pet connection

The House of Representatives passed a food safety reform bill back in July of 2009, but  the Food Safety Modernization Act stalled in the Senate. Today, the Senate Health Panel announced a bipartisan compromise on the bill had been reached, although no date for actually voting on the bill has been set.

The compromise doesn’t address Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) desire for the new law to ban bisphenol-A (BPA) from food and beverage containers, nor does it exempt small farmers and those who sell at farmers’  markets from its provisions as sought by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).

It does, however, include mandatory recall authority for the FDA as well as increased ability to inspect facilities where food is handled and the records of food manufacturers.

And, presumably thanks to the thousands of pets sickened and killed by the 2007 melamine contamination of dog and cat food, the AP reports it would also ” require importers to verify the safety of their foreign suppliers and would require businesses that manufacture and process food to have in place plans to prevent adulteration.”

From TheHill.com:

The compromise was worked out between six senators who have been working on the issue: Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.); food-safety bill authors Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.); and lead co-sponsors Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

[....]

“Any 100-year-old-plus structure — like our nation’s food safety system — needs improvements,” the six lawmakers said in a statement.

“With this announcement today, we aim to not just patch and mend our fragmented food safety system, we hope to reinforce the infrastructure, close the gaps and create a systematic, risk-based and balanced approach to food safety in the United States.

“The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act will place more emphasis on prevention of food-borne illness and will provide new tools to respond to food-safety problems. We look forward to working with our respective leaderships to take up this bipartisan legislation as soon as possible.”

Some additional background here from Pet Connection BFF Marion Nestle.

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Hat tip to David for noticing this one:

Menu Foods Income Fund (the “Fund”) and Simmons Pet Food, Inc. (“Simmons Pet Food”), an affiliate of Simmons Foods, Inc., announced today that the Fund has entered into a definitive agreement with Simmons Pet Food providing for the acquisition by Simmons Pet Food of Menu Foods Limited, the Fund’s operating subsidiary. Under the agreement, Simmons Pet Food will acquire Menu Foods Limited for approximately $239 million, including assumption of existing debt. Immediately after the disposition of the Fund’s assets, the units of the Fund will be redeemed for $4.80 per unit in cash. That value represents a 65.5% premium to the March 15, 2010 closing price of $2.90, the last trading day prior to the Fund’s announcement that it would undertake a strategic review process, and a 46.8% premium to the closing price of $3.27 on August 6, 2010.

I’d say more, but I’m restraining myself. Although who want to bet the corporate officers and execs all got platinum parachutes and nice bonuses? Anyone?

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Front limb issues in horses, brachycephalic airways syndrome in dogs, urinary blockages in cats, respiratory disease in birds, food-borne illness regulations, vendors, vendors and more vendors across a conference hall floor, parasitology, toxicology (with and without martinis) and so much more …

After four days and I don’t know how many seminars I’ve eagerly sat in on during the American Veterinary Medical Association‘s annual conference, this year’s version here in Atlanta, I have to admit to feeling a little like a tick myself, sitting in my hotel room now utterly engorged with enough information to drop off and lay thousands upon thousands little eggs of blog posts, articles, backgrounders and book chapters.

I do also have to admit to feeling more than a little awed by the flying fingers of PetConnection colleagues Kim Campbell Thornton and Christie Keith, who performed amazing feats of real-time coverage of most of the seminars where they were over the weekend, at the No-Kill conference in D.C.

Me? I’m a little old school in my reporting style, and I don’t do the liveblog thing. What I have instead is notepads full of quotes, a laptop with all the proceedings (all the dreaded PowerPoints as well as the beloved journal citations and contact information) along with another full notebook’s worth of to-do’s based on the endless rounds of drinks, talks, and contacts made over the course of this massive veterinary extravaganza.

The most fun I had — I’m a reporter, I have to admit it — was causing a momentary heart flutter in the chest of the very knowledgeable but reserved FDA veterinarian Dr. Christopher Melluso when he realized the question I’d asked from the audience at his seminar on the FDA’s improvements to the food-safety system wasn’t the sort of thing a veterinarian would ask.

