National Pet Food Recall Database - Pets Sickened 1,715; Deceased 845

[NAO]

From the PetConnection.com database. As of Thursday March 22, 2007 at 11:20 a.m. PT:

Total reports of sick or dead pets: 1715
Deceased pets: 845
Of those:

Cats, deceased: 500
Dogs, deceased: 345

updates posted frequently

***

Pet Connection
http://www.petconnection.com

For Latest Database Statistics and Information Updates
http://www.petconnection.com/blog

If you have had a pet in your family become seriously ill from kidney problems anytime since December - whether the pet is still with you of even if it passed or was euthanized months ago - please enter your case into this national database. Their site also directs you to the FDA site, with instructions on reporting the problem to the FDA.

ENTER AN INCIDENT INTO THE DATABASE
http://www.petconnection.com/recall

****

Petconnection.com is run by a high profile veterinarian. He realizes - as I hope everyone here does too - that the "10 dead cats" story the media keeps repeating is absolute nonsense. The problem is MUCH larger than this.

Lots of veterinarians have LOST THEIR OWN PETS to acute renal failure and their clinics have seen very abnormally high numbers of unexplained acute renal failure over the PAST FEW MONTHS (the poisoned food was on the shelves for nearly FOUR (4)MONTHS before the recall of 60 MILLION packets was finally issued on March 16.)

[IndyOp]

1. K&R, because I want the whole truth to come to light. (n/t)

:(

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. I'll wait for the peer-reviewed studies.

"Lots of veterinarians have LOST THEIR OWN PETS to acute renal failure and their clinics have seen very abnormally high numbers of unexplained acute renal failure over the PAST FEW MONTHS"

That's too anecdotal.

Organ failure is a rather common problem of old age in pets. I'd expect a lot of these deaths aren't related to the contaminate.

Last night on the local news, there was a poor woman who lost her cat. The cat had stopped eating, so she tried to feed it a "treat" with this recalled stuff. The cat later died and the woman blamed herself for the death. But the cat had stopped eating before she fed it too him, so that's a sign that the cat was ill over something else. I imagine there's a lot of misdiagnoses going on.

[NAO]

6. Chronic Kidney failure is common - ACUTE renal failure is rare

Chronic renal failure is a very common cause of death in older pets. Acute renal failure in ANY age animal is almost ALWAYS indicative of poisoning. Usually it's anti-freeze.

Many vet clinics across the country are reporting the same scenario: MULTIPLE pets in the SAME household are ALL sick at ONCE with renal failure. There are cases where multiple dogs AND cats, of VARIOUS AGES, all became sick and died within a few days of each other.

REMEMBER, this food has been on the shelves for NEARLY FOUR MONTHS. When they finally issued the recall, 60 MILLION packets were pulled off the shelves. "10 cats" & "some anecdotes"? No way.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. Did you see how he came up with his number?

He just solicited for claims on the internet.

This isn't science, it's just a panic.

[NAO]

11. The FDA's ADR data is ENTIRELY based on this method; consider the vastness of under-reporting

Of course these numbers are not solid until they have been evaluated. But soliciting self-reports IS science. In fact, it is the ENTIRE BASIS of the US FDA's "Adverse Drug Reaction" (ADR) database.

The site is run by a prominent veterinarian. They are encouraging people to report to the FDA.

Consider, with 60 million packets taken off the shelves on March 16, - how many packets were sold between Dec. 06 and March 07. If <1% resulted in fatalities, or even <0.01%, the numbers would still be in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.

These numbers are preliminary, but this is valid science. And I wouldn't rely on the pet food companies to gather this data (although they should review and dispute it once the numbers come in.)

[swimmernsecretsea]

3. Thank you for running this important info.

Many who have lost animals or have had them become seriously ill will need it. Don't think these companies don't already have their own methods of settling cases on this issue. They will.

