Ex-FDA head: "Simply put, our food safety system is broken." [View All]

[mhatrw]

http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/05/02/fda_is_failing_to_protect_food_ex_chiefs_say

Regulators don't have the money, equipment, and staff to keep industrial chemicals, salmonella, and E. coli from contaminating the US food supply, former commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration said.

"Simply put, our food-safety system is broken," said David Kessler, who headed the agency from 1990 to 1997.

"The reality is that there is currently no mandate, no leadership, no resources, nor scientific research base for prevention of food-safety problems," Kessler told the House Oversight Committee yesterday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/07/AR2007050701685.html

Chickens that ate bird feed made with a small amount of contaminated pet food are safe for human consumption and can be released for slaughter and sale, federal health officials said yesterday. That decision emerged from a government risk analysis completed over the weekend involving 20 million chickens that officials said Friday had inadvertently been fed the tainted feed in several states.

Officials said the amount of melamine in the feed consumed by the 20 million chickens was so low that the chemical was undetectable in the birds, even using a highly sensitive experimental test that can detect as few as 10 parts of melamine per billion parts of tissue.

A larger proportion of pet food was added to the feed eaten by the Indiana breeding birds, so those chickens are being kept off the market until measurements of melamine in their tissues are complete, officials said. But government scientists said they were encouraged by the fact that none of the birds had grown ill -- and by the recent finding that the kidneys of pigs that ate the contaminated chow appeared normal under a microscope. Kidneys are often the first organs to show damage from melamine poisoning.

The USDA and the FDA are creating a science advisory board to review their risk assessment and to contribute to future such analyses. Robert Buchanan, a senior science adviser with the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, who was involved in the risk analysis, said he was gratified to find that "the safety margins are very large" -- that is, the conclusion that there is minimal risk to human health would hold true even if the scientists' assumptions were found to be off by tenfold or more.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/06/AR2007050601034.html

If you add melamine to almost anything, the amount of nitrogen in the final mixture will rise simply because, gram for gram, melamine contains so much of the element. Since the food industry generally measures total "nitrogen content" and equates it with "protein content," a few shovelfuls of melamine can appear to turn a low-protein meal into a high-protein one. And what's wrong with that? Can't the body use the nitrogen in melamine? Actually, it can't.

Melamine is an extremely small molecule, and most of it is absorbed through the intestinal tract before it is digested. It circulates in the bloodstream until it gets to the kidneys, where it slips easily into the fluid that eventually becomes urine. Melamine can also enter other organs. That is how it could have ended up in the tissue of farm animals that ate scraps of melamine-laced pet food -- as apparently was the case in 2.7 million chickens and 345 pigs slaughtered and consumed in recent months. ...

The purpose of urine is to concentrate water-soluble waste products and to keep them dissolved. But water's dissolving power has its limits. Melamine and other chemicals can reach concentrations that exceed those limits. When the water can't hold any more, the chemical substance begins to form crystals. ...

Studies done decades ago found that rats fed melamine for two years developed stones in their urine, which led to bladder cancer in some. When rats were fed in one serving a large amount of melamine -- the equivalent of a 150-pound person eating a pound -- about half died.

The question that immediately comes to mind is, why didn't they test the kidneys of the pigs and the chickens who had eaten the most contaminated feed using the "highly sensitive experimental test that can detect as few as 10 parts of melamine per billion parts of tissue"?

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usdahome?contentidonly=true&contentid=2007/05/0129.xml

A safety/risk assessment is a scientific approach to estimating the risk to human health from exposure to specified compounds. It is based on available data and certain scientific assumptions in the absence of data. ...

The assessment notes that melamine is not metabolized, and is rapidly excreted in the urine. Thus, it is not believed to accumulate in the body of animals.

Am I missing something about this "scientific" assumption? Are the kidneys somehow not part of "the body of animals"?

http://www.horsesass.org/?p=2899

During an ongoing media teleconference call, USDA/FDA officials have revealed that melamine-tainted "protein concentrate," imported from China, contaminated fish meal manufactured in Canada. The tainted fish meal was then distributed to an unknown number of fish farms in the US and Canada.

Other revelations:

* 50,000 swine have been quarantined in Illinois due to suspect feed.
* The tainted "wheat gluten" and "rice protein concentrate" at the center of the pet food recall, was actually misrepresented as such. Further tests have determined that it is wheat flour, adulterated with melamine.

