YOUR WHOLE PET
Bigger than you think: The story behind the pet food recall
By Christie Keith, Special to SF Gate
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...03/petscol.DTL
Christie Keith will be appearing on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 tonight at
7:20 PM Pacific Time.
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
http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/new...cNews&storyID=
2007-03-19T225231Z_01_N19293241_RTRIDST_0_CANADA-PETFOOD-RECALL-COL.XML&arch
ived=False.
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
http://www.sacbee.com/267/story/143324.html 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
http://catmanager.wordpress.com/2007...-connection-da
ta/ , and while we did correct for a couple of them, our numbers are not
considered "confirmed." But USA Today reported
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/...od-scare_N.htm 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."
See next post for Part Two