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MONTH: June 2007

Pet food scare may bring
trade reform to China

BEIJING--Furor over the deaths of cats and dogs who were poisoned by adulterated and mislabeled Chinese-made pet food ingredients may have protected millions of people as well as animals worldwide.
Chinese citizens themselves, and their pets, may be the most numerous beneficiaries of new food safety regulations introduced by the Beijing government on May 9, 2007.

With 1.5 billion citizens, China is the world's most populous nation--and also has more than twice as many pets as any other nation. Officially, China had more than 150 million pet dogs as of mid-2005. China is also believed to have from 300 to 450 million pet cats, but the Chinese cat population has never been formally surveyed.

The first announced Chinese regulatory changes covered only exports, but within hours the rules governing items sold on the domestic market were strengthened as well.

Summarized Daniel Martin, Beijing correspondent for Agence France-Presse, "The department in charge of inspecting export products said it had instructed its offices across China to increase inspections and supervision. Separately, China's State Council, or cabinet, announced it had ordered more inspections of all plant and aquaculture products, and increased control of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, drugs, and animal feed. It also called for better systems of official responsibility over food safety, and for monitoring the movement of food products.

"China has ordered such crackdowns in the past amid health scares," Martin acknowledged. Follow-up has then been lax.

This time, however, the Beijing government reinforced the message by sentencing former State Food & Drug Administration chief Zheng Xiaoyu to death for taking bribes and dereliction of duty, while heading the agency from 1998 to 2005. The sentence was announced on May 28, 2007. Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, was the first Chinese official of his rank to receive the death penalty for corruption since 2000.
The melamine contamination issue, unlike most previous adulteration cases involving Chinese-made products, spread far beyond China and the small developing nations which have previously been victimized.

This time the adulteration hit throughout the U.S., Canada, South Africa, and Puerto Rico. From 15 to 20 million pet caretakers purchased melamine-tainted food for their animals. In excess of 60 million pet food containers marketed under more than 150 labels were recalled.

More than two months after the recalls began, on March 16, 2007, the pet food industry was still announcing recalls of additional products found to contain melamine.

Two Chinese companies, Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology, are believed to have exported wheat and rice glutens that were deliberately contaminated with melamine, a coal derivative, to fool purchasers who used a test to measure protein content that measures nitrogen emissions. Of no nutritional value to animals, melamine is commonly used as a nitrogen-rich fertilizer, and as an ingredient of hard plastics.

Melamine-tainted pet food is believed to have killed at least 1,950 cats and 2,200 dogs in the U.S. alone, the Food & Drug Administration estimates, based on consumer claims. The Banfield veterinary hospital chain has put the possible toll at as many as 7,000 animals.

The FDA on May 1, 2007 assigned chief food division medical officer David Acheson, M.D., to supervise improving food safety surveillance. By May 4, Acheson was pondering what to do about 20 million chickens and 6,000 pigs who had been given feed made in part from recalled pet food.

"About 2.5 million to 3 million broiler chickens raised on those farms [that bought the tainted feed] already have been slaughtered and most likely have been consumed," Washington Post staff writer Rick Weiss disclosed.

About 100,000 breeder chickens were culled.

Usually an animal who has been fed adulterated food is considered unfit for human consumption, USDA spokesperson Keith Williams told Weiss. However, after preliminary tests found no measurable traces of melamine in the chickens, and found that they appeared to be healthy, the USDA, FDA and Environmental Protection Agency produced a joint risk assessment, determined that the potential human exposure risk would be one 2,500th of the level that might cause harm, and released the remaining chickens for slaughter and sale as usual.

"We do not believe there is any significant threat to human health," Acheson concluded.

The pigs were held for further testing.

Bulldozed evidence

In China, meanwhile, "We visited the two facilities," FDA Office of International Programs deputy director Walter Batts told reporters, "but there is essentially nothing to be found. They've been closed down, machinery dismantled, with nothing to get access to."

The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company plant manager Mao Lijun was reportedly detained by Chinese authorities.

"Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao's factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely," said the Los Angeles Times.

"Yet no one stopped Mao's company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke-until last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility. It wasn't authorities who finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory, days before the U.S. FDA investigators arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients."

Elaborated New York Times China correspondent David Barboza, "Xuzhou Anying shipped more than 700 tons of wheat gluten labeled as non-food products this year through a company called Suzhou Textiles Silk Light and Industrial Products," which was denied by Suzhou Textiles.

"Despite denials of knowing anything about melamine contamination," Barboza continued, "Xuzhou appears to have sought to buy large supplies of melamine, even in the weeks after the pet food recall. The company posted more than a dozen ads on the Internet seeking melamine scrap.

Henan Xinxiang Huaxing Chemical Company manager Li Xiuping acknowledged to Barboza that the ads were unusual. "Our chemical products are mostly used for additives, not animal feed," Li Xiuping said. "Melamine is mainly used in the chemical industry, but can also be used to make cakes."

Commented Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, "The real issue is not melamine, but that this problem exposes such a huge gap in consumer protection. It's not this event, but the next event that people should be concerned about."

Deadly toothpaste

Food and consumer product safety in the U.S., Canada, the European Union, and other developed nations has been maintained for decades by semi-harmonized regulations which require that ingredients be subjected to extensive testing before products using them can be marketed.

Animal tests are still the mainstay of product safety evaluation. Animals are used primarily to study total systemic response. If animals exhibit adverse effects, non-animal tests may be used to zero in on the problem.

While more than 40 non-animal testing methods are now used to assess specific toxic responses, developing a non-animal test that accurately mimics the complexity of a whole living organism has proved elusive.

