US Food Quality not up to Chinese Standards

More from the people that put melamine in wheat by-products to increase the apparent protein count, and shipped tooth paste and cough medicine with industrial diethylene glycol misused as a sweetener.

China destroys U.S. imports on safety grounds

Reuters, The Associated Press IHT
Published: June 8, 2007

BEIJING: Raisins and health supplements imported from the United States failed to meet Chinese safety standards and have been returned or destroyed, the country's food safety agency said Friday.

The move comes as China itself faces international criticism, especially in the United States, over a series of scandals that have plagued Chinese food, drugs and other products from poisoned cough syrup to tainted toothpaste and pet food.

Inspectors in the ports of Ningbo and Shenzhen found bacteria and sulfur dioxide in products shipped by three American companies, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said.

"The products failed to meet the sanitary standards of China," the agency said in a brief notice posted on its Web site. No details were given on when or how the inspections were conducted.

The agency said it was asking "all local departments to increase quarantine examinations of foods imported from the United States."

Telephones at the administration's office were not answered on Friday.

The Creepy China Food Syndrone. Why?

Take two parts of junk science, add a healthy dash of legal mumbo-jumbo and government insanity and you come up with some interesting results. Two industrial elements, asbestos and lead in paint have cost the US economy hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. Here are two little tidbits:

2005 Study Quantifies Benefits and Costs of Asbestos Litigation Reform

New York, 26 April 2005 -- A new study by NERA Economic Consulting estimates that asbestos litigation has cost the US economy $343 billion to date and that proposed trust fund legislation would save $71 billion in future administrative and legal costs alone. The US Senate is currently considering a bill that would remove claims from the court system and establish a $140 billion asbestos trust fund, financed by defendants and insurers.

Hysteria and junk science over lead paint can cost $15,000 to remove per house. Lead paint was banned in 1979. There are over 60,000,000 US houses that can be affected, plus schools and public buildings. That is a $900 billion government and lawyer made problem.

Now you can argue over the wisdom and the hows and wheres and whys over these two industrial components. We never intentionaly ate them. You can plead ignorance. The use and consequences of use were unknown, hard to stop and are now very expensive to correct, but the latest indignity from China of industrial chemicals intentionally used to adulterate food additives...Melamine, the only place in the kitchen for that was supposed to be to make your kitchen cabinets. The sick cynical freak that put it in food additives, produced in China, and sold to the US should be shot. Why is he still alive?

This should not be news to anyone but, we do not need to import any food additives from China. None. Not now, not ever.

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- The manager of the Chinese company suspected of selling tainted wheat flour to the United States has been detained for nearly two weeks outside Beijing, CNN has learned.

Tian Feng is the manager of Binzhou Futian Biology Technology, which U.S. pet food distributors have identified as the company that sold them wheat flour -- mislabeled as wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate -- containing melamine and related products.

Tian's company was shut by local police on April 25, the day he was detained.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Tian said in an interview with CNN from the detention center in Binzhou in China's eastern Shandong Province.

Dressed in a white T-shirt and orange prison vest, Tian said, "I don't know about melamine. I don't even know what this melamine is. I have never heard of anyone using it." (just a coincidence)

Under Chinese law, police can hold Tian for 30 days while the investigation continues. After that, he must be tried or released.

In addition to being used in pet food, the tainted flour also made its way into feed for some 20 million poultry, thousands of hogs, and an unknown number of farmed fish, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.

The FDA has said the threat to humans is remote. ( not as dangerous as second hand cigarette smoke no doubt.)

While the FDA has received reports of more than 4,000 pet deaths related to the recall, it has confirmed the deaths of only 17 cats and dogs. Agency officials have said they do not plan to investigate the thousands of reports of deaths they have received allegedly caused by the tainted food products. (Say again)

U.S. food authorities suspect melamine and cyuranic acid -- a chemical used in swimming pools -- were mixed into the flour because the nitrogen-rich compounds would make it appear that the flour contained more protein than it really did.

