Why now? Pet food deaths baffle scientists

< Prev | 1 | 2

What about us?
Even if the combination of melamine and cyanuric acid makes a deadly meal for pets, scientists still don’t know much about how dangerous it might be for humans.

Earlier this week, the FDA announced that eight pork producers, 30 broiler poultry farms and eight breeder poultry farms have been giving their animals melamine-contaminated feed. Some 6,000 hogs have been placed under quarantine, but all of the potentially affected chickens have already been processed.

“We are not aware of any human illness that has occurred from exposure to melamine or its by-products,” the FDA recently stated. But in a press conference held last week, David Elder, director of the agency's enforcement office, said that no scientists have studied how the combination of melamine with related compounds—such as cyanuric acid—might affect people.

Story continues below ↓

There’s little reason to assume that they are safe for us if they’re not safe for our pets, said Weaver, the veterinary pathologist. Pets “pretty much eat the same stuff we do, except cheaper cuts, and they pretty much have the same metabolism as we do,” he said. “So whatever would affect them, should affect us.”

Never prepared
Weaver sees the ongoing crisis as a symptom of a far bigger problem—the limitations of the United States’ food safety program, a program that “was really put together some 70 years ago and just doesn’t work well at all now that we’re in this global marketplace,” he said.

Even if regulatory agencies ensure that food products are tested for melamine and cyanuric acid in the future, said Weaver, it’s just not enough.

“Tomorrow there’ll be another unknown—a virus, a bacteria, a chemical—and it’ll get through,” he said. “You’re always prepared to fight the last war. You’re always covering yesterday’s tracks,” but we need our regulatory agencies to be proactive, not reactive, he said.

The ongoing catastrophe presents an opportunity to ramp up food-safety standards, Weaver said. “We’re just lucky that it was only melamine and that it only sickened and killed cats and dogs,” he said. “It could have been anything else and it could have been people and it could have been deadly.”

But Akey at Cornell says that it’s unfair to “play Monday morning quarterback” after the fact and blame our regulatory agencies for this crisis. These kinds of problems, he said, are inevitable in a global economy. It’s unreasonable to ask regulatory agencies to look for every possible contaminant in imported food products, he said, “unless you want to pay $100 an ounce for your cat food.”

Click for related content

The FDA, in response to the crisis, announced yesterday that it has created a new role—an Assistant Commissioner for Food Protection—designed to provide advice to the commissioner about food safety.

"The protection of America's food supply and therefore the safety of Americans eating food of domestic or international origin is of utmost importance to me as a physician, and to the mission of this agency," FDA commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach said in a prepared statement.

< Prev | 1 | 2