More pet food recall info:
04/06/07
Note:I have been contacted with the question "which products are okay for dogs?" Since this is a cat site, I do not know, but some of the links presented here might give that information.
thanks
Lauren Merryfield,
http://www.catliness.com
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P&G Pet Care Update 4/6/2007
April 6, 2007
Dear Consumer:
As promised, we are continuing to keep you updated on the Menu Foods recall.
On April 5, 2007, Menu Foods amended its cuts-and-gravy pet food recall to
include food manufactured beginning November 8, 2006.
No new Iams or Eukanuba products have been added to the recall list. In
accordance with Menu Foods’ amendment, P&G Pet Care has amended the voluntary
recall dates in the United States and Canada on previously recalled Iams and
Eukanuba canned and foil pouch “wet” cuts-and-gravy-style cat and dog food
products manufactured by the affected Menu Foods plant. The amended code dates
are 6312 through 7073 followed by the plant code 4197.
No Iams or Eukanuba dry pet food products have been affected by the Menu
Foods recall or this amended Menu Foods recall. P&G Pet Care already implemented
a full voluntary recall of the affected wet products from store shelves in
the U.S. and Canada. As a result of these precautionary measures, all the dry
and wet pet foods that P&G Pet Care continues to sell do not contain wheat
gluten ingredients from any supplier.
For a complete list of affected products, go to the Menu Foods Web site at:
www.menufoods.com/recall.
We want to stress again that you can confidently feed all of your pets any of
our dry foods, as well as the wet foods not affected by the Menu Foods
recall. If you have any questions about the recalled products, please _click here_
(http://breedexperts.eukanuba.com/cgi-bin3/DM/y/jowr0BM8bjU0Rcg0BVgs0EH
) to
see the specific list of recalled wet pouch and canned products.
P&G Pet Care is deeply committed to pet well-being and our top priority is
to help you care for your dog and cat family members. We will continue to
provide you with meaningful updates. If you have additional questions, not
answered on our Web site _FAQs_
(http://breedexperts.eukanuba.com/cgi-bin3/DM/y/jowr0BM8bjU0Rcg0BVeY0En
) , please call us at 1-800-882-1591.
P&G Pet Care
*******
http://www.waggintails.com/
New Information on Menu Foods Recall from Waggin Tails
Dear Waggin Tails Customers
Since we wrote you last week about the pet food recalls, we have heard from many of you who are understandably confused and concerned about what to feed
your animal companions and which brands you can trust. We apologize for the length of this email, however there is much information to provide you with.
We have suspended sales of numerous brands and have provided that detail below.
We want to clarify one point, which seems to have been misunderstood from our last email. Menu Foods produces all types of pet food, from grocery economy
brands to the best holistic brands. This is the same in both the human food world and pet food world. The fact that high quality holistic brands are being
made by Menu Foods is in no way an indication that they are somehow not the quality you previously perceived them to be. Manufacturers develop recipes,
source ingredients, set quality control standards and then give that formula to a co-packer or producer such as Menu Foods who makes the product to their
specifications. Very few companies actually manufacture their own product, especially smaller holistic and organic brands.
The brands that we carry have been and will continue to be leaders in the holistic pet food industry. It would be a tragedy for anyone to conclude from
this recall that all pet food is the same. There is nothing that could be further from the truth. In fact, we feel confident that in the end, we will
all find that this recall was caused by inferior sourced ingredients by economy minded manufacturers.
However, in that there is still no conclusive explanation from the FDA or the AVMA of what happened and why, we will continue to suspend sales of any
product made by Menu Foods for any Manufacturer (even if they do not contain wheat gluten). We need to be clear that these brands are NOT recalled.
As soon as there is definitive information about the exact nature of the contamination, we will reinstate the brands temporarily taken down from our site
We do feel 100% confident that the manufacturers we carry on our website have your pet’s health as their number 1 priority and make products with that
mission in mind. Having said that, we will be asking very hard questions about quality standards and give you our word that any product made by a company
that either cannot or will not answer those questions will be permanently taken down from our site. In the coming weeks, we will be posting each company's
quality assurance statement on our site so that you can be aware of where the product is made, where the ingredients come from and what quality control
measures are in place.
Sincerely,
John Gigliotti
President
Waggin Tails
*******
This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2007/04/03/petscol.DTL
----------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 (SF Gate)
YOUR WHOLE PET/Bigger than you think: The story behind the pet food recall
By Christie Keith, Special to SF Gate
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 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.