Researchers say that when melamine is combined with cyuranic acid, crystals can form in the kidneys, leading to organ failure.

Original reports cited tainted rice protein concentrate and wheat gluten as the suspected compounds. But authorities said Tuesday that tests have shown simple wheat flour was the culprit.

Dr. David Acheson, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's assistant commissioner for food protection, said Tuesday that officials suspect the Chinese company substituted wheat flour for wheat gluten and rice-protein concentrate, then attempted to make them appear to be the protein-rich substances by adulterating them. ( Hardly worth investigating, you think?)

Melamine and related compounds each contain high levels of nitrogen. Some tests for protein, which is also rich in nitrogen, test only for the nitrogen.

The Chinese government banned the use of melamine as a food additive only last month.

Free trade is not free. The dark side of free trade.

US manufacturers, farmers and food producers are often weighted down with government rules and regulation. The Chinese are not as particular. China can roll over domestic US producers and the Chinese are not held to the same standards as US manufacturers. Clever idea.

In August 1996, residents in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn described odd tree damage to a forestry inspector. Showy beetles collected from the neighborhood trees stumped the experts until Richard Hoebeke, assistant curator of Cornell University's insect collection, recognized it as Anoplophora glabripennis, a well-known menace in China, Korea, and Japan.

During the past 20 years or so, he's spotted about three dozen insect species that were invading the United States. Most of them turned out to be relatively harmless.

"This is the worst," he says. "This could easily be on the same level with the gypsy moth and the medfly."

The Asian long-horned beetle spends most of its life as a grub inside wood. It probably hitchhiked from China to the United States hidden in the cheap, untreated wood often used for pallets or packing material. APHIS' roughly 1,300 inspectors manage to check only about 2 percent of the goods sweeping into U.S. ports, and Cavey has been worried that the recent trade boom would start an international boom of alarming pests.

"We don't usually jump in as hard as we did," he says. Hoebeke had called Cavey when he recognized the Asian long-horned beetle, and within days, a federal quarantine forbade moving wood or plants out of an irregular area that eventually stretched some 16 miles across Brooklyn.

Nevertheless, in September 1996, beetles turned up in nearby Amityville, N.Y. They might have hitchhiked there compliments of a tree-pruning company that did many Brooklyn jobs for the telephone company. A year later, beetles appeared in Lindenhurst, N.Y.

Two years later, a Chicago man surfing the Web to identify beetles crawling out of his firewood tipped off authorities that the pest had reached the Midwest. Investigators found infested trees in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood and the communities of Addison and Summit.

Beetle watchers discovered yet another hot spot, in the Bayside area of Queens. The USDA has estimated that it has the potential to cause more damage than Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, and gypsy moths combined, destroying millions of acres of America’s treasured hardwoods, including national forests and backyard trees. The beetle has the potential to damage such industries as lumber, maple syrup, nursery, and tourism accumulating over $41 billion in losses.

Now we have this and there are many many more examples:

Additive that tainted U.S. pet food is commonly used in China

By David Barboza and Alexei Barrionuevo International Herald Tribune
Published: April 29, 2007

ZHANGQIU, China: American food safety regulators trying to figure out how an industrial chemical called melamine contaminated so much pet food in the United States might come to this heavily polluted city in Shandong Province in the northern part of the country.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, small acorn-sized chunks of white rock, is then being sold to local entrepreneurs, who say they secretly mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to artificially enhance the protein level.

The melamine powder has been dubbed "fake protein" and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that provides higher nutrition value.

"It just saves money," says a manager at an animal feed factory here. "Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level."

The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

But now, melamine is at the center of a massive, multinational pet food recall after it was linked earlier this month to the deaths and injuries of thousands of cats and dogs in the United States and South Africa.

No one knows exactly how melamine - which had not been believed to be particularly toxic - became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal.

U.S. regulators are now headed to China to figure out why pet food ingredients imported from here, including wheat gluten, were contaminated with high levels of the chemical.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has banned imports of wheat gluten from China and ordered the recall of over 60 million packages of pet food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also stepped in Thursday, ordering more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.