What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

We are now approaching the three-month mark in the recall of contaminated pet foods and several things are clear. Most notable is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has done a scandalously poor job of staying on top things and has been painfully slow to acknowledge that the human food chain also is affected.

This much we know (or don’t know):

* The number of dogs and cats affected by the bad food is simply unknown.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration official said last week during a news media teleconference that although some 5,300 pet food products had been recalled the number of reported fatalities was only "in the high teens," as in 18 or 19. He was contradicted two days later by an FDA press release that pegged deaths at about 2,200 dogs and 1,950 cats. Anecdotal reports put the numbers higher.

* It is not unusual for the source of contaminants in food recalls to be elusive.

But it was the news media, prodded in part by bloggers, and not the FDA that first pointed a finger at Chinese-export wheat gluten and rice protein laced with melamine, used in the manufacture of plastics, to increase protein and profit levels. This is only the latest effort by Chinese manufacturers to dupe U.S. food processors into believing that they are buying a quality product.

* 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 China, authorizing border inspectors to detain ingredients used in everything from noodles to breakfast bars.”

To date, the contaminants have showed up in chicken feed in Indiana and in hogs in several states that were fed contaminated pet food. The FDA and Department of Agriculture said they have not ordered recalls because the likelihood of human illness from eating chicken or pigs fed the contaminants is very low. Also, a survey of poison control centers and hospitals by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found no increase in reports of kidney diseases, the most likely indicator of melamine poisoning.

* 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.

Says William Hubbard, who was associate director of the FDA from 1991 to 2005:

"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.

Dave Schuler, who has been all over the recall at The Glittering Eye from the beginning, tells me that:

"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.