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USDA Clears Suspect Meat: Millions of Chickens, Hogs That Ate Tainted Pet Food Are Declared Safe for Human Use

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 May 2007, 06:00 CDT

Tests of hogs and chickens that ate melamine-laced pet food in recent months suggest that eating the animals' meat poses virtually no health risk to humans, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

The agency also announced that it had released to market roughly 20 million chickens that were being held on farms identified as having received shipments of the contaminated pet food, a decision one consumer group called premature.

An additional 6,000 hogs and 100,000 chickens raised on farms where the feed tested positive for melamine are still being held pending further test results. An estimated 3 million broiler chickens that ate melamine-tainted feed were sent to market in February and March.

Melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics manufacturing, is believed to have been added deliberately to shipments of common pet food ingredients from China to boost their apparent protein content. The chemical has been implicated in a wave of illnesses and deaths in cats and dogs over the past two months that has prompted the recall of more than 150 brands of pet food. Melamine moved into the human food supply via scrap pet food sold to livestock operations.

Federal investigators believe the chemical was diluted to negligible concentrations before it reached consumers' dinner plates. At the farm, the scrap pet food was typically mixed with other feeds.

Once ingested by a hog or chicken, most of the melamine appears to have been excreted rather than being taken up into muscle or fat tissue, said Robert Buchanan, senior science adviser for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

Analyses conducted at the University of California, Davis, found melamine at a concentration of roughly 10 parts per billion in meat samples taken from animals that ate the contaminated feed, Buchanan said.

Using that figure as a starting point, federal scientists estimated the likely maximum daily exposure to the chemical for a person eating nothing but the tainted meat. Even in that extreme case, the exposure would still be 250,000 times less, per pound of body weight, than the maximum "safe" daily dose of melamine for rats.

Melamine toxicity in humans has not been studied directly, and rats and humans have very different responses to some toxins. But it would be extraordinarily surprising if such a low dose of melamine turned out to be harmful to humans, Buchanan said.

Jean Halloran, a food safety specialist at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, criticized the agency's decision to release the 20 million chickens into the food supply. She said too many uncertainties remain about the effects of melamine on the human body, and that federal investigators simply haven't had enough time to do a thorough investigation.

Halloran also called for the USDA to require labeling of meat from animals that may have eaten contaminated feed. USDA spokesman Keith Williams said the agency would not require meat packers to take that step.

Source: The Sacramento Bee

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