I'm posting this from another list.....it's very long, but worth the read for those of you who are concerned about this recall:
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The March 16 recall of 91 pet food products manufactured by Menu Foods
wasn't big news at first. Early coverage reported only 10-15 cats and
dogs
dying
after eating canned and pouched foods manufactured by Menu. The foods
were
recalled -- among them some of the country's best-known and
biggest-selling
brands -- and while it was certainly a sad story, and maybe even a bit
of a
wake-up call about some aspects of pet food manufacturing, that was
about it.
At first, that was it for me, too. But I'm a contributing editor for a
nationally syndicated pet feature, Universal Press Syndicate's Pet
Connection,
and
all of us there have close ties to the veterinary profession. Two of our
contributors are vets themselves, including Dr. Marty Becker, the vet on
"Good
Morning America." And what we were hearing from veterinarians wasn't
matching
what we were hearing on the news.
When we started digging into the story, it quickly became clear that the
implications of the recall were much larger than they first appeared.
Most
critically, it turned out that the initially reported tally of dead
animals
only
included the cats and dogs who died in Menu's test lab and not the much
larger number of affected pets.
Second, the timeline of the recall raised a number of concerns. Although
there have been some media reports that Menu Foods started getting
complaints
as
early as December 2006, FDA records state the company received their
first
report of a food-related pet death on February 20.
One week later, on February 27, Menu started testing the suspect foods.
Three days later, on March 3, the first cat in the trial died of acute
kidney
failure. Three days after that, Menu switched wheat gluten suppliers,
and 10
days later, on March 16, recalled the 91 products that contained gluten
from
their previous source.
Nearly one month passed from the date Menu got its first report of a
death
to the date it issued the recall. During that time, no veterinarians
were
warned to be on the lookout for unusual numbers of kidney failure in
their
patients. No pet owners were warned to watch their pets for its
symptoms. And
thousands and thousands of pet owners kept buying those foods and giving
them
to
their dogs and cats.
At that point, Menu had seen a 35 percent death rate in their test-lab
cats,
with another 45 percent suffering kidney damage. The overall death rate
for
animals in Menu's tests was around 20 percent. How many pets, eating
those
recalled foods, had died, become ill or suffered kidney damage in the
time
leading up to the recall and in the days since? The answer to that
hasn't
changed
since the day the recall was issued: We don't know.
We at Pet Connection knew the 10-15 deaths being reported by the media
did
not reflect an accurate count. We wanted to get an idea of the real
scope of
the problem, so we started a database for people to report their dead or
sick
pets. On March 21, two days after opening the database, we had over 600
reported cases and more than 200 reported deaths. As of March 31, the
number of
deaths alone was at 2,797.
There are all kinds of problems with self-reported cases, and while we
did
correct for a couple of them, our numbers are not considered
"confirmed." But
USA Today reported on March 25 that data from Banfield, a nationwide
chain of
over 600 veterinary hospitals, "suggests [the number of cases of kidney
failure] is as high as hundreds a week during the three months the food
was on
the market."
On March 28, "NBC News" featured California veterinarian Paul Pion, who
surveyed the 30,000 members of his national Veterinary Information
Network and
told anchor Tom Costello, "If what veterinarians are suspecting are
cases, then
it's much larger than anything we've seen before." Costello commented
that it
amounted to "potentially thousands of sick or dead pets."
The FDA was asked about the numbers at a press conference it held on
Friday
morning to announce that melamine had been found in the urine and
tissues of
some affected animals as well as in the foods they tested. Dr. Stephen
Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine, told reporters
that
the
FDA couldn't confirm any cases beyond the first few, even though they
had
received over 8,800 additional reports, because "we have not had the
luxury of
confirming these reports." They would work on that, he said, after they
"make
sure all the product is off the shelves." He pointed out that in human
medicine, the job of defining what constitutes a confirmed case would
fall to
the
Centers for Disease Control, but there is no CDC for animals.
Instead, pet owners were encouraged to report deaths and illness to the
FDA.
But when they tried to file reports, there was no place on the agency's
Web
site to do so and nothing but endless busy signals when people tried to
call.
Veterinarians didn't fare much better. They were asked to report cases
to
their state veterinarian'Veterinarians didn't fare much better. They
were asked
to report cases to their state veterinarian'<WBR>s office, but one
feline
veterinary blog, vetcetera, which surveyed all official state
veterinarian Web
sites, found that only eight had any independent information about the
recall,
and only 24 even mentioned it at all. Only one state, Vermont, had a
request
on their site for veterinarians to report pets whose illnesses or deaths
they suspect are related to the recall. And as of today, there is no
longer a
notice that veterinarians should report suspe
The lack of any notification system was extremely hard on veterinarians,
many of whom first heard about the problem on the news or from their
clients.
