Friday, May 11, 2007
Let's Give Them a Piece of Our Mind...
Ok, that's it. First it was melanine...
And when they stop laughing, we can maybe do another deal for some cheap plastic crap made by nine-year-old girls in a locked factory.
- Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China
April 30, 2007
By DAVID BARBOZA and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 -- As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
The pet food case is also putting China's agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.
In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.
Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is then used to create plastics and fertilizer.
But the leftover melamine scrap, golf ball-size chunks of white rock, is sometimes being sold to local agricultural entrepreneurs, who say they mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that is high in protein.
"It just saves money if you add melamine scrap," said the manager of an animal feed factory here.
- Another Chemical Emerges in Pet Food Case
By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: May 9, 2007
SHANGHAI, May 8 -- A second industrial chemical that American regulators have identified as a pet food contaminant may have been intentionally added to animal feed by producers seeking larger profits, according to interviews Tuesday with chemical industry officials.
Three chemical makers said Chinese animal feed producers often came to purchase cyanuric acid to blend into their feed because it was cheaper and helped increase protein content. In the United States, cyanuric acid is often used as a chemical stabilizer in swimming pools, though it is not thought to be highly toxic on its own.
- Chinese Company Linked to Deaths Wasn't Licensed
By JAKE HOOKER
BEIJING, May 8 -- China's drug regulation agency has confirmed that the company linked to counterfeit medicine that caused at least 100 deaths in Panama was not licensed to be engaged in the pharmaceutical business, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the agency, the State Food and Drug Administration, conducted an investigation last year in response to a request by officials at the United States Food and Drug Administration.
Ms. Jiang's comments, made in a regular Tuesday briefing, were prompted by an article on Sunday in The New York Times that described how cough medicine in Panama was tainted with a poisonous industrial solvent, diethylene glycol, that was traced to a factory in eastern China.
The article reported that the solvent -- which passed through brokers in China, Spain and Panama -- was falsely identified as glycerin, a sweet-tasting syrup that is a common ingredient in medicine.
And when they stop laughing, we can maybe do another deal for some cheap plastic crap made by nine-year-old girls in a locked factory.
