China probing tainted wheat gluten claim.... Only 873 tons have been linked to the contaminated pet food in America, raising the possibility that more of the bad product could still be in China or the United States. Xuzhou Anying says the U.S. is its only foreign market.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said Friday that importing the ingredients for food products from developing countries is becoming "increasingly common."
"This is what globalization is about," said Nestle, who is writing a book about pet food.
While regulators recognize that more and more food is reaching the U.S. from developing countries, Nestle said the Food and Drug Administration is not equipped to sufficiently monitor its quality.
"The FDA is an agency under siege," she said, lacking the funding and manpower to adequately screen imported food, though they are slowly being "reluctantly dragged into it, kicking and screaming."
An FDA spokeswoman, Vash Klein, said the agency did not have time to comment on Friday.
Nestle said that she has always wondered why imported vegetables from Mexico, for example, don't make Americans sick when American tourists traveling in Mexico often get sick from vegetables they eat there. Experts have told her, she said, that Mexican vegetables slated for export to the U.S. are "produced under conditions that are identical to conditions in the U.S."
"But if you think about it for a second, you realize that the FDA isn't going off into the wild to inspect everything," Nestle said, noting that the agency is able to inspect only 2 percent of the goods that cross U.S. borders.
Neal Hooker, a professor of agricultural economics at Ohio State University, said that while the FDA cannot inspect every good that comes into the U.S., it does insist that developing countries meet higher production standards for the goods they intend to send to the U.S.
Hooker said the agency can be fairly effective, despite its infrequent product inspections, because it brings pressure to bear on the system of production and works with foreign governments to ensure compliance.
But government regulations are not the only -- or even the most effective -- means of enforcing high standards. Hooker said the market also offers powerful incentives.
The pet food companies who received tainted ingredients, for instance, "are going to ask for things much more rigorously than a nation can ask for. And they will get them," he said, or they will take their business elsewhere.
Similarly, he said, Mexican vegetable growers may have even higher production standards than U.S. farmers because certain hygienic practices can increase the shelf-life of food, allowing the use of slower -- and cheaper -- shipping methods.
Friday, April 06, 2007
Pet poison: Congress to hold hearings, implications sinking in
Thursday, April 05, 2007
TIME on pet food: last post of the day on this topic
Unraveling the Pet-Food Mystery | TIMEI wonder how "balanced" those vitamins really need to be - especially for dogs. Goldstein needs to point to some science. In the meantime we're going to go "organic" as a starting point, though it will be a gradual migration. (Gradual because our dog's diet is already gluten free, migration because this has shown how insane the pet food industry is.)
... critics of the pet food industry point to two factors that may contribute to unsafe food: the centralization of the process for making food and the use of unsanitary material from rendering plants. The recall brought to light that the wheat gluten, which was eventually recalled, came from a single Chinese company but ended up in over 100 brands of pet food. ChemNutra Inc., based in Las Vegas, bought 873 tons of gluten from the Chinese company, farmed it out to three pet food makers and one distributor that services the industry. A highly centralized process may be cheap, but "at that size and scale if something goes wrong it goes wrong big time," says Nestle.Rendering plants, which boil down dead animal carcasses from slaughterhouses into fats and proteins, sell cheap material that often ends up in pet food. The "meat" in your cat's kibbles could be any kind: there's no law against even using rendered material from cats and dogs in pet food. Plants can mix in anything from road kill to supermarket deli meats, and investigations by KMOV-TV in St. Louis and the Los Angeles Times have suggested that pets killed in animal shelters just might make it into the slop. The Pet Food Institute, whose members create most of the dog and cat food sold in the U.S., told the Times that pets are not allowed in their products. But the FDA has admitted to finding "very, very low levels" of sodium pentobarbital — the chemical used to euthanize animals — in some brands of dog food. Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the U.S. said the allegations need more scrutiny. "The pet food industry is not the most transparent of industries and it has been really difficult for the public to obtain information," he says.
What Should You Feed Fido?
Besides staying away from recalled products, pet owners might want to consider using natural food from smaller companies. "I would suggest feeding pets organic instead of commercial dog food from big companies who are focused on filling food at the cheapest price," says Friedrich from PETA. Some pet lovers are bypassing store food altogether, serving up home cooked meals — everything from bone-shaped biscuits to homemade hamburgers. Sales of cookbooks for cats and dogs have increased dramatically, according Nielsen BookScan. But Goldstein of Cornell warns against cooking for your pet. "I would hate for people to stop using commercial pet food, because it's the healthiest diet in the long term for dogs and cats who need multiple vitamins at the proper ratios."
