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April 3, 2007

Pet Food News - Beware of Wheat Gluten from Xuzhou Anying Biologic

by Ferdinand T Cat

In response to the pet food recall crisis, The FDA has placed an import restriction on wheat gluten from Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company Ltd. The technical term for this type of restriction is detention without examination, meaning none of it gets through. In addition, import officers have been told to make sampling tests for the presence of melamine in all wheat gluten coming from China or the Netherlands. (This last is because the Netherlands ships a lot of wheat gluten that originated in China.)

A Xuzhou Anying spokesman says that they are investigating the problem, but they also claim that their gluten is purchased from other companies, further muddying the waters.

There are several pages about Xuzhou Anying on the web. Most look something like this.

Xuzhou Anying may, in fact, be innocent and the culprit one of the companies from which it buys the gluten. The tainted gluten was allegedly sold be XA to Suzhou Textiles, which then shipped it to a U.S. supplier who then sold it to the various pet food companies. XA wonders why they have been singled out, but I think the reason is that their name contains Biologic Technology Development instead of Textiles. In any case, XA is going to have to scramble if it wants to stay in business. The FDA will not lift the detention order until XA comes up with a reasonable explanation and a strategy to prevent this from happening again.

Before he started working at the lab, Bruce worked for a company that sold a giant computer program you could use to track the manufacturing process of your products and determine for each box going out of the plant exactly what pieces came from where. We mostly sold the program to manufacturers who products high-tech things like computers and television sets. No one ever thought to sell to Chinese food technology companies.

If only we had known.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Hat tip: Reuters.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Dumb Ox Daily News, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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I think we're being far too quick to swallow the melamine story. Several officials have pointed out what is obvious from research -- melamine is just not that toxic.

At least as far as we know.

http://stevejanke.com/archives/221554.php

The real culprit might still be lurking, and we've identified the wrong source because we've been looking at the wrong contaminent, then the problem could return.


Posted by: Steve Janke at April 4, 2007 9:35 AM

You are correct, and quite frankly, from a biology standpoint animopterin seemed a much better fit than melamine.

In the meantime, I've instructed Bruce to avoid ANYTHING with wheat gluten in it.


Posted by: Ferdy Author Profile Page at April 4, 2007 11:17 PM

And now with the Chinese being obstructionists (as predicted they would) the probability grows that we'll never understand just what happened. Which means it can happen again.

http://stevejanke.com/archives/221756.php


Posted by: Steve Janke at April 5, 2007 12:51 PM

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