Glass houses and food safety

Did the scandal over contaminated pet food encourage you to indulge in some smug superiority about American food safety standards? Think again:

Two companies are recalling livestock and fish feed ingredients because they contain the industrial chemical melamine, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday.

The companies were identified as Ohio-based Tembec BTLSR, a unit of the Canadian wood products company Tembec Inc., and Uniscope Inc. of Colorado.

The melamine was not linked to a recent recall of pet food that was tainted with [melamine added to] raw ingredients from China, said Dr. David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration’s assistant commissioner for food protection.-- Reuters [bolding and bracketed text mine]

So now we have a (Canadian owned) American company doing exactly the same thing the Chinese are accused of-- adding melamine, a potentially dangerous chemical, to animal feed ingredients.

In the Chinese case, it's commonly believed that the melamine was added to wheat gluten in order to inflate its score on protein-content tests. In this new case, (a significantly smaller amount of) melamine was added as a "binding agent" to improve the products' texture and handling qualities. From the (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration's recall notice:

Based on the levels of melamine and related compounds in the initial ingredients, FDA estimated the probable level of melamine and related compounds in livestock feed as less than 50 parts per million (ppm) based on the recommended mix rate of two to four pounds of binding agent per ton of livestock feed. The estimated levels in fish and shrimp feed are less than 233 ppm and 465 ppm, respectively, of melamine and related compounds...

The estimated melamine levels in feed made with these binding agents are similar to the levels discussed in the interim safety/risk assessment of melamine and related compounds made available by FDA earlier this month... [which stated that] the consumption of pork, chicken, domestic fish, and eggs from animals inadvertently fed animal feed contaminated with melamine and its analogues is very unlikely to pose a human health risk.

Today's Wall Street Journal [no link, read in dead-tree version] mentions this in the fifth paragraph of a story headlined China Rebuts Criticism Of Food Exports' Safety [June 1, 2007, central edition page A4].  The Journal quotes a Tembec executive vice president as saying that Tembec had used melamine as a binding agent since 2004, but stopped after the pet food crisis.

Uniscope, Inc. is actually the hero here.  That company discovered the presence of melamine in Tembec's product when it ran tests on materials from its suppliers in response to the pet food scandal.

This is the second instance of melamine getting into the human food chain that we know of.  Earlier some of the Chinese-contaminated gluten made its way into pig food (California) and chicken feed (Indiana) when the Canadian pet food producer sold some of it as surplus product to animal feed producers.

And now the Chinese are saying, effectively, "you do it too."   Guess what.  They're right.

Therese at the PetsitUSA.com weblog has been doing a much better job of following this story than I have.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:39:38 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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