoxin, several solvents and cleaning products known to be used on the machinery used in the production of these foods, and several pesticides.
Prepared by Sandy Willis DVM DACVIM
ACVIM Communications Committee Chair
www.ACVIM.org
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 06:24:55 AM
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/30/pet.food.recall.ap/index.html

FDA finds new chemical in tainted pet food, sick animals

POSTED: 10:29 a.m. EDT, March 30, 2007

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Government testing found a chemical used to make plastics in recalled pet food linked to the deaths of dogs and cats, officials said Friday.

The Food and Drug Administration said it found melamine in samples of the Menu Foods pet food, as well as in wheat gluten used as an ingredient.

Cornell University scientists also have found the chemical, also used as a fertilizer, in the urine of sick cats, as well as in the kidney of one cat that died after eating the company's wet food.

Menu Foods recalled 60 million containers of cat and dog food earlier this month after animals died of kidney failure after eating the Canadian company's products.

It is not clear how many pets may have been poisoned by the apparently contaminated food, although anecdotal reports suggest hundreds if not thousands have died. The FDA alone has received more than 8,000 complaints.

The new finding comes a week after scientists at the New York State Food Laboratory identified a rat poison and cancer drug called aminopterin as the likely culprit. They've since detected melamine as well, though it's not clear how that chemical would have poisoned pets.

Meanwhile, animal rights advocates called on federal food safety regulators and pet food companies to expand a nationwide recall of dog and cat food to include dry varieties, claiming they make pets sick.

The FDA said Thursday it had no plans to suggest a wider recall to pet food companies, and veterinarians said they have not seen a trend of animals becoming ill after eating dry pet food.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals plans to make the appeal Friday in Washington after it said it received complaints from pet owners who claim their animals suffered kidney failure after eating dry pet food.

Norfolk, Virginia-based PETA wants the FDA and the companies to extend the recall to foods that have received complaints, chemically test it and perform necropsies on the animals involved. It also wants companies prosecuted if the FDA's probe turns up wrongdoing.

FDA spokeswoman Julie Zawisza said she did not know how many of the complaints the agency has received have concerned dry pet food. Officials at Ontario, Canada-based Menu Foods, which made the recalled pet food, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Nearly 100 brands of pet food were recalled after animals suffered kidney failure. The recall involved "cuts and gravy" style dog and cat food. The recall covered products carrying names of major brands including Iams, Nutro and Eukanuba.

Veterinarians aren't seeing a trend of pets getting sick off dry food, said Paul Pion, founder of the Veterinarian Information Network. He said since so many people use dry food, you would expect to see many more ill pets if the food was tainted.

"I wouldn't put much credence in it, but it's not out of the realm of possibility," Pion said.

The Veterinary Information Network reported Tuesday that at least 471 cases of pet kidney failure have been reported since the recall, and more than 100 pets have died. (Full story) Menu Foods has confirmed 16 pet deaths.
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 06:28:27 AM
Nestlé Purina, Hills join pet food recall
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
A recall of pet food expanded Friday to include the first dry product, which is available only through veterinarians' offices.

Meanwhile, the FDA now says the contamination in wet pet food that has injured and killed pets across the country may not have been the pesticide aminopterin but possibly a fertilizer and plastics agent called melamine.

In a news conference Friday morning, the Food and Drug Administration announced that its labs had detected melamine in samples of the pet food, in the wheat gluten used to make it and in the urine and kidneys of cats who were injured by it.

FDA investigators are not certain how melamine would sicken or kill dogs and cats; there is little scientific information available about melamine exposure in animals.

ON DEADLINE: What is melamine?

Hills Pet Nutrition announced that it is recalling its Prescription Diet Feline Dry Food, Friday evening. The company said the food contained wheat gluten provided by a company that also supplied wheat gluten to Menu Foods, the firm that initiated the earlier recall. It did not say whether any pet illnesses had been associated with the food.

Nestlé Purina PetCare also late Friday said it was recalling all sizes and varieties of its Alpo Prime Cuts in Gravy wet dog food with specific date codes.

The company said it, too, learned that it received wheat gluten from the same company that supplied Menu Foods and Hills.

Purina said the wheat gluten was used in "limited production" at only one of its 17 pet food manufacturing plants.

The company then notified the FDA and began its recall.

Purina's recalled products include: 13.2-ounce and 22-ounce ALPO Prime Cuts cans and 6-, 8-, 12- and 24-can ALPO Prime Cuts Variety Packs. They have four-digit code dates of 7037 through 7053, followed by the plant code 1159. Those codes follow a "Best Before Feb. 2009" date. This information should be checked on the bottom of the can or the top or side of the multi-pack cartons.

Purina's 5.3-ounce Mighty Dog pouch products, manufactured by Menu Foods, were previously withdrawn from the market as a precaution on March 16 as part of the Menu Foods recall.

No Purina dry pet foods were affected by either recall.

Hill's Science Diet Savory Cuts Feline canned cat foods, manufactured by Menu Foods, were previously withdrawn from the market as a precaution. Together with this earlier withdrawal, less than 1% of all Hill's products have been affected, the company said. The recall does not include Prescription Diet m/d Feline canned food, which contains no wheat gluten.

The affected products:

• Prescription Diet™ m/d™ Feline dry food, 4 pound bag, 52742 42770(all lot numbers)

• Prescription Diet™ m/d™ Feline dry food, ten pound bag, 52742 42790(all lot numbers)

The company advised consumers to stop using the product and return it for a refund. Hill's is reformulating the food so that it will not contain wheat gluten, the company said.

Earlier in the day, the FDA said its labs found no aminopterin in its tests. Neither did labs at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University in New York. Cornell has been involved in testing of the Menu Foods since the first indication of the problem, "We have not been able to confirm aminoptrin in the food or body samples," says Donald Smith, dean of the college.

New York State, which originally found the aminopterin in the pet food, said Friday that it stood beyind its find. It also said it had no doubt that melamine is present in the pet food, but that there was not enough data on the mammalian toxicity levels to conclude that it could cause illness in cats and dogs.

The FDA has to date received more than 8,800 calls related to the pet food, made by Menu Foods of Canada and recalled March 16 after a New York State lab announced it had discovered aminopterin, a rat poison, in some samples.

Smith says that Cornell veterinarians found melamine in the affected animals' kidneys and urine but don't have a medical explanation for how it might be causing injury. He is being very cautious "There's no evidence yet to tie (the pet injuries) into the melamine," Smith says.

Menu Foods said Friday it imported the wheat gluten from China because of tight supply. Normally it gets wheat gluten, often used as a binding agent in wet pet foods, from North America and Europe.

The China wheat gluten supplier — a new supplier for Menu — was dropped in early March after the company realized there may be a problem. Menu said no product made since then contained the contaminated wheat gluten.

"Quite simply, one supplier's product was adulterated in a manner that was not part of any known screening process for wheat gluten," Menu Foods CEO Paul Henderson said today. He declined to identify the company that provided the wheat gluten — other to say that it was a new supplier for the company — and said Menu Foods was contemplating legal action against the supplier.

Henderson said Menu Foods had a "great deal of interest" in learning why it was supplied with adulterated wheat that would pass the screening.

The FDA said Friday the agency is now testing 100% of incoming wheat gluten supplies from China.

In the USA, melamine is primarily used as to make plastics. But in Asia it is also used as a fertilizer, said Stephen Sundlof, director of FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.

Earlier this month, more than 60,000 cans of wet pet food manufactured by Menu Foods were recalled because of reports that cats and dogs were being injured and killed by a mysterious contamination in the food, which was sold under more than 95 brand names.

Sundlof acknowledged that there is frustration on the part of the public that the cause hasn't been pinned down. He said FDA personnel have been working around the clock to determine the extent of the contamination and its cause. More than 400 employees at national headquarters and in 20 district offices are working on it, he says, as well as at least three field laboratories.

"FDA recognizes that pets are very important to the American people," Sundlof said. "As a veterinarian, my life's work has been to work with animals."

Contributing: Julie Schmit in San Francisco; Randy Lilleston and Steve Marshall in McLean, Va.
 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-pet-food-recall_N.htm?csp=24



Pebbles, a 7-year-old Yorkshire terrier, died after battling kidney failure. Pebbles ate dog food that was later recalled. The FDA found melamine, a chemical used in plastic and fertilizer, in the food

(http://images.usatoday.com/news/_photos/2007/03/23/dogx.jpg)
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on March 31, 2007, 11:14:22 AM
http://
http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2007/03/30/pet-food-recall-fda-press-conference-report/
Pet food recall: FDA press conference report

In an FDA press conference this morning, a reporter asked the FDA’s Dr. Stephen Sundlof if people could be feeding unsafe food to their pets right now, because the FDA won’t reveal the name of a company - that makes dry “kibbled” food as well as “wet” pet food - that received wheat gluten from the same source Menu did.

The response? “It is possible, but I think we’ve been following every lead that we can. My sense is that we have gotten most of it under control.”

As soon as we have any information, he assured reporters at a press conference this morning, we’ll notify the public. Except for the name of the company, it seems.

How about the numbers? asked another attendee. You’re still saying only 15 confirmed deaths, but some reports are in the thousands. How do you explain the discrepancy?

Dr. Sundlof said FDA can’t confirm any cases beyond those first few in Menu’s test labs, even though they have received over 8800 additional reports, because “We have not had the luxury of confirming these reports.” They’ll work on that, he said, after they “make sure all the product is off the shelves.”

He pointed out that in human medicine, the job of defining what constitutes a confirmed case would fall to the Centers for Disease Control, not the FDA… and there is no CDC for animals.

Updated: Karen Roebuck of the Pittsburg Tribune-Review, who broke the story earlier this morning that melamine, not aminopterin, had been found in the tested foods, asked if any of the wheat gluten had found its way into the human food supply.

The response: “At this point we are not aware that any of that went into human food.” They do know the company that supplied the contaminated wheat gluten, and are tracking its shipments, but they aren’t disclosing the name of the company.

They are, however, doing “100 percent review and sampling of all wheat gluten from China.”

More to come.

If you have a pet with a recall-related illness, let us remind you to:

    * Call the FDA to report your information
    * Call your veterinarian and ask him or her to report to your state veterinarian, also for the FDA
    * Enter your pet in our database
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on April 02, 2007, 01:12:22 PM
Pet foods NOT on the recall list.  Please go to the link as this list may change:


   http://petsitusa.com/blog/?p=210 (http://petsitusa.com/blog/?p=210)
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on April 02, 2007, 01:15:24 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-goldstein/tainted-wheat-gluten-sold_b_44743.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-goldstein/tainted-wheat-gluten-sold_b_44743.html)



Tainted Wheat Gluten Sold as "Food Grade"


Del Monte Foods has confirmed that the melamine-tainted wheat gluten used in several of its recalled pet food products was supplied as a "food grade" additive, raising the likelihood that contaminated wheat gluten might have entered the human food supply.

"Yes, it is food grade," Del Monte spokesperson Melissa Murphy-Brown wrote in reply to an e-mail query.
Del Monte issued a voluntary recall Saturday for several products under the Gravy Train, Jerky Treats, Pounce, Ol' Roy, Dollar General and Happy Trails brands.

Wheat gluten is sold in both "food grade" and "feed grade" varieties. Either may be used in pet food, but only "food grade" gluten may be used in the manufacture of products meant for human consumption. Published reports have thus far focused on tainted pet food, but if the gluten in question entered the human food supply through a major food products supplier and processor, it could potentially contaminate thousands of products and hundreds of millions of units nationwide.

Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine said the FDA is not aware of any contaminated gluten that went into human food but said he could not confirm this "with 100 percent certainty." Wheat gluten is a common food additive used as a thickener, dough conditioner, and meat substitute. It is widely used as an additive in commercial bakery items and special purpose flours.

The FDA announced today that it has traced the contaminated wheat gluten to a single processor, Xuzhou Anying Biological Technology of Peixian, China, but has not released the name of the U.S. distributor who supplied the product to Del Monte, Menu Foods, Nestle Purina, and Hills Nutritional. In all, more than 70 brands and over 60 million cans and pouches of dog and cat food are now part of this massive recall, as well as at least one brand of dry cat food.

Public statements have indicated that the contaminated gluten was distributed by a single U.S. company, but since the FDA refuses to name the supplier, it is not yet known if this company also supplies human food manufacturers. It is also not yet known if Xuzhou Anying sells direct to food manufacturers in the U.S. or abroad.

While cats seem particularly susceptible to the effects of melamine poisoning, there is little research on the substance's human toxicity. Unless and until the FDA determines otherwise, one cannot help but wonder if our sick and dying cats are merely the canary in the coal mine alerting us to a broader contamination of the human food supply.
Title: Re: UPDATES- PET FOOD RECALL
Post by: ~flower~ on April 04, 2007, 05:22:39 AM
Recall -- Firm Press Release


FDA posts press releases and other notices of recalls and market withdrawals from the firms involved as a service to consumers, the media, and other interested parties. FDA does not endorse either the product or the company. This listserv covers mainly Class I (life-threatening) recalls. A complete listing of recalls can be found in the FDA Enforcement Report at: http://www.fda.gov/opacom/Enforce.html

 
ChemNutra Announces Nationwide Wheat Gluten Recall

Contact:
Devon Blaine/Lisa Baker
310-360-1499

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE --Las Vegas, NV -- April 3, 2007 -- ChemNutra Inc., of Las Vegas, Nevada, yesterday recalled all wheat gluten it had imported from one of its three Chinese wheat gluten suppliers – Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd.

The wheat gluten ChemNutra recalled was all shipped from China in 25 kg. paper bags, and distributed to customers in the same unopened bags. The bags were all labeled "Wheat Gluten Batch No.: _______ Net Weight: 25 kg Gross Weight: 25.1 kg Made in China". The batch numbers included in the recall are 20061006, 20061027, 20061101, 20061108, 20061122, 20061126, 20061201, 20061202, 20061203, 20061204, 20061205, 20061206, 20061208, 20061221, 20070106, 20070111, 20070116, and 20070126. Each ChemNutra shipment had the certificate of analysis information from the supplier, including batch number and the supplier's content analysis and test results. ChemNutra shipped from its Kansas City warehouse to three pet food manufacturers and one distributor who supplies wheat gluten only to the pet food industry. ChemNutra's shipments commenced November 9, 2006 and ended March 8, 2007. ChemNutra did not ship to facilities that manufacture food for human consumption, and the distributor ChemNutra shipped to supplies wheat gluten only to pet food manufacturers. The total quantity of Xuzhou Anying wheat gluten shipped was 792 metric tons.

ChemNutra learned on March 8 from one pet food manufacturer that the wheat gluten it had sold them – all from the Xuzhou Anying - was among ingredients suspected as a potential cause of pet food problems. ChemNutra immediately quarantined its entire wheat gluten inventory and assisted this customer's investigation.

After that manufacturer issued a pet food recall, the FDA immediately commenced a thorough investigation of ChemNutra's wheat gluten, including documentation analysis, inspection, and laboratory testing. ChemNutra cooperated fully with the FDA and immediately notified its other three wheat gluten customers about the FDA's investigation. Those customers had all purchased smaller amounts of the Xuzhou Anying wheat gluten commencing in January, 2007.

On Friday, March 30, the FDA announced they had found melamine in samples of the wheat gluten ChemNutra had imported from Xuzhou Anying. The FDA did not inform ChemNutra of any other impurities in the Xuzhou Anying wheat gluten, nor of any impurities in the wheat gluten from ChemNutra's other two Chinese suppliers.

The toxicity of melamine is not clear. However, since melamine is not approved by the FDA for pet food, it should absolutely not have been in wheat gluten. ChemNutra is extremely concerned about the purity of all of its products. The company is particularly troubled that the certificates of analysis provided by the above-named supplier did not report the presence of melamine.

ChemNutra wants to ensure its products are safe. Consequently, in addition to its ongoing cooperation with the FDA, ChemNutra will be conducting its own independent, analytical tests of wheat gluten from all of its suppliers.

Yesterday ChemNutra sent recall notices to all four of its direct customers. If any other company received bags of recalled wheat gluten from the lot numbers referenced above, please call ChemNutra at 702.818.5019.

Consumers who have questions about the pet food they should go to the FDA's website at www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01590.html. This website lists all brands of petfood involved, with links to the manufacturer who should be contacted with questions.

####

 

FDA's Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts Page: http://www.fda.gov/opacom/7alerts.html
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - THE COVERUP!!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 05, 2007, 05:38:09 AM
  It is very ironic that more pets have died from "Nutritionally Complete, Scientifically Tested" pet foods over the years than from the "dangerous" species appropriate raw diets.



YOUR WHOLE PET
Bigger than you think: The story behind the pet food recall


The March 16 recall of 91 pet food products manufactured by Menu Foods wasn't big news at first. Early coverage reported only 10-15 cats and dogs dying after eating canned and pouched foods manufactured by Menu. The foods were recalled -- among them some of the country's best-known and biggest-selling brands -- and while it was certainly a sad story, and maybe even a bit of a wake-up call about some aspects of pet food manufacturing, that was about it.

At first, that was it for me, too. But I'm a contributing editor for a nationally syndicated pet feature, Universal Press Syndicate's Pet Connection, and all of us there have close ties to the veterinary profession. Two of our contributors are vets themselves, including Dr. Marty Becker, the vet on "Good Morning America." And what we were hearing from veterinarians wasn't matching what we were hearing on the news.

When we started digging into the story, it quickly became clear that the implications of the recall were much larger than they first appeared. Most critically, it turned out that the initially reported tally of dead animals only included the cats and dogs who died in Menu's test lab and not the much larger number of affected pets.

Second, the timeline of the recall raised a number of concerns. Although there have been some media reports that Menu Foods started getting complaints as early as December 2006, FDA records state the company received their first report of a food-related pet death on February 20.

One week later, on February 27, Menu started testing the suspect foods. Three days later, on March 3, the first cat in the trial died of acute kidney failure. Three days after that, Menu switched wheat gluten suppliers, and 10 days later, on March 16, recalled the 91 products that contained gluten from their previous source.

Nearly one month passed from the date Menu got its first report of a death to the date it issued the recall. During that time, no veterinarians were warned to be on the lookout for unusual numbers of kidney failure in their patients. No pet owners were warned to watch their pets for its symptoms. And thousands and thousands of pet owners kept buying those foods and giving them to their dogs and cats.

At that point, Menu had seen a 35 percent death rate in their test-lab cats, with another 45 percent suffering kidney damage. The overall death rate for animals in Menu's tests was around 20 percent. How many pets, eating those recalled foods, had died, become ill or suffered kidney damage in the time leading up to the recall and in the days since? The answer to that hasn't changed since the day the recall was issued: We don't know.

We at Pet Connection knew the 10-15 deaths being reported by the media did not reflect an accurate count. We wanted to get an idea of the real scope of the problem, so we started a database for people to report their dead or sick pets. On March 21, two days after opening the database, we had over 600 reported cases and more than 200 reported deaths. As of March 31, the number of deaths alone was at 2,797.

There are all kinds of problems with self-reported cases, and while we did correct for a couple of them, our numbers are not considered "confirmed." But USA Today reported on March 25 that data from Banfield, a nationwide chain of over 600 veterinary hospitals, "suggests [the number of cases of kidney failure] is as high as hundreds a week during the three months the food was on the market."

On March 28, "NBC News" featured California veterinarian Paul Pion, who surveyed the 30,000 members of his national Veterinary Information Network and told anchor Tom Costello, "If what veterinarians are suspecting are cases, then it's much larger than anything we've seen before." Costello commented that it amounted to "potentially thousands of sick or dead pets."

The FDA was asked about the numbers at a press conference it held on Friday morning to announce that melamine had been found in the urine and tissues of some affected animals as well as in the foods they tested. Dr. Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine, told reporters that the FDA couldn't confirm any cases beyond the first few, even though they had received over 8,800 additional reports, because "we have not had the luxury of confirming these reports." They would work on that, he said, after they "make sure all the product is off the shelves." He pointed out that in human medicine, the job of defining what constitutes a confirmed case would fall to the Centers for Disease Control, but there is no CDC for animals.

