pet connection

If the FDA won’t test food imports for melamine contamination, should we start doing it ourselves?

Joy Drawdy, owner of Gainesville’s Earth Pets Natural Pet Market, thinks so, and so she developed a home melamine test kit:

“Pet owners should have a way to test their food at home. People coming into Earth Pets kept saying something like this was needed. I started trying to find one, but none existed,” Drawdy said. “In the past year, using my knowledge of pet food manufacturing and contaminant testing, I developed one. I have it patented and it’s done. I just need to get it marketed.”

And there’s a “Pet Connection” to this story, too:

Drawdy may have been among the first persons to link melamine-tainted gluten to the pet deaths when the outbreak was occurring last year.

She is credited on the Pet Connection - a Web site and weekly pet-care feature distributed by Universal Press Syndicate - with discovering on the Internet an obscure U.S. Food and Drug Administration alert about imported Chinese gluten.

Drawdy knew gluten was often used in pet food and posted the alert on the Pet Connection Web site.

It turned out that the gluten cited in the alert was from a company that supplied pet food manufacturers.

The test should be fairly simple and inexpensive, Joy told me.

“The FDA tests, and the companies certainly have the ability to test their own products for melamine, but what I’m trying to do is make it affordable. When you send a test to an outside laboratory, it’s several hundred dollars for one sample,” she said. “The big challenge was getting something that can be manufactured cheaply enough but still be reliable to the consumer. My main goal is that it’s something that people can just buy for a few dollars.”

The test will be available sometime in the next six months. So, here’s my question: would you use it?

Weird little AP piece that doesn’t even mention melamine, but nonetheless, it would appear the FDA is in for a shock, and maybe a return to its mandate:

The Food and Drug Administration, bedeviled by a salmonella outbreak and tainted medicine from China, is likely to monitor imports and fresh produce more closely under an Obama administration.

[...]

Long seen as the government’s premier consumer protection agency, the FDA stumbled under Bush. Recurring drug and food safety lapses came against a backdrop of shrinking budgets and long periods without a permanent leader. In Congress, a senior Republican complained the FDA had gotten too cozy with industry.

Obama is being urged to move quickly to appoint an FDA commissioner. Already more than a half-dozen names are in circulation: outside critics such as Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Dr. Steven Nissen; insiders such as Susan Wood, a former director of the FDA’s women’s health office; and public health advocates such as Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Baltimore’s health chief.

Food safety will be a priority for Obama’s FDA. “He thinks this is a fundamental role of government to ensure that people’s food is safe and he has been concerned that we are not in a position to ensure that,” said Neera Tanden, a senior campaign adviser.

Here’s the article. Since the FDA seems to have long ago lost its copy of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 that was supposed to be its constitution, here it is. Read up, FDA. You have work to do.

Fortunately, the president-elect has his friend and mentor, fellow Illinois Sen. Dick Durban, to call on for help. No one did more during the pet-food recall to call the FDA on the carpet for its lapses, and no one has showed more leadership on the issue since.  (Image: President-elect Barack Obama with Sen. Dick Durbin.)

Every animal-advocacy group in the country put out a media release yesterday asking the new president to address the issue most critical to our nation’s very survival:

What kind of dog the first family should get.

For the record, I hope the Obamas get a nice little shelter dog, maybe some kind of mopsy, fuzzy-faced terrier mix. An adult, not a puppy, because a well-chosen adult dog often fits in better and more quickly into busy households, especially those with little dog experience.

Yes, it would be a good thing and a good example. But honestly? I don’t much care beyond that they get a nice dog who fits with their family and brings joy to their lives.

See, the Obamas choice of a family pet ranks about 1,074,037th on my list of things that it’s important for President Obama to be thinking about.

In my own Top 10? Along with the economy, the wars, healthcare and energy independence, I would put food.

Food.

Food.

and then, Food.

To say we are vulnerable to terrorist attack though our food supply is to state the absolute obvious. We don’t even need to have people want to hurt us: It’s already happening, just because of corporate greed, corruption in China and shoddy work from a government that’s supposed to protect us, not industry profits.

Melamine. In pet food, livestock feed, infant formula and heaven know what else. Salmonella, from the over-industrialized food system. Antibiotic resistance, from factory farming.

These issues are so much more important to me than getting the politically correct dog for the adorable Obama daughters.

I’m disappointed with the animal advocacy groups . With the lone exception of the Animal Poison Control Center of the ASPCA (hat tip to the courageous Dr. Steve Hansen of the APCC), they were mostly silent during the pet-food recall and they remain so on the issue of food safety still. A safe food supply effects us all, pets included, and I would hope to see some of them step up and say so.

