Posted on 04/03/2007 4:34:03 PM PDT by Arizona Carolyn
The March 16 recall of 91 pet food products manufactured by Menu Foods wasn't big news at first. Early coverage reported only 10-15 cats and dogs dying after eating canned and pouched foods manufactured by Menu. The foods were recalled -- among them some of the country's best-known and biggest-selling brands -- and while it was certainly a sad story, and maybe even a bit of a wake-up call about some aspects of pet food manufacturing, that was about it.
At first, that was it for me, too. But I'm a contributing editor for a nationally syndicated pet feature, Universal Press Syndicate's Pet Connection, and all of us there have close ties to the veterinary profession
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I agree with you.... and yet people are trying to play down the China connetion to this entire mess.
~ROFLOL!~
You’re reading those numbers wrong. That’s not 5% of all the pets treated at Animal Medical Center, much less 5% of all the pets in the region AMC serves, but 5% of the pets treated for kidney failure at AMC. In other words, 95% of the kidney failure cases they’d seen were NOT attributable to the contaminated pet food. The vast majority of pets living in this country currently don’t have kidney failure from any cause.
If babies eating Gerber’s got sick from a contaminant in the food, what party is “responsible” would depend on how the contaminant got into the food, and whether there was a reasonable way for Gerber to have detected it before it was shipped out to stores. If a domestic or foreign terrorist stealthily contaminates an ingredient that is shipped to Gerber, with a contaminant that is difficult to detect and unlikely to specifically looked for, the “responsibility” would lie with the perpetrator of the act. If an employee on the canning machinery, with no history of trouble that Gerber’s could know about, decided one day to stealthily start putting a few drops of a strong poison into jars of an already tested batch of food, right before the lids go on, the employee would be at fault.
The trouble with the home-cooking route is that few pet owners are both knowledgeable and dedicated enough to supplement these foods so that they’re nutritionally complete. Not to mention that there have been problems from time to time with basic human food items (like the bagged spinach last year) and with supplements packaged for humans, so home-cooking is not a guarantee of safety.
The American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine is recommending that pet owners continue to feed their pets commercially prepared pet foods, and just avoid the specifically recalled items. I don’t think they’re stupid, and I don’t think any of them are taking up home-cooking for their pets’ food.
How do you think people successfully feed their families on a day-to-day basis? How did they feed pets before there was dog food? How did they feed babies before Gerber? It’s not brain surgery, manufacturers would have everyone think it is, but it is not.
I spoke with the AP reporter today who is working on the story. The thing I pointed out is that the company identified in China in the CNN story has already said (in the April 2 AP story) that they sold to OTHER EXPORTERS. They even named one. I wrote this other exporter and they said they needed to know who at Xuzhou Anying sold the products to them at their company. Since I wasn’t the one who had that conversation I forwarded this onto the AP reporters in DC and in Shanghai who did the story.
Now ponder on this. Would we even be having this discussion in public if Joy here (on pet connection) didn’t dig up Xuzhou Anying’s name buried in an FDA database?
The FDA hasn’t revealed who else is buying and selling this wheat gluten. Just like the didn’t reveal the US distributor until the AP did.
Maybe the FDA wants to be more forthcoming, but they are being held back by industry agreements.
The USDA cut a deal with the people at ConAgra that made info about who bought food propriety. That is why when BSE was found in a cow it got into the human food supply and into a vietnamese restaurant in Truckee. The concern was first for the companies and later for the health of the consumers. If they are playing those games with humans of course they would do the same for pets.
Another person commented that fruits and vegetables are grown in "night soil" in China -- night soil being human excement. Can anyone confirm if this is true?
Acute renal failure is actually more common in young dogs and cats, because they’re more active and more likely to get into poisons around the house and garden. Chronic renal failure is usually age-related, but there’s no evidence that it’s related to food, except in the few cases where it’s secondary to diabetes (actually secondary to hypertension, which is often secondary to diabetes), which can be caused by feeding obligate carnivores a high-carb diet. I have an ancient cat who has been diabetic for 2 years and in chronic renal failure for 4 years. Needless to say, his renal failure is not secondary to diabetes, and the diabetes actually appeared a few months after I switched him to a very high protein diet (heavily supplemented Gerber’s all-meat baby foods), though there’s no reason to suspect a connection.