Whether animal or non-animal tests are employed, the safety determination process depends upon manufacturers honestly disclosing product ingredients, and then not varying the formula once a substance is put into production.

Even seemingly minor substitutions of ingredients can change product safety--like substituting diethylene glycol, a cheap but potentially deadly chemical, for glycerin, which is chemically similar, but is safe, and is much more expensive.

Diethylene glycol is the sweet-tasting toxic ingredient of many common brands of automotive antifreeze that are commonly misused to poison animals. Laws have been passed in several states--including Arizona in 2007--to require that bittering agents be added to diethylene and ethylene glycol products to prevent accidental ingestion.

FDA spokesperson Doug Arbesfeld disclosed on May 23, 2007 that the FDA has begun to check all imports of toothpaste made in China, after diethylene glycol was found in Chinese-made toothpaste sold in the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Australia.

China is the second-largest exporter of toothpaste to the United States behind Canada, Arbesfeld indicated.

The FDA had no indication that diethylene glycol had been used in toothpaste sold in the U.S., but became concerned after Dominican health officials seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol.

"Included were tubes of toothpaste with bubble gum and strawberry flavors marketed for children and sold under the name of Mr. Cool Junior," reported The New York Times.

Dominican Republic secretary of health Bautista Rojas Gomez said that the toothpaste actually listed diethylene glycol as an ingredient, and was found in stores and warehouses across the country.

There were indications that some might have been sold in Haiti.

Panamanian officials seized 6,000 tubes of the same toothpaste several days earlier, sold under the brand names Mr. Cool and Excel. Samples reportedly contained up to 4.6% diethylene glycol. Recalled New York Times reporters David Barboza and Walt Bogdanich, "Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government unwittingly mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. In that case, the poison was falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup. It originated in China, shipping records show."

A manager at Goldcredit International, the first Chinese firm to market Mr. Cool toothpaste, told Barboza that, "If diethylene glycol were poisonous," he said, "all Chinese people would have been poisoned," because Chinese manufacturers had been substituting diethylene glycol for glycerin in toothpastes made for domestic consumption for many years.

In fact, many Chinese people have been poisoned by similar substitutions. On May 28, 2007 the China News Service disclosed that the families of 10 people who died from injections of fake and tainted medicine at the Zhongshan University #9 Hospital in Guangzhou have sued the same company that made the diethylene glycol sold to Panama as glycerin. The families are seeking damages of $2.6 million.

Frozen seafood

Only one day after the FDA began checking toothpaste, the Hong Chang Corporation of Santa Fe Springs, California, announced a three-state recall of yet another apparently mislabeled product originating in China, in this case frozen "monkfish" sold in Illinois, California, and Hawaii. Two Chicago residents who ate a soup made from the "monkfish" suffered tetrodotoxin poisoning, indicating that the "monkfish" were actually pufferfish. The pufferfish poison is not destroyed by cooking or freezing.

Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, and former FDA science advisory board chair, warned Boston Globe staff reporter Diedtra Henderson that that biggest threat to public health from Chinese food products might come from pond-raised shrimp-- not because of either adulteration or mislabeling, but due to a production method that permits rapid transmission of diseases from poultry to humans with shrimp as intermediate hosts.

In China, Doyle explained, shrimp are produced on "hundreds of thousands of little farms. They have small ponds. Over the ponds--in not all cases, but in many cases--they'll have chicken cages. It might be like 20,000 chickens in cages. The chicken feces feeds the shrimp."

The USDA has found that up to 10% of shrimp imported from China contains salmonella, Doyle said.
"Even more worrisome are shrimp imported from China that contain antibiotics that no amount of cooking can neutralize," Henderson wrote. "Last month alone, the FDA rejected 51 shipments of catfish, eel, shrimp, and tilapia from China because of such contaminants as salmonella, veterinary drugs, and nitrofuran, a cancer-causing chemical."

Michael Gregor, M.D., warned in his 2006 book Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching that the combination of intensive confinement poultry production with aquaculture in southern China could become the incubator and vector for spreading the deadly avian influenza H5N1 worldwide. With the right mutation, H5N1 could spread as far and fast as frozen shrimp could be flown to restaurants and supermarkets.

"The safety of food imports from China extends beyond the pet food recall," Senators Richard Durbin of Connecticut and Rosa DeLauro of Illinois warned in an open letter to U.S. Trade Ambassador Susan Schwab.

"China is especially poor at meeting international food safety standards, which is particularly disturbing considering that China exported approximately $2.26 billion in agricultural products to the United States in 2006.

"This issue is particularly important," Durbin and DeLauro continued, "as U.S. agricultural imports [from all sources] are predicted to reach a record $69 billion in 2007. If we are to continue at this rate, we must ask important questions about the food safety standards of our trade partners to ensure our nation's public health is not compromised."

Durbin and DeLauro proposed combining elements of the FDA and USDA to create a single unified food and drug safety agency. Meanwhile, Durbin and DeLauro introduced a budget bill amendment which would form a computerized reporting system for contaminants in imported products, and would include early-warning coverage of pet food.

Durbin also proposed a $183 million increase next year in the FDA food safety budget, now about $470 million.

State-level legislation proposed to address issues raised by the melamine episode includes two New Jersey bills which would help protect pets from contaminated pet food and help pet keepers to recoup the cost of treating pets for health problems caused by the contamination.

ChemNutra, of Las Vegas, the original importer of the melamine-spiked glutens that ended up in pet food, scheduled a Pet Food Ingredients Safety Summit for July 14, 2007 in Las Vegas, at which manufacturers, ingredient importers, and analysis laboratories are to draft proposed global import standards for pet food components. --Merritt Clifton