Poisoning 2007: Melanine as a marker, and where the heck did the stuff come from?
22 Brands of Dog Biscuits Are Added to Pet Food Recall - New York TimesTons of gluten apparently just materialized from thin air, contaminated with all kinds of junk. Sounds like the vets suspect the Melanine is just one more contaminant and that the real poison may take months to find.
... Menu Foods, which last month recalled more than 90 brands of its “cuts and gravy” pet food, said yesterday that it had extended the period of time covered by its recall to include food made after Nov. 8, 2006. The company, based in Ontario, initially recalled only food made from Dec. 3, 2006, to March 6, 2007.The company also added 20 additional varieties of those brands to the recall list yesterday. Information about the recalled pet food can be found at www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/petfood.html.
Menu Foods said it acted after a supplier, ChemNutra of Las Vegas, recalled all wheat gluten it had imported from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company of Wangdien, China. ChemNutra said Wednesday that the F.D.A. had found melamine in the gluten. The agency said it was now testing all wheat gluten from China.
The Chinese government said yesterday that no wheat gluten had been exported to the United States or Canada. Xuzhou Anying denied it had ever shipped wheat gluten to either country.
“We are a trading company and don’t manufacture the product,” added Mao Lijun, the company’s general manager. Michael Rogers, director of the Division of Field Investigations for the F.D.A., said records showed that the tainted gluten came from China.
... Melamine, which is also used as a slow-release fertilizer, is generally not known to be toxic. Some theories are that it might act as a marker for another unknown toxin that causes renal failure in pets, Dr. Sundlof said, or that cats and dogs are extremely sensitive to melamine.
“We still have a lot of work to do to understand why melamine is involved, as it is a relatively nontoxic substance,” Dr. Sundlof said. “We are relatively certain that there is a connection here someplace.”
... Dr. Halbur and Grant Maxie of the University of Guelph in Ontario, which is also investigating the cause of the illnesses and deaths, said it would probably take months to determine what made the pets sick.
In the meantime, the whole story gets more appalling.
Update: The NYTs has a f/u article ...
April 6, 2007
China Says It Had Nothing to Do With Tainted Pet Foods
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI, April 5 — China said today that it had no record of exporting any agricultural products that could have tainted the pet food that has been linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in the United States.
The government said that wheat gluten — which has been linked to a nationwide pet food recall in the United States — had not been exported from China to the United States or Canada. The government also disputed some reports that the chemical aminopterin, a rat poison, could have entered the American pet food supplies from China. The government said the chemical is not used in rat poison here...
...the Chinese company identified by the Food and Drug Administration as the exporter tied to the tainted pet food ingredient denied today that it was the source.
“We have never exported wheat gluten directly or indirectly to the U.S., Canada or the Netherlands,” said Mao Lijun, the general manager of the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, an agricultural products company in the coastal Jiangsu Province.
...ChemNutra, a Las Vegas company that supplies pet food makers, said it imported 792 metric tons of wheat gluten from Xuzhou between Nov. 29 and March 8. The products were then shipped from its Kansas City warehouse to three pet food makers and one distributor of pet food ingredients in the United States and Canada.
The wheat gluten ended up in pet food made for several companies, including Menu Foods of Ontario, Canada and Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a division of Colgate-Palmolive as well as private label pet foods.
But Xuzhou now insists it never shipped the packages.
“Maybe some company bought our product and exported it without our knowledge,” said Mr. Mao, the general manager of Xuzhou Anying.
Earlier today, however, The Associated Press reported that another official working at Xuzhou had acknowledged that the company shipped wheat gluten to the United States...
... Agricultural product and melamine traders here in China said today that the chemical is sometimes used as a fertilizer but that Chinese farmers have turned away from it in recent years because it is considered too costly.
They also said melamine was used in a wide variety of manufactured goods all over the country, everything from DVD’s to plastic forks and knives, and was widespread in areas where wheat production is strong...
