The news media are starting to pick up on the story about acetaminophen having been found in pet food. Still no word on this from the FDA or USDA. Considering how dangerous this potentially is for cats, I’m surprised.
The Christian Science Monitor notes, correctly, that recent announcements by the Chinese about plans to improve food and drug safety of Chinese-made products are directed more to preserving domestic harmony than external markets:
Though the recent food scares abroad may have prompted the timing of the new plan’s release, its content was aimed more at domestic consumers.
“The external factors helped push things along,” says David Zweig, head of the Center for China’s Transnational Relations at Hong Kong’s University of Science and Technology. “But the driving force behind this is the fact that Chinese have been dying for quite a while” from tainted food and drugs.
Chinese consumers have long been familiar with local food producers’ trickery, and the government drew up its new plan to combat the problem in April, before the spate of critical foreign press reports.
Still, when China improves its food and drug safety everybody benefits. Or its environmental controls.
There’s a really good recap of the history of the pet food recall to date at DVM, a news magazine targeted at veterinarians. The article makes a number of important points including the fact that the problems are far from over:
Among those expressing concern about possible long-term effects of tainted foods is Dr. Nancy Zimmerman, senior medical adviser for Banfield, The Pet Hospital, which is assisting the FDA investigation through its extensive database that gathers information from more than 615 Banfield pet hospitals nationwide.
“Until we have identified the true toxin that caused acute renal failure, particularly in cats, no one can say what might happen in the long term, whether this (renal failure) could become chronic, or whether more organs might become involved,” Zimmerman says.
“While it’s true that we’re seeing fewer new cases and not as many calls – it seems we’ve hit a plateau there – this hasn’t gone away. Right now, many of the pets we saw during the first week or two are coming back for follow-up care.”
and, significantly, the point I’ve been making for some time now—the toxin remains unidentified:
While melamine was found in tainted wheat gluten from a Chinese supplier (and later in rice protein concentrate), that chemical probably is not the causative agent but is a marker somehow associated with it. The search for the toxin goes on.
As I understand it the prevailing theory is that the combination of melamine and cyanuric acid is responsible but that hasn’t been confirmed and, as long as that’s the case, neither manufacturers nor brand names nor consumers really now what to be concerned about. We just know to be concerned.
