Just wanted to be sure you guys see this.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_he_me/pet_food_recall

This is insane, unless the Chinese are knowingly contaminating food or do not have proper methods they stand to only lose by refusing to let FDA investigate.

Do they think that companies will just forget and move on? Or maybe hope that it doesnt happen again? :\

I think pet food makers are going to have a lot of work to do to regain people's trust. I haven't fed my cat pet food for years because I didn't like all the carbs they were putting in cat food.

I wonder how much of this stuff made it's way into human consumption? I actually have a big jar of rice protein I'm kind of afraid to use.

I've wondered and tried to find information on that too, Pan. From what I've read the first problem ingredient was "food grade" not just pet grade so the article I was reading said it was simply a matter of chance that it didn't enter the human food chain. This would be in breads, rice and pastas....it's scary to think about really. And I wonder how much information they have actually given us or if they know for certain where it was all distributed.

I wonder how much of this stuff made it's way into human consumption? I actually have a big jar of rice protein I'm kind of afraid to use.Rice? YOU? :eek:

If you're worried about pesticides and shady farming practices, buy domestic, organically grown grains. The only pesticides they contain are those that have already contaminated the entire water supply.

Oh and if I had a dog or cat, I wouldn't feed him commercial pet food, recalls aside. You don't even want to know what goes into that ****.

I wonder just how far this will reach.

http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/pet-food-may-have-been-intentionally/20070412155809990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Rice? YOU? :eek:
Rice protein and rice bran, dofus. It is low carb.

Yeah, I heard about that yesterday! It's kind of scary to think what goes on with imported food....

I wonder just how far this will reach.To your dinner plate, it seems.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/20/AR2007042002016.html<b>Criminal Probe Opened in Pet Food Scare
FDA Says Charges Possible; Tainted Pork Confirmed in Calif.</b>

The Food and Drug Administration has opened a criminal investigation in the widening pet food contamination scandal, officials said yesterday, as it was confirmed that tainted pork might have made its way onto human dinner plates in California.

More than 100 hogs that ate contaminated food at a custom slaughterhouse in California's Central Valley were sold to private individuals and to an unnamed licensed facility in Northern California during the past 2 1/2 weeks. The hogs consumed feed that contained rice protein tainted with melamine, the industrial chemical that has sickened and killed dogs and cats around the world.

Almost a dozen companies have found that they have used melamine-contaminated ingredients from China in their animal foods, either wheat gluten, corn gluten or rice protein concentrate. In the United States, more than 60 million containers of cat and dog food have been pulled from the market in the past five weeks.

People who bought pork from the American Hog Farm, a 1,500-animal facility in Ceres, Calif., between April 3 and April 18 are being advised not to eat the meat, California health officials said yesterday, although there have been no reports of illness in either people or the hogs. Authorities are tracking down all the purchasers.

I love the wording in this one:

"While the public was focused on the danger to their pets, sources tell CBS News that the FDA had tracked at least one suspect batch of wheat gluten into the human food supply, quietly quarantined some products and notified the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention to watch for new patients admitted to hospitals with renal or kidney failure."

Lovely, lets not warn people but wait and see if there are higher rates of renal or kidney failure!! Some of those products might still be in people's homes depending on what they were. Here's the entire link:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/13/world/main2679864.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_2679864

I love the wording in this one:

"While the public was focused on the danger to their pets, sources tell CBS News that the FDA had tracked at least one suspect batch of wheat gluten into the human food supply, quietly quarantined some products and notified the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention to watch for new patients admitted to hospitals with renal or kidney failure."

Lovely, lets not warn people but wait and see if there are higher rates of renal or kidney failure!! Some of those products might still be in people's homes depending on what they were. Here's the entire link:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/13/world/main2679864.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_2679864

I dunno its kinda a double edged sword. Damned if they did tell us and damned if they didnt. If it wasnt a large batch i'd agree with them, if there was potential for large scale problems then i'd notify the public.

I love the wording in this one...

Centers For Disease Control and Prevention to watch for new patients admitted...

Lovely, lets not warn people ...

You would be surprised how ineffectual the CDC&P in the disease control and prevention business?

It makes me happy I'm not eating wheat products any longer... but that rice protein is bugging me. I think I'll call the manufacturer.

It makes me happy I'm not eating wheat products any longer...All those animals you eat, do.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSWBT00688020070424<b>FDA says probing "thousands" of hogs for tainted feed</b>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday that "thousands" of U.S. hogs might be affected by the agency's investigation of livestock feed contaminated with melamine.

"I don't have the numbers on that right now but it potentially affects thousands of hogs," Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, told reporters. "Some of the hog operations were fairly sizable."

Livestock feed that may have been contaminated with ingredients imported from China was sent to hog farms in North and South Carolina, California, New York, Utah and "possibly" Ohio, he said.You might want to pass on that bacon for breakfast.

Chicken too..

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/05/02/pet.food.poultry/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Clearly this needs to just be spun slightly different:

New Melamine Fortified Pet Food! (You didn't really like that pet anyway)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070503/ap_on_he_me/pet_food_recall_8<b>Menu foods opts for another recall</b>

WASHINGTON - Pet food manufacturer Menu Foods expanded its recall Thursday because of possible cross-contamination between melamine-tainted products and other foods made in the same period.

The expansion includes cuts and gravy pet food, as well as other products that were not made with the contaminated wheat gluten supplied by ChemNutra Inc., but were manufactured during the period the chemical-laced gluten was used.

The company based its decision on study results that revealed cross-contamination, as well as one report from a customer.

The recall now includes additional pet food products in the United States, Canada and Europe. It also expands the date ranges of previously recalled products to match the period that melamine-tainted wheat gluten was used in manufacturing plants.

It would be interesting to know how long this has been going on and how many products have really been compromised.

Links to recalled foods for ease of those who need to check.

Dog:
http://www.menufoods.com/recall/product_dog.html

Cat:
http://www.menufoods.com/recall/product_cat.html

It would be interesting to know how long this has been going onhttp://www.itchmo.com/read/melamine-spiking-in-food-widespread-for-years_20070429<b>Melamine Spiking in Food “Widespread” For Years</b>

We will just let the story speak for itself. Highlights are below. NOTE: The article went missing on the IHT site. It is now back on the IHT site.

No more denials, no more hemming and hawing by the FDA. Time to take massive cautionary action is now. It’s not just animal feed anymore. It’s not just pet food. It’s a crisis. It’s been going on for years. It’s being done in “wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins”.

All ingredients and foods imported from abroad needs to be tested now. Period. Any food that used suspect ingredients should be recalled. ASAP.

Highlights below from the IHT article (emphasis ours):

<table><tr><td width=75></td><td>Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, small acorn-sized chunks of white rock, is then being sold to local entrepreneurs, who say they secretly mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to artificially enhance the protein level.

“It just saves money,” says a manager at an animal feed factory here. <b>“Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level.”

The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers</b> by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” says Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”

Most local feed companies do not admit that they use melamine. But last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, a pair of animal feed producers explained in great detail <b>how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine,</b> whose chemical properties give a bag of animal feed an inflated protein level under standard tests.