I participate in a large internet group devoted to chronic kidney failure in cats, and have never seen any evidence or even suspicion voiced, that kidney failure is appearing at “younger and younger ages”. My cat was 17 when he was diagnosed with very early stage, still asymptomatic kidney failure. The veterinary nephrologist who is a consultant to the group (and who is a vet school professor who teaches nephrology) has never indicated any suspicion of a connection between high-carb foods and kidney failure. In her lecture notes, which are posted online, she lists the causes of renal damage as: “immune-mediated inflammation, infection, ischemia, nephrotoxins, congenital abnormalities, heredofamilial abnormalities, trauma, postrenal obstruction, neoplasia, hypertension, diabetes, electrolyte disturbances” http://www.vetsites.vin.com/Kidney/CRF.doc
There are a lot of good reasons to feed cats and dogs high protein diets, but warding off kidney failure isn’t one of them.
The foundation that funds the American Veterinary Medical Association lists these companies as big donors
Benefactor - $100,000 or above
Merial
$25,000 and above
Chicago Veterinary Medical Association
The Cleveland Foundation
New York State Veterinary Medical Society
$10,000 and above
Idexx Corporation
Steven Leuthold Family Foundation
Oppenheimer Brothers Foundation
Pennsylvania Veterinary Foundation
VCA Antech, Inc.
Diamond - $5,000 - $9,999
Dr. & Mrs. Roger Mahr
Dr. & Mrs. Richard Coon
Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Inc.
MWI Veterinary Supply
Louis & Celia Nussman Fund
Rathmann Family Foundation
L.E.A.W. Family Foundation, Inc.
The vet on the list, who happened to be an expert on TBD's, said it was his sincere desire that more vets would test for TBD's in the dogs with renal failure but many are not putting two and two together.
This hit home because I had a dog with Cushings who was also showing renal failure when by happenstance a substitute vet recommended a complete senior blood workup on her and the upshot was she did have undiagnosed Ehrlicha and Ehrlicha takes a huge toll on the kidneys. The snap test is unreliable in testing for tick disease. So yes, there is a lot of reasons for renal failure, but contaminated food should not be one of them.
I appreciate
you're a passionate person
but so are the types
who freak out over
the JFK/Dallas thing,
globalist monsters,
daycare child abuse,
and other would-be nightmares.
All current events
are not deep and dark
conspiracies where evil
goons are hood-winking
decent citizens.
Relax. Everyone cares but
no one should freak out.
Interesting. I don’t know much about renal disease in dogs, as I only have cats myself, and the main renal failure group I participate in is cat-specific. I do participate in another related group (re the use of calcitriol in pets with renal failure) that gets a few dog owners participating. I’ll be sure to mention that in the future when dog owners turn up on the group. I would assume that most TBDs are treatable, and that timely treatment would therefore tend to slow the progression of renal failure if the disease was at the root of, or a contributing factor to the renal failure. I know that renal failure tends to progress a lot faster in dogs than in cats, and while I think there are other reasons for this, TBDs might be part of the explanation, since nearly all dogs spend a lot of time outdoors and many are allowed to go for runs in wooded and brushy areas, while many cats are indoor-only or (like my cats) go outside a lot, but stick close to their suburban gardens where ticks are rare.
Apparently CNN is going to do an update tonight on this story and show that footage of the facility in China that supplied the food. It's supposed to be on sometime this hour on that Anderson Cooper show (which I had never watched until last night, and only because of this story).
One thing that I think is really scary is this: if you look at the lot numbers of the wheat gluten that ChemNutra distributed (listed in their press release), you will see that there are large gaps. That means that the lot numbers not imported by ChemNutra have gone somewhere else -- who knows where? More pet food manufacturers? Or to human food manufacturers? I hope the FDA is trying to track this down.
Segment on now!
This allows the spirochet to basicall curl up and play dead only to return with a vengence when the treatment is stopped.
I learned a great deal, more than I wanted to know, on the Tick-L list about the treatment protocol.. there was a few cats on the list, but you are correct, the majority is dogs; and I learned that it's better to do the more extensive test and prove the dog doesn't have a TBD than take a chance.
In the case of my dog there was so many overlapping symptoms of the Cushings vs Ehrlichia that it was pure luck we discovered the Ehrlichia.
We had unexpected company. I’ll look for the rerun (again)... I understand Lou Dobbs got involved with this also.
