We are now approaching the three-month mark in the recall of contaminated pet foods and several things are clear. Most notable is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has done a scandalously poor job of staying on top things and has been painfully slow to acknowledge that the human food chain also is affected.
This much we know (or don’t know):
* The number of dogs and cats affected by the bad food is simply unknown.
A U.S. Food and Drug Administration official said last week during a news media teleconference that although some 5,300 pet food products had been recalled the number of reported fatalities was only “in the high teens,” as in 18 or 19. He was contradicted two days later by an FDA press release that pegged deaths at about 2,200 dogs and 1,950 cats. Anecdotal reports put the numbers higher.
* It is not unusual for the source of contaminants in food recalls to be elusive.
But it was the news media, prodded in part by bloggers, and not the FDA that first pointed a finger at Chinese-export wheat gluten and rice protein laced with melamine, used in the manufacture of plastics, to increase protein and profit levels. This is only the latest effort by Chinese manufacturers to dupe U.S. food processors into believing that they are buying a quality product.
* Suspicions that melamine also was showing up in the human food chain were debunked by the FDA.
And then on Monday the agency dropped a bombshell, explaining in an import alert that it “is enforcing a new import alert that greatly expands its curtailment of some food ingredients imported from China, authorizing border inspectors to detain ingredients used in everything from noodles to breakfast bars.â€
To date, the contaminants have showed up in chicken feed in Indiana and in hogs in several states that were fed contaminated pet food. The FDA and Department of Agriculture said they have not ordered recalls because the likelihood of human illness from eating chicken or pigs fed the contaminants is very low. Also, a survey of poison control centers and hospitals by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found no increase in reports of kidney diseases, the most likely indicator of melamine poisoning.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.