“If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt the animals,” said one animal feed entrepreneur whose name is being withheld to protect him from prosecution.

The man - who works in a small animal feed operation that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas - said <b>he has mixed melamine into animal feed for years.</b></td></tr></table>
We’ve always suspected that this problem went back further than Menu Foods and this article confirms our suspicions. Again, we may never know the degree of deaths and illnesses in pets as many have long died and evidence has been lost.

So in otherwords, someone has NOT been grinding up countertops and Ikea computer stands and putting it in feed to kill animals...

People have been adding it to feed for years to boost the Nitrogen levels and protein levels for chemical testing to bump up the protein levels of feed.

And somehow they overdosed the feed, and we all now know about it now, after a bunch of animals and pets have died because its byproduct through metabolism is cyanide///

???

I think all of the food producers who made this sh!t should be fed melamine until they are all dead.

So in otherwords, someone has NOT been grinding up countertops and Ikea computer stands and putting it in feed to kill animals...

People have been adding it to feed for years to boost the Nitrogen levels and protein levels for chemical testing to bump up the protein levels of feed.

And somehow they overdosed the feed, and we all now know about it now, after a bunch of animals and pets have died because its byproduct through metabolism is cyanide///


Welcome to the wonderful world of unrestricted capitalism...


Eri

Welcome to the wonderful world of unrestricted capitalism...China? More like poorly regulated authoritarianism.

“It just saves money,” says a manager at an animal feed factory here. “Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level.”
It doesn't actually boost the protein level, it boosts the nitrogen level, which is how they measure the protein content. Obviously they need a new test.

So in otherwords, someone has NOT been grinding up countertops and Ikea computer stands and putting it in feed to kill animals...
The melamine comes from coal. It used to be a byproduct that could be gotten for free but it became so popular in China by agriculturlists that they now charge for it.

But melamine alone isn't probably causing the problems. Yes, it is carcinogenic but it takes years for that to happen. They think there's something else, like cyanuric acid causing the kidneys to form crystals.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19426023.600-melamine-suspected-of-killing-hundreds-of-us-pets.html

What I don't understand is why they aren't using american vegetable proteins, we export huge amounts of grain, why is it cheaper to buy in China. Well, now we know... it's adulterated.

Many decades ago I worked for General Foods. The plant I worked at manufactured the usual garbage for human consumption such as Minute Rice, Kool-Aid, Post cereals, Tang and Swansdown cake mixes.

An adjacent plant made Gaines dog food. The quality control for the dog food was an order of magnitude greater than for the human 'food' (yeah... I know that the human stuff was mostly junk). There were regular dog food audits done by government meat inspectors.

I find the current pet food scandal ironic given my past experience. Of course, there's been human food issues too, such as the tainted spinach not that long ago.

What I don't understand is why they aren't using american vegetable proteins, we export huge amounts of grain, why is it cheaper to buy in China. Well, now we know... it's adulterated.It could have something to do with the Chinese farmer's annual wage of about $100 or so.

It could have something to do with the Chinese farmer's annual wage of about $100 or so.

And there you have the reason for my capitalism remark Fyyr


Eri

How many people think of Mel Gibson eating Dinty Di dog food when they eat Dinty Moore stew?

They think there's something else, like cyanuric acid causing the kidneys to form crystals.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19426023.600-melamine-suspected-of-killing-hundreds-of-us-pets.html


The article ends up saying, 'we don't know'.

I don't know.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070506/ap_on_he_me/panama_tainted_medicine_3<b>Report traces tainted medicine to China</b>

NEW YORK - A Chinese factory was the source of a counterfeit chemical that killed dozens of people in Panama after it was used in human medications, a newspaper reported.

The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions that records and interviews revealed the poison was first sold by Chinese companies that exported it as 99.5 percent pure glycerin. The source of the chemical was then obscured as middlemen in Spain and Panama removed the names of their suppliers from shipping documents — a practice used by distributors to ensure continued business.

Panama's government health agency used the substance to produce medicines, not realizing that it was diethylene glycol, a chemical cousin of antifreeze that can cause kidney and neurological damage if ingested.

The Times said investigators in four countries identified Taixing Glycerine Factory as the maker of the poison. That company's certificate of analysis said the shipment was 99.5 percent pure, the Times reported.

The sale of the syrup was brokered by a unit of a state-owned business in Beijing, the article said. From there, it went to a distributor in Barcelona, Spain, and on to a dealer in Panama.

No one in China has been charged with causing the Panamanian deaths. An unidentified Chinese drug official told the Times that investigators tested the Taixing Glycerine Factory's product and found it contained no glycerine. But a spokeswoman for the drug agency said the company had not broken any laws.

Wan Qigang, the legal representative for the factory, told the Times last year that the company made only industrial-grade glycerin. But more recently it has been advertising 99.5 percent pure glycerine on the Internet, the Times said. Wan declined to answer further questions.

Concerns about the safety of imports from China rose in the U.S. after pet food containing a Chinese ingredient was found to be tainted with another industrial chemical, melamine. The poison has killed or sickened an unknown number of dogs and cats and led to the recall of more than 100 brands of pet food.

I just read that China makes most of our vitamin ingredients now too. God, they don't have to invade us, they can just poison us.

The New York Times published a long article about this fiasco, if you're interested. What's scary is not only the level fraud and corruption in China, and government complacency with it, but also the fact that the middlemen hide the original source of the product, so the consumer never even knows it's from China.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06poison.html

(Full text hidden to prevent thread spamming.)
May 6, 2007
From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine
By WALT BOGDANICH and JAKE HOOKER

The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.

Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.

The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.

It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.

Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.

Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.

Panama’s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

Forty-six barrels of the toxic syrup arrived via a poison pipeline stretching halfway around the world. Through shipping records and interviews with government officials, The New York Times traced this pipeline from the Panamanian port of Colón, back through trading companies in Barcelona, Spain, and Beijing, to its beginning near the Yangtze Delta in a place local people call “chemical country.”

The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner. As a result, traders bought the syrup without knowing where it came from, or who made it. With this information, the traders might have discovered — as The Times did — that the manufacturer was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients.

An examination of the two poisoning cases last year — in Panama and earlier in China — shows how China’s safety regulations have lagged behind its growing role as low-cost supplier to the world. It also demonstrates how a poorly policed chain of traders in country after country allows counterfeit medicine to contaminate the global market.

Last week, the United States Food and Drug Administration warned drug makers and suppliers in the United States “to be especially vigilant” in watching for diethylene glycol. The warning did not specifically mention China, and it said there was “no reason to believe” that glycerin in this country was tainted. Even so, the agency asked that all glycerin shipments be tested for diethylene glycol, and said it was “exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated.”

China is already being accused by United States authorities of exporting wheat gluten containing an industrial chemical, melamine, that ended up in pet food and livestock feed. The F.D.A. recently banned imports of Chinese-made wheat gluten after it was linked to pet deaths in the United States.

Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India.