Instead, pet owners were encouraged to report deaths and illness to the FDA. But when they tried to file reports, there was no place on the agency's Web site to do so and nothing but endless busy signals when people tried to call.

Veterinarians didn't fare much better. They were asked to report cases to their state veterinarian's office, but one feline veterinary blog, vetcetera, which surveyed all official state veterinarian Web sites, found that only eight had any independent information about the recall, and only 24 even mentioned it at all. Only one state, Vermont, had a request on their site for veterinarians to report pets whose illnesses or deaths they suspect are related to the recall. And as of today, there is no longer a notice that veterinarians should report suspected cases to their state veterinarians on the Web site of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

The lack of any notification system was extremely hard on veterinarians, many of whom first heard about the problem on the news or from their clients. Professional groups such as the Veterinary Information Network were crucial in disseminating information about the recall to their members, but not all vets belong to VIN, and not all vets log on to VIN on the weekend (the Menu press release, like most corporate or government bad news, was issued on a Friday).

But however difficult this recall has been for veterinarians, no one has felt its impact more than the owners of affected dogs and cats. While the pet media and bloggers continued to push the story, the most powerful force driving it was the grief of pet owners, many of them fueled by anger because they felt that their pet's death or illness wasn't being counted.

Many of them were also being driven by a feeling of guilt. At Pet Connection, we received a flood of stories from owners whose pets became ill with kidney failure, and who took them to the vet. The dogs or cats were hospitalized and treated, often at great expense -- sometimes into the thousands of dollars -- and then, when they were finally well enough, sent home.

For some, the story ended there. But for others, there was one more horrifying chapter. Because kidney failure causes nausea, it's often hard to get recovering pets to eat. So a lot of these owners got down on their hands and knees and coaxed and begged and eventually hand-fed their pets the very same food that had made them sick. Those animals ended up right back in the hospital and died, because their loving owners didn't know that the food was tainted.

To many pet owners, the pet food recall story is a personal tragedy about the potentially avoidable loss of a beloved dog or cat. Others have a hard time seeing the story as anything more than that -- with implications beyond the feelings of those grieving pet owners. Which brings us to the bigger picture, and questions -- not about what happened but about the system.

How did this problem, now involving almost every large pet food company in the United States, including some of the most trusted -- and expensive -- brands, get so out of hand? How come pet owners weren't informed more rapidly about the contaminated pet food? Why is it so hard to get accurate numbers of affected animals? Why didn't veterinarians get any notification? Where did the system break down?

The issue may not be that the system broke down, but that there isn't really a system.

There is, as the FDA pointed out, no veterinary version of the CDC. This meant the FDA kept confirming a number it had to have known was only the tip of the iceberg. It prevented veterinarians from having the information they needed to treat their patients and advise pet owners. It allowed the media to repeat a misleadingly low number, creating a false sense of security in pet owners -- and preventing a lot of people from really grasping the scope and implication of the problem.

And it was why Rosie O'Donnell felt free to comment last week on "The View": "Fifteen cats and one dog have died, and it's been all over the news. And you know, since that date, 29 soldiers have died, and we haven't heard much about them. No. I think that we have the wrong focus in the country. That when pets are killed in America from some horrific poisoning accident, 16 of them, it's all over the news and people are like, 'The kitty! It's so sad.' Twenty-nine sons and daughters killed since that day, it's not newsworthy. I don't understand."

In fact, Rosie didn't understand. She didn't understand that the same government she blames for sending America's sons and daughters to die in Iraq is the government that told her only 15 animals had died, and that the story was about a pet "poisoning accident" and not a systemic failure of FEMA-esque proportions.

Think that's going too far? Maybe not. On Sunday night, April 1, Pet Connection got a report from one of its blog readers, Joy Drawdy, who said that she had found an import alert buried on the FDA Web site. That alert, issued on Friday, the same day that the FDA held its last press conference about the recall, identified the Chinese company that is the source of the contaminated gluten -- gluten that is now known to be sold not only for use in animal feed, but in human food products, too. (The Chinese company is now denying that they are responsible, although they are investigating it.)

Although the FDA said on Friday it has no reason to think the contaminated gluten found its way into the human food supply, Sundlof told reporters that it couldn't be ruled out. He also assured us that they would notify the public as soon as they had any more information -- except, of course, that they did have more information and didn't give it to us, publishing it instead as an obscure import alert, found by chance by a concerned pet owner, which was then spread to the larger media.

All of which begs the question: If a system to report and track had been in place for animal illness, would this issue have emerged sooner? Even lacking a reporting and tracking system, if the initial news reports had included, as so many human stories do, suspected or estimated cases from credible sources, it's likely this story would have been taken more seriously and not just by Rosie O'Donnell. It may turn out that our dogs and cats were the canaries in the coal mine of an enormous system failure -- one that could have profound impacts on American food manufacturing and safety in the years to come.

Christie Keith is a contributing editor for Universal Press Syndicate's Pet Connection and past director of the Pet Care Forum on America Online. She lives in San Francisco.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/04/03/petscol.DTL
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - THE COVERUP!!! (+ updates)
Post by: knny187 on April 05, 2007, 12:51:40 PM
Dog biscuits added to pet food recall

Manufacturer includes broader range of production dates, FDA reports
 
Updated: 50 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - The recall of pet foods and treats contaminated with an industrial chemical expanded Thursday to include dog biscuits made by an Alabama company.

The Food and Drug Administration said Sunshine Mills Inc. is recalling dog biscuits made with imported Chinese wheat gluten. Testing has revealed the wheat gluten, a protein source, was contaminated with melamine, used to make plastics and other industrial products.

Also Thursday, Menu Foods, a major manufacturer of brand- and private-label wet pet foods expanded its original recall to include a broader range of dates, the FDA said. Menu Foods was the first of at least six companies to recall pet foods and treats made with the contaminated ingredient.

The FDA knows of no other pet product companies planning recalls, agency officials told reporters.

Sunshine, of Red Bay, Ala., sells pet foods and treats under its own brands as well as private labels sold by grocery, mass merchant and dollar stores, according to its Web site. A list of recalled products was not immediately available.

Title: Pet Food Adulterated on Purpose!!?
Post by: ~flower~ on April 07, 2007, 09:56:02 AM
One possibility: Pet food adulterated on purpose
Story Highlights
• NEW: Theory: Chemical may have been added deliberately to raise protein level
• NEW: FDA: We've been working round the clock since we were told of recall
• Senate to hold hearings on FDA's handling of tainted pet food
•Recall expands to include dog biscuits, more Menu Foods products

(CNN) -- Contaminants that led to a massive recall of pet food could have been added intentionally, according to one theory being considered by the Food and Drug Administration.

"Somebody may have added melamine to the wheat gluten in order to increase what appears to be the protein level," the FDA's Stephen Sundlof told CNN on Friday.

"Wheat gluten is a high-protein substance and by trying to artificially inflate the protein level, it could command a higher price. But that's just one theory at this point." (Watch theory about why anyone would deliberately adulterate pet foodVideo)

Sundlof said the agency is virtually sure the animal deaths linked to tainted pet food were caused by something that contaminated the wheat gluten, a normal ingredient of the food.

The FDA has found melamine, a component of fertilizers and plastic utensils, in the gluten, but that may not be the culprit, said Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.

"Melamine is not very toxic as a chemical, so we're wondering why we are seeing the kinds of serious conditions, especially the kidney failure, that we're seeing in cats and dogs," he said.

"We are focusing on the melamine right now because we believe that, even if melamine is not the causative agent, it is somehow associated with the causative agent, so it serves as a marker," Sundlof said Thursday.

The recalled food has been linked to kidney failure in an undetermined number of dogs and cats. (Watch people whose pets died describe what happenedVideo)

The Senate's second-ranking Democrat announced Thursday the Senate will hold hearings on the FDA's handling of the recall.

"The FDA's response to this situation has been tragically slow," Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, told reporters in Chicago. "Pet owners deserve answers. The uncertainty about what is safe to feed their pets has gone on far too long." (Watch Durbin call response to pet food recall 'a failure'Video)

Responding on Friday, Sundlof said, "We learned of the pet food recall from the company, Menu Foods, on the evening of March 15. We were in the plant on the morning of March 16, and since then we have had more than 400 people working on this issue virtually around the clock ... identifying the one company in China that produced this material."

The original recall included more than 60 million cans of "cuts and gravy-style" wet cat food and dog food made by Menu Foods.

Since then, the recall has broadened to include some pet foods produced by Nestlé Purina PetCare Co., Del Monte Pet Products and Hill's Pet Nutrition.

And on Thursday, Sunshine Mills in Red Bay, Alabama, said 20 types of large dog biscuits are contaminated with potentially toxic wheat gluten from China. The dog-treat maker said it has received no reports of death or illness related to the products.

Company spokesman Conrad Pitts told CNN it purchased the tainted wheat gluten from The Scoular Co. of Minneapolis. Scoular officials said they bought the product from ChemNutra Inc. in Las Vegas, which recalled the tainted wheat gluten on Monday.

ChemNutra obtained it from Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd., a Chinese company. (Watch how the toxic food was traced to ChinaVideo)

The FDA has embargoed further imports of the Chinese company's wheat gluten, which it has determined was contaminated with melamine. Xuzhou Anying Biologic said it was astonished by the report but that it would cooperate with the U.S. investigation.

"We have never exported to the U.S. -- we are a trading company. We don't even know how we became implicated in this matter," Mao Lijun, the company's general manager, said Friday.

Asked if the company sold wheat gluten to another Chinese company that could have exported it to America, Lijun said he could not comment since the company was going through records to establish that.

The original recall announcement for Menu Foods covered products manufactured between December 3 and March 6. But on Thursday, the Ontario-based company widened it to include products dated back to November 8. (Details on recall)

Although no new brands were added on Thursday's amended list, Menu Foods added 20 varieties of pet food to the recall in response to ChemNutra's recall announcement. About 1 percent of the U.S. pet food market has been affected by the various recalls, the FDA said.
Official figure of 16 deaths expected to grow

Sundlof acknowledged that the official count of 16 pet deaths linked to the food will increase.

"We know that there have been a lot more animals affected by this, made ill and have died," he said. "Trying to put an estimate to it at this time is just not something we can do."

He said the agency is in the process of defining how to confirm suspect cases. The FDA has received 12,000 complaints during the three weeks since the recall was announced -- a number it would typically get over two years.

"Right now, our priority is still ensuring that all contaminated product is identified and removed from store shelves," Sundlof said.

The FDA said it has no evidence that any of the questionable wheat gluten has entered the human food supply.

CNN's Katy Byron, Susie Xu and Miriam Falco contributed to this report.
 
 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/06/pet.deaths/index.html?section=cnn_latest_
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 3,240 pets have been reported as deceased (+ updates)
Post by: ~flower~ on April 07, 2007, 10:14:47 AM
http://www.vin.com/WebLink.plx?URL=http://www.fda.gov/opacom/7alerts.html (http://www.vin.com/WebLink.plx?URL=http://www.fda.gov/opacom/7alerts.html)

http://www.vin.com/promo/News/Recall/Hills_Letter_Regarding_Reimbursement.pdf (http://www.vin.com/promo/News/Recall/Hills_Letter_Regarding_Reimbursement.pdf)

http://www.menufoods.com/recall/PRESS%20RELEASE%2004052007%20CAN.htm (http://www.menufoods.com/recall/PRESS%20RELEASE%2004052007%20CAN.htm)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/4691151.html (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/4691151.html)

http://cahfs.ucdavis.edu/ (http://cahfs.ucdavis.edu/)

http://cahfs.ucdavis.edu/pet_food.htm
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 39,000 sickened or killed!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 10, 2007, 04:02:09 AM
Thousands of pets probably sickened by food
Veterinary chain’s data estimates 39,000 animals were affected

The Associated Press
Updated: 8:53 p.m. ET April 9, 2007

WASHINGTON - Pet food contaminated with an industrial chemical may have sickened or killed 39,000 cats and dogs nationwide, based on an extrapolation from data released Monday by one of the nation’s largest chains of veterinary hospitals.

Banfield, The Pet Hospital, said an analysis of its database, compiled from records collected by its more than 615 veterinary hospitals, suggests that three out of every 10,000 cats and dogs that ate the pet food contaminated with melamine developed kidney failure. There are an estimated 60 million dogs and 70 million cats in the United States, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.

The hospital chain saw 1 million dogs and cats during the three months when the more than 100 brands of now-recalled contaminated pet food were sold. It saw 284 extra cases of kidney failure among cats during that period, or a roughly 30 percent increase, when compared with background rates.

“It has meaning, when you see a peak like that. We see so many pets here, and it coincided with the recall period,” said veterinarian Hugh Lewis, who oversees the mining of Banfield’s database to do clinical studies. The chain continues to share its data with the Food and Drug Administration.

FDA officials previously have said the database compiled by the huge veterinary practice would probably provide the most authoritative picture of the harm done by the tainted cat and dog food.

From its findings, Banfield officials calculated an incidence rate of .03 percent for pets, although there was no discernible uptick among dogs. That suggests the contamination was overwhelming toxic to cats, Lewis said. That is in line with what other experts have said previously.

At least six pet food companies have recalled products made with imported Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical. The recall involved about 1 percent of the overall U.S. pet food supply.

Finally tally isn't possible
Measuring the tainted food’s impact on animal health has proved an elusive goal. Previous estimates have ranged from the FDA’s admittedly low tally of roughly 16 confirmed deaths to the more than 3,000 unconfirmed cases logged by one Web site.

“On a percentage basis it’s not breathtaking, but unfortunately it’s a number that, if it was your pet that was affected, it’s too high,” veterinarian Nancy Zimmerman, Banfield’s senior medical adviser, said of the newly estimated incidence rate.

In another estimate Monday, the founder of a veterinary group said 5,000 to 10,000 pets may have fallen ill from eating the contaminated food, and 1,000 to 2,000 may have died.

The estimate was based on a Veterinary Information Network survey of 1,400 veterinarians among its 30,000 members. About one-third reported at least one case, said Paul Pion, the Network’s founder. He cautioned that a final, definitive tally isn’t possible, and that even his estimate could be halved — or doubled.

“Nobody is ever going to know the truth,” Pion said. “It’s always going to be a guess.”

Also Monday, the Web site petconnection.com said it had received reports of 3,598 pet deaths, split almost evenly between dogs and cats. The site cautioned that the numbers were unconfirmed.

Banfield’s veterinarians treat an estimated 6 percent of the nation’s cats and dogs. After the first recall was announced, the chain beefed up its software to allow those veterinarians to plug in extra epidemiological information to help track cases, Zimmerman said.

The new template allowed vets to log what a sick pet had eaten, any symptoms its owner may have noticed, the results of a physical examination, any urine and blood test results and other observations.

Lewis said there is no reason to believe the company’s findings — including an apparently heightened vulnerability of kittens to the contaminant — wouldn’t hold for other veterinary practices as well.

No CDC for pets
In outbreaks of foodborne disease in humans, the FDA leans on its sister agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to help track and confirm cases. During the ongoing pet food scare, FDA officials have repeatedly reminded the nation that there is no CDC for dogs and cats.

A spokesman for the American Veterinary Medical Association said the lack of hard numbers has worried pet owners eager to understand the extent of the problem. He suggested the recall could spur the creation of an animal counterpart to the CDC.

“This might be something that would push this in the future,” AVMA spokesman Michael San Filippo said.

Another large veterinary chain, Los Angeles-based VCA Antech Inc., has not tallied reports from its nearly 400 VCA animal hospitals around the country, a spokesman said.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18029173/wid/11915773?GT1=9303
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 39,000 sickened or killed!!
Post by: Euro-monster on April 10, 2007, 04:24:47 AM
It's unbelievable ... the list goes on and on!... >:(
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 39,000 sickened or killed!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 10, 2007, 08:40:14 AM
It is ironic that a lot of vets and other uneducated people say that "raw will kill your pet" yet kibble has caused more deaths/illnesses than raw ever has.

This one hasn't made it to the list of recalls yet:



Marin case confirms new tainted pet food
Jim Staats
Marin Independent Journal
Article Launched:04/09/2007 07:34:24 PM PDT

Scientists at a state animal health laboratory confirmed Monday that a popular brand of pet food submitted for testing by Marin veterinarians was indeed contaminated, even though it is not on a growing list of recalled pet foods.

The pet food apparently sickened a cat owned by a Greenbrae woman. The cat has slowly recovered and was returned to its home on Monday.

At the request of the Mill Valley Pet Clinic, three varieties of Nutro Max Cat Gourmet Classics, in 3-ounce cans, were tested by the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

The food tested positive for melamine, which has been found in wheat gluten imported from China. Melamine is used to make plastics and other industrial products.

Tests were ordered by the Mill Valley Pet Clinic after the cat was diagnosed with acute renal failure on March 26. UC Davis officials supplied the test results to the Mill Valley Pet Clinic, but declined comment.

"We do not discuss results from specific testing with third parties," said Birgit Puschner, of the lab's toxicology department.

Dr. Marianne Willis, veterinarian at Mill Valley Pet Clinic, said the UC lab "doesn't want to be in the middle of all this. They said since we ordered the test and paid for it, we were free to do what we want with it."

She said clinic veterinarians were notifying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the food manufacturer of the tainted food.

Last week, the FDA added dog biscuit manufacturer Sunshine Mills Inc. to a growing list of companies that have recalled more than 100 brands of pet foods and treats made with imported Chinese wheat gluten.

Several varieties of Nutro Products brand pet food - including 3-ounce food pouches for cats, 5.3-ounce pouches for dogs and 12.5-ounce cans for dogs - are either on the FDA's list or on Nutro's own list at its Web site, www.nutroproducts.com. But the lists do not include the 3-ounce cans for cats.

The canned cat food that tested positive for melamine at UC Davis were the Lamb & Turkey Cutlets, California Chicken Supreme and Chicken Cacciatore.

A Nutro spokesman could not be reached for comment Monday.

The overall recall covers "cuts and gravy"-style products made between Nov. 8 and March 6 from a select variety of popular brands including Iams, Hy-Vee, Nutro, Paws and private label brands sold by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Kmart and Longs Drug Stores.

Last week, the FDA said 21 pet food samples obtained from consumers tested positive for melamine. The recall is one of the largest pet food recalls in history, according to Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. The FDA has received more than 12,000 complaints but has confirmed only about 15 pet deaths.

Mill Valley Pet Clinic officials ordered the food sample test for Cleo, an 11-year-old domestic short-hair cat brought to their office last month after she stopped eating. She was rushed to the Pet Emergency and Specialty Center of Marin in San Rafael.

Kellie Little, Cleo's owner, said she purchased the food from Pet Club in Corte Madera on March 19. She said she has been in contact with Nutro officials about six times over the past two weeks, but she was told that only the cat food in pouches had been recalled, not the canned cat food. She provided two samples to the company's office in addition to the samples sent to UC Davis.

Little's cat has slowly recovered under constant veterinary care, and she brought Cleo home Monday.

"I feel it's kind of a victory that we may be able to save some other cats' lives," Little said of Monday's test results.

When it comes to specific pet foods on the recall list, "we're getting updates every day," said Dr. Chris Rodi, Pet Emergency and Specialty Center of Marin.

NUTRA MAX CAT GOURMET CLASSICS

The following three 3-ounce varieties tested positive for melamine by UC Davis:

- Chicken Cacciatore, UPC 79105352055

- California Chicken Supreme, UPC 79105300117

- Lamb & Turkey Cutlets, UPC 79105300148
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 39,000 sickened or killed!!
Post by: Butterbean on April 10, 2007, 10:48:19 AM
39,000!  :'(

Thanks for keeping us updated w/all this info.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 39,000 sickened or killed!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 11, 2007, 05:34:18 AM
http://www.petconnection.com/recall/index.php (http://www.petconnection.com/recall/index.php)

Update 4/10, 5:12 a.m. PT: 3,730 pets have been reported as deceased to our PetConnection database. Of these, 1,938 are cats, and 1,1792 are dogs. Total reports of all owner-suspected cases of food-related illness: 11,703. These are self-reported numbers, and should be in no way be considered confirmed or "official." But if even a fraction can be confirmed, they show deaths far exceeding the FDA's count of 16 pets, most of whom died in a manufacturers feeding trial.

