After finding contaminated wheat gluten in cat and dog food, the United States has banned imports of the item from one Chinese company and suggested further scrutiny of other wheat imports.
In an alert issued March 30, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that wheat gluten imported from Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company Ltd. of the Wangdian Industrial Zone in China, contained melamine, a synthetic plastic that may be implicated in recent pet deaths and illnesses that may have occurred after the animals ate cat and dog food containing the toxin.
The FDA said last week it is still actively tracing the path of the contaminated wheat gluten, but does not believe the ingredient has made its way into human food.
Initially, 95 brands of cat and dog food produced by Canada-based Menu Foods Inc. were recalled March 16, but since the FDA’s discovery of melamine, several additional pet food items were recalled, because they used the same wheat gluten supplier as Menu Foods.
The barred Chinese company told the Associated Press that it did not produce the impacted wheat gluten but instead purchased it from other sources.
The FDA import alert doesn’t bar other companies from sending their wheat gluten products to the U.S., but it does recommend that the FDA’s field representatives sample and screen for wheat gluten coming from China and the Netherlands, a country where Chinese wheat gluten might travel through.
Read more updates about the dog food recall at www.dogchannel.com/dog-news/dog-food-recall-updates.aspx.