Pet Food Update 2
From CNN: Rat poison found in pet food, official says
ALBANY, New York (AP) — Rat poison has been found in pet food blamed for the deaths of at least 16 cats and dogs, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Agriculture and Markets said Friday.
Spokeswoman Jessica Chittenden would not identify the chemical or its source beyond saying it was a rodent poison.
The Food and Drug Administration has said the investigation was focusing on wheat gluten in the food. Wheat gluten itself would not cause kidney failure, but the common ingredient could have been contaminated by heavy metals or mold toxins, the FDA said.
The culprit is probably brodifacoum, an anticoagulant, that is the most common active ingredient in most rodent poisons, like d-CON. The antidote is vitamin K1 administered by injection or IV. It is a cumulative poison, building up in the blood stream until the fatal dosage is reached. If a particular animal already has a low level of vitamin K1 it will be affected more rapidly than others, but all will eventually be affected.
The first symptom is dehydration due to the internal break down of small blood vessels. The vitamin injections are effective, but it takes a while for the body to eliminate the chemical.
UPDATE: The New York Department of Agriculture has announced that they have discovered aminopterin, which is not licensed for use in the US as a rat poison, but is used in countries like China. It has been tested for use in chemotherapy. The antidote is folinic acid, which is not readily available and will kill if it is not used in conjunction with aminopterin, i.e. if it isn’t a case of aminopterin poisoning, the “cure” will kill your pet.
UPDATE II: The rat poison seems to be tied to Chinese wheat but no one can figure out why there are such concentrations. The poison is normally in bait around facilities, not on the grain itself.
9 comments
What do you suspect… accident, or deliberate introduction by a disgruntled employee? Disgusting either way, and especially disgusting that shipments were allowed to go out after the toxicity was known.
It sounds like they bought something from overseas that was contaminated in the factory, possibly the gluten they mentioned. I can see why vets missed it: it isn’t approved for use in the US other than treating leukemia.
Who in hell would look for a cancer drug in pet food? You need the facilities of a Cornell [a major vet research program] to find something like this. I wonder if someone was dumping the chemical in the raw grain to get rid of rats, but you really need to concentrate the chemical for it to cause death as quickly as it apparently did in some cases.
Another “benefit” of globalization – no standards.
“… dumping the chemical in the raw grain to get rid of rats, …” – Bryan
Then what about human consumption? I eat wheat gluten pretty frequently in one or another form (veggie BBQ, “wheat roast,” nuggets for stir-fry, etc.), and a quantity that would kill a cat would probably at least make me very sick. And I have some canned stir-fry nuggets from China on my shelf this very moment… the stuff even looks a bit like cat food. 🙂 I still have my suspicions that this is an intentional poisoning of cats and dogs by person(s) unknown. (Then again, maybe I’ve read too many British murder mysteries.)
This is odd because the amounts required to cause death would have to be high. While I was looking at the d-CON they had a report of a woman who apparently ate 1½ kilograms of the stuff but was successfully treated. From the report, you have to eat more that two pounds to reach a dangerous level.
Rat poisons are not very high in concentration, so for animals to die indicates a very high concentration, or the problem has been going on much longer than reported, allowing the poison to accumulate in the pets. Cats would be affected first because of their smaller size.
It is possible that the contamination took place on the ship and not the factories, but it didn’t happen in the US, because the poison isn’t readily available and is expensive in the US.
They are going to need to track the problem back.
As to your concern human food – Asians tend to be smaller than Americans, so contaminated products will so up first in Asia as the dosage levels are weight dependent.
The irony is that rats are the perfect cat food. A grain fed rat is the best diet a cat can have, because it is the diet that the cat has evolved for. Rats in a cat food plant should be considered a source of protein, not a problem.
We have a local “celebrity” vet who grosses people out by suggesting that dropping mice in a blender is the best way to make cat food.
My cat has been poisoned by that!
I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO, THE VETS TOLD TAHT SHE IS GOING TO DIE!
Have you considered that the China wheat poison may be a test on getting poison into our food supply?
This poison was found in a ratio of 40 to one million parts. This means that they put 40 pounds of poison into every million pounds of wheat sent to us. How much wheat did the Chinese send in the six-month (or longer) period that the China wheat was being poisoned? I would think that it would be many millions of pounds. At this ratio, the poisoning of the China wheat was not an accident.
How much of the China wheat that was poisoned was sent over for human consumption? Have we been slowly poisoned and haven’t considered it? Dog’s and Cat’s eat only one type of food so they would get the China poison in a higher concentration than humans would. Humans eat a larger variety of foods so we may have been getting poisoned by the Chinese at a slow but steady rate. If so, we will feel the health effects of this poisoning over the long term. You don’t really think that this poisoned China wheat was sent exclusively to pet food suppliers do you? How was that slice of healthy wheat toast and jelly this morning? How was the slice of apple pie with the wheat flour crust today for desert? Think folks, it was a bigger conspiracy than you have considered.
Yes, this is the result of our outsourcing our food supply to other countries. Do you think that Terrorists are paying attention to the China wheat poisoning? Man this is starting to worry me, well you think about this.
Good health to all of you.
Dr. Lee
My condolences, K. I’ve lost pets and know how I felt, but I won’t say say I know how you feel, because each relationship is different. There is a law suit pending and while I’m not advocating joining it, the more information that is available, the better. If you can think of it, have your vet send copies of case to the authorities in your state. It won’t help much, but you should be able to receive compensation for your vet bills.
The “cure” is as bad as the disease, and can cause the same type of problems. I’m sorry to say that if the kidneys are already destroyed nothing can help.
Dr. Lee, this is just one more in a long list of failures by the government to monitor the food system which is extremely susceptible to tampering. The laboratory that found the poison is actually part of New York’s terrorist response system, indicating that New York is thinking along the same lines. I trust them to follow this back to the source more the Federal government.
I don’t understand why a company from Canada, one of the largest wheat exporters in the world, is buying wheat from China. One of the plants is in Iowa, which can buy wheat from the Dakotas and have it shipped via the Missouri River for next to nothing, as opposed to being shipped from half way around the world. A lot of things don’t make sense, and I’m suspicious that in the end we are going to discover that the wheat was a shipment that was rejected for human consumption at the port, making it dirt cheap.
As Dr. Lee said, we may want to stop eating wheat gluten until we know its safe….
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