Other sources also support higher numbers, including state numbers from the Oregon State Public Health Veterinarian (40 cases, April 6) and the Michigan State Veterinary Association (46 dead, April 6), as well as a sampling of all U.S. and Canadian veterinarians from the independent Veterinary Information Network. (4/10: our post or the Sacramento Bee story; need a log-in?).

Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 39,000 sickened or killed!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 16, 2007, 06:38:30 AM
(I will be offline for a bit, but will continue to post any updates on this tragedy)

http://www.itchmo.com/read/natural-balance-pulling-venison-dry-dog-formula_20070415 (http://www.itchmo.com/read/natural-balance-pulling-venison-dry-dog-formula_20070415)


BREAKING NEWS: Natural Balance Pulling Venison Formulas


Itchmo has confirmed an email from Natural Balance that they are removing two products from sale:

    * Venison and Brown Rice Dry Dog Formula
    * Venison and Green Pea Dry Dog Cat Formula

These products do not contain wheat gluten. No deaths or serious illnesses have been reported and no recall warning has been issued. The warning applies only to products sold in the last week, according to Natural Balance.

    Please know that at this time we are removing this product from the shelves, as we have had some phone calls indicating gastric upset after eating this formula. At this time, we are unsure if this could just be a particular batch problem, or simply customers switching diets too fast. However, in the meantime while we are looking further into this matter, we are not recommending to feed this formula, and are suggesting to feed our Potato and Duck or Sweet Potato and Fish Dry Dog Formula.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - 39,000 sickened or killed!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 16, 2007, 06:44:20 AM
http://www.pnv2.com/index.html (http://www.pnv2.com/index.html)

  Please click on the above link for more information


Welcome to Pets Need A Voice Too!
This is the new home for the KeepOurPetsSafe (KOPS) Nationwide March.
Please bookmark our site and check back often for updates.

We are marching in memory of our pets that have lost their lives, we are marching in memory of those pets that are fighting for their lives, we march as pet owners, dog lovers, cat lovers and average citizens that are tired of the lowered safety standards for goods coming in to this country.


The latest numbers
04/13/07. . . FDA: MORE THAN 13,000 REPORTS
Petconnection.com (as of 04/13/07; 6:30 a.m. PDT):  4,069 dead - (2,099 cats; 1,970 dogs)
PETCONNECTION: 12,663 Total Reports


http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/04/pet_food_recall26.html (http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/04/pet_food_recall26.html)


(http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u82/pnv2pics/OurCardPictures.jpg)
Abigail, Alex and Allie (June 15, 2001- Feb. 17, 2007)



 
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 17, 2007, 01:29:22 PM
I don't use this poison, but for those that do:


> Just an head's-up:
>
> Dr Andrew Jones, DVM, he issued a warning with regard to Heartguard Chewables
> today.
>
> He states that he's recently heard that this product may soon be recalled and
> he suspects it may be due to this product containing wheat gluten as a binder
> to hold the pill together.
>
> To avoid a potential problem for those of you who use a heartworm
> preventative, he suggests switching to Interceptor (his opinion, not mine. :) )
>
> If anyone's dog is on any type of medication, it would be prudent to check
> not only with your vet, but also with the manufacturer what the binder is.
> Heck. The way things are going, you may as well include human medication into
> that too.
>
> Just so everyone is aware of a potential problem . . .



 UPDATE:

  A friend of mine called Merial (the manufacturer of the product). She spoke with Kelle Straw. Kelle said there is no wheat gluten in Heartguard, nor has there ever been any. Anyone wishing to confirm this can call Kelle directly. She is head of their media department: 678-638-3687.

Permission given by Kelle to cross post and distribute.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates!
Post by: Princess L on April 17, 2007, 08:48:15 PM
I don't use this poison, but for those that do:


Why do you not use heartworm prevention?
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 18, 2007, 05:36:24 AM
Why do you not use heartworm prevention?

Princess, I have replied and put some info in the Vaccination thread.  :)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! RICE PROTEIN CONTAMINATED ALSO!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 18, 2007, 06:22:41 AM
It's not just wheat gluten!!!!!

http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/naturalbalance04_07.html (http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/naturalbalance04_07.html)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- Pacoima, CA -- April 17, 2007 --  Natural Balance, Pacoima, CA, is issuing a voluntary nationwide recall for all of its Venison dog products and the dry Venison cat food only, regardless of date codes. The recalled products include Venison and Brown Rice canned and bagged dog foods, Venison and Brown Rice dog treats, and Venison and Green Pea dry cat food. Recent laboratory results show that the products contain melamine. We believe the source of the melamine is a rice protein concentrate. Natural Balance has confirmed this morning that some production batches of these products may contain melamine.

The recall was prompted by consumer complaints received by Natural Balance involving a small number of cats and dogs that developed kidney failure after eating the affected product.

Dogs or cats who have consumed the suspect food and show signs of kidney failure (such as loss of appetite, lethargy and vomiting) should be seen by a veterinarian. We recommend our customers immediately stop feeding our recalled venison products regardless of date code and return unused product to their retailer for a full refund.

The products are packaged in bags, cans and zip lock treat bags and sold in pet specialty stores and PetCo nationally.

No other Natural Balance products are involved in this voluntary recall as none of our other formulas include the rice protein concentrate.

Although the problems seem to be focused on a particular production period of the venison products, over the last four days we have notified our distributors and retailers by phone and e-mail to immediately stop selling and return all recalled Venison dog foods and treats and the Venison dry cat food. Venison canned cat food is not involved.

The source of the melamine appears to be a rice protein concentrate, which was recently added to the dry venison formulas. Natural Balance does not use wheat gluten, which was associated with the previous melamine contamination.

None of Natural Balance's other dry formulas, none of our other canned or roll products and none of our other treats are involved with this voluntary recall.

We continue to work closely with the FDA in their ongoing investigation.

Consumers with questions may contact the company at 1-800-829-4493 or visit the website at www.naturalbalance.net.

Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 18, 2007, 06:51:54 AM
  Word on the street is that this was a HUMAN GRADE Rice Protein - this has not been confirmed yet.  But it was from the US and not China. 



http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-04-17-premium-pet-food-recalled_N.htm

Premium pet food company recalls dry foods

By Julie Schmit, USA TODAY
Natural Balance Pet Foods said Tuesday it found melamine in two of its pet food products, which the company has recalled.
Melamine is the chemical suspected of causing pet deaths and illnesses related to the Menu Foods recall, covering more than 60 million cans and pouches of wet dog and cat food from dozens of brands the past four weeks.

But Natural Balance doesn't use wheat gluten, the ingredient contaminated with melamine in the Menu recall. Instead, it suspects that melamine was in a rice protein concentrate, a new ingredient used in the dry foods, said Natural Balance president Joey Herrick. "That was the only change in the product," he says.

The concentrate is now being tested, he added. Melamine was detected in samples of the food. The recalled foods are: Venison & Brown Rice Dry Dog Food and Venison & Green Pea Dry Cat Foods.

Whether other pet food makers got the same rice protein concentrate is unclear at this time. Herrick says the food was made for Natural Balance by Diamond Pet Foods.

Diamond Pet Food makes no other food that includes rice protein concentrate, spokesman Jim Fallon says.

Herrick also said Diamond got the rice protein concentrate from an American company, which he wouldn't name. The melamine in the Menu Foods recall was in wheat gluten imported from China.

The company has recalled all dates of the two products, although Herrick says it has only received complaints for food made March 28.

Herrick says Natural Balance, a premium pet food maker based in California, started getting calls Thursday from consumers reporting that dogs were vomiting. By Friday, the company had received calls from seven households regarding 11 dogs, Herrick said. The company also says it has received reports of animals suffering kidney problems, which has also occurred in the Menu recall.

The consumer calls set off alarms because "we don't get that," Herrick said.

The company has also received reports involving three or four cats, he said.

Natural sent out the food Friday to be tested for the usual things that would cause animals to vomit, such as pesticides and heavy metals, Herrick says.

No animals had yet died but that the company had reports that some were hospitalized, he said.

Melamine is not allowed in human or pet food. It is an industrial chemical used in plastics making in the USA and as a fertilizer in Asia, the Food and Drug Administration says. While melamine is not highly toxic, the FDA is investigating whether it, or something related to it, is responsible for pet deaths in the Menu recall.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 18, 2007, 09:46:28 AM
UPDATE ON HEARTGARD:

A friend of mine called Merial (the manufacturer of the product). She spoke with Kelle Straw. Kelle said there is no wheat gluten in Heartguard, nor has there ever been any. Anyone wishing to confirm this can call Kelle directly. She is head of their media department: 678-638-3687.

Permission given by Kelle to cross post and distribute.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 19, 2007, 05:47:44 PM
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.petfood19apr19,0,4141728.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.petfood19apr19,0,4141728.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines)


Pet food probe turns to possibility of fraud
Toxic additive boosts protein and shipment value


By Jonathan D. Rockoff
Sun Reporter

April 19, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Federal investigators are probing whether Chinese producers laced a key ingredient in pet food with an industrial chemical in order to boost the price of their shipments, Sen. Richard J. Durbin said yesterday.

Referring to the contamination that has prompted the recall of more than 100 brands of pet food, he said investigators are trying to determine whether Chinese producers purposely added melamine to their wheat gluten shipments to Menu Foods.

"It could have been intentional, not accidental," Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in an interview after meeting privately in his office with federal health officials. "Economic fraud is a theory" the investigators are pursuing, Durbin said.

The Food and Drug Administration found melamine, a plastic component whose use is not approved in food, in pets that died. Investigators traced the melamine to wheat gluten, shipped from China, that is used to thicken pet food.

According to Durbin, investigators are examining whether Chinese manufacturers added nitrogen-rich melamine to wheat gluten in order to raise its nitrogen level. Nitrogen levels are measured to calculate the protein content, which determines the value of a shipment.

The FDA is sampling all imports of wheat gluten from China and the Netherlands, which also received shipments from China. The agency says it has found no evidence that the wheat gluten entered the human food supply.

A bag with the word "melamine" stenciled on the side was found Sunday in a shipment of rice protein concentrate, a second pet food ingredient that has been linked to the pet food scare.

Investigators want to visit Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd., the suspected wheat gluten producer, and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd., which is thought to have made the rice protein, according to Durbin.

But FDA Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach told the senator that investigators haven't been able to make the trip because they cannot get visas from the Chinese government. FDA officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Durbin and Democratic Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro of Connecticut wrote yesterday to China's ambassador to the United States, protesting the failure to respond to visa requests from the FDA on April 4 and 17 and urging cooperation in the investigation.

A man who answered the telephone at the Chinese embassy's press office refused to confirm that visas had not been granted. Xuzhou Anying, the manufacturing company, has denied making the tainted wheat gluten.

The developments come a month after Menu Foods, of Ontario, Canada, recalled 60 million cans of pet food following reports of kidney problems and deaths in dogs and cats.

The recall has since expanded to more Menu Foods products, as well as food made by other companies that found tainted wheat gluten in their brands.

On Tuesday, Natural Balance Pet Foods Inc. recalled Venison and Brown Rice canned and bagged dog foods and dog treats, and Venison and Green Pea dry cat food.

The company, based in Pacoima, Calif., said it acted after pet owners reported kidney failure in some dogs and one cat that ate its food.

Laboratory tests on the Natural Balance products indicated that they contained melamine. Natural Balance doesn't use wheat gluten, but recently began using rice protein concentrate, which the testing indicated had melamine.

The rice protein was distributed in the United States by Wilbur-Ellis Company. On Sunday, the San Francisco company found a bag with the word "melamine" stenciled on the side in a shipment of rice protein concentrate it had received from China.

The bag tested positive for melamine, and the company has sealed the rest of the shipment in a warehouse until it completes safety tests, Wilbur-Ellis said on its Web site.

Durbin met with the FDA officials after complaining about the agency's handling of the pet food scare. He and DeLauro plan to offer legislation that would require FDA to develop national inspection standards for pet food-making facilities, rather than relying on states.

The proposed measure would also strengthen penalties that FDA could impose on pet food makers who delay reporting safety problems, an accusation critics have levelled against Menu Foods.

Durbin, the Senate's second-ranking Democrat, said von Eschenbach should have already penalized Menu Foods for waiting three weeks to report its concerns.

jonathan.rockoff@baltsun.com
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 19, 2007, 05:54:38 PM
Recall -- Firm Press Release

FDA posts press releases and other notices of recalls and market withdrawals from the firms involved as a service to consumers, the media, and other interested parties. FDA does not endorse either the product or the company. This listserv covers mainly Class I (life-threatening) recalls. A complete listing of recalls can be found in the FDA Enforcement Report at: http://www.fda.gov/opacom/Enforce.html

Wilbur-Ellis Voluntarily Recalls Rice Protein Concentrate
Contact:
Ann Barlow
415-438-9826; 925-200-6539
Deborah Brown
212-931-6113

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- San Francisco, CA -- April 18, 2007 -- Wilbur-Ellis Company is voluntarily recalling all lots of the rice protein concentrate the San Francisco company's Feed Division has shipped to pet-food manufacturers because of a risk that rice protein concentrate may have been contaminated by melamine, an industrial chemical used to make plastics and fertilizers that can lead to illness or fatalities in animals if consumed.

Wilbur-Ellis noted that it obtained rice protein from a single source in China and shipped to a total of five U.S. pet-food manufacturers located in Utah, N.Y., Kansas and two in Missouri.

Last Sunday, April 15, Wilbur-Ellis notified the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that a single bag in a recent shipment of rice protein concentrate from its Chinese supplier, Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd., had tested positive for melamine. Unlike the other white-colored bags in that shipment, the bag in question was pink and had the word "melamine" stenciled upon it. Wilbur-Ellis separated that bag and quarantined the entire shipment for further testing and since that time, no further deliveries of rice protein concentrate have been made. Samples from the white bags tested negative for melamine. However, subsequent and potentially more sensitive tests by the FDA came back positive for melamine, leading Wilbur-Ellis to voluntarily issue the recall.

Wilbur-Ellis began importing rice protein concentrate from Binzhou Futian Biology Technology in July 2006. A total of 14 containers holding 336 metric tons of rice protein concentrate were sent from Futian to Wilbur-Ellis. Wilbur-Ellis has distributed 155 metric tons to date.

On Monday (April 16), a pet food distributor issued a voluntary recall of its pet food, believing the source of contamination to be rice protein concentrate supplied by Wilbur-Ellis. As an additional precaution, Wilbur-Ellis is urging all pet food manufacturers using rice protein concentrate supplied through Wilbur-Ellis to recall any pet food that may be on supermarket shelves.

Consumers with questions about the pet food they use should visit the FDA Web site at www.fda.gov.

####

FDA's Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts Page: http://www.fda.gov/opacom/7alerts.html
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 19, 2007, 05:55:34 PM
Pet Food Recall Expanded

By ANDREW BRIDGES
The Associated Press
Thursday, April 19, 2007; 1:35 AM Eastern

WASHINGTON -- An industrial chemical that led to the nationwide recall of more than 100 brands of cat and dog food has turned up in a second pet food ingredient imported from China.

The discovery expands the monthlong cascade of recalls to include more brands and varieties of pet foods and treats tainted by the chemical.

"This has exposed that the safety standards for pet foods are not in place in any significant way and the kind of drumbeat, day after day, of recalls has shaken consumers' confidence in the pet food industry's adherence to food safety standards," said Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive officer of the Humane Society of the United States.

The chemical, melamine, is believed to have contaminated rice protein concentrate used to make a variety of Natural Balance Pet Foods products for both dogs and cats, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday.

The FDA has there is no evidence so far to suggest any of the rice protein went to companies that make human food, said Michael Rogers, director of the agency's division of field investigations. But the FDA has not accounted for all the imported ingredient.

Previously, the chemical was found to contaminate wheat gluten used by at least six other pet food and treat manufacturers.

Both ingredients were imported from China, though by different companies and from different manufacturers.

The FDA on Wednesday began reviewing and sampling all rice protein concentrate imported from China, much as the agency has been doing for wheat gluten, Rogers said.

A lawmaker said Wednesday the Chinese have refused to grant visas to FDA inspectors seeking to visit the plants where the ingredients were made. An FDA spokesman later said the visas were not refused but that the agency had not received the necessary invitation letter to get visas.

"It troubles me greatly the Chinese are making it more difficult to understand what led to this pet food crisis," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told The Associated Press after meeting with the FDA commissioner, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach.

A message left Wednesday with the Chinese Embassy in Washington was not immediately returned.

Natural Balance said it was recalling all its Venison and Brown Rice canned and bagged dog foods, its Venison and Brown Rice dog treats and its Venison and Green Pea dry cat food. The supplier of the tainted rice protein said early Thursday it was recalling all the ingredient it had distributed to U.S. manufacturers and in turn urged them to recall any products that may be on store shelves.

The recalls now include products made by at least seven companies and sold under more than 100 brands.

The Pacoima, Calif., company said recent laboratory tests showed its recalled products contain melamine. Natural Balance believes the source of the contaminant was rice protein concentrate, which the company recently added to the dry venison formulas.

A San Francisco company, Wilbur-Ellis Co., began importing the ingredient in July from a Chinese company, Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd., according to Wilbur-Ellis president and chief executive John Thacher.

It resold the ingredient to five pet food manufacturers, including Diamond Pet Foods Inc. of Meta, Mo. Diamond manufactured the dry dog and cat foods recalled by Natural Balance, Diamond Pet Foods spokesman Jim Fallon said.

Thacher declined to identify his company's other four customers, except to say two tested the ingredient and found no melamine. Wilbur-Ellis has not heard from the other two, both of whom received limited amounts of the ingredient, Thacher said.

The FDA's tests detected melamine in a rice protein sample; the agency would not disclose the sample's origin.

The source of the melamine remains unclear. It may have contaminated the rice protein through the reuse of dirty bags used to ship the products.

Thacher said an April 4 delivery from Futian Biology included 146 1-ton bags of rice protein concentrate. All were white except for a single pink bag, which was stenciled "melamine."

Wilbur-Ellis isolated the entire shipment at a Portland, Ore. warehouse and sent out samples for testing. The pink bag's contents tested positive for melamine while the two white bags tested were negative, Thacher said.

Futian Biology later told Wilbur-Ellis that a damaged bag was replaced with a clean one, Thacher said. The company then "certified the product was all fine," he added.

The Las Vegas importer of the contaminated Chinese wheat gluten, ChemNutra Inc., that led to the original pet food recall has suggested that spiking a product with melamine can make it to appear to be richer in protein during tests, thus increasing its value.

ChemNutra also imported rice protein concentrate from China, though from another source. Spokesman Steve Stern said the company is testing those shipments.

The recalls began March 16 when Menu Foods recalled 60 million cans of dog and cat food after the deaths of 16 pets, mostly cats, that had eaten its products. The FDA said tests indicated the food was contaminated with melamine, which is used in making plastics and other industrial processes.

Five other companies later recalled pet products also made with wheat gluten tainted by the chemical. The FDA has since blocked Chinese imports of wheat gluten.

Menu Foods continues to add more varieties to its recall list. Menu Foods spokesman Sam Bornstein did not know if the Streetsville, Ontario-based company also used rice protein concentrate as an ingredient in its pet foods, sold under more than 100 different major and store brands.

A House committee is holding a food safety hearing Tuesday and is expected to discuss the pet food recall.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 19, 2007, 05:57:42 PM
Now contaminated corn gluten!!!! >:(   



Pet-food poison from SA firm
19/04/2007 16:23 - (SA)

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2101493,00.html

Johannesburg - Tests have confirmed that Vets Choice and Royal Canin dog and cat dry pet-food products contained corn gluten contaminated with melamine, says the manufacturer.

The contaminated corn gluten was delivered to Royal Canin by a South African third-party supplier and appears to have originated from China.

Those products subject to the present recall were manufactured by Royal Canin South Africa in its Johannesburg plant between March 08 2007 and April 11 2007 and were sold exclusively in South Africa and Namibia.

The company said all other Vets Choice and Royal Canin products (including those made in South Africa before March 8 2007 and products made outside South Africa) were not affected and could be fed to pets.