While some of what you say is true, I sincerely hope you aren’t trying to minimize the true scope and magnitude, not to mention the overall significance of the root issues here. And there is a clear difference between early detection of chronic kidney failure vs. early detection of acute kidney failure.
And you don’t think a 5% increase in deaths related to ARF is significant?
Why are you minimizing this? What is the point of trying to minimize this?
And please cite your source for saying that “most vets are reporting no increase at all in kidney failure cases.” The article you linked doesn’t say anything like that, so where are you getting that information, or are you making a completely illogical and unrelated leap from the 5% illness statistic reported in the link you posted?
I am dumbfounded as to why you are trying to minimize this huge and severe issue.
Can you say insurance?
Can you say they shouldn’t have poisoned so many pets if they didn’t want to or couldn’t afford to pay the price, literally?
Can you say it’s not the dead pets’ fault that Menu Foods doesn’t make enough money to be able to pay for all these Vet bills?
Can you say they should go bankrupt and close down if they don’t do the right thing here? Nevermind, nobody has to say that... because if they don’t do the right thing here, people will stop buying their food anyway, so they will go bankrupt one way or the other.
YOU are reading those numbers wrong too. As you said, thousands of pets across the country are diagnosed with kidney failure every week. So an additional 5% is ALOT of additional sick/dead pets.
Furthermore, AMC reviewed cases for the period from March 17-20, which is a 4-day period immediately after the recall (March 16). The recall happened on a FRIDAY (16th), and everyone at FR knows why companies/Govt release bad news on a Friday - so that very few people hear it and so it will be old news by Monday (19th). So the cases that AMC reviewed most likely don’t represent a large influx of paranoid pet owners, and they also most likely don’t represent an accurate percentage of recall-related cases because pet owners didn’t yet know what symptoms to watch for as indicators of ARF... so a pet owner who saw their cat get lethargic and skip a meal or two on Monday didn’t recognize those as potentially fatal, EMERGENCY symptoms, so they didn’t take their pets to Vets until the story had been in the news for awhile.
Many pets died at home without even seeing a Vet, so they would never be counted in an AMC-type statistic. In other words, 5% more kidney failure cases than “normal” at AMC is HUGE.
17% of the animals who ate the contaminated food in Menu Foods’ own taste tests died! Menu Foods’ food feeds 5 million pets.
Imagine if the human kidney failure rate was increased by 5% due to a food contaminant. Would you be minimizing that? And please don’t reply with anything that resembles “No, but cats and dogs are not humans.”
It’s called Quality Control. I worked in a tiny little mom-and-pop strawberry packing plant, and even that tiny plant had their own QC lab tech who sampled and tested the product all day long every day for quality and standards.
You make some good arguments about a contaminant that is difficult to detect and unlikely to be specifically looked for. No arguments there.
But if you look at the timeline here, Menu Foods knew there were problems with the food already on the market back in January (at least) when customers were reporting illness and deaths. Subsequent to that, they conducted their own taste tests and 17% of those animals died and another (~35%) had kidney failure but survived (at least initially)... yet they STILL didn’t recall the food. It took them at least 3 more weeks before they recalled the food.
So the jury is still out on whether they dropped the ball on testing their own product, on Quality Control, etc. But it is VERY clear that they did not act in a timely manner after KNOWING the had shipped 60 MILLION units of potentially contaminated food.
You nailed it on the home cooking issue: The vast majority will not educate themselves sufficiently to cook appropriately for their pets. So the reality is that for the vast majority of people/pets, the best commercial food they can afford, from a safe/trustworthy company, is probably their best option.
However, as for the ACVIM being stupid or not... just remember they are not nutritionists. Vets receive 2 weeks of nutritional instruction during Vet school. MOST Vets don’t know much about nutrition, and even fewer know anything about pet food. And the truth is, the FDA doesn’t know where all the contaminated wheat gluten went or whether they have identified all the contaminated food yet. So I caution everyone regarding feeding commercial foods that are not (at this time) on the recall list: If you are feeding any of the nationally-branded commercial foods, wet or dry, on or off the recall list, monitor your pets closely for symptoms related to the recall issue. If any change in your pet is observed, especially any of the noted symptoms, stop feeding that food immediately and get your pet to the Vet for exam and any appropriate diagnostic tests.
re “night soil” — I am too tired to search for a link/”proof”, but I have heard the same thing. Not necessarily that ALL fruits and veggies are grown in night soil, but “some” is more than I care to eat. ;-)
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