Credit due, he recovered with hardly a blink and answered me openly and honestly — something I got from both him and his colleague Dr. Carmela Stamper every time I needed something more from them. Dr. Stamper, it turns out, is undoubtedly a relative a mine, since she revealed seconds after meeting me that her maiden name is Spadafora, something I hope won’t be stalling her career at the FDA. That’s her on the right, and I’ll be damned if we don’t look related, sorry about that, Dr. Stamper.

But of all the seminars, all the talks, all the button-holing in hallways, meet-and-greet and sales jobs on the conference floor by eager folks selling everything from surgical steel to avian earirngs, the time I enjoyed the most was hearing about a topic I enjoy the least:

Ticks.

That’s because no one loves the subject of his research more than Dr. Michael Dryden of Kansas State University, known fondly in veterinary and academic circles as “Dr. Flea.” And no one shares his passion more entertainingly, dropping in such anecdotal gems as his dragging for ticks in Malibu Beach State Park while on vacation in California, because, yes, he always travels with his equipment, the better to study his beloved blood-suckers, all 10 or so North American species of them.

He reeled off the names of them all without consulting his notes — both Latin and common names — and then cautioned us all that what we mostly think of as the “deer tick” is in fact the black-legged tick, and the real deer tick is the Lone Star tick, but it really doesn’t matter since they’re all happy to attach themselves to deer first and foremost, except the the brown dog tick, which is just as happy to attack to a black dog or a spotted one, and yes, a veterinarian really asked him once if the brown dog tick only jumped on brown dogs.

“I’d have asked him where he went to school,” said Dr. Dryden. “But I would have been afraid it was K State.”

He was so funny I immediately regretted that I hadn’t caught his act on heartworms, and would only catch part of it on fleas.

Still, it’s pretty amazing to me that anyone can be such a spellbinder on the subject of ticks, weaving in a vivid history lesson on market hunters, the early 20th century conservation movement, the restoration of forests and, even more successfully, of deer, once hunted to near zero population in many states and to fewer than 300,000 head in all of the United States and Canada until The Lacey Act of 1900 put an end to wholesale hunting and started deer and wild turkey (which juvenile ticks love) back from the brink of extinction. Nearly 28 million deer roam the United State alone today, and Dr. Dryden notes that they are not alone by any means — they are all loaded with ticks.

“When I started studying ticks, I didn’t know I needed to study deer,” Dr. Dryden said. “But where there are deer, there are ticks. When I was growing up, we used to stop and stare in amazement when we saw a deer. Now, you only stop if you hit one.”

What that means is if you were hoping for good news on ticks you aren’t going to get any. Ticks are indeed getting worse every year, but it’s not because of resistance, said Dr. Dryden.

“It’s a numbers games,” he said, and the ticks are winning. “There’s no way to develop resistance in a parasite with three hosts. If you think there is, let me know the next time you put Frontline on a wild turkey.”

In some parts of the country, a dog can pick up a tick a minute on a simple walk, and even if a spot-on product eliminates all but a couple of them, the pet’s owner will consider it a failure.

“Tick control isn’t like flea control,” he said. “People want to have ticks eliminated and repelled, and that’s just not possible.”

Still, he says, some products seem to do better in different regions against different tick populations, making it worthwhile to ask your veterinarian which product works best in your area.  (Frontline generally works better in California, he says, while K9 Advantix works better in other parts of the country.) For the ticks that remain – and there will always be ticks, ticks and more ticks as long as there are deer, deer and more deer – picking them off with tweezers or a tick-removal tool immediately after a walk remains the best defense against the parasites. On your property, keep grasses cut low, leaf piles cleaned up and spray under shrubs and along the fence lines, where ticks are waiting for you and your pets, their nasty little legs extended and ready.