Managing director Gregory Watine said: "We will continue to co-operate totally with the relevant public authorities, vets , customers and pet owners to help them by all means possible.

Condolences

"They can rest assured that Royal Canin remains committed to putting the interests of pets and their health and nutrition first."

He said the company wanted to express their support and offer condolences to pet owners whose pets may have fallen ill or died as a result of eating the contaminated food.

Sales of all Vets Choice products were suspended on April 11 2007 and all affected products were being recalled from the market.

Measures had been taken in co-ordination with the South African Veterinary Association (Sava) and the Pet Food Institute (PFI) to ensure this contamination did not happen again.

Royal Canin South Africa Call Centre can be contacted on 011 446 1025.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 20, 2007, 05:49:52 AM
http://www.royalcanin.us/

April 19, 2007

Dear Royal Canin USA Customer,

It is with sincere regret that I inform you of a new and unfortunate development with some of our pet food products.

Although we have no confirmed cases of illness in pets, we have decided to voluntarily remove the following dry pet food products that contain rice protein concentrate due to the presence of a melamine derivative.

ROYAL CANIN SENSIBLE CHOICE® (available in pet specialty stores nationwide)

Dry Dog Food
- Chicken Meal & Rice Formula Senior
- Lamb Meal & Rice Formula Puppy
- Lamb Meal & Rice Formula Adult
- Lamb Meal & Rice Formula Senior
- Rice & Catfish Meal Formula Adult

ROYAL CANIN VETERINARY DIETT (available only in veterinary clinics)

Dry Dog Food
- Canine Early Cardiac EC 22T
- Canine Skin Support SS21T

Dry Cat Food
- Feline Hypoallergenic HP23T

We are taking this proactive stance to voluntarily recall these products to avoid any confusion for our customers about which Royal Canin USA products are safe and which products may be affected.

Pet owners should immediately stop feeding their pets the Royal Canin USA dry pet food products listed above. Pet owners should consult with a veterinarian if they are concerned about the health of their pet. No other Royal Canin diets are affected by this recall and CONTINUE TO BE safe for pets to eat.

In addition, Royal Canin USA will no longer use any Chinese suppliers for any of our vegetable proteins.

This decision to recall some of our dry pet food products is driven by our philosophy that the "Pet Comes First". The safety and nutritional quality of our pet food is Royal Canin USA's top priority. Pet owners who have questions about this recall and other Royal Canin USA products should call 1-800-592-6687.

On behalf of the entire Royal Canin family, our hearts go out to the pet owners and everyone in the pet community who have been affected by all of the recent recalls. We are as passionate about the health and happiness of our customers' pets as we are of our own, so we are committed to taking the steps necessary to ensure this never happens again.

Sincerely,

Olivier Amice
President and CEO
Royal Canin USA
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 20, 2007, 05:52:02 AM
LARGEST PET FOOD RECALL EVER:

FULL INQUIRY CALLED FOR: AND ACCOUNTABILITY

By Michael W. Fox B.Vet.Med., Ph.D., D.Sc. M.R.C.V.S.

In March 2007, millions of concerned pet owners became aware of the massive recall by Menu Foods of 60 million cans and packages of contaminated, poisonous cat and dog food, in an effort to prevent the development of acute kidney disease and even death in the nation’s pets. This one company in Canada, Menu Foods Income Fund, produced over one billion containers of pet food in 2006. This compounded and processed food for dogs and cats was distributed to the major brand name pet food companies and mega-stores for sale under close to 100 different labels.

So which labels to trust? And how can one trust the industry when Menu Foods, after receiving many complaints about problems with its products, took 3 weeks to notify the FDA after running feed tests on some 50 cats and dogs that resulted in the unnecessary suffering and deaths even more animals. Noted as a ‘horrible coincidence’, the CFO of Menu Foods sold about half of his stake in the company three weeks before the widespread pet food recall.

This recall eventually involved around 100 different brand names and distributors, including major well known ones such as Iams, Eukanuba, Nutro, Hills, Nutriplan, Natural Balance, Waltham’s Royal Canin, Pet Pride, Your Pet, America’s Choice-Preferred Pet, Sunshine Mills, as well as store brands such as PetSmart, Publix, Winn-Dixie, Stop and Shop Companion, Price Chopper, Laura Lynn, KMart, Longs Drug Stores Corp, State Bros. Markets and Wal-Mart, and a host of private labels of mainly canned (moist) cat and dog foods. Under each brand name are usually many different varieties of cat and dog foods, and this meant that hundreds of different types of pet food were recalled. When coupled with the recalls of other pet food manufacturers who had bought the purportedly poisonous gluten and did not contract with Menu Foods that included other well known company brand names like Purina, Alpo, and Del Monte Pet Products, the quantity of material recalled must be in the hundreds of thousands of tons.

The FDA has no mandatory authority to demand a pet food recall. All recalls are ‘voluntary’, upon written request notification by the FDA. There is no mandatory requirement for pet food manufacturers to inform the FSDA in a timely fashion, or any penalty for not doing so. Even so, upon request, IAMS recently recalled pet foods supplemented with Cadmium, and in early 2006 Royal Canin recalled some of their prescription-only dog food that contained toxic levels of Vitamin D 3, that is also, in high doses, used as a rat poison. Some people believe that this is the main problem behind the ‘melamine cloud’ that the FDA has set up, and that independent laboratory tests are called for. But at this stage of the investigation, I concur with others (see www.aplus-flint-river-ranch.com) that Vitamin D is not the issue in this massive recall. Testing for this would have been on top of the FDA’s agenda, and if problematic, impossible to ultimately hide from public knowledge.

This debacle of the commercial processed pet food industry puts us all on notice. Better quality controls, oversight and testing are called for, but one must be realistic. There have been recent massive recalls of human food commodities, including ground beef, poultry, onions, and spinach. Costs aside, no system of mass production can be fail-safe. The recycling of human food industry by-products, and products considered unfit for human consumption, into livestock feed and processed pet food presents a monumental risk-management challenge.

On March 19, The FDA notified the press that the manufacturer, Menu Foods, had performed tests on 40-50 dogs and cats on Feb 27, one week after receiving reports of dogs and cats dying from kidney failure. Seven of the test animals died, cats being more severely affected than dogs.

 

I began to receive letters from dog and cat owners thanking me for ‘saving their animal’s lives’ because they were feeding them the kind of home-made diet that I have been advocating as a veterinarian for some years. Other letters document the suffering and deaths of several companion animals, their care givers’ disbelief, outrage, and financial as well as emotional loss. These letters came during and after what turned out to be the largest pet food recall in the industry’s history.

On March 23, 2007 the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets announced that they had found ‘rat poison’ in contaminated wheat gluten imported from China initially thought responsible for the suffering and deaths of an as yet uncounted numbers of cats and dogs across North America. The poison is a chemical compound called aminopterin.

Veterinary toxicologists with the ASPCA and American College of Internal Veterinary Medicine shared my concern that there may be some other food contaminant (s) in addition to the aminopterin that was sickening and killing many pets. Experts were not convinced that the finding of rat poison contamination was the end of the story.

On March 30, the FDA reported finding a widely used compound called melamine, described as a chemical used in the manufacture of plastics, as a wood resin adhesive and protective, in the wheat gluten. The FDA claimed that the melamine was the cause of an as yet uncounted number of cat and dog poisonings and deaths. The FDA could not find the rat poison, aminopterin, in the samples it analyzed. However a lab in Canada, at the University of Guelph, confirmed the presence of rat poison.

The Environmental Protection Agency identified melamine as a contaminant and byproduct of several pesticides, including cryomazine. People began to question if there is also pesticide contamination of the wheat gluten. Was there a possibility of deliberate contamination, or was it the result of gross mismanagement and lack of effective food-safety and quality controls that account for levels of melamine reported to be as high as 6.6% in FDA analyzed samples of the wheat gluten?

The widely used insect growth regulator cryomazine is not only made from melamine. It also breaks down into melamine after ingestion by an animal. Wheat gluten is wheat gluten, fit for human consumption, so the question still remains, what was wrong with this imported gluten that it was only bought for use in pet food?

On April 3 Associated Press named the US importer as ChemNutra of Las Vegas, reporting that the company had recalled 873 tons of wheat gluten that had been shipped to three pet food makers and a single distributor who in turn supplies the pet food industry. Close to 100 different brand labels of cat and dog food were recalled.

Until there is evidence to the contrary, the following concerns remain to be addressed by the FDA.

1. The wheat gluten imported from China was not for human consumption, because, I believe, it had been genetically engineered. The FDA has a wholly cavalier attitude toward feeding animals such ‘frankenfoods’ but places some restrictions when human consumption is involved (yet refuses appropriate food labeling).

2. The ‘rat poison’ aminopterin is used in molecular biology as an anti-metabolite, folate antagonist, and in genetic engineering biotechnology as a genetic marker. This could account for its presence in this imported wheat gluten.
 
3. The ‘plastic’, ‘wood preservative’, contaminant melamine, the parent chemical for a potent insecticide cyromazine, could possibly have been manufactured WITHIN the wheat plants themselves as a genetically engineered pesticide. This is much like the Bt. insecticidal poison present in most US commodity crops that go into animal feed.

 4.So called ‘overexpression’ can occur when spliced genes that synthesize such chemicals become hyperactive inside the plant and result in potentially toxic plant tissues, lethal not just to meal worms and other crop pests, but to cats, dogs, birds, butterflies and other wildlife; and to their creators.

 
 My suspicion is that the FDA was aware that the gluten came from genetically engineered wheat that was considered safe for animal consumption. To admit that the gluten came from a genetically engineered food crop could harm the US agricultural biotechnology industry by raising valid consumer concerns: So better for the FDA to focus on the melamine question.

I could be wrong. But a greater wrong is surely for the pet food industry to use food ingredients and food and beverage industry by-products considered unfit for human consumption; to continue to do business without any adequate government oversight and inspection; and for government to give greater priority and support to agricultural biotechnology ( that requires far more food quality and safety tests and surveillance than conventional crops--- all at the public’s expense)---than to organic, humane, ecologically sound and safe food production.

On April 6, 2007, FDA’s veterinarian Stephen Sundlof told CNN that the melamine found in the contaminated wheat gluten from China could actually have been added as a 'cheap filler'. Melamine crystal is a urea-derived,
synthetic nitrogen product that is used as a fertilizer that could have been added to the wheat gluten, But in fact it is NOT cheap. Fine Chem Trading Ltd Special Offers lists China Melamine Price Indication for 1 metric ton at
$1,130, while other sources list China wheat gluten at around $750.

How this melamine got into the gluten is still an open question, and some toxicologists still doubt that this is the main cause of so many dogs and cats becoming sick and even dying from kidney failure. I believe that the
China contaminant is the tip of the iceberg, and could become the scapegoat.

Possibly glyphosate, an herbicide that is liberally applied to crops across the US, and is a absorbed by crops that are genetically engineered (transgenic or GM, genetically modified), so that they are not harmed by the weed killer while all else growing in the fields is wiped out, could be part of the problem. This widely used herbicide has caused kidney damage and other health problems in laboratory tested animals. It is most probably in the pet food that made so many animals sick and even die, and is in most of the crops currently being fed to beef cattle, pigs, poultry, and dairy cows whose produce is not Certified Organic.

Farmed animals, whose various produce non-vegans consume, are also fed corn and other feeds from genetically engineered crops that produce their own insecticide called Bt. High levels of Bt in crops have made farmers ill and poisoned sheep. Since pet foods show no labels to the contrary, and the FDA does not even permit the labeling of human foods when they contain GM ingredients, we have no way of knowing what we are really eating or feeding to our pets.
(For details see my books ‘KILLER FOODS: What Scientists Do to Make Food Better is not Always Best.’ The Lyons Press, 2004 and "EATING WITH CONSCIENCE: THE BIOETHICS OF FOOD. New Sage Press, 1997)).


While my theory that a melamine-like derivative insecticide like cyromazine could have been produced within the wheat plants as a result of genetic engineering may not hold up, and we are dealing instead with a simple chemical contamination, accidental or deliberate, one fact remains. Two independent laboratories found the chemical aminopterin in samples of the recalled pet food that they identified as a rat poison. And that it is, but rarely used, and costly. This chemical is used as a genetic/DNA marker, and is included in  U S Patent 6130207, filed Nov 5, 1997 (Cell-specific molecule and method of importing DNA into a nucleus).

Although the U S has resisted the temptation of genetically engineering the staff of life---wheat, our daily bread, ---China has forged ahead, in collaboration with the UK's Rothamsted Agricultural Research Center to develop GM/transgenic varieties of wheat, as well as rice and other commodity crops.

So it is surely incumbent upon the FDA to determine if this imported wheat gluten from China was indeed genetically engineered. It most probably was,
since it was not  imported for human consumption,  and was possibly an experimental crop with  anti -fungus blight and viral disease genetic insertions that could have gone haywire as a result of 'overexpression.'  Other endogenous toxins not yet identified could well have resulted in so much sickness, suffering and death in companion animals across North America.

The ‘life science’ industry has convinced legislators that genetically engineered crops are safe, and ‘substantially equivalent’ to conventional varieties of food and animal feed crops. But the scientific evidence, and documented animal safety tests, point in the opposite direction. The US government even attempted to have genetically engineered seeds and foods included under the National Organic Standards. Genetically engineered crops of corn, soy and canola that are herbicide resistant, and corn that produces its own insecticidal poison called Bt, get into the human food chain, and are put into livestock feed and pet foods with the government’s blessing. Herbicide resistant crops actually absorb the herbicide that is repeatedly sprayed to kill competing weeds which we and the animals subsequently consume, along with whatever endogenous pesticides they have been genetically engineered to produce.

While scientists and environmental health experts, along with the Sierra Club’s Laurel Hopwood, are pointing to agrichemicals and to the pollen of genetically engineered crops as being possibly responsible for the collapse of the honey bee population---that could mean an agricultural apocalypse, ---veterinarians and toxicologists are unraveling the cause of the epidemic of food poisoning and untimely death of thousands of beloved cats and dogs across the nation. My theory awaits answer from the FDA , namely that the most probable cause was the source of the poison. It had been extracted from wheat genetically engineered to produce its own insecticidal chemical, or an as yet unidentified biopharmaceutical or other chemical that became concentrated in the gluten after it arrived in the US.

The possibility of synergism of toxic pet food contaminants, where two or more harmful additives or contaminants resulted in this pet food poisoning pandemic, still remains open. The massive pet food recall in 2004 of dry cat and dog food manufactured in Thailand by Pedigree Pet Foods after reports of kidney failure in hundreds of pets, mostly puppies, in nine Asian countries is a matter of public record, but no toxic agent/s were ever reported to the public by this multinational pet food company.

This latest pet food recall in North America should mobilize the public and their elected representatives to take control of how our food is produced, and where it comes from. Without labeling as to country of origin and method of production, with Organic Certification being the watermark, prepared human foods and manufactured pet foods (that should include no ingredients considered unsafe for human consumption) can no longer be considered safe and wholesome.

 
The FDA's Dr. Stephen Sundlof, Director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine, (CVM) told a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on April 11 that the FDA had 16 reported deaths and some 9,000 complaints of adverse reactions. This  figure of 16 deaths is curiously low since I have 18 reported deaths---12 dogs and 6 cats--- from readers of my syndicated newspaper column 'Animal Doctor' that is far from being in every city across the US. Now surely the FDA & CVM have better communication networks with consumers and veterinarians than I. And if not, then why not?

Or is the FDA down-playing the severity of this nation-wide pet food poisoning scandal? One major question has not yet been answered---why was the imported wheat gluten not intended for human consumption?

What is the pet food industry doing to compensate people for their veterinary expenses? Evidently nothing. They are just setting up yet another expert committee.

Duane Ekedahl, head of the Pet Food Institute(PFI) that represents the pet food industry, told the senators at this hearing that the Institute had set up a National Pet Food Commission, as he held up a full page ad that the PFI had placed that day in major newspapers. He asserted that "Pet foods are perhaps the most regulated product on market shelves."

When challenged by Sen. Richard Durbin, representatives for the PFI and the American Association of Feed Control Officials, whose AFCO labeling is standardized on most processed pet foods but can give no valid guarantees on quality or safety, became extremely defensive and contradicted themselves when it came to actual inspection and testing of ingredients. Dr. Sundlof cited a Federal inspection rate frequency of only 30% for the last 3 years for pet food processing facilities that was actually more than usual because of the mad cow disease issue.

As for the actual origin of the melamine, this chemical is the parent of a widely used crop insecticide called cyromazine that is actually absorbed by plants and is converted into melamine. This could be the source of gluten contamination, and was why the gluten was not considered fit for human consumption. But melamine, according to Dr. Sundlof "is not very toxic as a chemical." Since it was purportedly found in some 873 tons of wheat gluten from China the dilution in the vast volume of pet foods being recalled must be considerable. So perhaps melamine is a smoking gun, a symptom and not the primary cause of so many animals becoming sick, and even dying.

This pet food recall is a wake-up call to every consumer as well as every pet owner. The FDA has questions to answer (go to www.fda.gov/cvm).  Surely it is now incumbent upon the Pet Food Institute in Washington DC (www.petfoodinstitute.org)  to coordinate with all the pet food manufacturers involved, and with agribusiness pet food subsidiaries for which it lobbies and represents, an emergency fund to compensate people for all veterinary expenses resulting from their animal companions becoming sick and even dying, and requiring life-long care as a consequence of this largest pet food recall in recent history.

Postscript.

There are many vested interests that would like to see this poisoned pet food pandemic forgotten because it exposes the unhealthful nature of industrial food production, processing and marketing that harm people and their animal companions, as well as wildlife and the increasingly dysfunctional natural environment. Mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, dioxins, and thousands of other industrial pollutants, and especially those highly toxic petrochemicals used ironically in the production and preservation of food---from fertilizers to herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, now contaminate our drinking water, our food, even the milk of human, polar bear, whale and elephant mothers: and lead to the untimely death, often after prolonged suffering, of our loved ones, including our animal companions. This need not be, but will continue so long as there is public apathy and indifference rather than outrage and political action.

Dr. Fox writes the syndicated newspaper column Animal Doctor, with United Features, NY, and is author of the forthcoming two books on pet care, Dog Body, Dog Mind: Exploring Canine Consciousness and Well-Being, and Cat Body, Cat Mind: Exploring Feline Consciousness and Total Well-Being, published by The Lyons Press. His website is www.doctormwfox.org
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 20, 2007, 11:58:11 AM
BLUE BUFFALO RECALLS SPA SELECT KITTEN DRY FOOD
04/19/07

From Blue Buffalo's website:

The Blue Buffalo Company has undertaken a voluntary recall of one production
run of our Spa Select Kitten dry food. The production code on the recalled
product is:
"Best Used By Mar. 07 08 B."

We have taken this action because the rice protein concentrate used for this
run was obtained from Wilbur-Ellis, the same company who supplied this
ingredient to Natural Balance. Test results received late last evening
(4/18) indicated that this rice protein concentrate tested positive for
melamine. This is the first and only time our manufacturing partner sourced
an ingredient from Wilbur-Ellis, and we had no knowledge that they had
imported the ingredients from China.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 20, 2007, 12:01:26 PM
Humans at risk from tainted pet food?

By Karen Roebuck
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, April 20, 2007

Federal officials confirmed Thursday they are investigating whether pork products intended for humans are contaminated with the same industrial chemical that prompted a massive pet food recall and sickened cats and dogs nationwide.

Researchers also have identified three other contaminants in the urine and kidneys of animals sickened or killed after eating the recalled foods, including cyanuric acid, a chemical commonly used in pool chlorination, three researchers told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Cyanuric acid is what most likely sickened pets, one researcher said.

Melamine previously was found in the recalled pet food and two ingredients -- wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate -- as well as in the urine, blood, kidneys and tissues of infected animals.

Researchers and U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said since it was discovered in the pet food, wheat gluten and in animals' urine and kidneys, they did not believe it was what sickened the animals.

The Trib learned yesterday that melamine-contaminated feed was fed to hogs.The FDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture are investigating.

Some animals that are believed to have eaten the contaminated food were slaughtered and sold as food before authorities learned their feed had been contaminated, said Nancy Lungren, spokeswoman for the California agriculture department.