In Bangladesh, investigators found poison in seven brands of fever medication in 1992, but only after countless children died. A Massachusetts laboratory detected the contamination after Dr. Michael L. Bennish, a pediatrician who works in developing countries, smuggled samples of the tainted syrup out of the country in a suitcase. Dr. Bennish, who investigated the Bangladesh epidemic and helped write a 1995 article about it for BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, said that given the amount of medication distributed, deaths “must be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”

“It’s vastly underreported,” Dr. Bennish said of diethylene glycol poisoning. Doctors might not suspect toxic medicine, particularly in poor countries with limited resources and a generally unhealthy population, he said, adding, “Most people who die don’t come to a medical facility.”

The makers of counterfeit glycerin, which superficially looks and acts like the real thing but generally costs considerably less, are rarely identified, much less prosecuted, given the difficulty of tracing shipments across borders. “This is really a global problem, and it needs to be handled in a global way,” said Dr. Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization’s top representative in Beijing.

Seventy years ago, medicine laced with diethylene glycol killed more than 100 people in the United States, leading to the passage of the toughest drug regulations of that era and the creation of the modern Food and Drug Administration.

The F.D.A. has tried to help in poisoning cases around the world, but there is only so much it can do.

When at least 88 children died in Haiti a decade ago, F.D.A. investigators traced the poison to the Manchurian city of Dalian, but their attempts to visit the suspected manufacturer were repeatedly blocked by Chinese officials, according to internal State Department records. Permission was granted more than a year later, but by then the plant had moved and its records had been destroyed.

“Chinese officials we contacted on this matter were all reluctant to become involved,” the American Embassy in Beijing wrote in a confidential cable. “We cannot be optimistic about our chances for success in tracking down the other possible glycerine shipments.”

In fact, The Times found records showing that the same Chinese company implicated in the Haiti poisoning also shipped about 50 tons of counterfeit glycerin to the United States in 1995. Some of it was later resold to another American customer, Avatar Corporation, before the deception was discovered.

“Thank God we caught it when we did,” said Phil Ternes, chief operating officer of Avatar, a Chicago-area supplier of bulk pharmaceuticals and nonmedicinal products. The F.D.A. said it was unaware of the shipment.

In China, the government is vowing to clean up its pharmaceutical industry, in part because of criticism over counterfeit drugs flooding the world markets. In December, two top drug regulators were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs. In addition, 440 counterfeiting operations were closed down last year, the World Health Organization said.

But when Chinese officials investigated the role of Chinese companies in the Panama deaths, they found that no laws had been broken, according to an official of the nation’s drug enforcement agency. China’s drug regulation is “a black hole,” said one trader who has done business through CNSC Fortune Way, the Beijing-based broker that investigators say was a crucial conduit for the Panama poison.

In this environment, Wang Guiping, a tailor with a ninth-grade education and access to a chemistry book, found it easy to enter the pharmaceutical supply business as a middleman. He quickly discovered what others had before him: that counterfeiting was a simple way to increase profits.

And then people in China began to die.

Cheating the System

Mr. Wang spent years as a tailor in the manufacturing towns of the Yangtze Delta, in eastern China. But he did not want to remain a common craftsman, villagers say. He set his sights on trading chemicals, a business rooted in the many small chemical plants that have sprouted in the region.

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mr. Wang’s older brother, Wang Guoping, said in an interview. “He didn’t understand chemicals.”

But he did understand how to cheat the system.

Wang Guiping, 41, realized he could earn extra money by substituting cheaper, industrial-grade syrup — not approved for human consumption — for pharmaceutical grade syrup. To trick pharmaceutical buyers, he forged his licenses and laboratory analysis reports, records show.

Mr. Wang later told investigators that he figured no harm would come from the substitution, because he initially tested a small quantity. He did it with the expertise of a former tailor.

He swallowed some of it. When nothing happened, he shipped it.

One company that used the syrup beginning in early 2005 was Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical, about 1,000 miles away in Heilongjiang Province in the northeast. A buyer for the factory had seen a posting for Mr. Wang’s syrup on an industry Web site.

After a while, Mr. Wang set out to find an even cheaper substitute syrup so he could increase his profit even more, according to a Chinese investigator. In a chemical book he found what he was looking for: another odorless syrup — diethylene glycol. At the time, it sold for 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a ton, or about $725 to $845, while pharmaceutical-grade syrup cost 15,000 yuan, or about $1,815, according to the investigator.

Mr. Wang did not taste-test this second batch of syrup before shipping it to Qiqihar Pharmaceutical, the government investigator said, adding, “He knew it was dangerous, but he didn’t know that it could kill.”

The manufacturer used the toxic syrup in five drug products: ampules of Amillarisin A for gall bladder problems; a special enema fluid for children; an injection for blood vessel diseases; an intravenous pain reliever; and an arthritis treatment.

In April 2006, one of southern China’s finest hospitals, in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, began administering Amillarisin A. Within a month or so, at least 18 people had died after taking the medicine, though some had already been quite sick.

Zhou Jianhong, 33, said his father took his first dose of Amillarisin A on April 19. A week later he was in critical condition. “If you are going to die, you want to die at home,” Mr. Zhou said. “So we checked him out of the hospital.” He died the next day.

“Everybody wants to invest in the pharmaceutical industry and it is growing, but the regulators can’t keep up,” Mr. Zhou said. “We need a system to assure our safety.”

The final death count is unclear, since some people who took the medicine may have died in less populated areas.

In a small town in Sichuan Province, a man named Zhou Lianghui said the authorities would not acknowledge that his wife had died from taking tainted Amillarisin A. But Mr. Zhou, 38, said he matched the identification number on the batch of medicine his wife received with a warning circular distributed by drug officials.

“You probably cannot understand a small town if you are in Beijing,” Zhou Lianghui said in a telephone interview. “The sky is high, and the emperor is far away. There are a lot of problems here that the law cannot speak to.”

The failure of the government to stop poison from contaminating the drug supply caused one of the bigger domestic scandals of the year. Last May, China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, ordered an investigation of the deaths, declaring, “The pharmaceutical market is in disorder.”

At about the same time, 9,000 miles away in Panama, the long rainy season had begun. Anticipating colds and coughs, the government health program began manufacturing cough and antihistamine syrup. The cough medicine was sugarless so that even diabetics could use it.

The medicine was mixed with a pale yellow, almost translucent syrup that had arrived in 46 barrels from Barcelona on the container ship Tobias Maersk. Shipping records showed the contents to be 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

It would be months and many deaths later before that certification was discovered to be pure fiction.

A Mysterious Illness

Early last September, doctors at Panama City’s big public hospital began to notice patients exhibiting unusual symptoms.

They initially appeared to have Guillain-Barré syndrome, a relatively rare neurological disorder that first shows up as a weakness or tingling sensation in the legs. That weakness often intensifies, spreading upward to the arms and chest, sometimes causing total paralysis and an inability to breathe.

The new patients had paralysis, but it did not spread upward. They also quickly lost their ability to urinate, a condition not associated with Guillain-Barré. Even more unusual was the number of cases. In a full year, doctors might see eight cases of Guillain-Barré, yet they saw that many in just two weeks.

