The broad reaches of melamine

Over at Deep Sea News, Craig has a heartbreaking story about the death of his dog a year ago, and it's possible connection to the current pet food recall. I admittedly haven't been paying very close attention to all the updates on this. I have two small dogs of my own, a 10-year-old chihuahua and a 8-month-old Boston terrier mix, and they both get boring dry food that hadn't been implicated in the recall, so I tuned out a bit after assuming their food was safe. However, Craig's post noted that this melamine spiking has been going on for as long as 15 years, and the American Veterinary Medical Association has an updated list of recalled foods.

Why I bring this up is because in 2005, my chihuahua had horrible pains after Christmas. She could barely walk, would yip in pain with every step, and had nasty diarrhea. When I realized she wasn't getting any better, we took her in to the vet to get her checked out. Our vet suggested it was probably pancreatitis, and at that point, we stopped feeding her any soft food (previously she'd gotten occasional pouches of Mighty Dog--which is on the affected list). These symptoms can be caused just by fatty food, and so removing the soft food from her diet stopped the symptoms--but was it merely because of the food, or was it because the food was spiked with melamine? I suppose it doesn't matter much for my dog--if she was poisoned, she's since recovered, with no apparent permanent damage. But stories like Craig's are a reminder that we're not all so lucky, and that despite our best efforts and intentions, we can't always protect the ones we love. My heart goes out to everyone who lost a friend due to this mess.

More like this

I've been meaning to write something up about this for awhile, but keep forgetting. Anyhoo, because my own dog is currently ill and it's stressing me out watching her (not due to this, thankfully), I thought I'd do my own little part to get the word out to any dog owners who may not have heard of…
I try to keep all posts here strictly on topic, after all this is Deep-Sea News. So if you are not interested in my personal life and only in the deep sea then stop reading now. Last year on July 4, I faced the decision that no one with a dog should ever face. The vet looked at me and said…
Because of the flood of responses I got to yesterday's post on The Insanity of the FDA Approved Obesity Drug for Dogs, I thought I'd start a series of follow up posts answering the many questions I got by email and in the comments here. The most common question was, Okay, so the drug is a bad idea…
The other day I took my dogs to the vet for a checkup and saw a woman with her morbidly obese dog waiting to fill her prescription for Slentrol -- the first obesity drug for dogs -- which made me feel the need to resurrect this post below, which I wrote the day the FDA announced they'd approved the…

As the author of Food Pets Die For: and Protect Your Pet: I have researched/investigated the commerical pet food industry for over 16 years. It has been clear that government has virtually no regulations within this industry and anything and everything is fair game for use in pet foods.
Pet foods have contained wheat gluten and rice by-products for many years and with the recent massive recall you have to wonder for how many years contaminants from these grains have been going into pet foods. If pets were older and suffered from renal failure the owners would not question if it was a toxin in the food they were feeding that caused the problem. They would assume it was old age. Renal failure, even in younger animals, can be attributed to a number of causes so unsuspecting owners and even veterinarians would likely rule out the diet as the cause. There has been no information come to light as to how long the industry has been purchasing grains from China but it might be interesting to do a little digging and find out.

15 years! About 10 years ago, my cat had a stroke and I switched from dry to canned food since he seemed to have lost his appetite. A year later, I had to have him put to sleep because of kidney failure. At the time, there didn't seem to be any possible connection between stroke and kidney failure. The canned cat food may provide that link. The industry needs regulation, inspections, and some strong fines.

My cat died of kidney failure about 10 years ago. He was 11 years old. At the time, my vet said that cats who eat wet food tend to get kidney failure much more often than cats who eat dry food. I don't remember if he gave a rationale. My questions: 1. Is there a real association between wet food and kidney failure in cats? 2. Could this association have been due to melamine doping all along?

November my 9year old Rott died from a similar organ shutdown. Don't have much clue what the cause was, but his digestive track had been weak for at least a year. The other two dogs are doing fine. I suspect there has probably been a low level of this sort of additional illness going on for many years.

Tara: pancreatitis is pretty common in dogs, I had an animal with a pretty severe case about 30years ago, so it probably isn't related to
melamine spiking.

The FDA's Search For Pet Food Recalls page at
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/petfoodrecall/
allows you to search by:
- Brand Name (Example: Americas Choice, Authority)
- UPC Code (Example: 54807-59114)
- Product Description (Example: SL Beef/Gravy 24x5.5oz)
- Container (Example: Pouch)
- Any combination of: container, brand name, description, size (Example: Pouch Menu Beef/Gravy 24x5.5oz)
The advantage of the FDA site is it is always more up to date than anyone else's page.

VeterinaryPartner.com keeps updating its recall page as well -
http://www.veterinarypartner.com/Content.plx?C=32&A=2528

By Becky Lundgren, DVM (not verified) on 03 May 2007 #permalink