This evening, Menu Foods has extended the recall backwards to "to pet food made between Nov. 8 and March 6," per Bloomberg.com. Wasn't Menu's rationale for its original cutoff date of March 6 the fact that that was the date the wheat gluten in question was added to the food? And now food produced up to four months earlier is being recalled, after pet owners may have been feeding this food for the past few weeks, thinking it was safe?
If the pet food industry (with the assistance of the FDA) intentionally set out to bankrupt itself, they couldn't have done a better job than they're doing right now, IMO.
In addition, according to the same report, the FDA is now modifying it's position on melamine being the sole contaminant:
``We still have a lot of work in understanding why melamine is involved,'' said Stephen Sundlof, the director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, today in a news conference. ``We are relatively certain there is a connection here someplace.'' (Well, that's reassuring/sarc)
>>snip<<
Melamine may be linked to another substance that hasn't yet been identified that could have contributed to pet deaths, Sundlof said.
Since the Chinese supplier in question also exports other grains, including, IIRC, corn gluten, which is also used extensively in pet food, I can't help wondering if this will turn out to be a matter of cumulative poisoning over a period of months, with more than one contaminated ingredient and/or toxin involved.
I don’t quite get the dates you’re citing. The earliest reports of pet illness and death from Menu Foods products were back in late December. I would think that anything made AFTER March 6 is what would be safe (at least as safe as anything is). Menu Foods has said from the start that they had already stopped using the new wheat gluten supplier at the time the recall started. Perhaps they’ve extended the date further back for some reason, but I don’t think they extended it further forward. In this era of “just in time” manufacture and delivery, there’s probably little or no food left on store shelves that was made as far back as November, though there’s likely to be a bit more in people’s cupboards. So the AVMA statement that food being SOLD NOW is safe would be generally true, as long as you steer clear of foods in dusty packages that look like they’ve been on the shelf for an unusual length of time.
Re the “is it the melamine?” question, veterinary experts have been saying since the first day melamine was mentioned that it really couldn’t account for the severe effects seen in dogs, and that it was unknown whether it could produce such severe effects in cats. I’ve never thought for a minute that it was established that melamine was the responsible agent, and I’ve never seen any statement from the FDA that suggested they thought so. The FDA found melamine in pet food that shouldn’t have been there, and MIGHT be responsible for at least some of the food-related kidney failure cases. Foods believed to contain melamine were recalled because the melamine shouldn’t have been there, and because there was at least some known risk from it (of mild and non-permanent kidney damage in dogs), not because a conclusion had been reached that it was THE explanation for all these pet illnesses and deaths.
My point throughout this has been that we don’t really know what the contaminant is, so we clearly don’t know how it got into this batch of wheat gluten (and now there’s even some question as to what country the wheat gluten originated from), and so we really have no idea what else the contaminant might be in. Some of the over-the-top panicking over “pet food”, when there’s very real reason to be concerned about human food, just strikes me as seriously misdirected. There’s no reason to think that a non-recalled brand/flavor of pet food is less likely to be safe than any human food on the market containing wheat gluten (and there are a LOT of those), yet many people are steering clear even of non-recalled brands that don’t contain any wheat gluten, and taking up home-cooking for their pets.
This whole thing is looking like a step-by-step instruction manual to al-Qaeda on how to generate a mass panic and serious economic damage in the US, very easily and inexpensively. That’s the main reason I’ve felt it’s worth the effort to chime in and try to inject some reason and perspective when people start making irrational statements.