Doctors sought help from an infectious disease specialist, Néstor Sosa, an intense, driven doctor who competes in triathlons and high-level chess.

Dr. Sosa’s medical specialty had a long, rich history in Panama, once known as one of the world’s unhealthiest places. In one year in the late 1800s, a lethal mix of yellow fever and malaria killed nearly 1 in every 10 residents of Panama City. Only after the United States managed to overcome those mosquito-borne diseases was it able to build the Panama Canal without the devastation that undermined an earlier attempt by the French.

The suspected Guillain-Barré cases worried Dr. Sosa. “It was something really extraordinary, something that was obviously reaching epidemic dimensions in our hospital,” he said.

With the death rate from the mystery illness near 50 percent, Dr. Sosa alerted the hospital management, which asked him to set up and run a task force to handle the situation. The assignment, a daunting around-the-clock dash to catch a killer, was one he eagerly embraced.

Several years earlier, Dr. Sosa had watched as other doctors identified the cause of another epidemic, later identified as hantavirus, a pathogen spread by infected rodents.

“I took care of patients but I somehow felt I did not do enough,” he said. The next time, he vowed, would be different.

Dr. Sosa set up a 24-hour “war room” in the hospital, where doctors could compare notes and theories as they scoured medical records for clues.

As a precaution, the patients with the mystery illness were segregated and placed in a large empty room awaiting renovation. Health care workers wore masks, heightening fears in the hospital and the community.

“That spread a lot of panic,” said Dr. Jorge Motta, a cardiologist who runs the Gorgas Memorial Institute, a widely respected medical research center in Panama. “That is always a terrifying thought, that you will be the epicenter of a new infectious disease, and especially a new infectious disease that kills with a high rate of death, like this.”

Meanwhile, patients kept coming, and hospital personnel could barely keep up.

“I ended up giving C.P.R.,” Dr. Sosa said. “I haven’t given C.P.R. since I was a resident, but there were so many crises going on.”

Frightened hospital patients had to watch others around them die for reasons no one understood, fearing that they might be next.

As reports of strange Guillain-Barré symptoms started coming in from other parts of the country, doctors realized they were not just dealing with a localized outbreak.

Pascuala Pérez de González, 67, sought treatment for a cold at a clinic in Coclé Province, about a three-hour drive from Panama City. In late September she was treated and sent home. Within days, she could no longer eat; she stopped urinating and went into convulsions.

A decision was made to take her to the public hospital in Panama City, but on the way she stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated. She arrived at the hospital in a deep coma and later died.

Medical records contained clues but also plenty of false leads. Early victims tended to be males older than 60 and diabetic with high blood pressure. About half had been given Lisinopril, a blood pressure medicine distributed by the public health system.

But many who did not receive Lisinopril still got sick. On the chance that those patients might have forgotten that they had taken the drug, doctors pulled Lisinopril from pharmacy shelves — only to return it after tests found nothing wrong.

Investigators would later discover that Lisinopril did play an important, if indirect role in the epidemic, but not in the way they had imagined.

A Major Clue

One patient of particular interest to Dr. Sosa came into the hospital with a heart attack, but no Guillain-Barré-type symptoms. While undergoing treatment, the patient received several drugs, including Lisinopril. After a while, he began to exhibit the same neurological distress that was the hallmark of the mystery illness.

“This patient is a major clue,” Dr. Sosa recalled saying. “This is not something environmental, this is not a folk medicine that’s been taken by the patients at home. This patient developed the disease in the hospital, in front of us.”

Soon after, another patient told Dr. Sosa that he, too, developed symptoms after taking Lisinopril, but because the medicine made him cough, he also took cough syrup — the same syrup, it turned out, that had been given to the heart patient.

“I said this has got to be it,” Dr. Sosa recalled. “We need to investigate this cough syrup.”

The cough medicine had not initially aroused much suspicion because many victims did not remember taking it. “Twenty-five percent of those people affected denied that they had taken cough syrup, because it’s a nonevent in their lives,” Dr. Motta said.

Investigators from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who were in Panama helping out, quickly put the bottles on a government jet and flew them to the United States for testing. The next day, Oct. 11, as Panamanian health officials were attending a news conference, a Blackberry in the room went off.

The tests, the C.D.C. was reporting, had turned up diethylene glycol in the cough syrup.

The mystery had been solved. The barrels labeled glycerin turned out to contain poison.

Dr. Sosa’s exhilaration at learning the cause did not last long. “It’s our medication that is killing these people,” he said he thought. “It’s not a virus, it’s not something that they got outside, but it was something we actually manufactured.”

A nationwide campaign was quickly begun to stop people from using the cough syrup. Neighborhoods were searched, but thousands of bottles either had been discarded or could not be found.

As the search wound down, two major tasks remained: count the dead and assign blame. Neither has been easy.

A precise accounting is all but impossible because, medical authorities say, victims were buried before the cause was known, and poor patients might not have seen doctors.

Another problem is that finding traces of diethylene glycol in decomposing bodies is difficult at best, medical experts say. Nonetheless, an Argentine pathologist who has studied diethylene glycol poisonings helped develop a test for the poison in exhumed bodies. Seven of the first nine bodies tested showed traces of the poison, Panamanian authorities said.

With the rainy season returning, though, the exhumations are about to end. Dr. José Vicente Pachar, director of Panama’s Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, said that as a scientist he would like a final count of the dead. But he added, “I should accept the reality that in the case of Panama we are not going to know the exact number.”

Local prosecutors have made some arrests and are investigating others connected to the case, including officials of the import company and the government agency that mixed and distributed the cold medicine. “Our responsibilities are to establish or discover the truth,” said Dimas Guevara, the homicide investigator guiding the inquiry.

But prosecutors have yet to charge anyone with actually making the counterfeit glycerin. And if the Panama investigation unfolds as other inquiries have, it is highly unlikely that they ever will.

A Suspect Factory

Panamanians wanting to see where their toxic nightmare began could look up the Web site of the company in Hengxiang, China, that investigators in four countries have identified as having made the syrup — the Taixing Glycerine Factory. There, under the words “About Us,” they would see a picture of a modern white building nearly a dozen stories tall, adorned by three arches at the entrance. The factory, the Web site boasts, “can strictly obey the contract and keep its word.”

But like the factory’s syrup, all is not as it seems.

There are no tall buildings in Hengxiang, a country town with one main road. The factory is not certified to sell any medical ingredients, Chinese officials say. And it looks nothing like the picture on the Internet. In reality, its chemicals are mixed in a plain, one-story brick building.

The factory is in a walled compound, surrounded by small shops and farms. In the spring, nearby fields of rape paint the countryside yellow. Near the front gate, a sign over the road warns, “Beware of counterfeits.” But it was posted by a nearby noodle machine factory that appears to be worried about competition.

The Taixing Glycerine Factory bought its diethylene glycol from the same manufacturer as Mr. Wang, the former tailor, the government investigator said. From this spot in China’s chemical country, the 46 barrels of toxic syrup began their journey, passing from company to company, port to port and country to country, apparently without anyone testing their contents.

