Melamine has now been found in the feed given to farmed fish. There goes another part of the human food chain!
Farmed fish have been fed meal spiked with the
same chemical that has been linked to the pet food recall, but the
contamination was probably too low to harm anyone who ate the fish,
federal officials said Tuesday.The
Canadian-made meal included what was purported to be wheat gluten, a
protein source, imported from China. The material was actually wheat
flour spiked by the chemical melamine and related, nitrogen-rich
compounds to make it appear more protein rich than it was, officials
said.
Bad for pets, good for humans- next they will be saying that melamine is like chocolate and actually confers health benefits on the humans who ingest it.
What this does show is the sad state of affairs of environmental toxins permeating every aspect of our daily lives. You might escape one or the other by cutting back on ingesting pork, or chicken , or beef (mad cow), or non-organic veggies (pesticides), or farmed fish, or sea fish (mercury),or tap water or… Why don’t we just quit breathing the air and start using oxygen cylinders, as well?
To paraphrase ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:
‘Toxins,toxins everywhere and not a bite to eat/drop to drink/air to breathe’
Update: On further reading the fish feed article, we come across the latest discovery in the investigations of the wheat gluten-it’s not just gluten, it’s simple wheat flour spiked with melamine.
U.S. investigators also have learned that the
purported Chinese wheat gluten and a second ingredient, rice protein
concentrate, were actually simple wheat flour. The flour was spiked
with melamine and related, nitrogen-rich compounds to make it appear
more protein rich than it was. In tests, nitrogen levels are measured
to gauge the overall protein content of food ingredients.“What
we discovered is these are not wheat gluten and rice protein
concentrate but in fact are wheat flour contaminated by melamine,”
Acheson said.
All bets are off now, as to whether this ‘wheat flour spiked with melamine’ hasn’t already made it into our daily bread somehow or the other.
(Edited to change registration only link and add snippet of the news article.Thanks for the link,Ruchira.)
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “Melamine- Bad for pets, harmless for humans? (Sujatha)”
The melamine contamination is particularly upsetting because there is suspicion that this was a case of deliberate adulteration. (China has refused examination of the farm and packing facilities by American inspectors) Addition of melamine (which contains nitrogen) to foods would falsely boost their protein content in analysis. Again greed trumped all other considerations.
My sixteen year old cat eats commercial pet food but not any of the brands or formualtions that were on the recall list. However, most pet food manufactures use the same suppliers for one or more of the products / by-products that go into pet food. I will soon need to go and purchase supplies for him. I am nervous despite the reassuarances from the FDA that most offending products are now off the shelves.
Humans ingest a whole lot of environmental junk in processed foods. Even fresh foods often contain natural toxins. But we are not as vulnerable to contaminants as the pets, unless exposed to a virulent pathogen. We eat different foods at different meals and our diets vary daily. Most pets eat the same thing day after day and the build up of even a mildly toxic ingredient can have lethal cumulative effects.
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Adulteration of food items and the risk to pets ingesting the tainted materials aside, the FDA and USDA have released this report, concluding that no significant risk exists to humans ingesting even the worst case amounts:
“In the most extreme risk assessment scenario, when scientists assumed that all the solid food a person consumes in an entire day was contaminated with melamine at the levels observed in animals fed contaminated feed, the potential exposure was about 2,500 times lower than the dose considered safe. In other words, it was well below any level of public health concern.”
But I suspect that over time, such chemicals building up in the body can lead to other conditions, just like the well-worn analogy of the straw on the camel’s back. From another blogger:
“Okay, maybe each individual doesn’t get a massive dose of melamine but this isn’t like getting drowned in water where the amount is the crucial factor. The important fact here is that melamine even in very small amounts is toxic to living creatures. It doesn’t take a pound of it in your body to permanently disable or kill you. The right combination is shown to cause autoimmune dieases. So years later when you’re wondering why you have fibromyalgia or diabetes even though it does NOT run in your family, you eat healthily, etc. the tainted chicken is long gone but it has left its scars on your body. Besides, these poisons stay in bodies, building up over time.” (More at Link)
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