[DBrow]

At Home Depot, the Melamine is a melamine-formaldehyde polymer.

In some countries they use melamine monomer as a fertilizer- six nitrogen, three carbons and six hydrogens, a good source of nitrogen.

In the US we use ammonium nitrate, but some countries don't trust their citizens with stuff like that (we make about 6 million tons a year and so far only Karl Armstrong and Tim McVeigh have misbehaved).

China has been known to use melamine as a fertilizer and sometimes as a sort of pesticide.

Point is, melamine plastic and melamine monomer are different.

I think that some bags of fertilizer got mixed with bags of wheat and processed, or a tank car was used for fertilizer then wheat without cleaning.

[sig226]

Even if they mixed an entire tank car of the stuff in with the wheat gluten, it should have made a high concentration of toxin in a few batches, then been diluted in the subsequent batches. I hope that they cleaned the line after each lot. I expect that they at least purged the system when they went from one kind of food to another - say from tuna to chicken.

Even if they were blending wheat gluten from several different sources, the contaminated gluten would have to have a high amount of poison in it to be dangerous after blending, which would dilute it. This is possible, but I think unlikely. I still suspect bacteria. It might be something new, or an evolved bacteria that's harmless by itself, but excretes toxic waste products.

[arasina]

I should've read your post before I typed mine in. You answered my question. (I thought the melamine that was mentioned was the plastic type.) .... anyway .... thanks.