I just have to say that this is STUNNING. Two months after first determining a problem with "wheat gluten flour" they only now determine it was really plain old wheat FLOUR? Anybody who has ever baked bread would have been able to tell the difference... the two products have different color and texture. Mix in a little water and rub it between your fingers, and you can tell the difference with your eyes closed. ... Wheat flour might typically contain 14-percent protein by weight. Wheat gluten (or more appropriately, "vital wheat gluten flour") contains a minimum of 75-percent protein by weight. This helps explain the surprisingly high levels of melamine found in some samples.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_he_me/food_contamination

The supposed wheat gluten was exported directly from China to Canada in a deal brokered by a U.S. company, ChemNutra Inc., Acheson said. ChemNutra also supplied the ingredient to a Canadian dog and cat food company, Menu Foods, that's since recalled dozens of brands.

Steve Stern, a ChemNutra spokesman, said the Las Vegas company actually only cobrokered the deal to supply wheat gluten to the fish meal producer: "We never owned it, we never sold it."

When asked why ChemNutra didn't disclose previously that it played a part in that deal, Stern said the company did notify the FDA in mid April. However, the company chose not to include the co-brokered shipment in an April 2 recall of the wheat gluten it had imported for use in pet food _again because it hadn't sold the ingredient, Stern said.

http://www.itchmo.com/read/chemnutra-says-fda-had-fish-feed-info-for-weeks_20070508

ChemNutra Says FDA Had Fish Feed Info For Weeks

ChemNutra says information on their co-brokered deal for fish feed ingredient was in FDA’s hands in mid-April. Spokesperson Steve Stern also stated that the search of ChemNutra by federal officials announced 10 days ago should have turned up these details.

http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2007/05/07/pet-food-recall-a-vet-speaks

"Scooby was 6 months old, a beautiful big purry healthy guy. When the recall began, his mom, who is a physician, went over the lists with a fine-toothed comb and continued to do so throughout the recall. He became acutely ill April 10, well into the recall. She was positive she was not feeding recalled food. He was so acutely ill that when he first presented his creatinine was just above normal but it skyrocketed over the next few days, on aggressive fluid therapy. On ultrasound a few days into it, he had moderate-severe hydronephrosis with bilateral ureteral obstruction…but I couldn’t see stones which seemed odd. As he was worsening rapidly, we took him to surgery to see if the obstructions could be relieved. The surgeons were mystified because his proximal ureters were dilated but they couldn’t see why. His mom decided to euthanize him on the table.

What happened to Scooby?

"On necropsy, the pathologist found that his ureters were stuffed with the melamine-type crystals. We were horrified because he wasn’t eating recalled food. I went through all the foods he was eating with his mom over and over, and narrowed it down to 2 foods I felt were the most likely culprits (other flavors of the same line of foods had been recalled, etc.). I notified the 2 companies, one of whom took 2 days to call me back despite repeated attempts. I also notified the FDA. That was April 23. (His necropsy unfortunately took 10 days to come back). I didn’t really get any sense that the 2 companies were going to do anything about the info, especially as he was eating several foods. One of those 2 foods was just recalled; it was one of the ones recalled due to 'cross-contamination' at the Menu plant. It did not contain wheat gluten. Supposedly. What a tragic little story.

"I hope people realize that this 'cross-contamination' isn’t just some hypothetical possibility; Scooby is dead from whatever 'cross-contamination' means. That’s a lot of cross-contamination."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/05/04/DI2007050401776.html

Washington, D.C.: Is it safer to use pet food manufactured by a company that doesn't outsource?

Robert Poppenga: Good question. I believe that the food supply in developed countries (i.e., the U.S., Canada, Europe) is more tightly regulated and therefore much less likely to be adulterated than in other countries with fewer regulations and oversight. The problem would probably be finding out where the ingredients in a product originated from since that information is not on the label.

San Antonio, Texas: ... How much melamine, cyanuric acid was found in the eggs of chickens?

Robert Poppenga: ... I am not aware that anyone has tested eggs from chickens; I believe that the majority of chickens were broilers (i.e., raised for meat and not eggs). ...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/3/23927/23258">The ominous silence about eggs