The state quarantined the farm Wednesday, she said.

Yesterday, the urine of some pigs at the 1,500-animal American Hog Farm in Ceres, Calif., tested positive for melamine, although all appeared healthy, Lungren said. About half a dozen pigs were put down and researchers at the University of California-Davis are testing their kidneys, tissues, blood and other body parts for melamine contamination, she said.

The contaminated feed was bought April 3 and 13 as salvage pet food from Diamond Pet Foods Inc., which received contaminated rice protein concentrate used in some recalled Natural Balance pet food, Lungren said.

Diamond Pet Foods made the dog and cat foods recalled this week by Natural Balance after melamine was found in an ingredient, rice protein concentrate.

Researchers isolated a spoke-like crystal in pet food, wheat gluten and in the urine, kidneys and tissues of infected animals. That crystal serves as a marker for determining what animals were sickened in the outbreak. About 30 percent of those crystals are made up of melamine, one investigator said, and researchers spent several weeks trying to identify what is in the remainder.

Researchers in at least three labs found cyanuric acid, amilorine and amiloride -- all by-products of melamine -- in the crystals of animals' urine, tissues and kidneys, according to Dr. Brent Hoff, a veterinarian and clinical toxicologist and pathologist, at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada; Richard Goldstein, associate professor of medicine at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine and a kidney specialist, and Dr. Thomas Mullaney, acting director of Michigan State University's Center for Population and Animal Health.

Michigan State's lab so far has found only the amilorine and amiloride, but Mullaney said he was aware of at least three other labs finding the cyanuric acid in the animals. The FDA asked labs involved in the pet food recall to test for the three chemicals.

All three are by-products of melamine, which researchers said they believe were formed as the animals metabolized the melamine.

Finding cyanuric acid is the more significant finding, Hoff, Goldstein and Mullaney said, although they are not yet certain how toxic it is to animals.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web site said, "When ingested (by humans) in large amounts, the substance may have effects on the kidneys, resulting in tissue lesions."

Because cyanuric acid was used in pool chlorination, more scientific studies have been done on that chemical than on melamine, amilorine and amiloride, Goldstein said. However, tests in dogs and rats found it is safe, he said.

Hoff, Goldstein and Mullaney said amilorine and amiloride were found earlier this week in low concentrations.

The findings have not been announced yet, because officials overseeing the research are seeking confirmation from as many labs as possible, they said.

Researchers ruled out aminopterin -- used as rat poison in other countries -- which New York state officials previously announced was in the pet food.

The FDA said the contaminated wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate used in pet food in the United States and Canada and melamine-tainted corn gluten used in recalled pet food in South Africa have been traced to companies in China.

The Chinese government told the Trib and the FDA yesterday that the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd., which the FDA said supplied the tainted wheat gluten, did not export any wheat gluten intended to be used in food.

The FDA has received more than 15,000 calls reporting sick or dead cats and dogs since the pet food recall began last month, but the agency has not confirmed those yet.

Karen Roebuck can be reached at kroebuck@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7939.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_503671.html (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_503671.html)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 20, 2007, 12:08:54 PM
Chemical found in state hogs
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg - Bee Staff Writer

Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, April 20, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1

The chemical linked to cat and dog deaths on two continents has made
it into pig feed and perhaps onto California tables, with state
agricultural officials announcing late Thursday they've quarantined a
Ceres hog farm where lab tests showed melamine in pig urine.

"The farm is cooperating with us to determine the disposition of all
animals that have left the premises since April 3," Richard
Breitmeyer, the state veterinarian, said in a prepared statement.
That's the first time melamine-tainted food is known to have been
shipped to the farm.

He said the 1,500-animal American Hog Farm was quarantined "out of an
abundance of caution."

Melamine has caused tumors in rats and shouldn't be used in animal
feed, according to toxicologists.

The farm sells to both private individuals and others whom the state
declined to identify, saying it is still investigating what happened
to the pork. The state Health Services Department is urging people who
bought pigs from the farm not to eat the meat until further notice.

So far, "evidence suggests a minimal health risk" to people who have
consumed it, Dr. Mark Horton, the state's public health officer, said
in the same press release.

The theory that Chinese suppliers put melamine in starches to boost
their protein content, and thus command higher prices, becomes
increasingly credible as melamine is found in more ingredients, said
Stephen Sundlof, head of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for
Veterinary Medicine.

The FDA wants to probe that and other theories by inspecting Chinese
factories, but Chinese officials have not allowed their entry, Michael
Rogers, FDA's field investigations director, said Thursday.

"A number of letters" have been sent to China, Rogers said, adding
that he expects Chinese officials will cooperate.

The FDA wants to learn how widely melamine has spread and which other
products it might have contaminated.

That question became more urgent Thursday with reports from South
Africa that corn gluten in Royal Canin pet foods there was
contaminated with melamine, killing about 30 pets. The Web site for
Royal Canin U.S. announced an eight-product recall late Thursday.

The South Africa report brings to three the number of Chinese products
with melamine contamination -- wheat gluten, rice protein concentrate
and corn gluten.

Veterinarians and nutritionists said that other potential targets for
tampering could include whey protein isolate, soy protein isolate, soy
protein concentrate, soy grits and soy lecithin.

All are pet food ingredients valued for the protein punch that they pack.

The melamine at the quarantined hog farm apparently came from salvage
pet food sold as pig feed by Diamond Pet Food's Lathrop plant, the
state said. Diamond had gotten rice protein imported from China by a
San Francisco distributor who recalled it on Wednesday because of
melamine content.

A man who answered the phone for the American Hog Farm late Thursday
declined to comment, the Associated Press reported.

What little is known about melamine suggests its cancer-causing
effects are limited. In studies, melamine caused bladder tumors in
male rats but not in female rats and not in mice of either gender,
said Dr. Stephen McCurdy, a UC Davis Medical School professor of
public health sciences.

"I wouldn't argue that it's safe or that people should take a
lackadaisical attitude toward their exposure," McCurdy said, but
there's insufficient evidence whether it may cause cancer in humans.

Since the first U.S. recall more than a month ago, thousands of
products from 100 brands have been yanked from the market. Thousands
of dog and cat deaths are suspected.

The FDA has gotten about 15,000 consumer calls.

In the latest pet food recall Thursday, Blue Buffalo company pulled
back its Spa Select Kitten dry food, in bags stamped "Best Used By
Mar. 07 08 B."

The FDA confirmed Blue Buffalo was one of five companies that received
rice protein concentrate from Wilbur-Ellis, a San Francisco
distributor that recalled the ingredient late Wednesday night.

The company has shipped 155 metric tons of the suspect rice protein to
five pet food makers since July. Neither Wilbur-Ellis nor the FDA
would name them.

The FDA is checking which companies put the rice protein into pet
foods. It expects those companies to issue their own recalls, Rogers said.

As the melamine investigations widen, a question haunting pet owners
and regulators is how early the first tainted foods reached consumers,
and whether previous episodes of contamination passed unnoticed.

"I am not so sure that this phenomenon is new," said Yorba Linda
veterinarian Elizabeth Hodgkins.

"I honestly think pet foods have been making dogs and cats sick for a
long time," she said.

Hodgkins, who testified at a congressional hearing last week, said
it's less complicated to cook at home for dogs than pet food companies
want people to believe. Home cooking for cats is a little more
complex, she said, and people should seek advice.

Some vets recommend home cooking -- with professional nutritional
guidance -- or specialty brands that avoid additives, at least until
sources of contamination are tracked and eliminated.

Alternative pet food companies report being swamped.

In Elk Grove, Sheryl Gunter had about 35 people turn out for a free
course on cooking for pets at her store, Corner Pet.

The Honest Kitchen, a San Diego pet food company, stepped up
production and hired a person just to handle calls.

"We've seen about a fourfold increase in sales in the last four
weeks," said Lucy Postins, who helped found the firm.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 23, 2007, 11:24:37 AM
FDA Update

April 22, 2007
   

Media Inquiries:
301-827-6242
Consumer Inquiries:
888-INFO-FDA

FDA’s Update on Tainted Pet Food

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating an imported shipment of rice protein concentrate which has been found to contain melamine. The rice protein concentrate may have been used as an ingredient in some pet foods. FDA’s investigation of the rice protein is being carried out by specialists in FDA headquarters and in eight FDA district offices.  Thus far, the following has been established:

    * The suspect shipment of rice protein concentrate was imported and offloaded during the week of April 2, 2007 by Wilbur-Ellis, an importer and distributor of agricultural products, including rice protein concentrate, with headquarters in San Francisco, CA.  The source of the product is identified as Binzhou Futian Biological Technology in China. 
    * The shipment consisted primarily of rice protein concentrate in white bags, but also included one pink bag that was labeled, in part, with the word “melamine.”
    * On April 15, Wilbur-Ellis notified FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine about the suspect shipment. On April 16, FDA launched a nationwide investigation tracing eight import entries identified as being shipped from the Chinese firm since July 2006.  FDA testing revealed melamine in both the white and pink bags.
    * Wilbur-Ellis has initiated a recall of all suspect rice protein concentrate it had imported and distributed; see http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/wilburellis04_07.html.

FDA investigators have obtained records showing distribution to five pet food manufacturers in seven locations.  Investigators are currently inspecting all five manufacturers and collecting additional samples, as appropriate.

    * FDA initiated inspections at Royal Canin USA and C.J. Foods and, as a result, both companies have voluntarily recalled certain products; see http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/royalcanin04_07.html and http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/bluebuffalo04_07.html.
    * FDA also has confirmed the presence of melamine in finished pet food products containing rice protein concentrate.  Those products, and others within the same product line, are currently under recall by Natural Balance Pet Foods and are labeled as: Venison and Brown Rice canned and bagged dog foods; Venison and Brown Rice dog treats; and Venison and Green Pea dry cat food; see http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/naturalbalance04_07.html.

If FDA’s investigation determines that additional pet food products have been manufactured from the suspect rice protein concentrate, FDA will expect manufacturers to initiate voluntary actions to remove these products from the marketplace. FDA will continue to communicate its findings promptly.

In a related development, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) issued a press release on April 19, 2007, stating that CDFA laboratory testing had detected melamine in urine from hogs at the American Hog Farm in Ceres, CA.  For further information, see:  http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/exec/pa/pressreleases/PressRelease.asp?PRnum=CDFA07-038.
Due to the involvement of animal feed, FDA is working with CDFA on this development.

FDA continues to work comprehensively to protect the nation’s pet food as well as to conduct a full investigation to determine any impact on the human food supply.  The agency is now sampling all rice protein concentrate from China and continues to sample all wheat gluten imported from China, and it is ready to increase its surveillance of other products, if necessary.

To search for the latest list of recalled products, which will be updated when new information is received, please see:  http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/petfoodrecall/.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 23, 2007, 12:01:48 PM
Royal Canin Canada Recalls Additional Cat and Dog Food Due to New Toxin

UPDATE: The toxin found in these foods is cyanuric acid - not melamine. This is the first recall attributed to cyanuric acid.

    Royal Canin has discovered a new contaminant in rice gluten. This contaminant is cyanuric acid, which is chemically related to, but distinct from, melamine.

ORIGINAL POST: Due to contaminated rice protein concentrate, Royal Canin has recalled the following cat and dog products from Canada on Friday:

    * Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Canine EARLY CARDIAC
    * Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Canine SENSITIVITY RC (Rice and Catfish)
    * Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Canine SKIN SUPPORT
    * Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Feline HYPOALLERGENIC HP
    * Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Feline SENSITIVITY RD (Rice and Duck)

These differ from the products pulled from the US. Two products, Feline Sensitivity RD and Canine Sensitivity RC are not currently recalled in the US. We do not know whether the food was made in Canada or the US. Therefore, it is also not clear whether the tainted rice protein went to Canada.

So far, Royal Canin has pulled products due to tainted wheat gluten, corn gluten and rice protein in the US, Canada, and South Africa. And is being sued for Vitamin D overdose.
Full release from Medi-Cal Canada homepage after the jump.

They have also promised to no longer use vegetable protein from China.

(Thanks D&K and anonymous reader)

Medi-Cal/Royal Canin Canada Voluntary Product Recall

April 20, 2007 - Medi-Cal/Royal Canin Canada Voluntary Product Recall
(all date codes of):

ROYAL CANIN VETERINARY DIET CANINE EARLY CARDIAC EC
ROYAL CANIN VETERINARY DIET CANINE SENSITIVITY RC (Rice and Catfish)
ROYAL CANIN VETERINARY DIET CANINE SKIN SUPPORT SS

ROYAL CANIN VETERINARY DIET FELINE HYPOALLERGENIC HP
ROYAL CANIN VETERINARY DIET FELINE SENSITIVITY RD (Rice and Duck)

Royal Canin has discovered a new contaminant in rice gluten. This contaminant
is cyanuric acid, which is chemically related to, but distinct from, melamine.

Consequently, we are recalling all date codes of these dry products.

We recommend you stop feeding these specific diets and return them to your veterinary clinic for a substitute diet or refund. If you have any concerns over the health and well-being of your pet, please contact your veterinary clinic. You can also contact Medi-Cal/Royal Canin Veterinary Diet at 1-866-494-6844. Please leave a voice message with your name, number, and a brief description of your concern. This will help us determine the appropriate routing of your questions. All calls will be returned by a Medi-Cal/Royal Canin Veterinary Diet team member within 24 hours.

We cannot express how devastated we are to notify you of this new finding, and we offer you our sincere regrets and apologies. The steps we are taking are driven by our philosophy of putting pets first.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 26, 2007, 06:09:16 AM
http://www.macleans.ca/business/companies/article.jsp?content=20070430_104326_104326 (http://www.macleans.ca/business/companies/article.jsp?content=20070430_104326_104326)


The Great Pet Food Scandal

How one supplier caused a huge crisis, and why it's just the tip of the iceberg


CHARLIE GILLIS AND ANNE KINGSTON | April 30, 2007 |

Sometime in the next couple of years, when the public gaze has drifted from the tainted pet food epidemic and we've all forgotten what melamine is, a judge in Ohio or California or Ontario will take up the daunting question of what a dog or cat is worth. There was considerable legal debate on this topic even before the current uproar. But if an animal's curative effect on the human heart plays any part in the calculation, the courts might start at a small house in Floral Park, N.Y., where the wounds wrought by the poisoning epidemic will stay raw for a long time to come.

It was here in the Long Island suburbs that Donna Opallo and a couple of relatives brought home Checkers, a chocolate-eyed beagle puppy, three years ago, figuring she might lend solace to Opallo's grief-stricken sister, Debbie DiGregorio. The previous week, DiGregorio's 16-year-old son, Louis, had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Frantic for ways to help, the family took a flyer on the dog, and their instincts proved correct. "That dog filled a very big void in her life," says Opallo, 47, who lives with her 45-year-old sister. As the months passed, it became clear that Checkers possessed healing powers no psychiatrist, friend or relative could equal.

Then, in mid-February, the family was thrown back into crisis. Checkers began vomiting incessantly and defecating blood, sending the sisters on a series of futile visits to a local veterinarian. Test after test proved inconclusive, and only after Mississauga, Ont.-based Menu Foods issued its first recall of contaminated food on March 16 did the penny finally drop. Both Checkers and Opallo's own dog, an 11-month-old Bichon-Shih Tzu cross named Taco, had been eating food from foil pouches sold under the Nutro brand name, one of the products on Menu's list. Checkers survived the initial illness, but her gruesome symptoms persisted. Today her vets can't say whether she'll survive. Taco, who hadn't showed any outward signs of trouble, turned out to be in near-total renal failure. He spent more than a week in an animal hospital in nearby Westbury, with an intravenous line attached to his leg and his owner by his side. "Three-quarters of his kidneys are destroyed, and I don't know what his life expectancy will be," says Opallo. "It's like there's a little ticking time bomb inside of him."

The plight of Checkers and Taco is by no means unique: it is believed some 40,000 pets who ate Menu Foods products made with melamine-laced wheat gluten have been sickened in the U.S. and Canada. While mortality estimates vary, a recent survey by the Davis, Calif.-based Veterinary Network estimated the death toll in the U.S. in the thousands. But it does give some sense of the debacle's reach -- as well as its ruinous effect on each family it touched. Quite apart from the collective US$6,200 in vet bills Opallo and DiGregorio have paid out of their line of credit, or the thousands more they're willing to spend, they quake knowing they might lose one or both of their beloved animals. "I don't think I could ever buy another dog," says Opallo. "I'm basically in denial."

The scope of the tragedy -- emotional and financial -- continues to widen. The recall has been expanded four times in the last four weeks, with 889 separate items under 100 different brand names yanked off the market. The company's explanations raise more questions than answers, and there's been predictable talk of reform at the government level. In Canada, talks between pet food makers, vets and a variety of federal agencies have already begun, with a view to imposing rules on an unregulated industry. In the U.S., members of the Senate's agriculture appropriations subcommittee have held hearings into the Food and Drug Administration's handling of the crisis, while the FDA itself continues to investigate the cause of the contamination.

But the economic model that led to the poisoning shows little sign of change. Even in the throes of a PR nightmare, the big grocery chains continue to support Menu, a production behemoth with whom they share a mutual dependency. Loblaw Companies, for one, which sells Menu products under its President's Choice and No Name brands, has no plans to switch suppliers. "They've been a valued partner," says spokeswoman Elizabeth Margles. "We do have confidence about them at this point."

Loblaw may remain unshaken, but for the average dog or cat owner the entire affair has been a faith-testing experience. Little did pet owners know that, whether they were buying a budget supermarket brand or splurging on top-of-the-line fare at a specialty pet store or from a veterinarian, the food was being produced at the same factory and even shared some of the same ingredients. How could they? Menu Foods' name appeared nowhere on the label. The company existed as an invisible cog in the food chain, churning out most of North America's most popular wet food in cans and foil pouches to its customers' blue-chip specifications -- Science Diet for Colgate Palmolive, Iams for Procter & Gamble, Whiskas for Purina. It also manufactured an estimated 75 per cent of private label brands in Canada, including Wal-Mart's, Sobey's and Pet Valu's. In the United States, where its customers include PetSmart, Safeway and Wal-Mart, Menu supplies between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of wet pet food.

The story of how a tiny, shoestring operation in Toronto's western suburbs came to dominate its industry reflects the seismic shifts in the manufacturing food chain over the past three decades. Increasing power wielded by the margin-obsessed, cutthroat supermarket industry has forced manufacturers to source cheaper ingredients globally. Those forces have favoured faceless giants -- players capable of supplying myriad products demanded by retailers, retooling and remixing recipes as the orders came in. But as the Menu case demonstrates, the system also ensures a continent-wide catastrophe when something goes wrong. Marion Nestle, a professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, doesn't see the Menu tragedy as an aberration. Rather she calls it "the tip of the iceberg."

Suffice to say, no such spectre troubled Robert Bras, the sharp young supermarket executive who bought into Menu Foods in the late 1970s and turned the plodding company into a trailblazer. At the time, Bras was working for Loblaw Companies, a firm in the midst of its own astounding turnaround from down-at-the-heels grocery chain. Central to its recovery strategy was a private-label program that would rival the big national brands in quality and sales. Without the advertising and distribution costs that inflated the prices of national labels, executives reasoned, a supermarket could sell its own brand -- often made at national brands' factories -- at a lower cost for a higher margin. Pet food was a critical part of the scheme: it is a high-frequency purchase that brings people into the store. Desirable proprietary brands presented a way to cultivate customer loyalty. Sensing untapped opportunity, Bras left Loblaw in 1977 and bought a 50 per cent stake in Menu, a manufacturing generalist that made everything from bargain-basement pet food to bleach.

Bras quickly stripped away extraneous product lines and purchased a factory in New Jersey with an eye to expanding into the U.S. But his big break came in 1979, with a contract to produce Loblaw's "no-name" canned pet food. The first offering, a No Name Luxury meat mix, claimed to match brand leader Dr. Ballard's formula in quality at a lower price. The "luxury" reference was a master stroke: it seduced pet owners into believing they were buying status for the same price as "maintenance" -- an industry term for standard product. Within six months, it was the No.1-selling product at Loblaw's Ontario stores.

