Posted on 04/24/2007 8:04:13 AM PDT by dawn53
Lost amid the anxiety surrounding the tainted U.S. pet food supply is this sobering reality: It's not just pet owners who should be worried. The uncontrolled distribution of low-quality imported food ingredients, mainly from China, poses a grave threat to public health worldwide.
Essential ingredients, such as vitamins used in many packaged foods, arrive at U.S. ports from China and, as recent news reports have underscored, are shipped without inspection to food and beverage distributors and manufacturers. Although they are used in relatively small quantities, these ingredients carry enormous risks for American consumers. One pound of tainted wheat gluten could, if undetected, contaminate as much as a thousand pounds of food.
(Excerpt) Read more at sptimes.com ...
Great links. Too bad I use a couple of the herbal supplements on the first link.
The caveat of “free trade” that is being ignored is that one should not engage in free trade with your enemy. Free trade all you want with free countries. This mess is just suicidal and foolish, and could be the death of all of us.
I don’t know why we haven’t immediately stopped receiving consumables from China, the minute they said no to inspections?
I am going to ask my local HFS to inquire where the main brands they sell are coming from and about their quality control.
Can you imagine what would happen in this country is we shut down Chinese imports? This is madness.... and personally, I don’t buy that vitamins can be made cheaper in China than USA — not in this day and age of automation... I suspect it has more to do with fewer hassels from QA regulations — which have gone overboard in this country since Jimmy Carter’s days in the WH... the manuals in most companies are horendous and whole departemts keep track of QA, OSHA, etc..
It looks like they are cooperating now, but I’ll bet they have had time to hide what they didn’t want inspectors to see.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/24/business/24pets.php
China yields to U.S. investigation on pet food
BEIJING: China on Monday gave American regulators permission to enter the country to investigate whether Chinese suppliers exported contaminated pet food ingredients to the United States earlier this year, leading to one of the largest pet food recalls in American history.
Representatives of the United States Food and Drug Administration had been blocked from entering China, despite growing evidence that the tainted pet food that killed at least 16 cats and dogs and sickened thousands of other animals in the United States originated with Chinese exporters of wheat gluten and other animal feed ingredients.
The FDA confirmed Monday that it has now opened a criminal investigation into the pet food scandal, but the agency did not name the target or say whether any American companies may have intentionally laced animal feed with banned ingredients. On Tuesday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is scheduled to hold hearings on how to secure the safety of the country’s food supply.
Last Thursday, the FDA expanded its already large pet food recall after it found more evidence that an industrial chemical called melamine had contaminated the supplies of additional pet food makers, including Royal Canin US and C. J. Foods.
The agency, which has already recalled more than 60 million packages of pet food, is also investigating imports of rice protein from China.
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Regulators in California said this week that they had found melamine in rice protein animal feed that was fed to livestock, and the fear is that the chemical could have entered the human food supply chain through hogs.
Laboratory testing in California had detected melamine in urine from hogs at the American Hog Farm in Ceres, California. California regulators have alerted anyone who purchased pork from American Hog Farm from April 3 to April 18 to be cautious.
In its news release over the weekend, the FDA also identified a second Chinese company that had exported animal feed tainted with melamine to American pet food and animal feed suppliers.
Reached by telephone Monday in China, the company, Binzhou Futian Biological Technology, declined to comment. Earlier this month, regulators said another Chinese company, the Anying Biological Technology Development Company in Xuzhou, had sold wheat gluten contaminated with melamine to suppliers of American pet food.
China’s State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, which is responsible for overall food safety issues here, declined to respond to questions sent to the agency Monday.
American regulators now believe the Chinese companies may have intentionally added melamine to their feed ingredients to artificially bolster the protein count in those supplies in order to meet requirements.
A Chinese expert here said Monday that it was possible melamine could have been used to bolster protein counts.
“If the melamine level is high, it must have been added intentionally.” Liu Laiting, a professor of animal sciences at the Henan University of Technology. “The amine in melamine can boost the protein level in tests, because it has chemical element N. It’s also likely to increase the adhesiveness of the gluten.” Liu added that melamine was hard to detect in ordinary tests.
