Posted on 11/28/2008 8:41:00 AM PST by Dr. Marten
Public health groups, consumer advocates and members of Congress blasted the Food and Drug Administration yesterday for failing to act after discovering trace amounts of the industrial chemical melamine in baby formula sold in the United States.
"This FDA, this Bush administration, instead of protecting the public health, is protecting industry," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the FDA budget. In an interview, DeLauro said she wants the agency to disclose its findings and to develop a plan to remove melamine from formula. "We're talking about babies, about the most vulnerable. This really makes me angry."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ping.
The FDA should be recalled.
“Bush’s Fault”
How many more YEARS do we have to listen to this crap?
Since when does anyone in government care about babies? Babies are disposable commodities.
I don’t even blame China any more. They’re just doing what they do. The buyers on the other hand should be held to a higher standard.
I want to know the levels. It might be 0.001 parts per trillion. You can’t draw any conclusions until you know that. This might be like the pharms in the water story. Yeah, pharms are in some water supplies, but what they didn’t tell ya was that to get a daily dose worth of pharms, you’d have to drink an olympic-sized swimming pool’s worth of water every day! I need more info!
We, as a nation, are crazy to allow China to produce and/or manufacture most all of our necessities. They are about making lots of money, they know it will take time for the effects to show up as death ... They do not allow us inspections of their factories/plants etc. Our corporations do not care either. True!
Who knows they (China) may be using it as a means of population control. We are fools to let them have control of our food, and production of our armaments, medicines, etc.,
It made sense to me that the politicians would not endanger themselves, or their immediate families, ... I was wrong.
What can we do about it?
Nestle has cut corners before.
We do the same thing with our animals. Companies place chemicals in the feed for longer shelf life, without regard to what it does to the animal. People feed this stuff, even though they know about some of it. I’ve been in the horse business for over 40 years and my horses live long happy lives. Others have horses that die young and/or are sick all the time. It’s the feed folks.
Psychiatric Projection.
There was an article on Yahoo news the other day about this situation. The article cited the amounts in the different brands, and my impression was that the melamine was not from the milk products but from packaging and processing, and was very minute. I’ll try to the article.
On Sunday, Sundlof said the agency had never said, nor implied, that domestic infant formula was going to be entirely free of melamine.
In China, melamine was intentionally dumped into watered-down milk to trick food quality tests into showing higher protein levels than actually existed.
The concentrations of melamine there were extraordinarily high, as much as 2,500 parts per million. The concentrations detected in the FDA samples were 10,000 times smaller — the equivalent of a drop in a 64-gallon trash bin.
According to the FDA, data for tests of 77 infant formula samples showed a trace concentration of melamine in one product — Nestle's Good Start Supreme Infant Formula with Iron. The FDA had two positive tests on one sample, with readings of 0.137 and 0.14 parts per million, FDA spokeswoman Judy Leon said Wednesday.
An FDA spreadsheet the AP received Monday under its FOIA request attributed those results to Mead Johnson's Infant Formula Powder, Enfamil LIPIL with Iron. On Wednesday, Leon said the FDA's spreadsheet contained an error — that the information provided to the AP had incorrectly switched the names of the Mead Johnson product with the Nestle product.
Leon said Wednesday that a corrected spreadsheet shows that it was Mead Johnson's Infant Formula Powder, Enfamil LIPIL with Iron in which FDA detected an average of 0.247 parts per million of cyanuric acid, a melamine byproduct.
Mead Johnson spokesman Pete Paradossi said the FDA had not informed his company of any of its test results until an emergency conference call Wednesday.
The FDA said last month that the toxicity of cyanuric acid is under study, but that in the meantime, it is "prudent" to assume that its potency is equal to that of melamine.
And while the FDA said tests of 18 samples of formula made by Abbott Laboratories, including its Similac brand, did not detect melamine, spokesman Colin McBean said some company tests did find the chemical. He did not identify the specific product or the number of positive tests.
McBean did say the Abbott detections were at levels far below the health limits set by all countries in the world, including Taiwan, where the limit is 0.05 parts per million.
The FDA tests also detected melamine in two samples of nutritional supplements for very sick children who have trouble digesting regular food. Nestle's Peptamen Junior medical food showed 0.201 and 0.206 parts per million of melamine while Nestle's Nutren Junior-Fiber showed 0.16 and 0.184 parts per million.
The agency said that while there are no established exposure levels for infant formula, pediatric medical food — often used in feeding tubes for very sick, young children — can have 2.5 parts per million of melamine, just like food products other than infant formula.
The head of manufacturing for Nestle Nutrition in North America, Walter Huber, said in an interview that the company took samples alongside FDA officials who visited a manufacturing plant, and that those samples showed similar results to what FDA found for the two pediatric medical foods. Huber added that Nestle didn't find cyanuric acid in any of the samples.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who heads a panel that oversees the FDA budget, said the agency was taking a "marketplace first, science last" approach.
"The FDA should be insisting on a zero-tolerance policy for melamine in domestic infant formula until it is able to determine conclusively based on sound independent science that the trace levels would not pose a health risk to infants," DeLauro said.
Several medical experts said trace concentrations would be diluted even in an infant, and are highly unlikely to be harmful.
"It's just a tiny amount, it's very unlikely to cause stones," said Stanford University Medical School pediatrics professor Dr. Paul Grimm.
Dr. Jerome Paulson, an associate professor of pediatrics at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., said he didn't think the FDA's decision was unreasonable. He added, however, that the agency should research the impacts of long-term, low-dose exposure, "and not just assume it's safe, and then 15 years from now find out that it's not."
This, from the same scumbags that want to nationalize the pharma and energy industries. This idiot accuses the Bush admin of protecting industry but would gladly destroy industry if given the chance.
This report should be taken with a block of salt until we know how much melamine was found and the source is determined.
So what do you feed your horses? We were given the sister of a horse we bought, and she was a bag of bones. We gave her strategy with corn oil mixed in, and she’s in great shape now, after 5 months here. But that’s expensive, so now that we are starting to have to feed again since the pasture stopped growing, we’re giving good quality hay and sweet feed. We have four. Two TW’s and two qh’s.
Well, certainly it's annoying that the Dems immediately blame everything on Bush. But at this point they have some justification, IMHO. Bush has been in office now for eight years, and if he hasn't cleaned out the clintonoids yet--which he hasn't, in many areas of his government--then the responsibility now is HIS.
As HST said, "The buck stops here." There was plenty of warning with the dogfood scandal, which the FDA pretty much tried to cover up or minimize until veterinarians started speaking out. But Bush seems to be unwilling or unable to DO anything about the corruption and subversion in his administration.
Somebody in the FDA obviously loves trade with China more than the safety of our citizens.
I was surprised and reassured when I read that it’s illegal for American poultry producers to give antibiotics, steroids etc. to chickens and turkeys as a standard procedure. There has to be something detectable in the flock before they can dose them with meds.
It prevents them from building resistant disease strains. It’s kinda like I’ve always done with aquarium fish. If I medicate them too much it fails to work next time.
What’s wrong with breast feeding?
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