Menu's sales grew 25 per cent a year on average during the 1980s, fuelled by the growing number of supermarkets cluing in to the fact they could make margins of 35 to 40 per cent profit on their own premium house-label pet food. Business was buoyed by the fact that pets were increasingly viewed as full-fledged family members -- "furkids" as they came to be called. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the pet bowl. When canned dog food was introduced in 1922 there was no pretense of nutritional benefits; the only benefactors were meat packers who seized on a profitable way of disposing of surplus offal and horse meat. By the 1980s, however, pets' diets were mirroring their owners' own peccadillos, food phobias and culinary dispositions, be they kosher, hypo-allergenic, vegetarian or low-fat.

"We have anthropomorphized our pets," says Kelly Caldwell, editor of Dogs in Canada. "You want to feel you're giving your dog the best possible food. It's a way to show we care, that we're not scrimping, that they're valuable." Caldwell buys only "organic" feed for her purebreds because that's what she eats. "I've bought into the packaging and promises," she says. Nutrition tops the concern of Dogs in Canada readers, she says. Bras understood the business was "counter-economic." Pet food wasn't sold on price alone; if your dog or cat isn't going to eat it, you're not going to buy it. And if people believed they'd improve the health or extend life of their pet, they'd spend more on higher-priced premium labels.

Menu's expansion in the United States was ramped up in the 1990s when Cott Corporation, a Toronto-based manufacturer of private-label soft drinks with grand plans for global domination, bought the remaining 50 per cent stake in the company. Wal-Mart and Safeway were added to Menu's customer roster. The company also benefited from the fact that national brands, under assault from retailer labels, were increasingly outsourcing their manufacturing so they could focus on "managing the brand." It was an ironic twist: managing the brand became synonymous with distancing itself from the grimy business of production.

Menu, meanwhile, invested heavily in a U.S. infrastructure. A state-of the-art factory was built in Emporia, Kan. In 2001, Menu bought the wet food operations of Doane Pet Care for US$15 million. The following year, the company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange as an income trust, a structure that avoids most corporate taxation because most of the company's income is paid directly to its unit holders. If there's a discernible turning point in the company's history, however, it is 2002, when Bras died of cancer. He was replaced by Paul Henderson, a former chief operating officer at Cott. In 2003, Menu assumed US$85 million in new debt to purchase a Procter & Gamble plant in North Sioux City, S.D. With that purchase came a five-year supply agreement to be the exclusive supplier of Iams and Eukanuba wet foods, which now account for about 11 per cent of Menu's sales.

But even as Menu's business grew exponentially, its margins were reportedly under constant pressure. It was rumoured within the industry that Wal-Mart and Loblaw, eager to maintain their own margins in a competitive pricing environment, kept a lid on prices that squeezed Menu's profits. Specifically, Menu was expected to deliver expensively made foil packs -- now at the centre of the contamination controversy -- at the same price as cans. "They definitely had to eat margins to a point they weren't making any money selling to Wal-Mart," says an industry insider who explains Menu couldn't afford to lose the contracts because they provided credibility with potential customers. Loblaw says there was no freeze on prices. "We always try to keep prices down but didn't say you couldn't raise prices," Margles says. "We always try to keep costs down for our customers. We have to remain competitive."

At the end of 2005, Menu reported a loss of $54.6 million and suspended payments to its unit holders, blaming the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar. The next year Menu returned to profitability, yet its cash distributions remain suspended. By early 2007, with a revived Canadian dollar and new price increases, prospects appeared on the upswing. Improved cash flow was being used to pay down debt and industry analysts were expecting it to resume distributions to unit holders.

If the engines of Menu's success were humming again, they cut out abruptly on March 16, 2007. The recall notice the company issued that morning downplayed the implications, describing the removal of 60 million units from the market as "precautionary" and omitting all reference to any potential contaminant. Within days, however, the FDA was asking awkward questions about wheat gluten shipped from China, and pet owners were starting to exchange horror stories on the Internet.

What the company did next will surely go down as a case study in how not to manage a crisis. Far from tackling the matter head-on -- by, say, quickly withdrawing all products made with suspect material -- it left items on the shelves for what by human food-safety standards seemed an eternity. On March 24, eight days after its original notice, Menu expanded its recall to include all varieties of its wet pet food, a rearguard action that encompassed those household names it had so assiduously cultivated, from Iams to Wal-Mart's house brand Ol' Roy. Two more recalls would follow, the first on April 5 for all Menu products made with the suspect wheat gluten, including dry food; the next on April 10, when Menu pulled products made at its plant in Mississauga (previous recalls affected product made at the Kansas plant).

At the centre of all of this was an ingredient few North Americans had heard of before the crisis. Wheat gluten -- essentially, destarched flour dough -- is used in pet food to bind and add texture. Menu had previously been buying it from U.S. sources, but had switched last November to an obscure Chinese manufacturer called XuZhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Menu cited a gluten shortage in North America for the change, but a cynic would point to other potential motivations: in 2006, wheat gluten from China sold for about 20 cents per pound less than that made by U.S. competitors.

Whatever the savings Menu realized, however, could not possibly have been worth what followed. By Feb. 22, according to timelines provided by the company, Menu was receiving warnings from consumers that its food was sickening pets. On Feb. 27, routine taste tests of its own products resulted in the deaths of at least two and, by some accounts, as many as 10 animals. Still, it took Menu until March 8 to notify ChemNutra, the Las Vegas-based distributer of the Chinese product, that it was investigating the possibility the gluten was causing illness. The recall, however, wouldn't come for another eight days.

The contempt implicit in this tardiness infuriates pet owners. Jody Tomlinson of Coquitlam, B.C., lost his job as a warehouse supervisor after spending hours on the phone last winter researching the mysterious kidney ailment that eventually claimed the life of his two-year-old mastiff, Binky. The idea that Menu may have sat on vital information leaves the 38-year-old fuming, and calling for government regulation. "Greed started this," he says, "not common sense." Lance Ganske, a Calgary sheet-metal worker who lost Blackie, one of several pet cats, now distrusts the entire industry. "When I buy something, I don't know whether it's going to be good or not," he says, "and I still have to feed my animals."

Menu officials haven't helped matters, allowing their phones to ring unanswered for hours at a time, according to angry consumers, and providing confusing explanations for what went wrong. (In one interview, vice-president Randall Copeland blamed part of the contamination on a "clerical error" that saw the wheat gluten bags receive false U.S. labelling; photos supplied by the product's U.S. distributor clearly show the words "Made in China" printed directly on the bags.) In an email to Maclean's last week, Menu CEO Paul Henderson disputed suggestions that the company dragged its feet. While Menu did receive reports of cat illnesses on Feb. 22 and 28, he said, "the vets who attended these cats informed Menu that they each had access to various contaminants and could have gotten into something they should not have, such as antifreeze." A third call reporting a cat death came in on March 5, Henderson said, and while Menu did not receive veterinary information about the third case, the consumer did send in the unused food. "We tested the food, but the testing did not reveal anything wrong with it," he wrote.

The irony in all of this is that Menu was blindsided as well -- the company just can't seem to communicate it. In the end, lab tests performed in late March on the Chinese gluten identified the likely cause of the poisoning as melamine, a plastic by-product that is entirely foreign to the production of wheat gluten -- or, for that matter, pet food. "It's unheard of," says Steve Pickman, a vice-president at Atchison, Kan.-based MPG Ingredients Inc., which makes wheat gluten for human and pet consumption. "You'd never think to test for it."

Indeed, reports out of Washington last week said the FDA was investigating the possibility that workers at the XuZhou Anying factory tainted their product deliberately -- that they were using the substance to amp up the apparent nutrient value of their product. Melamine, it turns out, mimics protein when mixed into wheat gluten, creating the illusion that the substance is packed with value. Whether the supposed saboteurs knew it was fatal to animals is one question. How you guard against miscreants half a world away is quite another.

Despite what seems to be an unsurmountable crisis, analysts remain optimistic about Menu's future. Aleem Israel, an analyst at Cormack Securities in Toronto, currently rates Menu Foods Income Fund a "buy," noting that its status as the primary supplier of wet pet food, as well as the only source of foil pack pet food, ensures its survival. And while most of its customers aren't locked into long-term supply contracts, no other manufacturer has the economies of scale that can provide the same profits.

That retailers have an economic stake in maintaining the status quo also works to Menu's advantage. No grocery giant is standing by the company more staunchly than the one that helped create it. "To say [the contamination] is extremely unfortunate is an understatement," says Margles, the Loblaw Companies' spokeswoman. "People feel very strongly about their pets and we feel very strongly about product integrity. Still, they've been a valued partner and we have a very detailed recall process here and we are keeping on top of it, as we're sure they are with any products they're manufacturing."

Margles, like others, blames the tainted raw material, not the manufacturer, for the catastrophe. "It does seem to be linked to the wheat gluten in China," she says. Such a rationale doesn't reassure nutritionist Marion Nestle, who compares the Menu case to last summer's E. coli outbreak in the continental spinach supply. "What this has exposed about globalization issues is just breathtaking," she says. "No one knew this kind of thing. People knew that spinach was centralized because of what happened over the summer. But the idea that one ingredient from China could go into 100 brands of pet food is something no one had any idea about."

Nestle, currently writing a book about pet food, believes the recall should make customers question the price differentials in the pet food market. "The disclosure is particularly striking for people who were paying a lot of money for Iams or one of those expensive brands," she says. "The idea that the same ingredients are going into cheap brands as expensive brands disturbs pet owners to no end. It's not that the formulas are the same but that they're using the same ingredients."

It certainly upsets Benjamin DeLong, 33, and his wife Jennifer, 32, a Wadsworth, Ill., couple who believed they were doing their cats Freddie and Rita a favour when they upgraded from no-name brands to Iams' "Tuna and Sauce" and "Salmon and Sauce" in foil packs. They now blame the products for Freddie's death and Rita's illness, and have joined a class-action lawsuit launched in Chicago. "We thought, let's spend a little more on our pets, get them a little better food and maybe they'll last a little longer," Benjamin DeLong says ruefully.

DeLong was particularly incensed by a full-page newspaper ad taken out shortly after the first recall announcement by Iams-Eukenuba, asking pet owners to keep buying product that was made in its "own" factories in the U.S., and not by Menu Foods. "Hey, you know what, I thought I was buying Iams," he says. "Obviously there was not enough oversight and management responsibility for somebody over at Menu Foods to stop this from happening. So not only do I hold Menu Foods responsible, but Iams as well."

The tragedy has also laid bare the lack of pet food regulation in Canada. The U.S., United Kingdom and European Union all have government agencies that monitor pet food for safety. Though the Department of Consumer and Corporate affairs oversees labelling claims, the Canadian industry is left to police itself. The Pet Food Association of Canada, comprised of manufacturers, has imposed a voluntary nutritional assurance program, while the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association runs a voluntary standards program that certifies only about two per cent of Canadian-produced pet food. Without systematic oversight, however, it's impossible to know whether the tainted pet food still sits on store shelves in Canada. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration said a random check of 400 retail outlets across the U.S. found some still stocking previously recalled dog and cat food; consumers north of the border have access to no such information.

cont............
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 26, 2007, 06:10:15 AM
How, then, to respond? Who is to blame when poison makes it into an ingredient made by a foreign supplier for a U.S. distributor, who in turn sells to a Canadian processor who supplies retail outlets for pets across North America? How do you stop it from happening again?

At least part of the fallout will take the form of legal retribution. Within days of the first recall, class-action lawyers assumed their customary circling pattern, in some cases posting sign-up sheets on their firm websites for potential clients. Frank Jablonski, an attorney from Madison, Wis., says he's received 3,000 inquiries, nearly half from people whose pets have died. "The stories are devastating," he says. "You end up spending a lot of time on each one of them because essentially you're consoling the person." Jay Strosberg, a class-action lawyer based in Windsor, Ont., who has filed suit against Menu, says he's received more than 100 calls from people whose pets were sick or had died. The company says it faces more than 50 suits in the U.S.

These actions are primarily aimed at recouping vet bills. But it's a measure of how widely the case has resonated that some owners hope to break new legal ground by winning awards for emotional distress. "There's no way you can tell me that emotion doesn't factor into this," says DeLong from Illinois. While courts on both sides of the border have resisted such findings, preferring to treat pets as property rather than family, both Illinois and Tennessee have legislation allowing damages for emotional loss. And in a precedent-setting decision last year, a Superior Court judge in Ontario awarded $1,417.12 to an owner whose dog was let out of a boarding facility and died. The ruling was significant because the judge specifically stated that pets should not be considered "owner's chattel so as to preclude damages for pain and suffering."

The Canadian government, meanwhile, is reconsidering its hands-off approach to pet food safety. Bill Hewett, the executive director of policy and planning for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, says the Menu case highlights the importance of pets in modern households, and has prompted his branch to reassess its options, including all-out regulation of the industry. The review comes after meetings with the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, which warned that the absence of rules and standards could expose humans to risk, as well as pets. "What if this had been something other than melamine, like a virus?" asks Dr. Paul Boutet, the association's president. "Government needs to know these things, because a lot of things that affect pets affect people as well. Look how close these pets are to us now. They're sleeping in our beds. You could probably find [homes] where pets are eating at the table."

Still, neither Boutet nor Hewett foresees a new era of risk-free pet food. The vastness and complexity of the industry, they acknowledge, make it difficult to police effectively. "We have everything from large, internationally competitive manufacturers to mom-and-pop, niche-type producers," says Hewett. The Menu contamination, he adds pointedly, occurred despite FDA rules requiring pet food makers to ensure the safety of their products, demonstrating the "opportunity for failure" even in the context of government regulation.

Under the circumstances, pet owners -- even those who escaped this particular crisis -- have little reason to feel confident. Barring a complete restructuring of the economics of food manufacturing -- or a regulatory regime that would see Canadian inspectors combing through factories in China -- the question is not how this contamination happened, or how it might have been handled better, but when the next crisis will strike. Henderson, Menu's CEO, reassures customers that melamine testing will become standard operating procedure for his beleaguered firm. But the broader sentiment in the industry is best summed up in his prediction of Menu's immediate future: "It will be a return to business as usual."
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 26, 2007, 06:54:59 AM
If you click have the tissues ready:


  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRv2BwTHamQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRv2BwTHamQ)


  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNXL-Ng4JZw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNXL-Ng4JZw)

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGt7HkzNC68 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGt7HkzNC68)


   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZbsFCaRffc (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZbsFCaRffc)

Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 27, 2007, 05:36:08 PM
Pet-food maker, ingredient supplier searched

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 Friday.

Food and Drug Administration officials searched an Emporia, Kan., pet food plant operated by Menu Foods and the Las Vegas offices of ChemNutra, 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.

BEIJING PROBE: China admits tainted food link

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 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.

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.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-04-27-company-raided_N.htm?csp=34 (http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-04-27-company-raided_N.htm?csp=34)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 27, 2007, 05:37:15 PM
China admits tainted food link

By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
BEIJING — Chinese authorities acknowledged for the first time that ingredients exported to make pet food contained a prohibited chemical, stepping up their probe of two Chinese companies' roles in one of the USA's largest animal-food recalls.

While pledging cooperation with U.S. authorities investigating the recall, the Chinese government in a statement Thursday also disputed that the chemical — melamine, which is used to make plastic — was responsible for harming pets.

IN CHINA: All's quiet in, around offices at core of probe

"There is no clear evidence showing that melamine is the direct cause of the poisoning or death of the pets," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing argued in a prepared statement. "China is willing to strengthen cooperation with the U.S. side … to find out the real cause leading to the pet deaths in order to protect the health of the pets of the two countries."

In a sign of government urgency, Chinese police two days ago sealed the headquarters of Binzhou Futian Bio-Technology, which exported rice protein concentrate to the USA for use in pet food. Paper strips were pasted across the doors of the eight ground-floor rooms the company rents in Wudi County, a five-hour drive southeast of Beijing.

As inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prepare to visit the firms where the ingredients were made, Chinese and American food experts here say China's vast and fragmented food-processing industry makes inspection difficult and increases the likelihood of future problems.

FDA tests identified melamine in imported wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate in pet foods. It also has said cyanuric acid, a chemical related to melamine used in cleaning pools, was found in wheat gluten. The agency has said melamine, a chemical high in nitrogen, might have been added to the grain products to make them appear higher in protein than they were.

Since March 16, cat and dog food sold under more than 100 brand names have been recalled. The FDA has said 14 pets died after eating recalled foods, but anecdotal reports from veterinarians and pet owners point to higher numbers.

President Hu Jintao this week urged officials to intensify work on food safety, a growing concern among consumers in China, where mass poisonings from tainted products are common. Hu called on officials to monitor the entire food-production process and focus on prevention and resolving problems at their source.

That won't be easy, said Luo Yunbo at the College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering at China Agricultural University, who briefed China's leader Monday on the FDA's role in food safety. "China is such a large country, with such a large population, and agricultural production is by individual farmers on a very small scale," Luo said. "There are so many farmers and food producers that it is a great challenge to inspect all foodstuffs and teach people better agricultural standards."

About 6,000 hogs in eight U.S. states may have been fed pet food made from salvage products that had the tainted rice gluten. The pet food was sold for reformulation before melamine was found. Several hundred hogs may have entered the human food supply, FDA officials said. While there is no tolerance for melamine in food, the FDA's Daniel McChesney said, "we believe the risks to be very low to humans."

Two more recalls were announced Thursday.

Costco Wholesale Corp. announced a recall of its Kirkland Signature Super Premium Lamb and Rice pet food with sell by dates of Aug. 21 2008 to April 15 of 2009. The food was made by American Nutrition using rice protein concentrate from Wilbur-Ellis, which imported the product from Binzhou Futian in China. Costco will mail 230,000 letters to all members who purchased the canned food on Friday, said Craig Wilson, food safety chief for Costco.

Chenango Valley Pet Foods also has begun voluntarily recalling pet foods manufactured with a certain shipment of rice protein concentrate it received from Wilbur-Ellis, the company said Thursday.

The pet foods were sold to customers in Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, who in turn sold the products to their customers through catalog mail orders or retail outlets.
 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-04-26-pet-food-china_N.htm
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 27, 2007, 05:40:26 PM
Attention

Diamond Pet Foods has announced it is withdrawing a limited number of canned products manufactured by American Nutrition. This action is limited to three specific canned products: Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul Kitten Formula 5.5 oz. cans, and Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul Puppy Formula 13 oz. cans, and Diamond Lamb & Rice Formula for Dogs 13 oz. cans.

Diamond Pet Foods took this action after learning the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirmed rice protein concentrate was used by American Nutrition in the above three canned formulas.

The products being withdrawn were not formulated or labeled to contain rice protein concentrate. The rice protein concentrate was put into our products without our knowledge. It should also be noted that we have not received any notices of pet illnesses. All tests received to date verify the absence of any contaminants. No other Diamond brand or Chicken Soup brand canned or dry pet food formulas are affected by the American Nutrition recall.

We are appalled that this action was necessary, and will continue to work with the FDA on this issue. In the meantime, withdrawing these three canned products is the right thing for our company to do.

Customers with these products should stop feeding them immediately and return them to their retailer for a full refund.

Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul dry pet food and dog treats ARE NOT part of any pet food or treat recall. We manufacture all of our own dry pet foods.

Please contact our customer call center at (866) 214-6945 if you have any questions about these products.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 27, 2007, 05:45:54 PM
FDA link to search for recalled products.


 http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/petfoodrecall/ (http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/petfoodrecall/)


  Recalls are still going on!  I am trying to keep this thread updated but PLEASE if you feed kibble or canned pet food, keep checking here and do searches yourself for updated information!

  Some items may still be on store shelves, so please stay informed!

Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: Tapper on April 29, 2007, 07:39:35 AM
Jeebus. Is there ANYTHING we can feed our animals anymore?
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on April 30, 2007, 09:54:42 AM
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/30/business/30food.php (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/30/business/30food.php)

 Filler in animal feed is open secret in China
By David Barboza and Alexei Barrionuevo
Sunday, April 29, 2007

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 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.

Scientists are now trying to determine whether melamine could be harmful to humans.