Traders should be thoroughly familiar with their suppliers, United States health officials say. “One simply does not assume that what is labeled is indeed what it is,” said Dr. Murray Lumpkin, deputy commissioner for international and special programs for the Food and Drug Administration.

In the Panama case, names of suppliers were removed from shipping documents as they passed from one entity to the next, according to records and investigators. That is a practice some traders use to prevent customers from bypassing them on future purchases, but it also hides the provenance of the product.

The first distributor was the Beijing trading company, CNSC Fortune Way, a unit of a state-owned business that began by supplying goods and services to Chinese personnel and business officials overseas.

As China’s market reach expanded, Fortune Way focused its business on pharmaceutical ingredients, and in 2003, it brokered the sale of the suspect syrup made by the Taixing Glycerine Factory. The manufacturer’s certificate of analysis showed the batch to be 99.5 percent pure.

Whether the Taixing Glycerine Factory actually performed the test has not been publicly disclosed.

Original certificates of analysis should be passed on to each new buyer, said Kevin J. McGlue, a board member of the International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council. In this case, that was not done.

Fortune Way translated the certificate into English, putting its name — not the Taixing Glycerine Factory’s — at the top of the document, before shipping the barrels to a second trading company, this one in Barcelona.

Li Can, managing director at Fortune Way, said he did not remember the transaction and could not comment, adding, “There is a high volume of trade.”

Upon receiving the barrels in September 2003, the Spanish company, Rasfer International, did not test the contents, either. It copied the chemical analysis provided by Fortune Way, then put its logo on it. Ascensión Criado, Rasfer’s manager, said in an e-mail response to written questions that when Fortune Way shipped the syrup, it did not say who made it.

Several weeks later, Rasfer shipped the drums to a Panamanian broker, the Medicom Business Group. “Medicom never asked us for the name of the manufacturer,” Ms. Criado said.

A lawyer for Medicom, Valentín Jaén, said his client was a victim, too. “They were tricked by somebody,” Mr. Jaén said. “They operated in good faith.”

In Panama, the barrels sat unused for more than two years, and officials said Medicom improperly changed the expiration date on the syrup.

During that time, the company never tested the product. And the Panamanian government, which bought the 46 barrels and used them to make cold medicine, also failed to detect the poison, officials said.

The toxic pipeline ultimately emptied into the bloodstream of people like Ernesto Osorio, a former high school teacher in Panama City. He spent two months in the hospital after ingesting poison cough syrup last September.

Just before Christmas, after a kidney dialysis treatment, Mr. Osorio stood outside the city’s big public hospital in a tear-splattered shirt, describing what his life had become.

“I’m not an eighth of what I used to be,” Mr. Osorio said, his partly paralyzed face hanging like a slab of meat. “I have trouble walking. Look at my face, look at my tears.” The tears, he said apologetically, were not from emotion, but from nerve damage.

And yet, Mr. Osorio knows he is one of the lucky victims.

“They didn’t know how to keep the killer out of the medicine,” he said simply.

While the suffering in Panama was great, the potential profit — at least for the Spanish trading company, Rasfer — was surprisingly small. For the 46 barrels of glycerin, Rasfer paid Fortune Way $9,900, then sold them to Medicom for $11,322, according to records.

Chinese authorities have not disclosed how much Fortune Way and the Taixing Glycerine Factory made on their end, or how much they knew about what was in the barrels.

“The fault has to be traced back to areas of production,” said Dr. Motta, the cardiologist in Panama who helped uncover the source of the epidemic. “This was my plea — please, this thing is happening to us, make sure whoever did this down the line is not doing it to Peru or Sierra Leone or some other place.”

A Counterfeiter’s Confession

The power to prosecute the counterfeiters is now in the hands of the Chinese.

Last spring, the government moved quickly against Mr. Wang, the former tailor who poisoned Chinese residents.

The authorities caught up with him at a roadblock in Taizhou, a city just north of Taixing, in chemical country. He was weak and sick, and he had not eaten in two days. Inside his white sedan was a bankbook and cash. He had fled without his wife and teenage son.

Chinese patients were dead, a political scandal was brewing and the authorities wanted answers. Mr. Wang was taken to a hospital. Then, in long sessions with investigators, he gave them what they wanted, explaining his scheme, how he tested industrial syrup by drinking it, how he decided to use diethylene glycol and how he conned pharmaceutical companies into buying his syrup, according to a government official who was present for his interrogation.

“He made a fortune, but none of it went to his family,” said Wang Xiaodong, a former village official who knows Mr. Wang and his siblings. “He liked to gamble.”

Mr. Wang remains in custody as the authorities decide whether he should be put to death. The Qiqihar drug plant that made the poisonous medicine has been closed, and five employees are now being prosecuted for causing “a serious accident.”

In contrast to the Wang Guiping investigation, Chinese authorities have been tentative in acknowledging China’s link to the Panama tragedy, which involved a state-owned trading company. No one in China has been charged with committing the fraud that ended up killing so many in Panama.

Sun Jing, the pharmaceutical program officer for the World Health Organization in Beijing, said the health agency sent a fax “to remind the Chinese government that China should not be selling poisonous products overseas.” Ms. Sun said the agency did not receive an official reply.

Last fall, at the request of the United States — Panama has no diplomatic relations with China — the State Food and Drug Administration of China investigated the Taixing Glycerine Factory and Fortune Way.

The agency tested one batch of glycerin from the factory, and found no glycerin, only diethylene glycol and two other substances, a drug official said.

Since then, the Chinese drug administration has concluded that it has no jurisdiction in the case because the factory is not certified to make medicine.

The agency reached a similar conclusion about Fortune Way, saying that as an exporter it was not engaged in the pharmaceutical business.

“We did not find any evidence that either of these companies had broken the law,” said Yan Jiangying, a spokeswoman for the drug administration. “So a criminal investigation was never opened.”

A drug official said the investigation was subsequently handed off to an agency that tests and certifies commercial products — the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

But the agency acted surprised to learn that it was now in charge. “What investigation?” asked Wang Jian, director of its Taixing branch. “I’m not aware of any investigation involving a glycerin factory.”

Besides, Huang Tong, an investigator in that office, said, “We rarely get involved in products that are sold for export.”

Wan Qigang, the legal representative for the Taixing Glycerine Factory, said in an interview late last year that the authorities had not questioned him about the Panama poisoning, and that his company made only industrial-grade glycerin.

“I can tell you for certain that we have no connection with Panama or Spain,” Mr. Wan said.

But in recent months, the Glycerine Factory has advertised 99.5 percent pure glycerin on the Internet.

Mr. Wan recently declined to answer any more questions. “If you come here as a guest, I will welcome you,” Mr. Wan said. “But if you come again wanting to talk about this matter, I will make a telephone call.”

A local government official said Mr. Wan was told not to grant interviews.

