Pet Food Recall

[rangerette]

yahoo news link - pet food recall

There is incomplete information at this time, but thought it good to post this as soon as possible.

[Little_Kopit]

I think part of my point is that some from Europe and Australia showed me that initialisms create confusion with many. For all that I grew up down there, I have difficulty with the two letter state abbreviations.

🙂

[dturm]

Sorry, American Animal Hospital Association one of the two major veterinary organizations, the other being AVMA - American Veterinary Medical Association.

Doug

[Little_Kopit]

Doug, I'm guessing what AAHA means. I'm afraid I don't automatically know.

:C

[dturm]

I got an email from AAHA yesterday that expressed the concern about cross contamination to wheat flour and other foods. This is all still shaking out. My understanding of the pathology is that the levels of melamine found "should not cause a problem" if found alone. It is apparent the the addition of cyanuric acid with the melamine is what is causing the kidney failure.

Doug, DVM

[Happytraveler]

BREAKING NEWS: Dry Dog Food (Nutra Nuggets) Not On Recall List Test Positive For Melamine
A central California vet is reporting that tests on a bag of Nutra Nuggets-brand dog food purchased from Costco tested positive for melamine. Nutra Nuggets is not on any current recall list. We are working on getting more specifics from the vet.

Nutra Nuggets is a brand of Premium Edge Pet Foods and is made by Diamond Pet Foods. A month ago, Diamond claimed that they did not use rice protein concentrate in their own foods. Dozens of brands have been recalled due to cross-contamination of pet food ingredients.

Veterinarian Dr. Matt Humason says “We began asking questions…we found the dogs all ate the same food from the same store at the same time… so we sent a sample to get it tested and it came back positive with melamine.”

All four dogs ate Nutra Nuggets brand food.

A sample was sent to a lab at UC Davis and [the pet owner’s] fears were confirmed. “All I’m trying to get people to do is notify the people and let them know we may have problem. Unfortunately I feel Costco has been very hesitant to do that.”

…

They’re working with the distributor to track down the specific batch number. A Costco representative tells KSEE 24 news once it’s been tracked, they will immediately yank the product in question. http://www.itchmo.com/read/dry-dog-food-nutra-nuggets-not-on-recall-list-test-positive-for-melamine_...

[sue_t]

A chemical trick that led to death; P Melamine's link to the appearance of high protein content may be behind the pet food fiasco
The Vancouver Sun
Wed 09 May 2007
Page: F6
Section: News
Byline: David Brown
Source: Washington Post

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 per cent to 8 per cent -- 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.

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 melamine is nontoxic. 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 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.

[JTMO]

Oh great, now we can't eat bread :R

[BCSnob]

DR. ACHESON: Thank you. This afternoon I would like to address two issues with you all, which are two new ones, and then obviously old issues if we have to address that in Q and A. But I'm going to focus on two.

The first is related to a misrepresentation of the wheat gluten and the concentrated rice protein. I want to preface it by saying as you are all aware we have been following wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate from two sources in China, and have undertaken a number of tests with those related to the detection of melamine and melamine-related compounds. As part of our strategy just to ensure that we are following this in all possible directions, a portion of both the wheat gluten and the rice protein concentrate that was already a concern because of melamine has been further analyzed by our forensic chemistry center. And we have discovered that these products, labeled wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, are we believe mislabeled, and that they actually contain wheat flour that is contaminated with the melamine and melamine-related compounds.

As we discussed previously, none of these products have been used as ingredients directly in the human food supply. We are not talking about a new set of ingredients. These are the ones we have been tracking since the beginning of this situation. We've just taken the analysis of those a little further. And to reemphasize what we've discovered is that these are not wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, but are in fact wheat flour contaminated with melamine.

The FDA considers this product to be mislabeled based on what I've told you and we're considering possible enforcement options. Again I want to emphasize that these mislabeled products are from the two Chinese firms previously discussed, previously identified in prior discussions and press conferences. None of this changes the findings regarding the levels of melamine or melamine-related compounds in relation to the risk assessment and its feeding to animals. So that part is essentially unchanged.

Source: TRANSCRIPT OF MEDIA BRIEFING UPDATE BY FDA AND USDA REGARDING ADULTERATED ANIMAL FEED

[BCSnob]

Breaking news
May 8, 2007 (3:30 pm CDT)
Mislabeled wheat flour is contaminated, not wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate

The FDA and USDA announced today that wheat flour, mislabeled as wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, is actually the melamine-contaminated ingredient that has been the focus of a massive pet food recall, not wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate as previously believed.

Levels of melamine in meat products from animals given contaminated feed are very low and pose little risk to humans if eaten, officials reiterated. None of these ingredients has been used in the human food supply.