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 its 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 do not 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."
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on May 01, 2007, 01:05:01 PM
FDA: Contaminated Pet Food Used in Chicken Feed

38 Indiana farms implicated; affected broiler chickens have already been consumed, officials say



TUESDAY, May 1 (HealthDay News) -- The potential threat to human health from contaminated pet food has now widened to include chickens, with U.S. health officials announcing that melamine-tainted pet product made its way into poultry feed at 38 Indiana farms.

Much of the adulterated feed was eaten in early February by broiler chickens that have since been sold and consumed nationally, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a joint statement issued late Monday.

The melamine-contaminated feed was used at 30 broiler poultry farms and eight breeder poultry farms across Indiana; all of the broiler chickens have since been sold to outlets nationwide. The breeder chicken have been quarantined and may be euthanized, the FDA and USDA said. The agencies also warned that "as the investigation continues, additional farms will likely be identified that received contaminated feed."

The announcement comes on the heels of similar discoveries at hog farms across the United States. The USDA first announced on Thursday that meat from 345 hogs suspected of eating the contaminated feed had entered the U.S. food supply. Some 6,000 hogs suspected of eating the contaminated product have since been quarantined and meat from these animals will be withheld from the food supply, both agencies said.

"As with exposure from hogs fed contaminated pet food and for similar reasons related to the dilution of the contamination, FDA and USDA believe the likelihood of illness after eating chicken fed the contaminated product is very low," the agencies said Monday night. "Because there is no evidence of harm to humans associated with consumption of chicken fed the contaminated product, no recall of poultry products processed from these animals is being issued."

In a similar vein, U.S. health officials have continued to reassure American consumers that pork products from hogs fed contaminated pet food were safe, even as reports surfaced that China has routinely added the contaminant melamine to its exported animal food supplements.

In a joint statement issued late Saturday, the FDA and USDA stressed that, "We are not aware of any human illness that has occurred from exposure to melamine or its byproducts." They added that they have also identified no illnesses in swine fed the salvage food tainted by melamine, which was imported from China as an additive to wheat gluten used in dog and cat food.

Melamine, a derivative of coal, is at the center of the United States' largest pet food recall, involving more than 60 million packages of 100 name-brand products. The chemical has been linked to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of animals.

In the Saturday statement, the FDA and the USDA said the possibility of human illness from eating swine exposed to melamine remains low for several reasons: "First, it is a partial ingredient in the pet food; second, it is only part of the total feed given to the hogs; third, it is not known to accumulate in the hogs, and the hogs excrete melamine in their urine; fourth, even if present in pork, pork is only a small part of the average American diet."

On Monday, The New York Times reported that Chinese producers routinely add melamine to wheat gluten and rice protein in animal feed products to falsely inflate levels of protein.

In interviews with agricultural workers and managers in China, the newspaper reported that animal feed producers have secretly added melamine to their feed for years because, during tests, it appears to be a protein, even though it doesn't add any nutritional benefits.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine, told the Times. "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."

On Thursday, China banned melamine from its food products, but rejected the charge that the substance caused the U.S. pet deaths, the Associated Press reported.

It's not clear how -- or even if -- melamine became fatal in pet food, because it's not believed to be particularly toxic. But U.S. law bans its presence in any form of food, the newspaper said.

The rice protein was imported to the United States by Wilbur-Ellis, an agricultural product importer and distributor. The FDA said it is continuing its investigation of the source of the adulterated pet food, including "tracing products distributed since August 2006 by Wilbur-Ellis throughout the distribution chain."

In their latest statement, the FDA and the USDA said that, as of April 26, they had identified sites in six states where contaminated pet food was received and used in feed given to hogs: California, Kansas, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Utah.

On Friday, FDA officials searched the facilities of a pet food manufacturer and one of its suppliers in the continuing probe of the contamination, the Associated Press reported.

The officials searched an Emporia, Kan., pet food plant operated by Menu Foods and the Las Vegas offices of ChemNutra Inc., the news service said, citing information supplied by the companies.

Menu Foods made many of the major brands of dog and cat foods that were recalled because of the melamine-contaminated wheat gluten. ChemNutra supplied Menu Foods with the wheat gluten, which was also imported from China but reportedly from a different supplier than the rice protein.

Both companies said they were cooperating with the investigation, the AP said.

Meanwhile, the USDA will compensate hog farmers affected by the tainted pet food, Kenneth Peterson, an assistant administrator for field operations at the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, said during a Thursday teleconference.

"The pork and pork products from these animals will be destroyed," Peterson added. Each year, more than 105 million hogs are slaughtered in the United States, the AP said.


http://health.msn.com/healthnews/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100161930&GT1=10008 (http://health.msn.com/healthnews/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100161930&GT1=10008)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on May 02, 2007, 10:04:12 AM
http://www.clickondetroit.com/video/13229330/index.html (http://www.clickondetroit.com/video/13229330/index.html)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! Rice Protein Affected!!
Post by: ~flower~ on May 03, 2007, 10:02:49 AM
http://www.pethobbyist.com/sitenews/index.php?/archives/46-Pet-Food-Crisis-Now-People-Food-Crisis....html

Pet Food Crisis Now People Food Crisis...

The FDA has finally acknowledged that adulterated animal food has killed thousands of pets in the United States and has been allowed to enter the human food chain. Now the U.S. public at large are to be their guinea pigs and they appear to be frighteningly comfortable with that position.

The FDA has danced around the topic of whether the toxins had entered the human food supply for weeks, and it has been both amazing and appalling to watch as each shoe has dropped. Each day brings bigger and far more shocking revelations about the results of lax safety standards in our nation's food supply.

usatoday.com - FDA: Feed no human threat:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-05-01-food-safety-usat_N.htm (http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-05-01-food-safety-usat_N.htm)

    Almost 3 million chickens may have eaten feed containing small amounts of pet food contaminated with melamine, but the health risk to consumers is minimal, federal officials said Tuesday.

    David Acheson, FDA assistant commissioner for food protection, said there is little threat to human health because the proportion of melamine in the original pet food was less than 6%, and the re-purposed pet food made up less than 5% of the chicken feed.



How much toxic food exactly do I need to eat Dave?

Tell me exactly what is the level of toxin the FDA considers it safe for me to ingest?

What is the level of toxin the CDC considers it safe for me to ingest?

Is the CDC even tracking melamine-related illnesses or testing for melamine?

How about my elderly parents and my school age nephews and nieces?

How about people with impaired immunities?

Do we have to wait for PEOPLE to start dying before it moves your stat meter any?

Do I have to die in your office for it to be confirmed, or would it be better for me to die in the CDC's office?

This is not a pet food crisis, this is a food crisis.

What does it say about this country's homeland security when I have to take off my shoes to board an airplane or face getting trundled off by 10 or 15 guards, and yet someone in a foreign country can introduce literally tons of toxins into our food supply with no oversight? Why waste billions on a nuclear program when you could introduce bulk shipments of ricin or anthrax-tainted rice gluten into our food supply instead, at a fraction of the cost, and maybe even turn a profit.

And here are my scariest questions Dave, the ones that I really fear the answer to the most...

How long and what else? When is the next shoe going to drop? How long has toxic, adulterated food been allowed into our food supply and what other toxins have I been ingesting? How many illnesses, cancers and deaths has this toxic food caused or enhanced in the public and for how long? We talk about a rise in things such as autism, allergens, cancer, and other health issues; how much has impact has toxic, adulterated food had on that?

Pet owners did not foment this crisis; dead and dying pets, lax regulations, poor systematics, lack of security, and shoddy oversite at the FDA did. Pets, then pet owners, then bloggers, then finally a few mainstream media houses brought this frighteningly huge hole in homeland security to light. It is fortunate, in a sense, that our pets acted as a tripwire to sound the alarm. It is unforgivable that so many had to die and will continue to die over the coming months for playing this role. Who knows what terrible act their deaths might have prevented? Or has their sacrifice already come too late?

Some people have referred to the bloggers and print journalists covering this as alarmists or sensationalists. If 3 million toxic chickens in the food supply isn't setting off bells and alarms somewhere, it damn well should. If Drudge and the rest of the mainstream media want to continue to ignore the situation, then I hope the journalists that are covering this ring as many bells as they can.


Jeff Barringer
President/CEO
OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc.
Home of PetHobbyist
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! People food too?!?
Post by: ~flower~ on May 04, 2007, 05:09:10 PM
The New York Times

May 4, 2007
China Makes Arrest in Pet Food Case
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI, May 3 — The general manager of a Chinese company accused of selling contaminated wheat gluten to pet food suppliers in the United States has been detained by the Chinese authorities, according to police officials here and a person who was briefed on the investigation.

The manager, Mao Lijun, head of the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, is being held in coastal Jiangsu Province, about 320 miles northwest of Shanghai, though a police spokesman in the area, Pei County, declined to say on what charges.

In a telephone interview a few weeks ago, Mr. Mao denied any knowledge of how melamine, an industrial chemical, had been mixed into pet food supplies sold under his company label earlier this year. He also insisted that his company had never exported any wheat gluten and that his products were sold only on the domestic market.

But regulators in the United States identified Xuzhou Anying and another Chinese company in nearby Shandong Province as the only sources of the contaminated ingredients that killed 16 dogs and cats, sickened thousands of others and led to one of the biggest pet food recalls in American history.

Calls made to the other Chinese supplier under suspicion, the Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Company, went unanswered.

Scientists are still trying to explain how melamine, a chemical used to make plastics, fertilizer and surface coatings but not considered very toxic, ended up in some of the leading American pet food brands.

The arrest of Mr. Mao may be an indication that the Chinese government is stepping up its own investigation into the scandal. It also seems to be trying to show a willingness to cooperate with investigators from the Food and Drug Administration, who finally arrived in China on Monday — after China had initially refused to issue them visas.

Concerns about the quality and safety of China’s agriculture exports have prompted agency regulators to ban all wheat gluten from China and to warn importers to sample or test all food and feed additives coming from there.

Last month, South Africa also announced a pet food recall after more than 30 dogs died from eating food contaminated with melamine-tainted ingredients imported from China.

The Chinese government had initially reacted angrily to suggestions that Chinese food exports could have been the cause of death or sickness in so many American pets. At one point, the Chinese government even insisted that the country had not exported any wheat gluten to the United States this year.

People briefed on the United States investigation also complained that the Chinese government was reacting slowly to efforts by American regulators to obtain information, in addition to visas for entry.

But last week, with the contaminant in pet food spreading to hogs in the United States, the government dropped the denial and insisted only that it was unlikely melamine could cause such harm in pets. Last Friday, China also banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins that are made for export or for use in domestic food.

There is still some question over the role of the Xuzhou company. Last week, the F.D.A. issued an import alert saying that the Chinese government had evidence that Xuzhou Anying was not the manufacturer of the tainted wheat gluten but may have had as many as 25 wheat gluten suppliers.

ChemNutra, a Las Vegas company that bought the wheat gluten and resold it to pet food makers in the United States, said it thought that Xuzhou was the manufacturer.

Regulators also said that Xuzhou had failed to disclose to China’s export authorities that it was shipping food or feed products to the United States and thereby avoided having its goods checked by food inspectors.

The Xuzhou shipments to ChemNutra were made through another Chinese company, the Suzhou Textiles Silk Light Industrial Company.

Despite its denials of knowing anything about melamine contamination, Xuzhou appears to have sought to buy large supplies of melamine, even in the weeks after the pet food recall.

The company had posted more than a dozen advertisements on the Internet seeking supplies of melamine scrap, the impure waste of an industrial chemical that animal feed producers here often mix into the feed to artificially increase the reading of the protein.

Chinese producers use this practice, local experts here say, in an effort to elevate the level of protein to make a higher grade feed, even though the melamine has no nutritional value.

On March 21, Xuzhou Anying had posted this message on an Internet trading site called EC21: “We urgently need a lot of melamine scrap.”

Despite the ban on melamine in vegetable protein, chemical companies in China continue to say they sell melamine scrap to animal feed companies and even to food companies that make bakery items.

“Our chemical products are mostly used for additives, not for animal feed,” said Li Xiuping, manager at the Henan Xinxiang Huaxing Chemical Company in central Henan Province. “Melamine is mainly used in the chemical industry, but it can also be used in making cakes.”

Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! People food too?!?
Post by: pumpster on May 07, 2007, 04:09:25 AM
How Two Innocuous Compounds Combined to Kill Pets

Monday, May 7, 2007

What do a dead cat in Ontario and a motel swimming pool in Phoenix have in common?
In certain circumstances, they both contain melamine-cyanuric acid crystals.
 
Scientists seeking the chemical culprits in the widening pet food scare have come across some unusual chemistry that may help them understand how two largely nontoxic compounds ended up killing an unknown number of cats and dogs.

At the end of March, investigators detected a man-made compound called melamine in wheat gluten produced in China and sold to U.S. manufacturers as a pet food thickener. The contaminated samples contained various amounts -- from 0.2 percent to 8 percent -- of the chemical.

Melamine has been used for decades in manufacturing. In its chainlike "polymerized" form, it is used to make dishes, flame-retardant fibers and industrial coatings.

Also found in the gluten in smaller concentrations was cyanuric acid. The man-made chemical is used to stabilize chlorine in outdoor swimming pools, especially in regions such as the American Southwest where the sun's rays are quick to dissipate that disinfectant. Two other compounds, ammeline and ammelide, were present in even smaller amounts.

The four compounds have similar chemical structures. One can easily be made into another with the right chemical reaction. All contain relatively large amounts of the element nitrogen. Of the 15 atoms in a molecule of melamine, six are nitrogen. It also has three atoms of carbon and six of hydrogen. Ammeline has five nitrogen atoms, ammelide has four, and cyanuric acid has three.

All living things need nitrogen. The element is an essential ingredient of proteins, which make up most of the human body that isn't bone or water. It is an essential ingredient of DNA as well.

Organisms can survive for short periods on carbon, oxygen and hydrogen -- sugar. But if they want to grow or reproduce, they need nitrogen. Plants can get nitrogen out of the soil or the air, but animals have a harder time. They must take in protein already made by plants or other animals. That's what the female mosquito is seeking when she's out for blood -- a source of abundant nitrogen with which to make the protein and DNA in her eggs.

If you add melamine to almost anything, the amount of nitrogen in the final mixture will rise simply because, gram for gram, melamine contains so much of the element. Since the food industry generally measures total "nitrogen content" and equates it with "protein content," a few shovelfuls of melamine can appear to turn a low-protein meal into a high-protein one.

And what's wrong with that? Can't the body use the nitrogen in melamine?

Actually, it can't.

Melamine is an extremely small molecule, and most of it is absorbed through the intestinal tract before it is digested. It circulates in the bloodstream until it gets to the kidneys, where it slips easily into the fluid that eventually becomes urine. Melamine can also enter other organs. That is how it could have ended up in the tissue of farm animals that ate scraps of melamine-laced pet food -- as apparently was the case in 2.7 million chickens and 345 pigs slaughtered and consumed in recent months.

(Late last week, the federal government identified another 20 million chickens that had eaten tainted feed and took steps to keep them off the market.)
 
As a practical matter, though, only a small amount of melamine would ever end up in Buffalo wings or pulled pork. Melamine's chemical structure makes it water-soluble, and it doesn't accumulate in fat. After an oral dose of melamine, more than half is out of the bloodstream and into the urine in three hours.

The purpose of urine is to concentrate water-soluble waste products and to keep them dissolved. But water's dissolving power has its limits. Melamine and other chemicals can reach concentrations that exceed those limits. When the water can't hold any more, the chemical substance begins to form crystals.

Studies done decades ago found that rats fed melamine for two years developed stones in their urine, which led to bladder cancer in some. When rats were fed in one serving a large amount of melamine -- the equivalent of a 150-pound person eating a pound -- about half died.

At low doses, however, melamine is nontoxic. In fact, microcapsules and chains made of melamine have been used experimentally in animals as vehicles for delivering long-acting drugs.

Veterinarians investigating the mysterious pet deaths realized that most of the animals died of kidney failure and had kidney stones containing melamine. Although little is known about melamine toxicity in cats and dogs, it seems unlikely, based on the rat studies, that the pets could have consumed fatal amounts of the chemical.

Last month, however, toxicologists at the University of Guelph in Ontario detected another compound in the stones from cats suffering kidney failure -- cyanuric acid. Initially, the ratio was thought to be about two parts melamine to one part cyanuric acid. More recent and more precise measurements suggest an even split.

Ten days ago, Guelph scientists Brent Hoff and Grant Maxie combined melamine and cyanuric acid in a sample of cat urine. They produced crystals that, when examined for their chemical and physical properties, were virtually identical to the stones taken from the ill or dead cats.

The crystals are a lattice of six molecules -- three of melamine and three of cyanuric acid -- held together by weak links called hydrogen bonds.

When melamine is added to water that contains cyanuric acid, the reaction clouds the solution. It's that reaction -- and the degree of cloudiness -- that tells pool maintenance workers how much cyanuric acid is in the water, and whether more is needed. When the reaction occurs in a pet's kidneys, however, it can have altogether different and deadly effects.

So how might a plastic and a pool chemical (and their cousins, ammeline and ammelide) have gotten into pet food?

Nobody knows.

But one theory is that they were leftovers from a chemical company's production of something else. In an act of fraud that substituted cheap scrap for more expensive protein, someone put the compounds into the wheat gluten, thinking they would never be discovered and never cause a problem.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Please Read Updates! People food too?!?
Post by: ~flower~ on May 11, 2007, 03:52:24 PM
latimes.com    
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-petfood9may09,0,6710026.story?coll=la-ho
FOOD PRODUCTS

Gluten factory had a toxic history
By Don Lee and Abigail Goldman

May 9, 2007

XUZHOU, CHINA — Before Mao Lijun's business exported tainted wheat products that may have killed American pets, his factory sickened people and plants around here for years.

Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao's factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao's company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke — until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

It wasn't authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory — days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients.

In the end, Chinese authorities caught up with Mao and arrested him. And Tuesday, after weeks of denials, China acknowledged that Mao's company and another Chinese business had illegally exported wheat and rice products spiked with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fertilizers. That chemical is banned in foods in the U.S.

China's watchdog agency said the businesses had added melamine to the food ingredients "in a bid to meet the contractual demand for the amount of protein in the products." Melamine can make animal feed appear to have more protein than it actually does.

Besides turning up in pet food, melamine has been found in feed for thousands of hogs and millions of chickens in the U.S. The FDA said Tuesday that melamine-contaminated foods also were fed to fish raised for human consumption. But in each case, U.S. officials said there was little risk to human health.

The FDA also said that although the tainted Chinese products were labeled as wheat gluten and rice protein, they were actually ordinary wheat flour — with melamine and related nitrogen-rich compounds.

Melamine producers in China have said that melamine scrap, a cheaper form of the chemical, has been widely sold to entrepreneurs who use it to fool farmers into thinking that they are getting higher-nutrient animal feeds. Among the apparent buyers of melamine scrap were Mao, head of Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. in Shandong province.

Liu Zhaoyi, 64, a farmer who lives next to Mao's now-demolished factory, recalled seeing globs of white and yellowish scrap, which may have included melamine, piled in the yard behind the plant.

One season after rains, Liu said, water with residue from the compound flowed into his family's cornfields and killed the crops.

"He gave me only 100 yuan when my corn was all dead," Liu said of Mao. That is the equivalent of about $13 today.

Few people in town, which has a large food manufacturing industry, seemed to know what Mao's factory made.

An Environment Protection Bureau official in Pei county, which is a part of Xuzhou, said one of his colleagues had visited Mao's facility in recent years when it was processing yeast and wheat. The inspection did not turn up any serious violations, and neighbors were told to complain to a court or another agency.

In recent days, Mao's company removed wheat gluten from the product offerings on its website. It also deleted something called ESB protein powder.

Xuzhou Anying had advertised the powder as its "latest researched, developed and produced" item and touted it as "a new way to solve the problem of shortage of protein resource." Several people with experience in China's food industry say such powders are invariably made with melamine.

Melamine itself isn't considered particularly toxic, but researchers believe that another compound, cyanuric acid, may also have been added to the pet food ingredients by Chinese firms or formed as a byproduct. Combined with melamine, it can cause a chemical reaction — forming crystals and blocking kidney function in some animals.