A five-minute walk away, another manufacturer, the Taixing White Oil Factory, also advertises medical glycerin on the Internet, yet it, too, has no authorization to make it. The company’s Web site says its products “have been exported to America, Australia and Italy.”

Ding Xiang, who represents the White Oil Factory, denied that his company made pharmaceutical-grade glycerin, but he said chemical trading companies in Beijing often called, asking for it.

“They want us to mark the barrels glycerin,” Mr. Ding said in late December. “I tell them we cannot do that.”

Mr. Ding said he stopped answering calls from Beijing. “If this stuff is taken overseas and improperly used. ...” He did not complete the thought.

In chemical country, product names are not always what they seem.

“The only two factories in Taixing that make glycerin don’t even make glycerin,” said Jiang Peng, who oversees inspections and investigations in the Taixing branch of the State Food and Drug Administration. “It is a different product.”

All in a Name

One lingering mystery involves the name of the product made by the Taixing Glycerine Factory. The factory had called its syrup “TD” glycerin. The letters TD were in virtually all the shipping documents. What did TD mean?

Spanish medical authorities concluded that it stood for a manufacturing process. Chinese inspectors thought it was the manufacturer’s secret formula.

But Yuan Kailin, a former salesman for the factory , said he knew what the TD meant because a friend and former manager of the factory, Ding Yuming, had once told him. TD stood for the Chinese word “tidai” (pronounced tee-die), said Mr. Yuan, who left his job in 1998 and still lives about a mile from the factory.

In Chinese, tidai means substitute. A clue that might have revealed the poison, the counterfeit product, was hiding in plain sight.

It was in the product name.

I think all of the food producers who made this sh!t should be fed melamine until they are all dead.

Sadly, human life is pretty cheap over in China. If you paid enough money, you could probably get the Chinese officials to mail you their brain stems or something.

But I agree. You kill our pets knowingly, we kill you.

I've never heard of any individual that holds all animal life in contempt to be a good member of society. Most of the malcontents that abuse animals just haven't progressed far enough to do the same to humans. They would if they could, I wager.

Wow. I read the whole article, and that is just plain murder. The Chinese ****head who originally sold the tainted glycerin knew exactly what he was doing.

And the Chinese are merely "debating" on whether or not to kill him?

In my enraged opinion, they should find out just what that ****head cares about and destroy it in front of his eyes, then kill him.

We can't control what Panama does, but what the US should do is make it law that if a US company sells any product that kills or injures US citizens in that manner, the CEO and their families will be fed the tainted material until whatever happened to the victims happens to them.

I guarantee if that was put in place, all the US companies that produce material for human consumption will begin to rigorously screen and test any chemicals they receive from other sources. Twice.

It seems the US companies are dropping the ball in recent months. If one US citizen dies from this ****, then there should be justice done.

but what the US should do is make it law that if a US company sells any product that kills or injures US citizens in that manner, the CEO and their families will be fed the tainted material until whatever happened to the victims happens to themThe American company that buys the raw product is hardly to blame, especially if middlemen hide the source. The manufacturer of the final product can't conceivably test every raw material for every possible contaminant, and that burden should not be on them in the first place.

I think we should ban imports where we can't certify the origin of the stuff. And I think we should have a moratorium on food imports from China until they're willing to enforce better controls on their end.

Washington Post: It's not just pet food (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042201163.html?hpid=opinionsbox1)

I think we should ban imports where we can't certify the origin of the stuff. And I think we should have a moratorium on food imports from China until they're willing to enforce better controls on their end.

Washington Post: It's not just pet food (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042201163.html?hpid=opinionsbox1)


I agree Panamah, why we would continue to buy from them until we know the products are safe I don't understand. Now I need to research our vitamin supplement.

And I think we should have a moratorium on food imports from China until they're willing to enforce better controls on their end.

I agree.

Tell Beelzubub to put on his mittens.

I think we should ban imports where we can't certify the origin of the stuff. And I think we should have a moratorium on food imports from China until they're willing to enforce better controls on their end.


If I understood the news article correctly the tainted food and also the poisonous glycerine did have certificates about their quality and origin. They were just fabrications by some middle man who knew he could not dump that shipment if it were known to be from China.

All this is really just the less pleasant side effect of globalisation of manufacturing and trade. Neither production nor trade can in any way be monitored nor regulated, allowing people with the business ethics of Dzenghis Khan to do whatever they want.


Eri

I've never heard of any individual that holds all animal life in contempt to be a good member of society.

Even as a hunter, I do not hold my animal quarry in contempt.

The opposite really. Great respect.

If I understood the news article correctly the tainted food and also the poisonous glycerine did have certificates about their quality and origin. They were just fabrications by some middle man who knew he could not dump that shipment if it were known to be from China.
I think you're right, the gluten was declared as a non-food item from what I recall. But we do have pretty tight measures in place for importing drugs (from a few "trusted" countries) I can't see why we can't implement something along those lines for food items but I don't really know anything about the process, maybe it's very hard.

But at the very minimum... I want to know if the food I'm buying contains ingredients from out of the US and preferably where they originated from. Right now the consumer has absolutely NO clue.

Right now the consumer has absolutely NO clue.The consumer also has no clue whether the food they're eating is real, or genetically modified. Or whether the meat they're eating is loaded with hormones. Even if the product is domestically produced (actually, especially if). This data is hidden from the consumer, to generate more profit, and the mega-companies have their hooks in the government to ensure it stays that way.

The consumer protection bandwagon has more stops than you think.

Even as a hunter, I do not hold my animal quarry in contempt.

The opposite really. Great respect.Fyyr, developing a set of morals? Surely this IS a sign of the apocalypse.

Even as a hunter, I do not hold my animal quarry in contempt.

The opposite really. Great respect.

I'm not referring to hunting, of course. My previous posts should be viewed with contempt being defined as similar attitudes as expressed by the original manufacturers of the tainted products. "They're just animals, who cares what happens to them?" type of attitude.

Hunters and other outdoorsmen that I know who collect game from the wild generally have an ingrained respect of the animal's sacrifice of its life so that they may eat.

There are exceptions to that statement. No group of humans is immune from asshats. But they are a very small percentage from my personal observations.

The American company that buys the raw product is hardly to blame, especially if middlemen hide the source. The manufacturer of the final product can't conceivably test every raw material for every possible contaminant, and that burden should not be on them in the first place.

I disagree. If a US company serves it to Americans, they better make 100% sure it's safe. Or it should be legal for the survivors, or the families of the victims to come after the employees of the company who had the authority to authorize testing of all sub-component batches of chemicals, but chose not to do so.

I'm not talking civil lawsuits either.

Of course my fantasy world would never happen, but if it did, every US company would be testing the **** out of things that came out of their plants if the products were to go into citizens' mouths.

Of course my fantasy world would never happen, but if it did, every US company would be testing the **** out of things that came out of their plants if the products were to go into citizens' mouths.And you'd be buying $100 bottles of aspirin, $250 pizzas, and a $500 meal at McDonald's.

Even issues like contamination are subject to economic pressures. If the risk of injury is extremely low and the cost of preventing that extremely unlikely injury is very high, we're not going to implement the policy. That's a good thing, because resources are limited, and if we focus them on preventing some unlikely contamination, we'll be taking them away from other areas where they're needed.