*******
This is a good column written by veterinarian, Dr. Chris Duke, and was online at the News Sentenial, Fort Wayne IN.
Niki Behrikis Shanahan
Author of the following books:
The Rainbow Bridge: Pet Loss Is Heaven's Gain ~ E-Book
There Is Eternal Life For Animals ~ Your Pet Has A Past, A Present, And A Future!
Animal Prayer Guide ~ Prayers To Bless, Heal, And Help Your Pet!
For more information, please visit
www.eternalanimals.com
So what's the latest on the pet food recall?
By Dr. Chris Duke
McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
In our practice, we have been very busy lately fielding phone calls, treating possible cases related to - and yes, calming fears with regard to - the pet
food recall. No, I can't tell you all there is to know about the recall that has made the news over the past couple of weeks, but I can share what I do
know.
Let's begin with the basic facts of the situation as they have unfolded.
Back on March 16, Menu Foods made a recall of many brands of both dog and cat foods of its "cuts and gravy" style of products. While this recall has expanded
to include more than 90 brands of pet food across the manufacturing spectrum (53 of them dog food brands), this represents those pet foods packaged in
Emporia, Kan., between Dec. 3, 2006, and March 6, 2007. Of all commercially available pet foods, this represents only 1 percent of the market. No dry foods
(the majority of pet foods on the market) have been affected.
Studies have identified the causative agent in the tainted pet foods as aminopterin, a rodenticide used for pest control purposes outside the U.S. The FDA
stated that as of last Friday, March, 23, 2007, that nationally, the substance may have contributed to 16 animal deaths.
Most reported cases have involved cats and small dogs. This could either be because of the relatively smaller amount that can affect these pets vs. larger
ones, or the fact that these pets may be likely to receive these types of foods in their diets.
So what symptoms are pet owners likely to see if they believe their pet is affected? Anorexia, lethargy, vomiting, diarrhea, changes in water consumption
and urination habits. The life-threatening feature of the toxin is kidney failure. If a pet owner suspects these symptoms may be linked to the food they
may have fed their pet, they are encouraged to have their veterinarian run a blood test and urinalysis, so as to check the integrity of the kidneys.
Furthermore, the pet owner is asked to do the following:
_ Retain food samples for analysis.
_ Document product name, type of product and manufacturing information, saving purchase receipts, date codes or production lot numbers.
_Document product consumption - as in when the product was fed, time and relative onset of signs afterwards, and feeding methods (including other foods
in the mix).
Dr. Sandra Willis, DVM, communications chair for the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, stated that owners shouldn't panic, as there are
a wide variety of reasons a pet might exhibit some or all of these symptoms. I agree. It may comfort some local pet owners that at our practice, we have
yet to see a case of kidney disease linked to these pet foods. We have had several pet owners ask us to test their pets to verify their kidney status,
but have luckily had no related confirmations.
I personally however, have diagnosed a case of heartworm disease, a bladder infection, and, on Monday, a Parvovirus case on three separate dogs of which
the owners thought the food was to blame. So, I guess we need to stay open-minded when it comes to diagnostics on pets that are having difficulty with
gastrointestinal or urinary tract disease during this suspicious time.
So what should a pet owner do if they have some of the pet food on the recall list? Return the food to where you bought it. How do you know whether that
food is on the recall list?
Visit the AVMA Web site at
www.avma.org
, and view the list. Another helpful Web site, which has more information regarding the topic of aminopterin is the ASPCA Web site:
www.aspca.org.
For those concerned directly with the manufacturer, or without a personal computer, you may call Menu Foods at 1-866-895-2708. We earnestly pray that we've
already seen the worst, and the recall of the involved foods was the first step in reversing the trend of these tragic pet deaths.
---
Dr. Chris Duke is a veterinarian at Bienville Animal Medical Center in Ocean Springs, Miss. Questions for this column are encouraged. Write to South Mississippi
Veterinary Medical Association, 20005 Pineville Road, Long Beach MS 39560 and include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/17026817.htm
*******
This morning I went to my favorite cat food shopping web site:
www.petfooddirect.com
I love it because they list the ingredients and basic analysis for
every food they sell. I took a quick look through the dry foods, and
found the following. It's not so hard to find dry cat food that has
no wheat products in it at all.
Beth
No Wheat
Wellness
Solid Gold
Sensible Choice
Royal Canin
Innova
Bil-Jac
California Natural
Eukanuba
Iams
Evolve
Natural Balance
Felidae
Nature's Recipe
No Grain
Wellness Core
Innova Evo
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