So let’s all enjoy the photo op moment of the Obamas getting their family dog. And then, let’s move on to something that really matters.

I once thought it was a shame that the first huge melamine contamination scandal involved pet food. Surely if it had been found in food for human consumption first — especially infant formula or baby food — it would have been taken more seriously.

Then it turned up in livestock feed and from there, in the human food chain, and nothing changed. There was no question, none, that melamine and cyanuric acid had been added to protein powders in China for years, and no reason to suppose those powders ended up only in pet food and livestock feed — and even if they did, they still ended up in the meat from those animals, including some livestock being fed salvaged pet food. But the response was no different than when the contaminants were found only in pet food.

Those of us writing in the pet media weren’t alone in sounding the alarm about the implications of the pet food recall for the human food supply. Marion Nestle, David Goldstein over at Huffington Post, and Daily Kos environmental diarist DeepHarm all wrote about the connections early on.

Now we know that melamine has turned up in all kinds of foods, including chocolate, coffee, yogurt and other dairy products, frozen pizza, and, worst of all, in infant formula that has killed babies in China.

Now, melamine has been found in eggs. From the New York Times:

Hong Kong food inspectors have found eggs imported from northeast China to be contaminated with high levels of melamine, the toxic industrial additive at the heart of an adulteration scandal in Chinese milk products.

The findings, reported over the weekend, have raised new concerns that a far wider array of China-produced foods than previously believed could be contaminated with melamine, which has already sickened more than 50,000 children in China and led to at least four deaths.

Scientists in China worry that in addition to being used to adulterate dairy supplies, melamine may have been intentionally added to animal feed in China, according to a report published on Sunday in South China Morning Post. Tainted chicken and possibly fish and hog feed could result in poisonous meat and seafood, it said.

I had to laugh at the idea that this was “a far wider array” of foods than “previously believed.” I previously believed it, and so did most of you, and a lot of other observers as well.

So why is it still like swimming through mud to get the media to pay attention to this issue? And forget the FDA or any other government trade agency. Asian and European countries are banning, heavily restricting, and doing widespread testing of foods from China, but the United States? No can do.

Our food safety system isn’t just in need of an overhaul; it needs to be re-conceived and built from the ground up. Free markets need to be willing to put their money where their mouth is and demonstrate the safety of their products and their imports, and not just tell us to trust them.

Ronald Reagan, the great deity of the “small government” folks, under whose leadership federal agencies like FDA began to be gutted in the first place, once said, “Trust, but verify.” Fine, I’d like to.

But it’s science and testing, not corporate spin and ad campaigns, that can tell us if the foods we’re eating are safe or not; this isn’t something consumers have the ability to figure out in the supermarket. Melamine is invisible, whether it’s in eggs or baby food or kibble.

We need strong food testing standards, based on science and public health, not corporate protectionism. I’ll never forget the FDA saying, in multiple press conferences and in response to direct questions from me and other journalists, that they knew other companies whose products were found to be contaminated or who had purchased contaminated ingredients, but they wouldn’t disclose them. They were guarding not the public health, as is their mission, but corporations.

That has to end. I’d say “before it’s too late,” but not only thousands of pets and other animals, but human beings — infants — have been killed, and tens of thousands sickened. For them, it’s already too late.

Yesterday’s trip to the farmers market for local produce has never seemed more important than when reading the Monday news stories. Like this little gem, about 1,500 raccoon dogs — which are not dogs, actually — in China, being raised for fur, killed my melamine-tainted feed. (hat tip to  Carol). From the AP:

BEIJING (AP) — Some 1,500 dogs bred for their raccoon-like fur have died after eating feed tainted with the same chemical that contaminated dairy products and sickened tens of thousands of babies nationwide, a veterinarian said Monday.

The raccoon dogs — a breed native to east Asia whose fur is used to make trim on coats and other clothing — were fed a product that contained the chemical melamine and developed kidney stones, said Zhang Wenkui, a veterinary professor at Shenyang Agriculture University. All of the dogs died on farms in just one village.

Zhang determined that the animals died of kidney failure after performing a necropsy — an animal autopsy — on about a dozen dogs. He declined to say when the deaths occurred but a report Monday in the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper said they had occurred over the past two months.

You can imagine what horrific conditions these animals were living under, as well. (Not that we should criticize for that, what with our puppy-mills matching cruelty cage for cage.)

We can only hope that whoever the next president is, he cares enough about food safety to sweep the FDA clean and put in people who will safeguard the food supply. Is there anyone left who can honestly say they think this crap isn’t in every kind of processed food?

Highly recommended from last week’s NYT magazine, the open letter to the next POTUS from Michael Pollan:

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”

I think some people would more than argue our food system has already been attacked … by greed.