We let people die, every day, just because we don't want to spend the extra money to prevent their deaths. And these are real deaths, not the potential ones that you're talking about. Real people, dying because we'd rather buy iPods and PS3s than help them.

Hunters and other outdoorsmen that I know who collect game from the wild generally have an ingrained respect of the animal's sacrifice of its life so that they may eat.Compared to the domesticated animal industry, hunters are Mother Teresa, or Gandhi. Most of the industry belongs in prison for the torture they inflict just to squeeze out a little profit (and that's where they'd be, if they weren't specifically exempted from animal cruelty laws).I've never heard of any individual that holds all animal life in contempt to be a good member of society. Most of the malcontents that abuse animals just haven't progressed far enough to do the same to humans. They would if they could, I wager.Indeed, there's evidence that serial killers and other psychopaths often "practice" on animals before moving on to humans.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_he_me/food_contamination_14<b>Farmed fish fed contaminated material</b>

WASHINGTON - Farmed fish were fed meal spiked with an industrial chemical linked to the ongoing recall of pet foods, though the contamination level was probably too low to pose a danger to anyone who may have eaten the fish, federal health officials said Tuesday.

The Canadian-made meal included what was purported to be wheat gluten, a protein source, imported from China. The material was actually wheat flour spiked by the chemical melamine and related, nitrogen-rich compounds to make it appear more protein rich than it was, officials said.

After pigs and chickens, the farmed fish mark the third food animal given contaminated feed.Amazing how much worldwide food contamination a couple of small Chinese companies can cause.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_he_me/food_contamination_14Amazing how much worldwide food contamination a couple of small Chinese companies can cause.


Sounds suspicious, don't it.

X Files kinda crap.

Maybe the melamine was delivered by bees.

Sounds suspicious, don't it.

X Files kinda crap.

Maybe the melamine was delivered by bees.

Now that you mention it ... bee hives are kind of dying out left and right throughout the country and nobody can figure out why ...


Eri

;)

Colony Collapse disorder, it isn't so much that they're dying, they just don't go home. Hey... perhaps the aliens are abducting our bees now! They're not finding dead bees...

We're supposedly safe, somehow I wonder exactly what else we're missing.

Text of link behind spoiler.

http://body.aol.com/news/articles/_a/why-tainted-animal-feed-poses-little/n20070504090409990022

Why Tainted Animal Feed Poses Little Threat to Humans
By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter

HealthDay
FRIDAY, May 4 (HealthDay News) -- Despite the massive recall of melamine-tainted pet food and numerous reports of dog and cat deaths, consumers really do have little to fear from the news that hogs and chickens sold to the public also ate the tainted feed, health experts say.

So why are pets at risk but not humans?

Because melamine itself carries a very low toxicity to humans, the dose consumers may have received in pork or chicken is very low compared to that eaten by pets in their food, and because cats and dogs also differ greatly -- physiologically speaking -- from their owners.

That's the word from health experts responding to consumer concerns about the widening scare.

U.S. officials charge that companies in China added melamine -- a compound often used to create fire-retardant products -- to exported wheat gluten and rice protein, ingredients that were later mixed into pet foods. The addition of melamine can falsely inflate the protein content in the foods.

The scandal has led to the recall of more than 100 pet food products during the past two months, as well as the quarantine this week of thousands of chickens and hogs.

More than 3 million chickens and 345 hogs suspected of eating feed contaminated with surplus, melamine-tainted pet food have already been sold and consumed by Americans nationwide, health officials say.

However, "nothing that has been shown so far is of real [health] concern, as far as human-consumed products go," said Dr. Barry Kellogg, a Florida-based veterinarian and medical director of disaster services at the Humane Society of the United States.

His view agrees with recent statements by officials at both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"We believe the likelihood of a human illness from melamine is unlikely," Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection, told reporters late Thursday. He and other government officials say they have so far turned up no sign of melamine-linked sickness in either humans or in the chickens and hogs fed the contaminated pet food.

However, it has been tough for people to square those statements with news that anywhere between 16 and 4,000 dogs and cats may have died from tainted food.

Why might something that may have caused lethal kidney failure in animals be harmless for people eating potentially melamine-tainted meat?

There are many reasons mitigating consumers' risk, experts say. They include:


Melamine's low toxicity. "As recently as 2000, [experts] almost took melamine off the list of products to be tested [in foods], because its toxicity is so low," Kellogg said. In fact, one standard measure of a compound's ability to cause harm found that people would have to ingest three times their body weight of melamine to run any serious health risk.
Lower dosages. "Remember, dogs and cats are primarily eating just one product, so they were eating [melamine] at high concentrations every day," noted Dr. Stephen Hooser, assistant director at Purdue University's Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. Hooser also suspects that Chinese workers who added the melamine to wheat gluten and rice proteins may have added much more to some lots than to others. "So, there might have been some spots where there was a lot of it, and that got passed on to certain pets," Hooser said. Humans, on the other hand, didn't eat the pet food directly. Instead, it was fed to hogs or chickens who naturally excrete much of the melamine away. In fact, very little of the compound could be expected to settle in the animals' muscle tissue -- the prime source of meat eaten in the United States. And, unlike pets eating a single food, consumers "are not exclusively eating chicken or pork," Hooser said.
Different physiologies. "There are lots of differences between species on how they respond to chemicals," Hooser noted. Cats can develop kidney failure from chewing on Easter lilies, and dogs can die after eating grapes -- neither of which harm humans. Cats, especially, have very acidic urine, and it could be that melamine and its metabolite, cyanuric acid (also detected in the recalled pet food), "might form crystals in the kidneys of cats. So, the acidity of their urine may help in the formation of these damaging crystals," Hooser said.
The bottom line: The current melamine scare offers little or no threat to the health of the typical U.S. consumer, the experts said.

The health of their pets is not so certain, however. According to Kellogg, it's still not even clear how many cats and dogs died from eating the tainted products.

"We don't have all the answers yet," the Humane Society expert said. "You have to realize that kidney failure is the number one cause of death and illness in dogs and cats as they age. So, whenever there is media awareness of a problem, everyone is going to look a lot closer."

The FDA has officially put the pet-food linked animal death toll at just 16 dogs and cats. But on Thursday, the agency said pet owners nationwide have reported the deaths of 1,950 cats and 2,200 dogs potentially linked to consumption of the tainted food.

"What's the real number? I honestly, at this point, don't know," Kellogg said.

In the meantime, the recalls roll on. On Thursday, Ontario, Canada-based pet food manufacturer Menu Foods announced it was widening its recall of suspect foods to include cuts of gravy and other select products. An updated list of all recalled Menu Food products is available at the company's Web site at http://www.menufoods.com.

Reacting to the scandal, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted 94-0 in favor of stricter production and labeling standards on pet foods, so consumers can be better informed about what they are feeding their pets.

That move came as welcome news to Kellogg.

