What an amazing statement. Do you test ALL of the food, cosmetics and drugs that you you use? How did that work out? What does it cost? My guess is that the only testing you do is when you use them, you might take them into consideration when you have a negative reaction to them. Similarly, there are regulations REQUIRING producers to only use approved ingredients and additives in their recipes, AND to list ALL of the ingredients on the label. The fact is, because of these regulations and the fact that people in the food business are honest and law abiding, there is minimal testing for unusual chemicals anywhere along the food production chain. As to using the cheapest, the mfgrs are only doing what you and I do, buy the cheapest food that serves our needs. Most people do NOT go into a store and purposely buy the most expensive food available. No, most people make a brief cost benefit analysis and buys the cheapest brand/recipe that meets their needs. If we didn’t do this, than there would be less pressure on the mfgrs to import even cheaper ingredients.

“Yes, China is to blame for adulterating ingredients, but the pet food industry is to blame for using the cheapest ingredients, careless production, failing to inspect or use quality control at any level: and they know the laws and standards of this country.”

See above. And, there is some testing…the some pet food mfgrs actually feed it to lab animals of the same species to monitor the health impact and the quality of the food. This is no different than what humans have been doing for thousands (millions?) of years…eating the foods that make us healthy and stop eating the foods that make us sick. That’s how we learned what is and isn’t good for us. Nothing has changed, except that you want to place all of the responsibility on the food producer (and often without allowing them to test the food on animals).

“I paid for ‘premium food’ that has been processed in the same production line as the cheapest of all imaginable pet foods, with (see ‘cross-contamination’) probably the same ingredients and without any QC in the first place.”

Yah, I wouldn’t want to have any of that cheap chicken parts contaminated with my beef by-products. But, seriously, you pay premium price KNOWING that they are using the cheaper ingredients? May I suggest that you buy the cheap pet food and save the cost difference.

“To me, the pet food industry is even worse than China: a totalitarian system…”

If this were actually true, then the American PF mfgrs are really stupid too, since they could have cut out the middle man and simply used American scrap melamine as a protein enhancer (kind of an oxymoron, if you ask me)! But they didn’t.

P.S. The Chinese exporter deceived both the Chinese and the US export/import authorities by purposely mis-identifying the wheat glutamine as textile products! So as to avoid any required gluten quality testing at the ports.

“…but without qc and tests it could mean ‘bye-bye’ to the company in question.”

And, if the Menu Foods doesn’t go out of business, the owners are going to take a real good “hit” for this one, as will many of their customers (P&G, Wal-mart, etc).

Since this issue is one of toxicology rather than a microbial infection, maybe their “balance peer review board” might have included more than one tox expert to offer additional opinions?

Oh, I forgot. That would be logical . . . . . . . . .

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/melamra2.html

In both cases, they told me I MUST be wrong. In both cases, I went ahead on my own and gathered enough information to disprove them. In both cases, the insisted I repeat the work in their presence. In both cases - standing there and staring at the results I’d just generated which contradicted what they knew “must be true”, they stood there just shaking their heads and saying “That can’t be true. That just doesn’t make sense.” But in both cases, we changed the procedure to reflect my findings rather than “what they knew” and began getting more consistent and reliable results.

Science can lead us down some paths of new and astounding learning. But if we’re not careful, it can also close off minds too tightly bound to considering the possibility that what “must be true” might NOT be after all . . . . .

by Rockman
===============
Rockman, my point about this is that if the FDA/USDA is using their limited melamine analysis as a reason to assume the pigs and chickens that have consumed adulterated pet food are safe to release to market, then they were not considering the whole scope of the contamination and therefore the safety of eating the aforesaid pigs, chickens and eggs is in question. Obviously, melamine must either not be as safe as they are saying, must occur in higher concentrations (remember the fda found contamination at a level of one magnitude higher—but we were never given those exact numbers on the risk/safety assessment. A magnitude as I know it is a multiple of 10 which switches things up a bit and may leave one wondering how much was out there and for how long) or there must be another one or more contaminants that also need evaluation before deeming safe. Either way, I believe the USDA should have erred on the side of caution and not released the meat and eggs. At the least, they should have notified the public of brands under which the meat was sold. I also believe they should do more testing of what is already out there, animal feed, livestock, and human food—not just commodities coming in for import. Their waiting for indications seems incompetent and negligent. The Chinese have admittedly been adding melamine, which degrades into cyanuric acid, for at least 10-15 years. Where you have melamine, you can potentially have cyanuric acid, by chemical definition. How long have we been importing it? Also, we now know at least one of our own companies that makes binder for feed has been using melamine for 3 years.
To sum up, the Study on melamine and dog toxicoloy presented by the fda in their risk/safety assessment, does not explain the pet deaths due to eating the contaminated food. Our dog could have eaten 18 lbs a day of pet food contaminatd at the level of the scraps fed to pigs and chickens. He ate only 1 1/2 cup. He was sick. So I’m not comfortable with the extrapolation of data to humans. Information is skewed or missing.

Rockman13,
thank you for this link:
http://www.intox.org/databank/.....cie286.htm

I quote from above link:
Warning Properties:
Insufficient information available for evaluation.

Effects of Long-Term (Chronic) Exposure
There is no human information available.

Kidneys/Urinary System:
Based on animal studies, long-term ingestion of relatively high doses can result in the formation of crystals in the kidneys resulting in kidney injury. Ingestion is not a typical route of occupational exposure.

Carcinogenicity:
There is no human information available.

Before I now copy more or less the whole article, let me formulate it in one nice sentence:

“There are no studies, and we don’t know.”

Your Honour, I rest my case.
BANG!