Cai Kesen, president of No. 1 Flour Factory of Pei county, said unadulterated wheat gluten from China certainly would not have caused a scandal. The quality of the region's wheat last year was the best in a decade, he said.

Cai vaguely recalled meeting Mao once. His company was small, he said, and it was common for such businesses to add words like "biologic" and "technology" to their names to get government subsidies intended for advanced enterprises.

Xuzhou Anying's website posted certificates claiming, among other things, that it had won top quality grades from various organizations, none of which could be verified.

China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said Tuesday that Xuzhou Anying and Binzhou Futian had evaded quality checks by labeling their products as exports not subject to inspection.

Farmer Liu said it was a shame that officials failed to heed earlier complaints. "If they had done more, this company won't have such a big problem."

don.lee@latimes.com

abigail.goldman@latimes.com

Lee reported from Xuzhou and Goldman from Los Angeles.



Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Updates! Claims!
Post by: ~flower~ on May 16, 2007, 07:14:01 AM
Menu foods has done a press release that they are getting ready to send out claim forms, notices, etc. to those who lost pets due to contaminated Menu pet foods.

GENERAL INFORMATION:
 http://menufoods.com/recall/Claim%20Settlement%20Process.pdf (http://menufoods.com/recall/Claim%20Settlement%20Process.pdf)

FOR US RESIDENTS:
 http://menufoods.com/recall/United%20States%20Residents.pdf (http://menufoods.com/recall/United%20States%20Residents.pdf)

FOR CANADIAN RESIDENTS:
http://menufoods.com/recall/Canadian%20Residents.pdf (http://menufoods.com/recall/Canadian%20Residents.pdf)

If anyone has questions, they are to call (toll free): 1-866-895-2708
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Updates! Claims!
Post by: knny187 on May 26, 2007, 05:41:19 PM
Records Say Company Harassed Pet Owners
By Elizabeth Weise
USA Today
(May 26) - The pet food company that recalled six million cans of contaminated dog and cat food made repeated harassing phone calls to pet owners who had lawyers and said they didn't want to talk, even after a judge ordered it to leave them alone, court records show.

Lawyers from six of the more than 80 law firms representing clients who believed their pets were harmed by Menu's pet food brought a motion in federal court in New Jersey Wednesday seeking to stop Menu from "bullying" people who had called the company since the recall was first announced two and a half months ago.

U.S. District Judge Noel Hillman in Camden, New Jersey agreed with them.

"It's one thing for two people to sit down at the table and voluntarily agree to settle their case, it's another thing to harass people on weekends through automated phone calls," Hillman said to Edward Ruff of Pretzel & Stouffer, Menu's lawyer.

Hillman entered a consent degree on Wednesday ordering Menu Foods to have no contact with anyone who believes their animal was injured by its product without a lawyer being involved.

Calls to Ruff on Friday by USA TODAY were not returned.

Menu Foods has hired Crawford & Company of Atlanta, an insurance adjustment company, to contact pet owners who called the company to report animal illnesses or deaths. Operators at the company directed USA TODAY to call back Tuesday after the holiday.

Jay Edelson, a lawyer with Chicago-based Blim & Edelson which represents over 400 owners, says he believes Menu has received close to 30,000 calls from owners across North America who claim their pets were injured.

At a previous hearing on May 18, the judge had cautioned Menu and Crawford that they should not contact people who had joined one of the lawsuits against the company. Legally, Menu cannot contact those plaintiffs directly but must go through their lawyers.

But affidavits presented in court on the 23rd showing that even pet owners who clearly told Crawford representatives they had retained a lawyer were being called both personally and by what the judge described as 'blaster' computerized phone banks, sometimes numerous times.

Ruff blamed the problem on the fact that Monday, May 21 was a holiday - Victoria Day - in Canada. Menu is based in Ontario, Canada.

Hillman was unyielding.

"It seems to me that Menu Food is out to do whatever Menu Foods wants to do in a way that could adversely impact the rights of (possible members of the class action suit," he said.

Menu's representatives asked owners to sign releases which waived their right to get advice from a lawyer," Edelson said.

"It appears that the company was engaging in a cynical strategy, designed to settle some of the strongest claims cheaply and induce pet owners to give up information it might be able to use to defend against others," his firm said in a letter released to pet owners on Friday.

At the end of May a federal multi-district litigation panel will meet in Las Vegas to determine which court the more than 800 cases against Menu will be heard in. The panel is expected to announce a decision by mid summer.

Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen and Cyanuric Acid now!
Post by: ~flower~ on June 13, 2007, 07:33:51 AM
New Contaminant Found In More Pet Food

ASPCA Sheds Light on Toxicity of Acetaminophen—Reminds Pet Parents to Stay Alert


ASPCA Media Contact

NEW YORK, June 6, 2007—With reports that acetaminophen has been found in brands of cat and dog food not included on the Menu Foods recall list, the ASPCA® (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals®) today reminded pet parents that vigilance is the key to keeping their pets safe and healthy—coupled with a strong dose of common sense.

“Though reports of dogs and cats poisoned from the Menu Foods recall seem to have abated, this news is extremely worrying,” said Dr. Steven Hansen, a board-certified toxicologist and senior vice president with the ASPCA, who manages the ASPCA’s Animal Poison Control Center (APCC), located in its Midwest Office in Urbana, Ill.

“Our data show that if an average-sized cat ingests as little as one extra-strength acetaminophen pain-reliever caplet and is not treated in time, it can suffer fatal consequences,” continued Dr. Hansen. “Depending on the amount ingested, clinical effects can include a condition called ‘methemoglobinemia,’ which affects the ability of blood cells to deliver oxygen to vital organs, or even liver damage.”

“At this point, we have very little information as to the actual level and concentration of this reported contamination, so it’s extremely important to be able to recognize any potential warning signs of this kind of poisoning.” However, early information on this contamination suggests that concentration levels are not high enough to have an adverse effect on most dogs; cats are more at-risk.

Dr. Louise Murray, director of medicine at the ASPCA’s Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital (BMAH) in New York City, and a board-certified internist, elaborates further. “Cats are especially sensitive to acetaminophen toxicity for two reasons. First, they don’t have enough of a specific enzyme that enables the body to metabolize the drug well. Second, cats are typically more susceptible to red blood cell damage than certain other species of animals. Put these together with a high dose of acetaminophen, and you have a potentially deadly combination.”

The most common effects of acetaminophen poisoning in cats include swelling of the face and paws; depression; weakness; and difficulty in breathing. “We also see a condition called ‘cyanosis,’” said Dr. Hansen, “which is literally when their gums and tongue start turning a muddy color due to the lack of oxygen.”

In 2006, the APCC received more than 78,000 calls to its hotline involving common human drugs such as painkillers, cold medications, antidepressants and dietary supplements—a 69 percent increase over 2005.

Until more information is provided by the U. S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the ASPCA urges pet parents to keep an eye out for any signs of illness in their pets, and also report any changes in dietary consumption or behavior to their veterinarian immediately. Those considering a home-cooked diet for their pets should do so in consultation with their veterinarian, or visit the ASPCA’s Web site for more information.

“It is important to remember to never give any medication to your pet without first talking to your veterinarian, and always store potentially poisonous substances in a secure cabinet above the countertop and out of the reach of pets,” said Dr. Hansen. “If you think your pet has ingested a poisonous substance, you should take her to your veterinarian immediately.”

The ASPCA continues to monitor the pet food recall situation, and is providing regular updates and advice for pet parents, at its Pet Food Recall Resource Center at www.aspca.org/recall.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen and Cyanuric Acid now!
Post by: ~flower~ on June 13, 2007, 07:37:01 AM
        

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Texas lab finds pain medicine in pet food

By Karen Roebuck
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating a Texas laboratory's finding of acetaminophen in dog and cat food, an agency spokesman said Monday.

"We're very interested in being able to test these samples ourselves to determine the levels of those contaminants," said FDA spokesman Doug Arbesfeld. "What's significant is these things are there. They don't belong there."

The pain medication is the fifth contaminant found in pet foods during the past 2 1/2 months and can be toxic or lethal to pets, especially cats. It is not known if any animals became sick with acetaminophen poisoning, or died from it.

"We were looking for cyanuric acid and melamine, and the acetaminophen just popped up," Donna Coneley, lab operations manager for ExperTox Inc. in Deer Park, Texas, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review yesterday. "It definitely was a surprise to find that in several samples."

At least five dog and cat food samples submitted by worried pet owners and pet food manufacturers contained varying levels of the pain reliever, she said. Only the food, not individual ingredients, were tested.

The medication was found most often with cyanuric acid, a chemical used in pool chlorination, Coneley said. Varying levels of melamine, a chemical used to make plastics, also were found among the hundreds of samples ExperTox tested, she said.

The contaminants were found in foods that are not among the more than 150 brands recalled since March 16, Coneley said. The highest level of acetaminophen was found in a dog food sample submitted by a manufacturer, she said. Coneley declined to identify the company but said its officials were given the results "well over a month ago."

That company should have -- but did not -- notify the FDA, which first learned of the acetaminophen findings after pet owners posted lab reports on the Internet, Arbesfeld said.

"With any poison, it's the amount that matters." said Dr. Wilson Rumbeiha, a Michigan State University pathologist who is working with the FDA on the pet food contamination investigation. His lab has screened for acetaminophen but found none, he said.

The highest level of acetaminophen found by the Texas lab -- 2 milligrams per gram of dog food -- is a large amount, Rumbeiha said. That is eight times what a 10-pound cat could safely consume, he said.

However, a 20-pound dog would have to eat more than 6.5 pounds of food in 24 hours to be poisoned, unless it ate the same contaminated food daily, Rumbeiha said.

A still-unmeasured amount of acetaminophen and cyanuric acid were found in cat food submitted by Don Earl, 52, of Port Townsend, Wash., whose 6-year-old cat, Chuckles, died in January.

He said he was suspicious of two flavors of Chuckles' Pet Pride food because his other two cats refused to eat it and because Chuckles, strictly an indoor girl, had been healthy.

Karen Roebuck can be reached at kroebuck@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7939.


Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen and Cyanuric Acid now!
Post by: ~flower~ on June 13, 2007, 07:41:25 AM
http://www.itchmo.com/read/lab-find-toxin-in-unopened-unrecalled-pet-food_20070612 (http://www.itchmo.com/read/lab-find-toxin-in-unopened-unrecalled-pet-food_20070612)


Exclusive: Lab Finds Toxin In Unopened, Unrecalled Pet Food

The same Texas lab that has reported acetaminophen in pet food, has reported finding cyanuric acid after receiving an unopened container of Hills Science Diet Light Adult canned dog formula. This is the first report we have received that was tested from an unopened container. The picture above (*attached below) shows 2 more cans from the same batch.

Science Diet Light Adult formula has not been recalled by the manufacturer.

The lab report from Expertox obtained by Itchmo states that the tested product had a best before date of 01 2009 and had the lot number T0520917 7048. Cyanuric acid was reportedly found in concentrations of more than 400 ug/g — that’s micrograms/gram.

Hill’s representatives declined to be interviewed over the phone and emailed questions were not returned in time for this deadline.

An Itchmo reader tested the food based on veterinary tests on a dog. The reader’s email is after the jump. It has been edited to remove personal information.


Reader’s email:

    I received today the test results on the canned food from the case lot my 4-year old Shih Tzu was eating from when her blood work indicated that she was in kidney failure. We did IV for 4 days, antibiotics for one month, and now fluid therapy once a week. She is still alive, eating home cooked food, has a good appetite, but I don’t know where her kidney levels are at present. Her BUN was 160 before the IV therapy. The BUN came down following 4 days on IV, but was still high when I brought her home.

The reader also said that another dog that did not eat the canned food had normal blood tests.


Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: Vet on June 14, 2007, 01:06:37 AM
It really really bothers me that the melamine cases have circulated rather quickly among the veterinarian community, but the reports of acetaminophen and cyanuric acid seem to have not.   I belong to a online veterinary group (in addition to V.I.N.) who sends me frequent posts/press releases on these cases.   However, when I talked to one of the hospitals I do consulting work with back in Ohio earlier today, they had heard absolutely nothing about the possibility of Acetaminophen in pet foods.   
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: Butterbean on June 14, 2007, 11:00:36 AM
!!!  Sheesh! :(

Is the Chicken Soup line still considered safe?  I just bought a new bag today
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on June 14, 2007, 11:40:14 AM
It really really bothers me that the melamine cases have circulated rather quickly among the veterinarian community, but the reports of acetaminophen and cyanuric acid seem to have not.   I belong to a online veterinary group (in addition to V.I.N.) who sends me frequent posts/press releases on these cases.   However, when I talked to one of the hospitals I do consulting work with back in Ohio earlier today, they had heard absolutely nothing about the possibility of Acetaminophen in pet foods.   

It took about 3 weeks for the public to get informed about the first recalls.  How many pets died or were injured because of that wait? 

  This was found in an independent lab.  I do see that it has been reported a number of places around the web, but nothing from the FDA yet.  I believe the lab results are being disputed.   


  this just in:    http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/lab.html (http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/lab.html)

June 13, 2007: In the news today, with hundreds of pet owners across the country reporting acetaminophen poisoning like symptoms in their dead or dying pets, the FDA announces their official position is to stand down. Who didn't know that? Perhaps it would be best to disband the FDA. It would save tax payers several billion dollars a year. The savings to corporate America on lobbyists and the usuals could be passed on to consumers. And, the lack of oversight would be the same as it is now, with private citizens bearing the burden of testing the safety of products at their own expense as you see here.


FDA ACETAMINOPHEN CHALLENGE


As amazing as it may seem, after the announced FDA stand down on testing for acetaminophen, the FDA then snuck over to ExperTox to try to glom onto samples. I and at least 4 others I am aware of were contacted for permission to release samples to the FDA.

The one thing we know for sure at this point is the 5 samples the FDA earlier claimed to have tested for acetaminophen, were NOT those tested by ExperTox.

Several others, along with myself, refused permission for the FDA to take the samples off ExperTox premises. We did however agree to allow the FDA to test the samples under the supervision of ExperTox at the ExperTox lab.

So, here’s the challenge:

* Let the FDA rent the ExperTox facilities for one day to duplicate the ExperTox results on those samples which tested negative for melamine, but positive for cyanuric acid and/or acetaminophen.

* Let the FDA bring in the experts of its choice to participate in the tests.

* Let ExperTox personnel act in a supervisory and oversight capacity to make sure everything is done according to Hoyle.

* Let the media bring in as many camera crews as it is possible to squeeze into the room without interfering with the work.

* Let the games begin.



    acetaminophen test results:
  http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/acetaminophen.pdf (http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/acetaminophen.pdf)

   cyanuric acid test results:
  http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/cyanuric.pdf (http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/cyanuric.pdf)

 acetaminophen/cyanuric acid in Hill's Science Diet Light Adult dry:
   http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/test2.jpg (http://www.petfoodrecallfacts.com/test2.jpg)

Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on June 14, 2007, 11:48:17 AM
!!!  Sheesh! :(

Is the Chicken Soup line still considered safe?  I just bought a new bag today

  That has not been involved in any of the recalls, except for one canned line that was made in another factory.  They have since changed to making every line in their own factory from what I have heard, so added ingredients will not be a concern.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on June 14, 2007, 11:56:25 AM
Anybody feed this?:

EXCLUSIVE: Lab Reports Cyanuric Acid In Unrecalled Dry Food

UPDATE: The company that tested the food requested that we remove the image of the report from this post after being contacted by Proctor & Gamble, the parent company of Iams.

UPDATE 2: We received a call from an Iams spokesman. We have updated the story with their response.

UPDATE 3: We believe the bags in question are located in the Denver area.

ORIGINAL POST: Itchmo has learned that a toxicology test reported the presence of cyanuric acid in an opened bag of what is alleged to be Iams Large Breed dry dog food.

According to the report obtained by Itchmo, the results have been certified by a forensic toxicologist. We have obtained a copy of the toxicology report. Iams Large Breed does not list rice protein concentrate or wheat gluten as ingredients.

In response, Iams says they are “fully confident” that no cyanuric acid or melamine entered their products. They also defended their “exceptional response” to handling customer complaints. When asked if they were testing for melamine and cyanuric acid after the manufacture of their products, Iams said that they were “constantly improving their quality control processes.”

We cannot stress this point enough: This test was performed on a sample from an opened bag. We do not know if this is an isolated case of contamination before or after the sale, or if it is widespread.

This information requires verification and we are asking for your help.

Itchmo is asking you to find an unopened 20 lb. bag of Iams Large Breed dry dog food that matches the lot number: 260608 70574173 F4 US30940 with the expiration date of 6/26/08.

If you find an unopened bag, please email us at tips@itchmo.com and we will provide further instructions. If it’s the right bag, we will pay for the cost of the bag of food, shipping and testing. There will be no cost to you.

If an unopened bag is found and tested, we will release the results as soon as they become available regardless of the outcome.
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: Princess L on June 14, 2007, 08:44:06 PM
!!!  Sheesh! :(

Is the Chicken Soup line still considered safe?  I just bought a new bag today

So did I
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on June 15, 2007, 05:18:03 AM

So did I

  How's that working ladies?  Any probs?  Complaints?  Feedback in general?  Is it a good recommendation in your opinions?
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: Butterbean on June 15, 2007, 07:06:18 AM
maybe she is trying to tell you that she doesn't want to eat in the dirty garage and is protecting her food.     ;D
It's not that dirty! ;D

I think she's trying to "bury" it or something
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on June 15, 2007, 07:16:06 AM
It's not that dirty! ;D

I think she's trying to "bury" it or something

  When Emmett doesn't want to eat, or is dissatisfied with the main course, he will try and push his towel over it.  Or turn his bowl over.  Like I won't find out he didn't eat it.    ::)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: Butterbean on June 15, 2007, 07:19:29 AM
 When Emmett doesn't want to eat, or is dissatisfied with the main course, he will try and push his towel over it.  Or turn his bowl over.  Like I won't find out he didn't eat it.    ::)
lol!  How about when you tell them to go potty and they "fake" it  ::)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on June 15, 2007, 07:29:06 AM
lol!  How about when you tell them to go potty and they "fake" it  ::)

 Mine aren't that smart.   ::)   I swear I have stood outside in the rain for over 10mins waiting for Addie to pee. She doesn't like the wet, yet she won't just do it and get it over with.    If she goes behind the car and I can't see her, when she comes back I will ask her if she "went potty" and if she hasn't she will give me a look and go back to trying to find the perfect spot.  I wouldn't know if she had gone or not!    I have told her to just squat down and fake it or something!! 

  For a big sow dog, she is quite dainty as far as getting wet and dirty.  ::)

 
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: JimmyTheFish on June 15, 2007, 08:10:16 AM
lol!  How about when you tell them to go potty and they "fake" it  ::)

hahahah Louie does that all the time because he thinks he will get a treat  ::)
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: Princess L on June 21, 2007, 07:02:40 PM
  How's that working ladies?  Any probs?  Complaints?  Feedback in general?  Is it a good recommendation in your opinions?

Scout seems to love it.  "Things" are consistant.  ;)  I feed 3Xday.  The feeding guideline suggests WAY more than I think his stomach could possibly hold, not to mention he'd probably end up being a porker.  My only complaint is the dead grass  >:(  That was never a major problem with Keesha.  :-\
Title: Re: PET FOOD RECALL - Acetaminophen !
Post by: ~flower~ on June 22, 2007, 05:24:40 AM

Scout seems to love it.  "Things" are consistant.  ;)  I feed 3Xday.  The feeding guideline suggests WAY more than I think his stomach could possibly hold, not to mention he'd probably end up being a porker.  My only complaint is the dead grass  >:(  That was never a major problem with Keesha.  :-\

  Have you tried something like this you spray on your lawn? I am considering treating my whole lawn:

  http://www.amazon.com/Peeeve-PP002-Ready-Lawn-Protectant-Concentrate/dp/B000LRFZ20 (http://www.amazon.com/Peeeve-PP002-Ready-Lawn-Protectant-Concentrate/dp/B000LRFZ20)