If they confirm some specific deaths, they have to confirm all of them, or pet-owners will be suing because the FDA confirmed some other specific pet’s death, but not their pet’s, leaving the other pet owner with an advantage in court when suing the manufacturer. This just isn’t the FDA’s job, and it’s having a hard enough time doing the things that ARE its job.
They are gathering data and analyzing it with the knowledge that the data is very imperfect. In many cases, it is simply impossible to determine whether or not a contaminated food was to blame, or some other factor, or a combination of the two. Few vets have been willing to confirm contaminated food as a cause of illness or death in specific animals they’ve treated themselves, because such certainty simply doesn’t exist — especially when there has not been a definitive identification of the contaminant or contaminants responsible for the overall problem. The FDA is confirming the deaths which can be confirmed by virtue of the fact that they occurred under controlled lab conditions. They are clearly acknowledging and investigating a much wider problem, but there’s no benefit to their changing their public statements from “We have confirmed food-related deaths in 16 lab animals and believe that there have been many more food related illnesses and deaths among pets” to “We have confirmed food-related deaths in 16 lab animals and 27 pets and believe that there have been many more food related illnesses and deaths among pets”. Who cares what tiny subset of pet illnesses and deaths they might have specifically confirmed? It doesn’t help solve the larger problem, and whatever number they could give would be much smaller than the actual number, and much smaller still than the owner-claimed number, and just set off another round of people howling that the FDA is greatly under-reporting the numbers.
The counts on that Pet Connection self-reporting site do not purport to be even remotely confirmed, and include everyone who has made a report, even those who answered “No” to the question “Has your pet been seen by a veterinarian?”, and who answered “No” to the question “Did you check the code number to confirm that it was from a recalled batch?” , and who left blank the answer box for the question “Which of the recalled products did your pet eat?” It’s unlikely the data being collected there would even be helpful to FDA investigators, since it does not even ask for specific batch numbers. I assume the FDA is attempting to collect that information when it takes reports, but frankly, most people throw out empty pet food cans and pouches pretty quickly, so I’d be surprised if more that half of the people making reports can cite a specific batch number that the pet definitely ate.
We can argue about details of what FDA does or doesn't do all day long. Frankly, none of that is relevant to me. What is relevant is that someone has a moral responsibility to make sure that people are informed when something this severe and deadly is in the food supply. And you can bet that if this same situation were happening in the human food supply (with the same numbers of human illnesses and deaths), the FDA would darn-sure be reporting "potentially thousands" of deaths, and they would be freggin' adamant, urgent, and LOUD about it, whether or not ANY of them could be confirmed at the time. They would darn sure make sure that additional deaths didn't happen on their watch. Look at how urgently they (and the media) reported on the Spinach e-coli issue, and that affected a fraction of the numbers that this recall does. So as far as I'm concerned, it's bullpuckey to say the FDA's press releases wouldn't change things if they reported some tiny subset of confirmed illnesses. Here's why:
I belong to a very large animal rescue group that feeds thousands of animals and we can always use donations of food for our animals. When the recall first came out, I personally was trying to obtain some of the recalled food for our animals because "only 16 animals died" out of 60 million cans/pouches recalled and that was such a small number that it was worth taking the risk vs. letting the animals starve to death because we never get enough donations. If I had been successful in doing what I envisioned, which was to get truckloads of the recalled food shipped to our group, we would have potentially KILLED thousands of animals rather than helping them. Fortunately for those animals, I continued to dig into the story and found that the risk was much much higher than "16 animals out of 60 million cans/pouches."
So how many individuals are out there who are NOT well-connected in the animal world like I am, who are simply hearing the "16" animals died, and who are making the same deadly assumption that I did, which is "Only 16 dies, so what are the chances I would get one of the bad cans out of the 60 million cans? The risk is extremely low, so I'll just keep feeding it to Fido."
But if those same individuals would hear on the news "Thousands of animals may be dead or dying due to the recalled pet food. The numbers are not able to be confirmed, but it is imperative that you do not feed your pets this food, because the risk is unknown and may be quite high." The italics indicate TRUE statements that are sufficiently non-committal so they would not put the FDA in a position of confirming any specific deaths, etc., which is what you are concerned about.
You are intelligent enough to know that Lawyers write vague language all the time, so the FDA darn sure could have come up with language that was sufficiently protective of the "public health" (in this case Pets) without locking them into essentially publically testifying on behalf of Pet owners. The fact that FDA did NOT express the severity and urgency and magnitude and risk of this recall is morally reprehensible, regardless of whatever their freggin' regulatory constraints may or may not be. I'll say again, you can be darn sure that if this recall related to human food/illness/death, they would have been LOUDLY all over the news.
We are going to have to agree to disagree from here forward, because I am a perfectly competent, rational, well-informed person, and I will never agree that it "wasn't the FDA's job" to report on the higher numbers, or to report the severity, urgency, magnitude, and risk associated with this recall. The only reason they didn't is because these were "just animals", not people, and that is just plain wrong in my book.