Sick Cardikid

Mikey is making me very worried tonight. He has vomited twice, and is restless and whiny. I'm always worried that the dogs will snatch up something they shouldn't eat on the bayou when I'm looking the other way. If he keeps vomiting or seems in any way worse, we're off to the emergency. I'm making some plain white rice for in the morning, assuming everything goes ok tonight. This is one of the icky parts of dogs; knowing something is wrong, but they can't speak and tell you what it is. . . Just a couple of hours ago he was fine and chasing pink ball up and down the hallway.

And I thought I was actually going to get to bed early tonight! To take my mind off the worry (if that's really possible) I'm going to briefly catch up on some recall related issues.

First, the FDA had another press conference today, live blogged as usual by Christie over at Pet Connection. Today's antics include reports of farmed fish in Canada that were fed contaminated feed. No word on if any of these fish have entered the human food chain. Also, both the wheat gluten and the rice protein concentrate are actually wheat flour! Looks as if the Chinese decided to cheapen the product even more by not even bothering to process the gluten out of the wheat flour. And this may explain why there has been an explosion of sickness, because only a small amount of melamine or related contaminant would be added to boost the nitrogen content of wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate. But because wheat flour is mostly carbohydrates, a lot of fake protein would have to be added to make the nitrogen levels high enough to pass for wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate. And so the plot thickens.

And about all those chickens and hogs that consumed the melamine contaminated feed. . .

The USDA has lifted the quarantine on the 20 million chickens they detained on Friday that may have eaten tainted pet food in their feed. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said that “testing found that the contaminant, the industrial chemical melamine, was so diluted that any human exposure from the meat or eggs of the animals would be thousands of times lower than the level considered safe.” So, now these chickens will be released into our food supply.

This is in stark contrast to
From the official transcript, FDA-USDA Update on Recall of Pet Foods , April 26, 2007:
REPORTER: Could I follow up that question? The parts per billion that you found in the urine, is there an acceptable level? You told me what the level is. But how much higher is that than what’s acceptable, or is there no acceptable level?

DR. MCCHESNEY: This is Dan McChesney. I’ll try that one. Currently there’s no tolerance for any of these compounds, either melamine or cyanuric acid. So because of that we really cannot, the likelihood of this leads from very low likelihood of any problems resulting in food that contained these as Dr. Acheson said is really extremely low. However, we just don’t know when we get these mixtures together. So there is no acceptable level.

And finally a quote from the comments section at Pet Connection that just really says it all:

TC Says: May 7th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
We are on our own. I don’t care what the label says or doesn’t say, or who “endorses” what, or which hour of which day the FDA gives the all clear, or the USDA’s pitful attempts at job security promising me the moon with NAIS.
Whatever these other groups, organizations, govt. agencies or my great Aunt Minnie says will from now on be merely “advisory” to me. I will it take under consideration. I won’t take it as a guarantee that someone actually DID the job I thought they were hired to do. Or trust what is said without seeing if I can verify it myself. I will reject out of hand anything that just doesn’t make sense, I am not even going to TRY to make sense of nonsense anymore.

Mikey says 'Errrp' and Holly says 'Hi'.