"I think the pet food industry has been somewhat overlooked in terms of regulation," he said, especially "some of the practices that have gone on and still go on in terms of raising protein content. I always hesitate to look at the 'byproducts' label on food that you buy, because you really don't know what that byproduct might be."

More information

For more information on the pet food recall, visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

SOURCES: Stephen Hooser, D.V.M., Ph.D., associate professor, toxicology, head of toxicology section, and assistant director, Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind.; Barry Kellogg, D.V.M., medical director, disaster services, Humane Society of the United States, Nokomis, Fla; May 3, 2007, press conference, U.S. Food and Drug Administration

What distrubs me is that the stuff that was supposed to be rice protein, was wheat flour. :\ Stuff that a lot of people are allergic too.

I'm thinking that advertising products as "Does not contain ingredients from China" might be a really good marketing strategy:

Poisonous toothpaste now (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=3199210&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312)

[QUOTE=Panamah]I'm thinking that advertising products as "Does not contain ingredients from China" might be a really good marketing strategy:

Yes please!!!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/05/22/national/w093004D29.DTL<b>US Hears Blunt Trade Warning From China</b>

(05-22) 11:43 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) -- The United States and China opened a new round of high-level economic talks on Tuesday with the leader of China's delegation bluntly saying that any effort to politicize economic differences between the two nations was not acceptable.

The Bush administration was pushing for concrete results to show to an increasingly restive Congress, where lawmakers blame America's soaring trade deficits and the loss of one in six manufacturing jobs since 2000 in part on China's trade practices in such areas as currency manipulation and copyright piracy.

The U.S. delegation also raised the issue of food safety highlighted by such incidents as the deaths of pets who had eaten pet food made with tainted wheat gluten imported from China.

U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, who briefed reporters on the discussions, said food safety was raised over breakfast by Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns and Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt.

"They know this is an issue that concerns us and concerns the American people," said Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who said the issue would be addressed more formally in a later session before the talks conclude on Wednesday.

In opening remarks delivered in an ornate government auditorium decked out in flags from both nations, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi cautioned the United States against pursuing a blame-game.

"We should not easily blame the other side for our own domestic problems," Wu said, speaking through an interpreter. "Confrontation does no good at all to problem-solving."

Wu, who gained a reputation for tough speaking when she was China's top trade negotiator, said that both sides should "firmly oppose trade protectionism." She said that any effort to "politicize" the economic relationship between the two nations would be "absolutely unacceptable."

Wu and her delegation were scheduled to meet behind closed doors on Thursday with key leaders of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been a vocal critic of China's human rights policies. Lawmakers are pushing a variety of bills that would impose economic sanctions on China in the wake of a trade deficit with China that last year hit $232.5 billion, accounting for one-third of America's total record deficit of $765.3 billion.I suspect the Chinese dictatorship is going to step in and try to crush this problem, before our lucrative trade dollars start dwindling.

They are making some moves regarding food safety, I hope they will make some serious improvements with the inspectors now in place.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070529/ap_on_re_as/china_tainted_food

I'm thinking that advertising products as "Does not contain ingredients from China" might be a really good marketing strategy:

Poisonous toothpaste now (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=3199210&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312)The tainted toothpaste has now been showing up in the U.S. too, not just in central America:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02toothpaste.html<b>Toxic Toothpaste Made in China Is Found in U.S.</b>

Consumers were advised yesterday to discard all toothpaste made in China after federal health officials said they found Chinese-made toothpaste containing a poison used in some antifreeze in three locations: Miami, the Port of Los Angeles and Puerto Rico.

Although there are no reports of anyone being harmed by the toothpaste, the Food and Drug Administration warned that the Chinese products had a “low but meaningful risk of toxicity and injury” to children and people with kidney or liver disease.

The United States is the seventh country to find tainted Chinese toothpaste within its borders in recent weeks.

Agency officials said they found toothpaste containing a small amount of diethylene glycol, a sweet, syrupy poison, at a Dollar Plus retail store in Miami, sold under the brand name ShiR Fresh Mint Fluoride Paste. The F.D.A. also identified nine other brands of Chinese toothpaste that contain diethylene glycol, some with concentrations of 3 percent to 4 percent.

Previously, only a few brands had been identified by health officials around the world as containing diethylene glycol and all of them listed the chemical on the label.

But diethylene glycol was not listed on the label of the toothpaste found in the Miami store. Its presence was detected only because the F.D.A. began testing imported Chinese toothpaste last month. That precaution was prompted by the discovery in Latin America of tens of thousands of tubes of tainted toothpaste made in China.

Over the years, counterfeiters have found it profitable to substitute diethylene glycol for its chemical cousin, glycerin, which is usually more expensive. Glycerin is a safe additive commonly found in food, drugs and household products. In toothpaste, glycerin is used as a thickening agent.

Chinese regulators said Thursday that their investigation of toothpaste manufacturers there had found they had done nothing wrong. Chinese officials also said that while small amounts of diethylene glycol could be safely used in toothpaste, new controls would be imposed on its use in toothpaste.

The F.D.A. said diethylene glycol in any amount was not suitable for use in toothpaste.

The agency said two Chinese companies, Goldcredit International Trading and the Suzhou City Jinmao Daily Chemicals Company, made the tainted brands found in the United States.

In a statement yesterday, federal health officials called diethylene-glycol poisoning “an important public safety issue.” The Panamanian government last year inadvertently mixed the poison made in China into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine, killing at least 100 people, prosecutors there said.

In that case, Chinese regulators acknowledged on Thursday that two companies in China had “engaged in some misconduct” in the way they labeled and sold the diethylene glycol, but they said a Panamanian importer bore most of the blame.

Last month, after publicity over the poisoning deaths from the cold medicine, a consumer in Panama noticed that toothpaste in a store listed diethylene glycol as an ingredient and notified the authorities. Eventually it was traced to China, and since then countries around the world have been on the lookout for the product.

In addition to the United States and Panama, tainted toothpaste has been found in Australia, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Chinese exports of toothpaste to the United States account for $3.3 million out of a $2 billion-dollar market in America, F.D.A. officials said. “The scope of this is fairly small when you look at all the toothpaste that is consumed in the U.S.,” Doug Arbesfeld, an agency spokesman, said.

The agency said Chinese-made brands with diethylene glycol were typically sold at low-cost, “bargain” retail outlets. A man answering the phone at the Dollar Plus store in Miami, identified by federal officials as selling the Chinese toothpaste, said he did not want to be interviewed because his English was poor. The man, who did not give his name, said federal inspectors came to his store yesterday.

Mr. Arbesfeld said that six tubes were confiscated there and that several more were found at the store’s distributor. Those tubes were destroyed. F.D.A. officials also said they had confiscated several brands of toothpaste at the Port of Los Angeles and at a retail store in Puerto Rico.

The agency said toothpaste containing diethylene glycol was sold under the names Cooldent Fluoride, Cooldent Spearmint, Cooldent ICE, Dr. Cool, Superdent, Clean Rite, Oralmax Extreme, Oral Bright, Bright Max, and ShiR Fresh Mint.