3 Companies Indicted in Pet Food Case

[RamboLiberal]

Source: ABC News/AP

Two Chinese businesses and a U.S. company were indicted Wednesday in the tainted pet food incidents that killed dozens of animals last year and raised worries about products made in China.

Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., Suzhou Textiles, Silk, Light Industrial Products, Arts and Crafts I/E Co., and Las Vegas-based ChemNutra Inc. were charged in two separate but related indictments. The U.S. attorney's office in Kansas City said the tainted food led to the death and serious illness of pets in the U.S. last year.

One of the indictments charges Xuzhou Anying Biologic, located in China's Jiangsu Province, and Suzhou Textiles, in Suzhou, China, with 13 counts of introduction of adulterated food into interstate commerce and 13 counts of introduction of misbranded food into interstate commerce.

ChemNutra and company owners Sally Quing Miller, a Chinese national, and her husband, Stephen S. Miller were charged with 13 counts of introduction of adulterated food into interstate commerce, 13 counts of introduction of misbranded food into interstate commerce and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

The indictments allege that Suzhou Textiles, an export broker, mislabeled 800 metric tons of wheat gluten tainted with the toxic chemical melamine to avoid inspection in China. Xuzhou then did not properly declare the contaminated product it shipped to the U.S. as a material to be used in food, the indictment says.



Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=4251943

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About time!

[Demeter]

1. I Thought It Was More Like Hundreds of Dead Pets

[RamboLiberal]

2. Yeah - ABC's web headline says 4,000+ pets dead

From what I was reading last year I had to believe it numbered in the hundreds or thousands.

[niyad]

3. one of the vets who posts here was saying at the time that, from what she was seeing and hearing,

vets all around the country were working frantically 24/7-- and the death toll was far higher than the media was reporting.

[kestrel91316]

6. Ultimately, the vet website I was monitoring concluded that

several thousand pets died, IIRC. I will go back there and check to refresh my memory.

One of the problems was, lots of pets got sick/died and never had tissue testing done so they could be counted among the victims. And case definition has been problematic. We see lots of renal disease in elderly animals anyway......

From the FDA website:
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2008/NEW01792.html

News of this indictment must have hit VIN, lol. I can't get the pet food recall thread to come up - must be JAMMED.

On edit: I found a fairly recent post at VIN that says 347 cases that THEY were tracking met the criteria for the case definition. Mortality 60-70% (cats were higher than dogs). IMHO this is the tip of the iceberg.

[woodsprite]

19. I'm still not so sure this isn't what happened to my dog.

They said she had lung cancer, but that didn't seem to be bothering her at all (slight wheezing). She was definitely having some real kidney issues that came up just about a month or so after this food was hitting the market. They couldn't pinpoint what was going on there after tons of testing. They wouldn't even consider the food as a possibility because it was Science Diet dry prescription from the vet mixed with Pedigree and Sci Diet Script wet. The kidney issues greatly diminished when I changed her over to an all natural human-grade diet.

Unfortunately, she died over Thanksgiving of a stroke. :(

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. Somewhere in China they're saying...

...damn. They're more concerned about animals which we consume, than they do for human life in another country.

[DCKit]

5. 800 Metric Tons...

yet we're expected to believe that none made it into any human food products?

The current government has zero credibility.

[kestrel91316]

7. Are you aware of any sudden up-tick in human renal failure cases

where mysterious crystals were found in the kidneys on postmortem?

'Cause I'm not. And I happen to believe that American pathologists would have noticed something.

[sendero]

9. You think every time..

... someone dies of kidney failure, there is a "postmortem".

Yeah, right.

[kestrel91316]

11. If the death didn't make sense, you bet.

And renal biopsies do happen when somebody gets renal failure unexpectedly. And more importantly, the crystals show up IN THE URINE. Call up your local human hospital lab and see just how many urinalyses they do in a day and get back to me.

Veterinarians aren't stupid. Neither are physicians.

[Joanne98]

10. My cat Rocky, who is nine years old, is dying right now...

he has been sick for three days and we have to put him to sleep tomorrow because he has kidney failure. I know this is common in older cats BUT, we have to know more about the food supply.

[kestrel91316]

12. The good thing is, reputable pet food manufacturers are now testing

their ingredients for melamine and cyanuric acid (the deadly combo of adulterants).

Sorry about your kitty. Before you put him to sleep, if you want, PM me with his lab numbers (BUN, Creatinine, Phosphorus, Urine Specific Gravity). Some vets don't get aggressive enough with these guys. Some can be turned around and have very good QOL for years.

[candice]

16. There's a great yahoo group

Feline-CRF-Support

that helped me keep my cat alive for two additional years!

[Critters2]

17. Me, too. My Ari lived 2 1/2 years with crf, largely due to info I found there. nt

[PSPS]

15. About your sick kitty

I had a cat with kidney failure, and I was able to give him a few more years of quality happy life by administering subcutaneous fluids every couple of days or so. It's easy to do, inexpensive, and I'm glad I did it. Your vet can tell you if it might work for Rocky, and also show you how to do it. (You can even take him in and let them do it if you want to, but it is so easy that you can do it yourself.)

Eventually, my cat did succumb. But until the last couple of days, he was a happy hungry guy whose company I enjoyed then, and I still miss today.

[DCKit]

18. As TheMadMonk stated below:

These chemicals do not have the same toxicity on humans. Cats are at serious risk of renal failure, dogs, less so. However, I would think that anyone with impaired kidney and/or liver function would also be at risk since they would be less able to process and eliminate this chemical and it's byproducts.

However, my point in replying: Where did I say, or even imply, that any people had died, or even been sickened, as a result of food products contaminated with melamine?

[TheMadMonk]

13. Not wonderful I know, but fortunately the offending chemicals...

...are less toxic to us, IIRC, than to our animal companions.

[kestrel91316]

8. Link to ChemNutra's CEO Stephen Miller's congressional testimony:

http://www.chemnutra.com/Commerce%20Committee%20Submissions.pdf

And link to ChemNutra's website - they don't appear to have anything for their shareholders about the indictments yet - odd, that:
http://www.chemnutra.com/pricipals.htm

[allisonthegreat]

14. That's just the deaths they know about

probably like people's pets just dying and they can't afford vet care, so no autopsy was done. Probably actually a hell of a lot more than 4000+.