For a dog who’s covered with ticks, Dr. Dryden recommended to the veterinarians attending his seminar that they spray the pet with Frontline, then wait two weeks to put the animal safely on a topical monthly, such as Frontline Plus or K9 Advantix, whichever appears to be working best against the regional blend of tick species.

The only other advice? Avoiding the areas where ticks are heaviest from spring through fall.

“Sometimes they only thing I can advise is that you can’t take your dog where you’ve been taking your dog,” said Dr. Dryden.

Yep, it’s a ticks’ world, and we’re just a convenient host. And my mother wonders why I carry a tick key on my key ring.

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When I checked in this morning at the conference of the American Veterinary Medical Association here in Atlanta, the press office folks cheerfully handed me a list of highlights for the media, covering the less-technical offerings from the companion animal track of seminars.

Thus was highlighted yet another broadside against home feeders, “Do raw food diets make you want to BARF?,” that promised to counter all the claptrap on Teh Webs and get pet-owners safely back in the commercial pet-food fold. I passed on that one, having pretty much heard it at every veterinary conference in the last 10 years and, yo, see Christie’s response to “The horror of raw diets” blah blah at an earlier veterinary conference.

Before I go further, let me say, once again, that I am not trying to push anyone towards a home-prepared diet, and frankly, your pet — most pets — will do just fine on commercial. But I have so completely had it with veterinarians packing a room to hear how to talk their clients out of home-prepared diets without looking at the fact that processed foods aren’t exactly safe, either, reference the thousands of pets killed by commercial diets in 2007…not to mention so many recalls of human foods I’ve lost count.

So let’s just stipulate: Whether you combine the ingredients or a company does it for you, food is a perishable item that can never, ever be made risk-free, only risk-minimized. That’s why government needs to be able to oversee the production (and raw feeders, that included the slaughterhouses), manufacturing and distribution, and be able to force companies to be responsible, whether they want to be or not. Most are, but that’s besides the point. We need to be protected from those that aren’t.

In any case, I passed on the obligatory and well-attended “raw feeders are cultish whackjobs” lecture/pep talk and scanned the program of all seminars. And lo, after three pages of companion animal seminars, in the third of a page of “Food Animal/Equine” columns, there was this little gem: “Melamine Contamination,” followed by “Pet Food Surveillance/Notification.”

I hiked the entire length of the Georgia World Congress Center, away from the crowds packing the seminars on child-directed aggression in dogs and causes of pruritus, past the seminars for veterinary technicians, past the practice-management seminars, walking, walking, walking and finally into a small room at the end of the hall, long past any open food stands or crowds, where less than 20 chairs had butts in them and the scanner to give CE credit hadn’t yet arrived.

There stood the FDA’s Dr. Christopher Melluso of the Center for Veterinary Medicine, and if he looked disappointed in the poor showing for a talk on regulatory matters with regards to pet foods, he was polite enough not to show it.

After an hour of listening to him talk and a couple of follow-up questions (one mine on Salmonella, and more on that in a later post), three points are pretty clear:

– The FDA has improved and will continue to improve its monitoring of pet-food companies, with a series of initiatives directly related to the 2007 pet-food deaths;

– The pet-food companies will continue to have the upper hand, since the federal government still has no legal authority to force a recall; and

– Better surveillance, reporting and arm-twisting mean the FDA is more likely to know there’s a problem, and more able to push pet food companies into “voluntary” recalls. (I gathered the FDA’s “suggestion” of the necessity of a “voluntary” recall can be pretty strong)

Key to the process, of course, is the system for getting information on a sick animal to the FDA, and that’s why the turn-out in the little room is so, well, depressing. Dr. Melluso noted that an animal who gets sick is often treated for symptoms, and if the symptoms abate, there’s no diagnosis. Even if there is a suspicion, without a direct link to the food and a veterinarian’s assistance, a consumer complaint can be easily dismissed by a company — “the pet ate something else outside when the owner wasn’t looking,” etc. (more…)

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We gotta stop breeding dogs this screwed up. This is just criminal. From the AP:

Bulldog and pug owners, beware: Short-snouted breeds accounted for roughly half the purebred dog deaths on airplanes in the past five years, government data released Friday shows. That comes as no surprise to the owner of the University of Georgia’s famous mascot, Uga, who gets the dog a special procedure before he flies.

