YOUR WHOLE PET
Bigger than you think: The story behind the pet food
recall
By Christie Keith, Special to SF
Gate
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
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.
Veterinarians didn't fare much better. They were asked to report
cases to their state veterinarian's office, but one feline veterinary blog, vetcetera, which
surveyed all official state veterinarian Web sites, found that only eight had
any independent information about the recall, and only 24 even mentioned it at
all. Only one state, Vermont, had a request on their site for veterinarians to
report pets whose illnesses or deaths they suspect are related to the recall.
And as of today, there is no longer a notice that veterinarians should report
suspected cases to their state veterinarians on the Web site of the American
Veterinary Medical Association.
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).
But however difficult this recall has been for veterinarians, no
one has felt its impact more than the owners of affected dogs and cats. While
the pet media and bloggers continued to push the story, the most powerful force
driving it was the grief of pet owners, many of them fueled by anger because
they felt that their pet's death or illness wasn't being
counted.
Many of them 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.
To many pet owners, the pet food recall story is a personal
tragedy about the potentially avoidable loss of a beloved dog or cat. Others
have a hard time seeing the story as anything more than that -- with
implications beyond the feelings of those grieving pet owners. Which brings us
to the bigger picture, and questions -- not about what happened but about the
system.
How did this problem, now involving almost every large pet food
company in the United States, including some of the most trusted -- and
expensive -- brands, get so out of hand? How come pet owners weren't informed
more rapidly about the contaminated pet food? Why is it so hard to get accurate
numbers of affected animals? Why didn't veterinarians get any notification?
Where did the system break down?
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 which was then spread to the larger
media.
