The March 16 recall of 91 pet food products
manufactured by Menu Foods wasn't big news at first. Early coverage
reported only 10-15 cats and dogs dying after eating canned and pouched
foods manufactured by Menu. The foods were recalled -- among them some
of the country's best-known and biggest-selling brands -- and while it
was certainly a sad story, and maybe even a bit of a wake-up call about
some aspects of pet food manufacturing, that was about it.
At first, that was it for me, too. But I'm a contributing
editor for a nationally syndicated pet feature, Universal Press
Syndicate's Pet Connection,
and all of us there have close ties to the veterinary profession. Two
of our contributors are vets themselves, including Dr. Marty Becker,
the vet on "Good Morning America." And what we were hearing from
veterinarians wasn't matching what we were hearing on the news.
When we started digging into the story, it quickly became
clear that the implications of the recall were much larger than they
first appeared. Most critically, it turned out that the initially
reported tally of dead animals only included the cats and dogs who died
in Menu's test lab and not the much larger number of affected pets.
Second, the timeline of the recall raised a number of concerns.
Although there have been some media reports that Menu Foods started
getting complaints as early as December 2006, FDA records state the
company received their first report of a food-related pet death on February 20.
One week later, on February 27, Menu started testing the suspect
foods. Three days later, on March 3, the first cat in the trial died of
acute kidney failure. Three days after that, Menu switched wheat gluten
suppliers, and 10 days later, on March 16, recalled the 91 products
that contained gluten from their previous source.
Nearly one month passed from the date Menu got its first
report of a death to the date it issued the recall. During that time,
no veterinarians were warned to be on the lookout for unusual numbers
of kidney failure in their patients. No pet owners were warned to watch
their pets for its symptoms. And thousands and thousands of pet owners
kept buying those foods and giving them to their dogs and cats.
At that point, Menu had seen a 35 percent death rate
in their test-lab cats, with another 45 percent suffering kidney
damage. The overall death rate for animals in Menu's tests was around
20 percent. How many pets, eating those recalled foods, had died,
become ill or suffered kidney damage in the time leading up to the
recall and in the days since? The answer to that hasn't changed since
the day the recall was issued: We don't know.
We at Pet Connection knew the 10-15 deaths being reported by
the media did not reflect an accurate count. We wanted to get an idea
of the real scope of the problem, so we started a database for people
to report their dead or sick pets. On March 21, two days after opening
the database, we had over 600 reported cases and more than 200 reported
deaths. As of March 31, the number of deaths alone was at 2,797.
There are all kinds of problems with self-reported cases, and while we did correct for a couple of them, our numbers are not considered "confirmed." But USA Today
reported on March 25 that data from Banfield, a nationwide chain of
over 600 veterinary hospitals, "suggests [the number of cases of kidney
failure] is as high as hundreds a week during the three months the food
was on the market."
On March 28, "NBC News" featured California veterinarian Paul
Pion, who surveyed the 30,000 members of his national Veterinary
Information Network and told anchor Tom Costello, "If what
veterinarians are suspecting are cases, then it's much larger than
anything we've seen before." Costello commented that it amounted to
"potentially thousands of sick or dead pets."
The FDA was asked about the numbers at a press conference it
held on Friday morning to announce that melamine had been found in the
urine and tissues of some affected animals as well as in the foods they
tested. Dr. Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary
Medicine, told reporters that the FDA couldn't confirm any cases beyond
the first few, even though they had received over 8,800 additional
reports, because "we have not had the luxury of confirming these
reports." They would work on that, he said, after they "make sure all
the product is off the shelves." He pointed out that in human medicine,
the job of defining what constitutes a confirmed case would fall to the
Centers for Disease Control, but there is no CDC for animals.
Instead, pet owners were encouraged to report
deaths and illness to the FDA. But when they tried to file reports,
there was no place on the agency's Web site to do so and nothing but
endless busy signals when people tried to call.
[...]
The lack of any notification system was extremely hard on
veterinarians, many of whom first heard about the problem on the news
or from their clients. Professional groups such as the Veterinary
Information Network were crucial in disseminating information about the
recall to their members, but not all vets belong to VIN, and not all
vets log on to VIN on the weekend (the Menu press release, like most
corporate or government bad news, was issued on a Friday).
[...]
Many of them [pet owners] were also being driven by a
feeling of guilt. At Pet Connection, we received a flood of stories
from owners whose pets became ill with kidney failure, and who took
them to the vet. The dogs or cats were hospitalized and treated, often
at great expense -- sometimes into the thousands of dollars -- and
then, when they were finally well enough, sent home.
For some, the story ended there. But for others, there was one
more horrifying chapter. Because kidney failure causes nausea, it's
often hard to get recovering pets to eat. So a lot of these owners got
down on their hands and knees and coaxed and begged and eventually
hand-fed their pets the very same food that had made them sick. Those
animals ended up right back in the hospital and died, because their
loving owners didn't know that the food was tainted.
[...]
The issue may not be that the system broke down, but that there isn't really a system.
There is, as the FDA pointed out, no veterinary version of the
CDC. This meant the FDA kept confirming a number it had to have known
was only the tip of the iceberg. It prevented veterinarians from having
the information they needed to treat their patients and advise pet
owners. It allowed the media to repeat a misleadingly low number,
creating a false sense of security in pet owners -- and preventing a
lot of people from really grasping the scope and implication of the
problem.
And it was why Rosie O'Donnell felt free to comment last week
on "The View": "Fifteen cats and one dog have died, and it's been all
over the news. And you know, since that date, 29 soldiers have died,
and we haven't heard much about them. No. I think that we have the
wrong focus in the country. That when pets are killed in America from
some horrific poisoning accident, 16 of them, it's all over the news
and people are like, 'The kitty! It's so sad.' Twenty-nine sons and
daughters killed since that day, it's not newsworthy. I don't
understand."
In fact, Rosie didn't understand. She didn't understand that
the same government she blames for sending America's sons and daughters
to die in Iraq is the government that told her only 15 animals had
died, and that the story was about a pet "poisoning accident" and not a
systemic failure of FEMA-esque proportions.
Think that's going too far? Maybe not. On Sunday night, April
1, Pet Connection got a report from one of its blog readers, Joy
Drawdy, who said that she had found an import alert
buried on the FDA Web site. That alert, issued on Friday, the same day
that the FDA held its last press conference about the recall,
identified the Chinese company that is the source of the contaminated
gluten -- gluten that is now known to be sold not only for use in
animal feed, but in human food products, too. (The Chinese company is now denying that they are responsible, although they are investigating it.)
Although the FDA said on Friday it has no reason to think the
contaminated gluten found its way into the human food supply, Sundlof
told reporters that it couldn't be ruled out. He also assured us that
they would notify the public as soon as they had any more information
-- except, of course, that they did have more information and didn't
give it to us, publishing it instead as an obscure import alert, found
by chance by a concerned pet owner, which was then spread to the larger
media.
All of which begs the question: If a system to report and track
had been in place for animal illness, would this issue have emerged
sooner? Even lacking a reporting and tracking system, if the initial
news reports had included, as so many human stories do, suspected or
estimated cases from credible sources, it's likely this story would
have been taken more seriously and not just by Rosie O'Donnell. It may
turn out that our dogs and cats were the canaries in the coal mine of
an enormous system failure -- one that could have profound impacts on
American food manufacturing and safety in the years to come.
Christie Keith is a contributing editor for Universal Press
Syndicate's Pet Connection and past director of the Pet Care Forum on
America Online. She lives in San Francisco.
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