Actually, the real “procedure” to do with  University of Georgia’s famous mascot is to replace them when they drop dead. But no, that’s not the procedure that’s referred to:

Sonny Seiler of Savannah, Ga., who owns the University of Georgia’s mascot, Uga the bulldog, said people who fly English bulldogs are taking a risk. Seiler said that’s why he takes precautions before flying his dogs. Before each Uga is a year old and flies for the first time, Seiler has a procedure done at the University of Georgia veterinary school to enlarge the dog’s airways.

[...]

Uga routinely flies to the football team’s away games, often in the team’s charter plane or the university’s smaller plane, and is in the cabin or an air-conditioned cargo hold, said Seiler, who is now searching for the eighth Uga. The seventh died last football season, and his half-brother Russ, the backup, is the acting Uga during the quest for No. 8.

“It’s just business as usual with us,” Seiler said of Uga’s air travel. “He goes with the team.”

What’s business as usual is breeding dogs with defects that are not compatible with the usual business of breathing … or being alive, for that matter. The College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia should put its academic foot down and quit being a co-dependent to breeding canine defects.

Here’s the AP story. I have a feeling that the numbers of English bulldog deaths — while they are indeed related to the faulty build of the breed — are also related to the fact that some of these dogs may have been part of the trade in bulldogs born in Eastern European puppy mills. (Case in point, here.)

In any case, the fact remains: If you really want one of these dogs, you’d better be prepared for a lot of health-care costs and a short lifespan. And don’t fly with them, unless the flight is short and they’re small enough to go with you in the passenger compartment.

Better yet,  choose a healthier breed. Yes, they’re cute. But I can tell you from personal experience that chronic breathing trouble is no fun.

Oh, and for the love of doG, don’t support puppy-mills, here or abroad.

***

Home page recall FAILs: Since the massive pet-food recalls of 2007, we have been all over pet food companies that don’t put much effort into letting customers know about a recall. We understand that food is a tricky thing to make and there will be problems. But a good, responsible company uses all its communications channels to get the word out when there IS a problem.

Companies that have established an online presence and social media channels (Facebook, Twitter) to promote their products but don’t/won’t use those resources to broadcast recall news come in for special criticism.

OK, but wait …

Today the FDA issued a warning about stolen asthma inhalers:

The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to use inhalers stolen from a Virginia warehouse after some of the pilfered medicine turned up in some pharmacies.

The stolen Advair Diskus inhalers (fluticasone propionate and salmeterol inhalation powder) were found recently—the first batch known to have hit the supply chain since the August 2009 theft. As the investigation continues, FDA officials warned the public that more of the stolen inhalers could still be on the market.

The lot numbers are at the FDA site, and there’s a reason why this caught my attention and why I’m writing about it: This drug saved my life, or rather, made an active life with asthma possible when it wasn’t that possible before. I checked my meds, and the lot number are fine.

But here’s the interesting part: I decided to check the website put up for the drug by its manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline.

This is a human medication. And a damn serious one, too, with the FDA’s so-called “black box” warning on the packaging because people die using this medication, especially if they’re not using it exactly as prescribed.

Given all that: Human medication, black box warning and so on, wouldn’t you think there’s be a notice about the stolen inhalers on the GlaxoSmithKline website, Advair.com?

I’d sure think there would be.  But there isn’t. Don’t you find that just a little astonishing? I sure do.

When are we going to stop letting these companies hide their bad news, give the FDA/USDA some teeth and make them use them to protect us, not corporate profits?

Image: The late Uga VII.

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