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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: May 2007

How Chinese ingredients contaminated U.S. pet foods

 

BEIJING--How and why melamine came to contaminate wheat and corn gluten and rice protein concentrate manufactured in China is still unknown.

But, as a maker of wheat gluten, MGP Ingredients vice president Steve Pickman has voiced an idea.
"It is my understanding, but certainly unheard of in our experience," Pickman told media, "that melamine could increase the measurable nitrogen emitted from gluten, and then be mathematically converted to protein. The effect could create the appearance or illusion of raising the gluten's protein level. Understandably, any acts or practices such as this are barred in the U.S. How the U.S. can or cannot monitor and prevent these types of situations from occurring in other parts of the world," Pickman concluded, "is the overriding question."

Said U.S. Food & Drug Administ-ration chief veterinarian Stephen Sundlof, "Melamine was found in all three [pet food ingredients imported from China.] This would certainly lend credibility to the theory that the contamination may be intentional. That will be one of the theories we will pursue when we get into the plants in China," Stephen Sundlof, the FDA's chief veterinarian, told reporters.

But getting U.S. inspectors into China to visit the plants in question proved difficult. U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) alleged in early April that the Chinese government had refused to grant visas to FDA personnel. An FDA spokesperson clarified that the visas were not overtly refused, but added that the agency had not received the necessary invitation letter to get visas.

Xinhua News Agency editor Lu Hui meanwhile announced on April 6 that, "China is carrying out a nationwide inspection on the quality of its wheat gluten after the United States claimed that the pet food at the origin of a number of cat and dog deaths used tainted wheat imported from China."
"Sampling and examination are under way," said Xia Wenjun, a press officer for the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

There is no longer any question that the melamine tainting U.S.-manufactured pet foods for at least three months in 2006-2007 was of Chinese origin.

Wilbur-Ellis Company, of San Francisco, in July 2006 began importing rice protein concentrate from Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd., Wilbur-Ellis president and chief executive John Thacher told
MSNBC. Wilbur-Ellis resold the material to five pet food manufacturers, including Diamond Pet Foods Inc., of Meta, Missouri, which produces the Natural Balance pet food line at a manufacturing plant in California.

Thacher said an April 4, 2007 delivery from Futian Biology included 146 1-ton bags of rice protein concentrate. All were white except for a single pink bag, which was stenciled "melamine."

Aware that melamine had been identified five days earlier as a contaminant in wheat gluten used to make pet food, Wilbur-Ellis held the shipment at a warehouse in Portland, Oregon, and had samples tested. Melamine was found in the pink bag, but not in two white bags, Thacher said.

Futian Biology told Wilbur-Ellis that the pink bag had been used to replace a damaged bag, and that "the product was all fine," Thacher explained.

The tainted wheat gluten was earlier traced to a different supplier, Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Develo-pment Company, of Shanghai. Xuzhou Anying general manager Mao Lijun told Los Angeles Times staff writers Marc Lifsher and Abigail Goldman that the company and the Chinese government's inspection and quarantine administration are investigating how melamine got into the product.

Xuzhou Anying sales manager Geng Xiujuan told Christopher Bodeen of Associated Press that Xuzhou Anying is a broker, not a manufacturer.

"Anying produces and exports more than 10,000 tons of wheat gluten a year," reported Alexa Oleson of Associated Press, "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.

Anying export director Li Cui told Oleson that the U.S. is the company's only foreign market.

"There has been no reaction among the Chinese public to the tainted wheat gluten," Oleson said, "and Beijing authorities have not said whether they are investigating. 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 Associated Press to stop calling."

Throughout China, Bodeen wrote, "Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used in excess to boost yields, while harmful antibiotics are widely administered to control disease in seafood and livestock. Rampant industrial pollution risks introducing heavy metals into the food chain.

"Farmers have used the cancer-causing industrial dye Sudan Red to boost the value of their eggs, and fed an asthma medication to pigs to produce leaner meat," Bodeen recounted. "In a case that galvanized the public's and government's attention, an infant formula with little or no nutritional value has been blamed for causing severe malnutrition in hundreds of babies and killing at least 12."

The European Union and Japan have banned imports of a variety of Chinese agricultural and aquaculture products due to the products containing excessive antibiotic or pesticide residues, Bodeen wrote.

"Hong Kong blocked imports of turbot last year," Bodeen recalled, "after inspectors found traces of malachite green, a possibly cancer-causing chemical used to treat fungal infections, in some fish."

Contrary to the common belief in the U.S. and Europe that products from small farms are safer than the output from factory farming, Bodeen suggested that, "One source of the problem is China's fractured farming sector, comprised of small landholdings which make regulation difficult. Small farms ship to market with little documentation. Test-ing of the safety and purity of farm products such as milk is often haphazard, hampered by fuzzy lines of authority among regulators. Only about 6% of agricultural products were considered pollution-free in 2005," Bodeen said, based on USDA data collection about the Chinese agricultural sector.

U.S. agricultural product purchases from China have increased 20-fold in 25 years.

"FDA inspectors are able to inspect only a tiny percentage of the millions of shipments that enter the U.S. each year," wrote Bodeen. "Even so, shipments from China were rejected at the rate of about 200 per month so far this year, compared with only 18 rejected cargoes per month from Thailand and 35 a month from Italy.