Poisoning 2007: ChemNutra, Anying, and it keeps getting worse
Tainted pet food may be sold in China - Pet Health - MSNBC.comChemNutra? I couldn't make that one up. Talk about factory food.
... The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week blocked wheat gluten imports from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. in the eastern Chinese city of Xuzhou, saying they contained melamine, a chemical found in plastics and pesticides.
Anying produces and exports more than 10,000 tons of wheat gluten a year, according to its Web site, but only 873 tons were linked to tainted U.S. pet food, raising the possibility that more of the contaminated product could still be on the market in China, or abroad.
Li Cui, director of Anying's foreign exports, told The Associated Press on Thursday the United States is the company's only overseas market for wheat gluten, although it wasn't clear if the company had more than one customer in the U.S.
... An official at the Chinese Ministry of Health, who refused to give his name, said the case was not an issue for the ministry and directed questions to the Ministry of Agriculture. An official there, who also refused to give his name, told The Associated Press to stop calling...
Both ministries also did not respond to faxed questions on whether they had concerns about tainted gluten in China.
The tainted wheat gluten underscores China's dismal food-safety record. Mass food poisoning cases are common in the country, many blamed on cooks who disregard hygiene rules or mistakenly use industrial chemicals instead of salt and other ingredients.
Last year, seven companies were punished for using banned Sudan dye to color egg yolks red. In 2004, at least 12 infants died from malnutrition after drinking formula with little or no nutritional value in eastern China's Anhui province.
Other recent cases include 30 high school and primary students who became sick this week after eating beef soup at a small restaurant in Zhejiang province in eastern China.
Last month, 57 people were hospitalized in Zhejiang after eating food laced with rat poison, while nearly 400 people were hospitalized with possible food poisoning after a wedding banquet in Yunnan province in southern China.
ChemNutra Inc., the Las Vegas-based company that imported the wheat gluten and shipped it to companies that make pet foods, said Tuesday that Xuzhou Anying had never reported the presence of melamine in the content analysis it provided.
Earlier this week, another official at the Chinese company said the gluten was not manufactured by Xuzhou Anying, but was bought from companies in neighboring provinces.
Melamine is used to make plastic kitchenware, glues, countertops, fabrics, fertilizers and flame retardants. It also is both a contaminant and byproduct of several pesticides, including cyromazine, according to the Environmental Protection Agency...
We're importing manufactured food of uncertain providence from a country that can't even begin to regulate food safety for their own citizens? An industrial product that even the alleged manufacturer can't say where they got it from? This is lunacy. (I imagine Japanese steak fans felt the same way about US beef imports after our mad cow outbreaks ...).
Update: The Toronto Star adds this footnote:
The story of the GOP's Pharma benefit bill (Medicare D) oozes out ...
Congratulations to 60 Minutes for covering a topic the GOP would love to forget ... Emphases mine.
NEW YORK, April 1, 2007
... One reason those profits have exceeded Wall Street expectations is the Medicare prescription drug bill. It was passed three-and-a-half years ago, but as 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft reports, its effects are still reverberating through the halls of Congress, providing a window into how the lobby works.
... It certainly wasn't ugly for the drug lobby which invested more than $10 million in campaign contributions during the last election and has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office.
Former senators Dennis Deconcini, D-Ariz., and Steve Symms, R-Idaho, and former congressmen like Tom Downey, D-N.Y.; Vic Fazio, D-Calif.; Bill Paxon, R-N.Y., and former House Minority Leader Robert Michel, R-Ill., all registered as lobbyists for the drug industry and worked on the prescription drug bill.
"I can tell you that when the bill passed, there were better than 1,000 pharmaceutical lobbyists working on this," says Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.
Dingell has been in Congress for 52 years and is the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which shares jurisdiction over Medicare. He says the bill would not have passed without the efforts of the drug lobby.
"There is probably a lotta truth in it that the bill was stacked in their benefit. And it's probably also true that it was written by their lobbyists," he says.
... Why was the drug lobby was so interested in this bill and what did it have to gain? Ron Pollack the executive director of Families USA, a nonpartisan health care watchdog group, says it all boiled down to a key provision in the legislation.
It prohibited Medicare and the federal government from using its vast purchasing power to negotiate lower prices directly from the drug companies.
... Before the vote, Congress was told the program would cost a whopping $395 billion over the first 10 years. In fact, Medicare officials already knew it was going to cost a lot more.
