USA TODAY: Pet Food Death Toll Unlikely to Be Known! SAD...

[KoKo]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2007-07-22-petfood_N.htm

Pet-food death toll unlikely to be known

By Julie Schmit and Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
The number of dogs and cats killed by contaminated pet food recalled this year will probably never be known, the Food and Drug Administration says.

The FDA received a record 18,000 consumer calls after the largest pet-food recall ever started in mid-March. Officials said in May about half alleged a pet death.

But tying a pet death to the food requires information such as test results from pets' tissue and blood samples, which the FDA doesn't have in most cases, it says.

"The sad truth is that we will probably never know with any confidence the number of animals that fell victim to the pet-food poisoning," says FDA spokeswoman Julie Zawisza.

In May, FDA official Michael Rogers told reporters the FDA expected to announce "in total the number of confirmed deaths associated with these recalled products."
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Food and Drug Administration | Veterinary | Julie Schmit | Barbara Powers

Zawisza says Rogers based his comment on the best information at the time. The FDA did devote 400 people, a huge number for the agency, to monitor the recalls, collect food samples and take consumer reports. But unlike in human food-borne illness cases, there was no Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff to do the bulk of the investigation to link illnesses to products.

The FDA early on confirmed 16 pet deaths, but that number is meaningless because so many reports weren't investigated.

Three groups provide more insight about the death toll:

•The American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians, which includes 1,300 medical professionals, is analyzing about 400 cases, mostly of dead pets. The cases include lab results. About two-thirds involve cats. There's no way to know how many cases went unreported, says Barbara Powers, AAVLD president.

•The Veterinary Information Network, which includes 20,000 veterinarians, received almost 1,500 death or illness reports from veterinarians, says Paul Pion, VIN president. VIN plans to follow 700 to 1,000 of those to see if medical data point to food. Pion says many cases probably went unreported. He and Powers estimate a death toll of at least 1,000.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2007-07-22-petfood_N.htm

[SoCalDem]

1. It will never be known, because they don't WANT to know.

as long as people don't know the total number, they can possibly hope to convince enough people that pet food is "safe"..

[Raine]

2. Media seems to have dropped this

I would like to know what is going on with this...what was the ultimate cause and what are they doing about it and are any foods really safe to feed animals.

[A Brand New World]

3. I have not fed mine a single can of canned food since this

travesty/tragedy! My goldens get their kibble with "people" food as their add-in. I refuse to take a chance with their lives. My small-town vet had 3 deaths attributed to this and my mom's healthy boxer died within 2 days of kidney failure after eating this crap.

[Raine]

6. Neither have I and

I doubt that I ever will again. I wouldn't care even if they said the food was safe, I will never trust them to not lie about it.

[Hidden Stillness]

4. Fucking LIARS

This is the now-corporate-run agency that recently tried to close down one-half of its food-testing plants, after admitting that they had cut total inspections by over half before that, and that most commercial meat processors, for example, are not even inspected at all, more than once every two or three years. I think Democrats have temporarily stopped the closure of the inspecting plants, suddenly announced when Sen. Byron Dorgan and others made plans to introduce "country of origin" labelling. There was a "hearing," if you could even call it that, a few months ago, by Sen. Kohl, a kind of a fuck-up if you ask me, that got at nothing new, asked no tough questions even after it was revealed that most of the pet food "reports" come from the industry itself and are not double-checked by anybody.

The FDA fucked around for months after the problem first became known--and they were aware of it even before it was public, when the first test animals were dying, during February--did not answer the phones, did no tests of their own, denied that there were even increasing deaths, etc., etc. The claim that they can't know what the number of melamine deaths were because the FDA doesn't have a "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff to do the bulk of the investigation to link illnesses to products" is absurd; I don't even know what it means. All they have to do is coordinate a call for Nationwide reporting of vets who had had patients that they themselves suspected of melamine poisoning. They are medical professionals, they can be trusted with reports of their own cases. This--yet again with this Administration--is what you get when the profit-making capitalists themselves have taken over every area of Government.

[Doremus]

5. Boldfaced lies. The largest chain of vet hospitals says 39,000 pets hurt

Pet food contaminated with an industrial chemical may have sickened or killed 39,000 cats and dogs nationwide, based on an extrapolation from data released Monday by one of the nation's largest chains of veterinary hospitals.

Banfield, The Pet Hospital, said an analysis of its database, compiled from records collected by its more than 615 veterinary hospitals, suggests that three out of every 10,000 cats and dogs that ate the pet food contaminated with melamine developed kidney failure. There are an estimated 60 million dogs and 70 million cats in the United States, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.

The hospital chain saw 1 million dogs and cats during the three months when the more than 100 brands of now-recalled contaminated pet food were sold. It saw 284 extra cases of kidney failure among cats during that period, or a roughly 30 percent increase, when compared with background rates.

"It has meaning, when you see a peak like that. We see so many pets here, and it coincided with the recall period," said veterinarian Hugh Lewis, who oversees the mining of Banfield's database to do clinical studies. The chain continues to share its data with the Food and Drug Administration. (snip)

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/04/09/national/w170650D46.DTL

[saracat]

7. I can't deal with this .My Cat Sara died from this poison.I want

these people destroyed.Seriously.I will never forget her or the agony of her death.I am part of a class action lawsuit but I have heard nada.

[CitizenLeft]

8. Saracat I'm so sorry

We love our pets so much. No words can take that pain away, but I wish they could.

[saracat]

9. Thank you.I am just so furious. It is as though they are killing children.