Chenango Valley Pet Foods has issued a recall of additional pet foods. The additional recalled pet foods include Doctors Foster & Smith Lamb & Brown Rice Formula Adult Dog Food, Ship Rite Red-Mixt Dog Food for Dogs, Lick Your Chops Kitten & Cat Food, Shep chunk-style dog food, 8 in 1 Ferret Ultra-Blend Advanced Nutrition Diet, Bulk Lamb & Brown Rice Formula Dog food, Healthy Diet Cat Food Chicken & Rice Dinner, and Evolve Kitten Formula.
Menu Foods has begun the claims process for pet owners who incurred expenses as a consequence of their pets having eating pet food manufactured by Menu Foods that was contaminated with melamine. The Menu Foods statement is here.
Yesterday’s joint press conference by the USDA, FDA, and Customs and Border Patrol contained quite a bit of interesting information. Most news outlets are picking up on the FDA’s having cleared fish that ate contaminated feed, pronouncing them free from melamine. There are also interesting details about the sampling and testing process.
However, the part that I found most interesting was this:
REPORTER: And my second question then would be, is there going to be any effort made to augment the human health risk assessment to include rather than just saying, okay more chemical, but the interaction between melamine and cyanuric acid rather than just saying them as two liquids but how they might come together as a solid?
DR. ACHESON: The way that’s been dealt with by the risk assessors is to do what’s called an additive interaction as opposed to a synergistic one, and I hope I’m not confusing you by what I say there, is that if there’s melamine in there and cyanuric acid in there, then you add the two together. I don’t believe the risk assessment has actually taken into account a synergism. There’s a difference, and I think that’s based on the fact that the various federal scientists who have been working on this haven’t been able to demonstrate that there’s scientific evidence that there is true synergism. What I’m talking about there is, if you’ve got one part melamine and one part cyanuric acid, you basically have two parts of the problem.
That’s additive.
If you’ve got one part melamine and one part cyanuric acid and they are synergistic, you may have a threefold or a fourfold problem. Hopefully I haven’t confused you with that, but there is no indication in the scientific literature that our scientists are aware of that these compounds are actually synergistic. Additive, yes. But synergistic, no.
Or, said another way, they’re discounting the findings that melamine and cyanuric acid mixed together cause crystals to precipitate out quite quickly. Presumably, they’re trying not to get ahead of the science and as best as I’ve been able to determine they’re right: there aren’t any reports in the scientific literature of the reaction.
This is problematic for two reasons. First, science and the scientific literature aren’t synonymous. My sources tell me that the reaction is readily reproducible and that they’ve reproduced it themselves. That’s enough for a prudent scientific conclusion.
It can take months or years for papers to percolate through the review process. That’s simply too long for something that’s potentially as serious as this is.
Secondly, it leaves us with a mystery. A couple of studies of melamine in the diets of dogs have been published (albeit quite a while ago) and it was found to be pretty non-toxic. But dogs and cats have died. That leaves us with an unknown toxin that’s killing pets.
So, take your pick. Either it’s the combination of melamine and cyanuric acid that’s been causing the deaths or there’s some other unidentified toxin involved.