Burton said he and others were misled.
"Within two weeks after the bill was passed, everybody knew it was gonna cost well over $500 billion," he says. "And many members of the Congress [who] had voted for it said, 'I would never have voted for it had I known that.' "
Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster later told Congress that he revised the cost estimate to $534 before the vote, but was told to withhold the new numbers if he wanted to keep his job.
During a Congressional hearing, Foster stated: "It struck me there was a political basis for making that decision. I considered that inappropriate and, in fact, unethical."
Foster said the person who told him to withhold Congress from getting the revised estimates was Medicare boss Tom Scully.
Scully was the administration's lead negotiator on the prescription drug bill, and at the time was also negotiating a job for himself with a high-powered Washington law firm, where he became a lobbyist with the pharmaceutical industry.
"He was negotiating for his job at the same time that the Medicare legislation was being considered. He wound up taking this job 10 days after the president signed this legislation," says Pollack.
It is but one example of the incestuous relationship between Congress and the industry, and just one of the reasons the pharmaceutical lobby almost never loses a political battle that affects its bottom line.
Former Congressman Billy Tauzin, who helped push the prescription drug bill through the House, didn't disagree.
Has the bill been good for the drug industry?
"It's been good for the patients whom the drug industry represents …" Tauzin says. "In terms of profits — [for the drug companies] and volumes, yes."
... Why has this lobby been so successful? The former congressman says he believes it's because they stood for the right things.
If Tauzin sounds a lot like a lobbyist for the drug industry, that's because now he is.
Just a few months after the prescription drug bill passed, Tauzin began discussions with the pharmaceutical industry to become its chief lobbyist in Washington. He says it was one of several lucrative offers he's received just before he got some very bad news.
... In fairness to Tauzin and former Medicare chief Tom Scully, they weren't the only public officials involved with the prescription drug bill who later went to work for the pharmaceutical industry.
Just before the vote, Tauzin cited the people who had been most helpful in getting it passed. Among them:
John McManus, the staff director of the Ways and Means subcommittee on Health. Within a few months, he left Congress and started his own lobbying firm. Among his new clients was PhRMA, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Merck.
Linda Fishman, from the majority side of the Finance Committee, left to become a lobbyist with the drug manufacturer Amgen.
Pat Morrisey, chief of staff of the Energy and Commerce Committee, took a job lobbying for drug companies Novartis and Hoffman-La Roche.
Jeremy Allen went to Johnson and Johnson.
Kathleen Weldon went to lobby for Biogen, a Bio-tech company.
Jim Barnette left to lobby for Hoffman-La Roche.
In all, at least 15 congressional staffers, congressmen and federal officials left to go to work for the pharmaceutical industry, whose profits were increased by several billion dollars.
... In January, one of the first things the new Democratic House of Representatives did was to make it mandatory for Medicare to negotiate lower prices with the drug companies.
A similar measure faces stiff opposition in the Senate, where the drug lobby is spending millions of dollars to defeat it. The president has already announced that if the bill passes, he will veto it.
The mainstream media did a terrible job of describing what was going on at the time, with the exception, of course, of people like Paul Krugman. Politicians who claim they were "misled" about the costs are joshing us -- they knew the price tag they were given was a cover story.
It's the usual story about how influence is bought in Washington, only on a bigger scale than most. It's partly old style corruption, and partly funding and supporting politicians that tend to agree with the buyer's position (which tends to make for fairly dumb politicians).
I believe there's some merit to pharma position, but I have little doubt that in an open and honest political discussion they'd have lost the battle. As it was, they and their shareholders (me included) won big. There was bipartisan corruption (as usual), but the GOP had control and was by far the most guilty party. Kudos to Pelosi for fighting back once the GOP fell, though I doubt the Senate will right this wrong. The Tom Scully story is truly noteworthy ...
Cheney/Bush and torture - now it's sensory deprivation
BBC NEWS | Americas | Guantanamo conditions 'worsening': "Smells like revenge.
... The report, published on Thursday, said about 300 detainees are now being held at a new facility - known as Camp 5, Camp 6 and Camp Echo - comparable to 'super-max' high security units in the US.
The group said the facility had 'created even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation'.
It said the detainees were reportedly confined to windowless cells for 22 hours a day, only allowed to exercise at night and could go for days without seeing daylight...
