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I'll digest it your entire post as time allows. Thank you for your reply.
I think I'll stick with my belief that consumers will be the last to know, and if something isn't "adding up" there May be more to the story than consumers will be told.
I'll continue to look for mishandled proprietary information and share it.
Last edited by leanansidhex; 12-02-2011 at 03:30 PM..
Reason: missing word
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['If the levels were high why wasn't a warning issued?' ] PacificFlights
YOU tell us why pet food companies don't issue a warning, until they have to because they get caught by consumers, or outside testing sources, or the anecdotal evidence becomes overwhelming, perhaps starting with the 2007 Recall of cat foods.
Let us know at what point in that 2007 "incident" owners with sick or dead cats, that attributed it to the food that had been fed, were officially notified that they were indeed correct in their panicky assumptions and were allowed the honor of an official recall.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PacificFlights
4. Pet food companies don;t issue warnings until they have proof also. Lets face reality, they are in the business to sell their products to consumers and unless they have to issue a statement, there is no reason for them to issue it. They test their products for contaminations, toxions, and qulaity all the time, but just like the melemine incident, it wasn;t somethingt hey test for because it wasn;t something them imagined would be in the food. When reports started coming in, they started testing to see what the heck was wrong and thats how the melamine was discovered. There are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of items that can contaminate food and manufactures can;t test for everything. So unfortunetely, facts are facts, it will take illness and deaths before they know something is wrong. Thats life!
Thank you for proving my point.
Last edited by leanansidhex; 12-02-2011 at 03:59 PM..
Reason: delete orphaned statement
I'll digest it your entire post as time allows. Thank you for your reply.
I think I'll stick with my belief that consumers will be the last to know, and if something isn't "adding up" there May be more to the story than consumers will be told.
I'll continue to look for mishandled proprietary information and share it.
there was no point you neede to prove because thats just the way it is and is a known fact. They can't warn you about something until they know it happened. Think of it logically.
Pet food is manufactured
It's tested with no harful results
people say it is now causing illness
They restest
They find something wrong, recall the item and notify the FDA who also issues the recall
Consumers are now aware.
Or, are you expecting the manufacture to issue a recall today on a product they will be making next year for a contamination that does not exist yet? If that's the case, don't eat cabbage because maybe in June 2016 there may be a e-coli outbreak, so we are recalling all cabbage that ghasn;t even been harvested let alone planted as of today? Once again, if manufactures issed recalls based soly on unconfirmed and none proven complaints, the shelves would be bare and you would have nothing to eat or drink.
I've missed this going on until recently but here is my weigh in on the matter - for what it's worth.
The long and short of the matter is these companies are exactly that - They will not recall a product until it comes a point where the bottom line outweighs the risk.
Car manufactures deal in these simple statistics and risk analysis all the time as well as drug manufactures - there's one we can ALL identify with. How much of my crappy product can I push out into the world to generate income BEFORE I reach the critical point where I am going to be doing more damage than I can fund. Other wise stated - Am I making more money for my product than what I can be sued for.
Since some of us are familiar with how pet food lawsuits from bad product go - they can push a TON of crap into the world! Their risk assessment is more in terms of PR and marketing damage than in a monetary pay out.
You have to realize that NO MATTER WHAT that nice little commercial says - these companies couldn't give a crap less about you as a "pet parent" and what you feed your precious furry kid. The part of the FDA that drew the short straw and oversees pet food also oversees every other miscellaneous category such as cosmetics. There is a reason for this! The labs that test are owned in part by the companies that manufacture the food - one is a subsidiary of another major conglomerate. If the problem isn't "that bad" it goes away until they can't keep it quiet anymore.
The FDA and food manufactures handle things quietly all the time - business to business. Why do you think a nice little fine makes things go away? Stroke a check and we turn our heads.
The latest "voluntary pull" from Iams is just a latest example. I think the issue is not WHAT the problem is - a the heart of it it really does not matter that it was aflotoxin levels or exactly what standards they were within . The problem is why the company feels the need to be so secretive about an issue with the product. Why our government allows food companies - both pet and human- to hide it's practices from it's consumers. Don't we have a right to know what we are putting in our pets bodies as well as our own? Why do these companies feel they have the authority to make us feel shameful for questioning their secrecy? Obviously there is something for them to hide.
