More Up to date articles on recall....

[miezzi]

This is such a great site for any up to date news on this whole recall thing.

http://www.itchmo.com/go/tagged/safety/


There is also an article about the FDA saying they can't confirm if HUMAN food as tainted....

ORGINAL POST:
FDA just issued this warning against the import of specific wheat gluten from a maker in China. The full name of the company is: Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company Ltd. This company also exports wheat flour, cornstarch, sweet potato starch, protein powder, zinc oxide, carrots, garlic, ginger, and other agricultural products. (Web site)

This is the only known source of contamination identified by the FDA. Unfortunately, this was never released to the media from what we can gather.

If anyone else is using supplies from this company (for human or pet consumption), they should contact the FDA ASAP.

In the alert, the FDA has now authorized the quarantine or dentention of any wheat gluten from this specific company in China and passed through the Netherlands (a transit point) without the need to inspect it. Basically preventing the supply from getting into any food stream.

Judging by the date (3/30) we suspect that this definitive action labeling this supply wheat gluten as ?poisonous? is what prompted many other makers from issuing their ?voluntary recalls? last Friday. After all, legally speaking, their hands were now tied.

(Thanks to Gina at Pet Connection)

Full FDA alert after the jump.
(more?)

Posted in Medical, Legal, News, Products, National, Dogs, Cats, Safety




This is getting scarier and scarier.....

[Little Bit]

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

[Little Bit]

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
http://catmanager.wordpress.com/2007...-states-doing/ ,
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
http://www.fda.gov/ora/fiars/ora_import_ia9926.html 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
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-...uten-sold_b_44
743.html . (The Chinese company
http://www.petconnection.com/blog/20...hina-denies-ro
ll-in-recall/ 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.