Jobs predicts the death of audio DRM within a year
If Jobs is correct in his prediction, this means the effective end of audio DRM within the year ...
AppleInsider | Jobs talks new iTunes functions, DRM and video, iPod storage [transcript]Jobs tries to imply this isn't that big a deal since consumers could always burn a CD then re-encode the music. In reality anyone who's tried this will tell you the quality is similar to AM radio.
...Q: You mentioned that 2.5 of 5 million [songs in your iTunes] catalog will be DRM-free by the end of the year. That's presumably not just EMI Records by the end of the year.
A: That's correct. That's our estimate. That's EMI content plus other content from other labels.
Q: And the second part of my question is: What do you think this will have an impact on the iPod-iTunes relationship in terms of now being able to buy your music on any player and not just on iPod?
A: Well again, you've been able to play all sorts of music on iPod forever. iPods have played MP3s forever. So the only music that has been in question is music you buy off the iTunes store. Now again, you can burn a CD and read that CD back in and it takes off the DRM. So you could then play it on anything else. We compete based on having what we we think is the best music store and based on what we think is having the best music players. And if customers agree with us, we are going to do well. If they don't, well we're going to get a message back that we have to work harder...
I suspect the non-DRMd files will have, embedded within them, an encrypted and non-removable identifier that can be tracked back to the purchaser's credit card records. I'm surprised nobody has asked about that. It's what I'd do if I were Apple. (Update 5/3/07: and that's what they did, but the one you can see isn't even encrypted. I'm sure there's an encrypted tag as well.)
I'm fine with the price increase, I'll upgrade the DRMd music I like. This will make me significantly more likely to use the iTunes store.
BTW, DRM on TV and video isn't dead yet. I'm not so sure it will die. What killed audio DRM for me was that it severely impaired my ability to listen to music and audio while working or driving. I can't multitask video inputs, so I am much less impacted by DRM on video. I do buy DRMd TV shows and movies for the kids to watch while traveling ...
The return of VRML? Google 3D warehouse
I haven't followed the sketch-up story very closely, but the emergence of applications that draw from an open (?) worldwide library of 3 D shapes got my attention. An interesting development!
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Christianity and data: Not promising
Dyer: Religion and Good BehaviorWell, of course Dyer knows numbers lie all the time. Still, there does not appear to be any empirical support for the theory that religion leads to better behavior, even when that behavior is defined in Christian terms (turn the other cheek, help the poor, etc). Dyer suspects they're finding correlation rather than causation and I tend to agree, but one cannot rule out that Christianity causes bad behavior.
... the numbers don't lie: the more religious a [Christian] country is, the worse people behave in their private lives. Thank God they didn't do a survey on the correlation between strong religious belief and war.
Dyer states the obvious about the Iranian snatch operation
Iran: How to Start a War:Dyer points out that the Iranians had a full ambush waiting for the Brits, and that it's silly to think they didn't have a logical agenda. When I heard the story I assumed it was a swap maneuver, but Dyer fills in details on why the Iranians wanted Brits and not Americans. (Yanks are more aggressive, hence a snatch would be more likely to produce dead US soldiers and an invasion of Iran -- both counter-productive.)
... it was not necessarily an operation ordered from the top of Iran's government. In fact, there is no single source of authority in Iran's curious system of 'multiple governments,' as one observer labelled the impenetrably complex division of responsibilities and powers between elected civilians and unelected mullahs. The Revolutionary Guards (who are quite different from the regular armed forces) enjoy considerable autonomy within this system.
According to the US authorities in Iraq, the five Iranian diplomats arrested by US troops in a raid in Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan last January were actually Revolutionary Guards, and it would seem that their colleagues want them back. Kidnapping American troops as hostages for an exchange could cause a war, so they decided to grab some Brits instead. And it will probably work, after a certain delay...
The Poincare Conjecture, In Our Time, and the limits of human minds
It's a great show, but they needed another hour to do justice to Poincaré and to the lay version of his mathematics. More significantly, I think IOT hit the limits of what the medium can handle with this topic; Melvynn kept half-joking that his head was hurting. The one non-mathematician guest had to opt out of a final comment, saying "this is too hard for me". The listener comments reflect how challenging the topic was.