Also, a portion of the mislabeled "wheat gluten" has been used in the preparation of fish feeds and has been used in some U.S. aquaculture production operations. Officials stated that levels of melamine in affected fish tested so far have been comparable to those found in hogs and chickens.

More information will be posted on the AVMA Web site as soon as it becomes available.

Source: AVMA

Mark

[JTMO]

What we need is better food labeling laws.
What ingredients come from what country. If it's china, throw it away.
People eat these Mandarin oranges from cans made in China. The water they are in, you likely don't want to know where the water came from....
My take, if it's Chinese, no one, nothing should eat it.

[sue_t]

Tainted pet food: Lab says melamine not only culprit
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-05-07-melamine-usat_N.htm
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

Melamine combined with a related chemical — rather than melamine alone — likely caused the kidney damage in pets that ate tainted food, one lab investigating the case has found.
The finding by a laboratory in Ontario, Canada, appears to substantiate many scientists' theory that the melamine found in wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate used in recalled pet food did not fully explain the foods' apparent toxic effects on some animals that ate it.

The other chemical, cyanuric acid, can be produced during the making of melamine.

Used in pool cleaning, it has also been found in samples of recalled pet food.

A team at the University of Guelph showed crystals formed in the kidneys of pets that ate food with the tainted ingredients are close to 50% melamine and 50% cyanuric acid.

"We took some ordinary cat urine and added three drops of melamine and three drops of cyanuric acid, and we got the identical crystals that we see in the kidneys" of the affected cats, said team leader Brent Hoff, a clinical toxicologist and pathologist at the university's Animal Health Laboratory.

Previous research had found melamine alone to be relatively non-toxic. It is used to make plastic.

The formation of these crystals in the kidneys appears to be the primary cause of renal failure in the affected animals, said Wilson Rumbeiha, a toxicologist at Michigan State University who is reviewing pathology reports on animal deaths related to melamine.

The FDA says melamine was added to two food ingredients, wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, because it is high in nitrogen and makes the grain product look as if it is higher in protein — and therefore worth more — than it actually is. The ingredients were imported from China.

Pure melamine makes clear, rectangular or needle-like crystals. The melamine-cyanuric acid mix forms crystals that are round and yellow to dark brown, said Hoff.

Melamine is composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. In China, it is often made from coal, said James Kapin, a member of the American Chemical Society's chemical health and safety committee.

The coal is turned to a gas, and nitrogen-rich compounds are extracted from it. After more steps, the end result is melamine.

Melamine and cyanuric acid are chemically very closely related, said Kapin. So cyanuric acid could be created at several points in the processing of melamine.

As melamine prices have risen, melamine scrap may been substituted for pure melamine.

The Chinese company that sold the tainted wheat gluten had advertised for melamine scrap on websites before the pet-food recall.

[sue_t]

Tainted ingredients sour China's global honey business; As Chinese food products appear on tables around the world, fears arise about agricultural methods
Vancouver Sun
Tue 08 May 2007

FUFENG, China -- For two years, Sun Baoli has been trying to clean up the dirty honey business here. He's been met with nasty stings from bees, but those are nothing compared with the curses and punches from their keepers.

The 52-year-old entrepreneur paid the local government about $5,000 to rent part of a nature preserve teeming with nectar-filled acacia trees. He's been recruiting beekeepers to harvest on the grounds, and all he asks is that they follow a few simple health rules. First, no using antibiotics in their colonies; the drugs can make people sick. Second, no storing honey in metal containers; those can taint the sweet goo with toxic iron and lead.

Some 45 keepers have signed up. But many others are hostile to his efforts, which they see as a threat to their decades-old way of doing business on the cheap, making easy profits.

On Saturday night, as the first acacia flowers were starting to bloom, a gang of 15 local bee farmers ambushed Sun as he got out of his red Isuzu truck, beating him and leaving him with a mild concussion.

"It's going to take some time," he said with obvious understatement.

Honey and thousands of other Chinese food products are showing up more often on dinner plates around the world. Last year, China said it exported $3.8 billion worth of food to the U.S., including vast quantities of apple juice, garlic, sausage casings, canned mushrooms and honey.

In any given month, though, U.S. customs inspectors block dozens of Chinese food shipments, including produce contaminated with banned additives and pesticides, and seafood tainted with drugs. In wake of the recall of pet foods that American regulators believe contained tainted Chinese ingredients, China's food-safety standards have become dinner table conversation across the United States.

U.S. inspectors believe that the pet food was made with wheat gluten and rice protein from China containing the chemical melamine, used in plastic. Although officials in Beijing say there is no evidence that melamine killed American pets, they moved to ban its use in food, as the U.S. does. And President Hu Jintao said China must produce more chemical-free foods and do a better job of ensuring that producers follow safety standards.

