Pattern found in fatally contaminated pet food
By ELIZABETH WEISE
and JULIE SCHMIT
Gannett News Service
2008-03-11
The outbreak of contamination in pet foods that killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of U.S. cats and dogs last year wasn’t the first such incident, veterinary pathologists have determined.
A 2004 outbreak that also involved pet foods contaminated with industrial chemicals sickened more than 6,000 dogs and a smaller number of cats across Asia.
Kidney failure in the animals was linked to Pedigree dog foods and Whiskas cat foods manufactured in Thailand by Mars Inc. Thousands of pets died, according to Asian press reports at the time.
The Asian outbreak was little known in the United States until it was reported last week by the blog Pet Connection. In the American public’s view, the U.S. outbreak several years later appeared to be the first of its kind.
Veterinarians in Asia initially blamed the 2004 problems on fungal toxins, which also was one of the first suspicions when more than 1,000 brands of cat and dog food were recalled last year.
It took months for U.S. veterinarians, federal officials and scientists to find out what was in the food that was sickening and killing cats and dogs.
The culprit eventually was determined to be grain from China that had been spiked with the industrial chemical melamine to make it appear higher in protein. The melamine was contaminated with cyanuric acid.
It was a comment by a Korean graduate student in the midst of the 2007 outbreak that led Cathy Brown, a specialist in renal pathology at Georgia’s Athens Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory to suspect this had happened before. Brown eventually tracked down tissue samples from the pets who died in 2004 at the Kyungpook National University in Korea.
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