Regulators have not made a definitive link between melamine and the deaths of animals that consumed it. But melamine is not approved for use in animal or human foods and therefore any use of it would be illegal.
The pet food scandal could seriously harm United States-China trade relations if it was determined that Chinese companies had intentionally altered food ingredients. And even if the contamination was unintentional, the scandal could cast a pall over imports of food or feed ingredients from China, where food safety measures are widely believed to be lax.
I believe you can purchase them here (after registering):
https://www.nutraaccess.com/main.asp?pageID=11
"We do not sell directly to consumers. Our products are sold in bulk form and transformed into a consumer product by other manufacturers."
You have to register as a store or company... I tried
Looks like they are trying to go Chinese from the second article I found.. time to put extreme pressure on all the products we use to bring back to the States...
I was going to post this on another related thread from earlier.
I wanted to go to the store and double check, have done it.
Christopher Ranch garlic, the Gilroy Ca. giant.
Their chopped garlic in a jar,
Made In China.
Since you put it that way, I guess it isn’t feasable to shut out “everything” that China sells us. China gets breaks in QA that American companies don’t. I believe this is dead wrong. I also believe the time has come to quit paying farmers NOT to grow crops. when there is a glut of one product, then switch to another...such as herbs. What can China grow that we can’t?
OSHA. Yikes :(
I doubt that the source of the ingredients will be listed on the packaging. Only the country of manufacture I suspect.
Doesn't surprise me. Saddam had 12 yrs to hide WMD's. Sacks of melamine wouldn't be too hard to hide.
When is the government going to "get it"? You just don't do free trade with countries that have shown animosity towards us. Btw, great article. Very detailed info.
I agree with you..... or we start growing our own — though here in the desert that is easier said than done. Between bad soil, heat, rabbits and pigeons, but I could certainly figure something out...
Agree, I bet they have “cleaned up” the sites.... now we can come in. How stupid is our government?
Sam’s brand juices have Arkansas as the origin address. Obviously the cranberries in my juice are not grown in Arkansas, but where the hell does the apple juice come from or the rasberries in Cranapple and Cranrasberry juice under the Sam’s brand name? You can’t get them to tell you at the store because they don’t know and don’t care. If you call Arkansas they will not tell you specifically where contents come from. So how the hell do you find out?
I agree. I think comprehensive food inspection should come under “providing for the common defense.”
Good luck with that. You'll probably be told to call the companies, who in turn will tell you that they keep "strict control" over their facilities and ingredients -- just like the pet food manufacturers. /sarc
Here's a good example involving Blue Buffalo:
From the Pet Food List, with information verified by Blue Buffalo before the rice protein recall:
Blue Buffalo (verified by company 3/27/07)
- BLUE BUFFALO VOLUNTARILY RECALLS ONE FOOD. 4/19/07 See website for details
- Brands include BLUE for dogs, and Spa Select for Cats
- No products made by Menu Foods (have never used Menu)
- Products do not contain wheat gluten, soy, or corn
- All ingredients from US except lamb from New Zealand
- They do not manufacture food in their own facility. Manufacturer is confidential but they have their own vets and staff on location at all times and ingredients are tested before and after each run.
Editors note: According to Blue Buffalo website, some products contain rice protein concentrate.
From Blue Buffalo, after the rice protein recall:
We have taken this action (voluntary recall of Spa Select Kitten dry food) because the rice protein concentrate used for this one production run was obtained from Wilbur-Ellis, the same company who supplied this ingredient to Natural Balance. Test results received late last evening (4/18) indicated that this rice protein concentrate tested positive for melamine. This is the first and only time our manufacturing partner sourced an ingredient from Wilbur-Ellis, and we had no knowledge that they had imported the ingredient from China.
So, on 3/27, they claimed all their ingredients (except NZ lamb) were from the US, and on 4/18, they admit that rice protein from China is in one of their formulas, and that they had "no knowledge" of it, despite their claim that "ingredients are tested before and after each run."
It makes you wonder a) how many degrees of separation there are between these companies and their manufacturing "partners," and b) if they care -- or will even care after this fiasco -- about anything other than the bottom line.
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