Blog-Wa, the Dog-Wa Blog

One of the major United States importers of ingredients that were at the center of the 2007 pet food recalls has pleaded guilty to distributing a tainted ingredient used to make pet food that killed many animals.

The federal indictment, dated Feb. 6, 2008, accuses Sally Qing Miller and Stephen Miller, and ChemNutra (the company they own), along with two Chinese companies, of bringing wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine into the United States.  The tainted wheat gluten was then sold to makers of pet food, and many animals became sick or died.

Wheat gluten is exported from China mainly for use as a protein in food manufacturing.  As a result of the March 2007 pet food recalls, it was found that some Chinese food and feed ingredients contained unacceptable levels of inexpensive melamine and other compounds such as cyanuric acid. These ingredients can be used to inflate the apparent protein content of the product, so that inexpensive ingredients can pass for more expensive, concentrated vegetable proteins.

Melamine by itself is not very toxic to animals or humans, but the combination of melamine and cyanuric acid has been implicated in kidney failure. Reports that cyanuric acid may be an independently and potentially widely-used adulterant in China have heightened concerns for both pet and human health.

Although it is difficult to know with certainty, the recalled foods are thought to be responsible for thousands of pet deaths.

Here’s a link to the Associated Press release.

Update of June 23, 2009: Turns out that the test the FDA used in the past to detect melamine contamination, a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry technique, is time-consuming. So several research groups have been looking for quicker and less elaborate methods to detect melamine in powdered formula.

A group at Purdue University is reporting in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that they have successfully used infrared spectroscopy for the task. The new tests require little sample preparation beyond putting some powder into a vial, and results are obtained within a few minutes.

So hopefully something good will come of all of this.

Here’s a link to the New York Times article reporting the new tests.