Kittymom, its important to understand that although questions are valid about the connectin betwen manufactures, labs and government, there are still plenty of independent groups also trying to catch problems. Take the chicken jerky, the EPA, manufactures and labs are not the only agencies world wide dealing with this. Canada, Australia, Europe and British independent labs are also trying to find the cause of any illness and have also come up empty handed. Places like Britain and Japan don;t use manufacture samples for testing, they do shelf aquisitions. They buy the products right off the sjhelf for testing. So athough a question may be raise about how things are done in the uSA, all the other countries have also found nothing.
So what can be done in the overall picture of pet food safety?
Well for a start (not the ultimate solution but a first step) I have a few ideas for discussion.
1. I belive that whenever any governement or true independent agency issues some warning or advisory about a product, the manufacture should be required to post that warning. USA wanings and foreign advisory notices arn;t issues just because of complaints, they are usually accompanied by certain specific issues that although not known or scientifically proven, they have risen to a level where consumers need to be aware of them as a precaution.
In Britain, advisories are the number one way of seperating facts from fiction. People tend to be more aware and as a result can show more details of an illness than through simple missassociation because they "heard" it may be a product. It also helps because people may report a developing illness but they never used a product. Noe the agencies can see that a illness occured that meets their concern but from another product so what is the relationship?
2. In the case where a product fails to meet or exceeds a manufactures specification even though it is well within the allowable limits, consumers should be notified, When you think of it, we have more laws related to proper trade practices over weights and measures than we do for ingredient specification.
If a manufacture claims their product contains 100% juice and thats how they market it, present it on the websites, in their literature or however they are using oit for their benefit, if they fail to meet that specification they are marketing the product under, they owe it to the consumer to advise them they are not buying what they think it is. We know that if a prodcut is advertised as being 10 oz but its only 8 oz, there are many laws to protect consumers and fine the manufacture, so why not for everything they advertise or claim?
3. When a issue with human or animal health is concern, we need to give the powers that be the authority to investigate even if that emans some upset to the family. If a dog is reported as dying after eating chicken jerky, the vets should be required to hold the body for examination. Right now the labs have nothing but product to test. They have nothing to examine that was impacted by the product.
You go into the hospital because you have severe stomach pains, your test and physical samples can be sent to labs and governemnt agencies for examination. Right now, the majority of reports are just paper narrative reports and suspicions with nothing backing them up but someone saying so. We need to impose the same health reporting for animals as we do for humans if we are really serious about protecting them.
Well First off - you're asking for the cooperation of several different government services and we all know how that goes. It's not going to happen. The USDA and the FDA don't like to share and don't like to play in each others sand box so to speak as far as oversight and quality control. One monitors some things, one monitors another and each pretends everyone is actually doing their job.
And yes, there are true independent labs that do testing. I believe such a lab did EXACTLY what you are speaking of with off the shelf product testing recently here in the US. After which they compiled a FANTASTIC report about unacceptable heavy metal levels in nearly ALL the tested brands of dry and wet cat and dog foods. As we all know that report never saw the light of day because the big manufactures threw enough money and weight around to keep the report shut down. NOW - lets ask ourselves WHY none of these heavy metal levels have EVER been found before - GEE doesn't take too long to figure that one out now does it? And if you would like to go a step further with this - the lab that did that report will NO LONGER accept food samples sent in from private citizens for testing, neither will many others - go figure.
I do not think that you will ever stop the hypochondriac bandwagon once a possible food contaminate has been made known. This is not a reason to keep the public in the dark. It's like saying we should no longer do drug trials because of the placebo effect - that's stupid, even though it does skew the results. You just know to know that every reported case is not going to be real. Should we stop telling the public when we find bad produce, peanut butter, or meat because some or the cases should be fake?
You cannot force a pet owner who suspects their animal to be affected by a pet food contaminate to do certain tests to "prove it" nor can you expect them to surrender the body of a deceased pet for necropsy. Possibly more pet owners would be willing to pay for testing such as blood work if the culpable party was willing to pay for the testing. However, as we are all aware, in most states pets are considered property - which is exactly why the laws are working AGAINST us, for now, in the lawsuits against the pet food manufacturers or in veterinary medicine malpractice claim. Thankfully these laws are slowly changing. If your child died because she ate bad chicken nuggets at McDonald's would you expect to surrender her remains to a cooperation for testing to prove it was their food? I certainly think not, and I think you would expect the company to be held liable.
The concepts of “risk assessment”, assessment < snip > should be applied to assess the risk and safety of mycotoxins in pet food,
thereby instilling public confidence in the pet food industry.
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