* The number of dogs and cats affected by the bad food is simply unknown.
* It is not unusual for the source of contaminants in food recalls to be elusive.
* Suspicions that melamine also was showing up in the human food chain were debunked by the FDA.
And then on Monday the agency dropped a bombshell, explaining in an import alert that it “is enforcing a new import alert that greatly expands its curtailment of some food ingredients imported from
* The FDA’s import food inspection processes are, for all intents and purposes, 70 years old.
As The Washington Post reports, the task of guarding against contaminants in imports has become far more complicated because an increasing portion of the tens of billions of dollars in Chinese food and agricultural imports involves powders and concentrates for the processed-food industry. Contaminants like melamine are not visible and do not show up on the FDA’s standard battery of tests.
"I do think this pet food thing has shown people, including people at the very highest levels of the administration, that something needs to be fixed. If this isn't a wake-up call, then people are so asleep they are catatonic."If you have a hard time digesting the feds’ "harmless unless proven harmful" argument, you’ve got company.
"It appears that the FDA views itself largely as a clearing house. We don't need a clearing house for that kind of information. That's 1950's thinking. This is a very commonplace problem with the federal government today."Importers are taking an enormous risk in not doing due diligence and really knowing their overseas sources. That's what they're being paid for, after all, and the legal buck stops with them. Unfortunately, so many of them are mom-and-pop shops that's not much of a solace."
To which he adds:
"Pet food manufacturers certainly have some obligation to ensure that they're selling what they say they're selling. That's a basic corporate governance issue. What they've actually been selling apparently has significantly lower protein than they've advertised."To which I can only add: In the end, it's all about the money, not your pet's health and well being.
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