Which brings me to my recent readings in physics. I'm reading Gribbins on Quantum Mechanics (1994) and Brian Greene with another cosmology/string theory overview, the Gribbins book is my personal favorite, but it's a bit dated now. Together though, they make it hard to overlook that physics seems to be getting harder and harder. We have more physicists than ever, and I'd wager there's a Feynman or two in the bunch, but we've been stuck for decades now. String theory's luster is a bit tarnished (Smolin et al), special relativity doesn't fit with 'spooky action at a distance', we can't unify gravity and QM, the math keeps getting harder (or so I read) and the universe feels ever more absurd and ill-suited to the frailties of the human mind.
Sort of like Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture, which teams of mathematicians are still slogging through years after its unofficial publication. Modern mathematics is said to be so complex only hyper-specialists can tackle it, but hyper-specialists can't make the kind of cross-domain breakthroughs Poincaré made.
I wonder if we'll run aground until we come up with better minds -- either human or otherwise.
PS. Firefox spell checking is very impressive. It corrected my spelling of Melvyn Bragg's first name!
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Pet Poisoning 2007: SFGate has the best overview
YOUR WHOLE PET / Bigger than you think: The story behind the pet food recallI used the "canaries in the coal mine" analogy a week ago. Based on what little we know to date, the death toll must be in the thousands and the rate of renal injury must be far higher. The emotional cost to tens of thousands of Americans is very high, and they will not forget that their government, yet again, failed them. Anyone who doesn't think this couldn't have happened to human consumers is sadly lacking in imagination. Besides a failure to comment on the likely injury rate, another item not covered in this otherwise topical review is the Homeland Security angle.
... 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. [jf: of those exposed, 80% were injured or killed] 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'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 suspected cases to their state veterinarians on the Web site of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
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)...
...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.
... 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.
Once again, we have legions of obsessive bloggers to thank for keeping a story alive that the mainstream media keeps trying to forget.
Oh, and yes, Rosie O'Donnell's producers and support staff are either very dim or very nasty.
Clearwater: crushed by condominums
Clearwater Beach is exhibit A. It's still a beautiful sight heading out from land, but the condo density is amazing. They're mostly dull rather than ugly, but there are a lot of them. I assume the economics of such high density, high cost accommodation are pretty overwhelming, in time they'll swallow the Keys -- unless the storm threats become overwhelming. Of course the ultra-rich will still be able to build estates and hang the cost -- but even in America this is a relatively small group.
I suspect most folks prefer the old Florida of single story wood frame buildings. We found a fair bit of that on Anna Maria island, but it felt like an anachronism.
Besides condos and estates, one other category of dwelling caught my eye. Southwest Florida has the greatest concentration of genteel trailer parks I've ever seen. I assume they're mostly occupied by non-wealthy elders. I wonder how they fit into the evolving land use pattern, and where the economics of the florida mobile home are going to go
... one out every five new single-family housing units purchased in the United States is a mobile home, sited everywhere from the conventional trailer park to custom-designed "estates" aimed at young couples and retirees...
Lycra swim shirts (rash guard) - no sun-fearing geek should be without
The shirt had no SPF rating, I've seen them quoted as "18", but this SPF stuff is nonsense. If I'd been wearing SPF 50 sunblock I'd have been disabled by the third day of nonstop sun. I ended up as pale as a dead fish in the area covered by the shirt (I did use sunblock beneath it). I paired the shirt with my ultra-fashionable camping hat -- super broad bill, rear fabric drape from hairline to shirt top. Works fine in the surf, and it's great at keeping beautiful starlets at bay (the latter is a joke, the less fashionable beaches we visit show why American endocrinology has such a great future).
It's true that manly men and Republicans have a hard time wearing these shirts, though I think they may be popular among surfers. Geeks and Democrats, however, should consider them proof of a rock solid ego. Recommended.
Update: For next year's model I want a hoodie. A Lycra hood I could slip on and off would work better underwater than my camping cap ...
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Aminopterin, melanine and what else?
Melanine is in the Chinese gluten, but it's not supposed to be nephrotoxic. The focus is still on the Chinese gluten (which apparently has lots of fun ingredients), but maybe it's not the gluten after all. A dry cat food has also been recalled.
I hope Homeland Security is paying attention.
In the meantime, my personal conclusion that our family needs to switch to human-regulated foods for our dog stands.