But as the honey business in this remote region in western China shows, major obstacles remain.

Even where standards have been set, making them known to millions of far-flung peasants is an enormous task. Many farmers are poor and uneducated. Short-term profits are so important that farmers, traders and brokers have little incentive to change old practices.

The result is a constant stream of tainted and sometimes poisonous food. Last year, duck farmers added cancer-causing Sudan B to their animal feed to make yolks redder and bring a higher price. In 2004, baby formula missing key nutrients left 13 infants dead and hundreds ill.

In 2002, Chinese honey was blocked first by the European Union and then the United States after shipments tested positive for chloramphenicol, an antibiotic banned in foods by many countries because it has been known to cause a fatal blood condition.

Later that year, China's Ministry of Agriculture outlawed the use of chloramphenicol in food production, and last year the Agricultural Science Association of China added it and nine other medicines, including penicillin, to its list of drugs prohibited in food.

The efforts by China helped restore shipments to the West, and in 2006 exports of Chinese honey to the U.S. grew by 14 per cent to $27.3 million. It is widely used as an ingredient in breads, cakes, barbecue sauces and jams.

But for many beekeepers, old habits die hard.

Wang Zhonggang, 50, pitched his tent in the acacia forest here in Shaanxi province, about two hours' drive west of Xian, a couple of weeks ago. He had 60 bright-blue boxes, each hive filled with 20,000 to 30,000 bees. Like other beekeepers in China's west, Wang had spent the winter months in southern Sichuan province before making his way north to Fufeng for the acacia bloom.

Earlier this year, Wang says, he averted a near disaster when his bees suddenly became lethargic and their numbers appeared to decline. The second-generation beekeeper thinks they got sick after drinking water polluted by runoff from a chemical plant.

Wang went to a local drug store and bought 10 pinky-sized tubes of penicillin for about $1. He says he mixed the medicine with sugar water and fed it to his bees. It didn't take long before they became active and produced honey.

Wang knew that chloramphenicol was illegal, but he had no idea that penicillin was another type of antibiotic and its use also had been restricted. He says he stores the honey he collects in both iron and plastic containers.

"The government doesn't care what we do," he said, squatting under a tree as the sun was setting over the hills of Fufeng, a region redolent with apples and peppers where the average annual per capita income is about $400, people in town say.

Wang says he sells his honey to dealers who make their rounds in the woodlands. Some of these traders will bring antibiotics for the keepers, but it's just as easy for keepers to call a local drug store and someone will deliver chloramphenicol or other medicines they request.

"The reason these farmers use antibiotics is simple. It is very cheap and effective," said Wang Fengzhong, an expert on China's honey industry at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing.

No one knows what percentage of Chinese beekeepers still use antibiotics.

In recent years, more farmers have switched to herbal medicines, said Li Chaohui, vice-general manager of Huakang Foreign Trade Honey Product Co. in Fufeng. Li says his company collects honey from local farmers and sells it to factories along China's coast.

Li thinks 30 per cent of Chinese honey comes from bees treated with antibiotics, but Sun Baoli believes the figure is as high as 70 per cent.

Sun bases his estimate on the number of beekeepers he turns away because they don't want to follow his rules. Sun, who made a small fortune selling oil drilling equipment and tools, says he got into the business because he loved honey.

In the hot summers, he would gulp down one glass after another of cold water mixed with acacia and other varieties of honey.

Sun hired a bee technician to help beekeepers keep their colonies strong without using medicine, and he doles out free plastic storage containers for honey.

Still, people argue with him or his wife about why they can't use iron containers, which are more durable.

"They say, 'It's just a little amount of antibiotics that I use. What's wrong with it?' " he said.

[Little_Kopit]

There is a very interesting item on CBC news this morning, which I post in the hopes that all food manufacturers are reading this forum. Much of the industrial pollution in China is carried onto agricultural land in China. There are illnesses in livestock which have not been sorted out. & dead pigs have been dumped in Chinese rivers.* The report was done by Anthony Germain, who is stationed in China.

Now, that kind of information is really going to be hard for that country to correct.

:C

On edit, I heard these reports 4 times. The dead livestock story is separate from the report of Anthony Germain.

[CA_POPPY]

All this talk of melamine reminds me that when soft "homestyle" (human food) cookies started appearing at the market some years ago, it was revealed that the ingredient that made them soft was a form of plastic. That's when I quit buying them.

[JTMO]

# The assessment notes that melamine is not metabolized, and is rapidly excreted in the urine. Thus, it is not believed to accumulate in the body of animals.

I don't know about science, but my dead cat sure 'accumulated' a bunch of crystals in her kidneys before she died....