Professional groups such as the Veterinary Information Network were
crucial in
disseminating information about the recall to their members, but not all
vets
belong to VIN, and not all vets log on to VIN on the weekend (the Menu
press
release, like most corporate or government bad news, was issued on a
Friday).
But however difficult this recall has been for veterinarians, no one has
felt its impact more than the owners of affected dogs and cats. While
the pet
media and bloggers continued to push the story, the most powerful force
driving
it was the grief of pet owners, many of them fueled by anger because
they
felt that their pet's death or illness wasn't being counted.
Many of them were also being driven by a feeling of guilt. At Pet
Connection, we received a flood of stories from owners whose pets became
ill
with
kidney failure, and who took them to the vet. The dogs or cats were
hospitalized
and treated, often at great expense -- sometimes into the thousands of
dollars
-- and then, when they were finally well enough, sent home.
For some, the story ended there. But for others, there was one more
horrifying chapter. Because kidney failure causes nausea, it's often
hard to
get
recovering pets to eat. So a lot of these owners got down on their hands
and
knees and coaxed and begged and eventually hand-fed their pets the very
same
food
that had made them sick. Those animals ended up right back in the
hospital
and died, because their loving owners didn't know that the food was
tainted.
To many pet owners, the pet food recall story is a personal tragedy
about
the potentially avoidable loss of a beloved dog or cat. Others have a
hard time
seeing the story as anything more than that -- with implications beyond
the
feelings of those grieving pet owners. Which brings us to the bigger
picture,
and questions -- not about what happened but about the system.
How did this problem, now involving almost every large pet food company
in
the United States, including some of the most trusted -- and expensive
--
brands, get so out of hand? How come pet owners weren't informed more
rapidly
about the contaminated pet food? Why is it so hard to get accurate
numbers of
affected animals? Why didn't veterinarians get any notification? Where
did the
system break down?
The issue may not be that the system broke down, but that there isn't
really
a system.
There is, as the FDA pointed out, no veterinary version of the CDC. This
meant the FDA kept confirming a number it had to have known was only the
tip of
the iceberg. It prevented veterinarians from having the information they
needed to treat their patients and advise pet owners. It allowed the
media to
repeat a misleadingly low number, creating a false sense of security in
pet
owners -- and preventing a lot of people from really grasping the scope
and
implication of the problem.
And it was why Rosie O'Donnell felt free to comment last week on "The
View":
"Fifteen cats and one dog have died, and it's been all over the news.
And
you know, since that date, 29 soldiers have died, and we haven't heard
much
about them. No. I think that we have the wrong focus in the country.
That when
pets are killed in America from some horrific poisoning accident, 16 of
them,
it's all over the news and people are like, 'The kitty! It's so sad.'
Twenty-nine sons and daughters killed since that day, it's not
newsworthy. I
don't
understand."
In fact, Rosie didn't understand. She didn't understand that the same
government she blames for sending America's sons and daughters to die in
Iraq
is
the government that told her only 15 animals had died, and that the
story was
about a pet "poisoning accident" and not a systemic failure of
FEMA-esque
proportions.
Think that's going too far? Maybe not. On Sunday night, April 1, Pet
Connection got a report from one of its blog readers, Joy Drawdy, who
said that
she
had found an import alert buried on the FDA Web site. That alert, issued
on
Friday, the same day that the FDA held its last press conference about
the
recall, identified the Chinese company that is the source of the
contaminated
gluten -- gluten that is now known to be sold not only for use in animal
feed,
but in human food products, too. (The Chinese company is now denying
that
they are responsible, although they are investigating it.)
Although the FDA said on Friday it has no reason to think the
contaminated
gluten found its way into the human food supply, Sundlof told reporters
that
it couldn't be ruled out. He also assured us that they would notify the
public
as soon as they had any more information -- except, of course, that they
did
have more information and didn't give it to us, publishing it instead as
an
obscure import alert, found by chance by a concerned pet owner, which
was
then spread to the larger media.
All of which begs the question: If a system to report and track had been
in
place for animal illness, would this issue have emerged sooner? Even
lacking
a reporting and tracking system, if the initial news reports had
included, as
so many human stories do, suspected or estimated cases from credible
sources, it's likely this story would have been taken more seriously and
not
just by
Rosie O'Donnell. It may turn out that our dogs and cats were the
canaries in
the coal mine of an enormous system failure -- one that could have
profound
impacts on American food manufacturing and safety in the years to come.
Christie Keith is a contributing editor for Universal Press Syndicate's
Pet
Connection and past director of the Pet Care Forum on America Online.
She
lives in San Francisco.
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evelyn
they bought the wheat gluten from China and then proceeded to sell it to several pet food companies in the U.S. and one in Canada (MenuFoods).