[kestrel91316]

4. I saw an unusual number of CHRONIC renal failure cases last year,

now that I think about it.

Is the contamination more widespread than just the cuts and gravy? My clients know better than to feed that junk, but lots of them feed regular (pate style) canned food. Maybe my patients are just getting SMALLER DOSES of the toxin??

Hmmmmmmm. I am really not liking where this train of thought is headed.

[piesRsquare]

5. A couple of months ago

I fed my kitty canned Iams "pate style" and, strangely, he threw up several times after eating it. I stopped giving him Iams after that.

He's going in for testing on Monday. He had bloodwork done in November which showed his kidneys were a-ok...hopefully we'll get the same results next week...

[RL3AO]

7. My cat is spoiled, so she gets a little tuna off and on insted of the other stuff.

[Critters2]

8. My vet called today, said he wonders whether my Sophie's recent illness

may have been related to tainted food. But as far as I know, she hasn't had anything but her Pet Promise, and the occasional nibble from her brother's C/D. That's what I told the vet, but he says her symptoms--bad kidney numbers, bad glucose numbers, bad thyroid numbers--look like it to him.

At any rate, she seems find now. But I am glad I'm really careful about what they eat.

[piesRsquare]

9. Thank you, NAO

Added to the blog

http://2blackcats.wordpress.com/

One of my boys is being tested on Monday, 3/26...

[alstephenson]

12. This is so tragic! And probably only the tip of the iceberg.

R.I.P., sweet fur babies. Do the "sickened" pets get better, or are there chronic problems afterwards? This is just so sad.

[thethinker]

13. This has been public for a week tomorrow

I can't believe no one has figured out what is in that pet food that is killing animals. So many pet owners want to know. I am beginning to think they will never tell us.

[NAO]

14. Tuesday , Menu Foods will have known about this 5 weeks. Pls K&R

Here is the time-line

t = 0 days (Feb 20): When the first cases were reported.
t = 7 days (Feb 27): When Menu Foods started testing.
t = 7-18 days: When their test cases were dying (one in six we now know).
t = 25 days (Friday, March 16): When they finally issued the recall.

****

From a blindsided vet's blog (I doubt this person will mind that I post this entry in it's entirety)
http://www.dolittler.com/index.cfm/2007/3/20/pet.vet.dog.cat.iams.%20nutro.pet%20food%20recall.3.20.07

It’s already been said on this blog and now I, too, will join the growing chorus of vets: Where was the heads up? Where was the newsflash warning us of the impending storm?

Where were the emails and faxes from the pet food companies? Why was no information provided to the distributors? Why were so many vets (busy reading their Journals instead of the newspaper all weekend) blasted on Monday morning without so much as a warning? Why could I not get through on the vet-dedicated lines?

As one vet I know said, “I felt so stupid coming in to work on Monday after a blissful weekend of yoga and family time knowing absolutely zero about the recall. My clients probably thought I was a horrible vet.”

But how was this offline, off-duty vet to know? So you understand, vets received no special notice before the announcement—made, by the way, on a Friday. As all newspeople know, the last day of the week is when you release an item you’d prefer to bury—not one you need to broadcast.

Does that sound cynical? Then check this out: Go to PetConnection.com and you’ll get a neat timeline:

t = 0 days (Feb 20): When the first cases were reported.
t = 7 days (Feb 27): When Menu Foods started testing.
t = 7-18 days: When their test cases were dying (one in six we now know).
t = 25 days (Friday, March 16): When they finally issued the recall.

Nearly a month has gone by. I’d have expected a lot more action from the huge conglomerates affected in this disaster. As if waiting a full ten days before an announcement isn’t horrific enough, delivering the news on the cusp of a sleepy weekend is the height of hubris. It’s a parting-shot insult that serves as much-deserved death knell for their collective brand equity.

Why am I this upset? As if I didn't have enough of a good reason, one of my chronically ill kitty patients, currently seeing the internal medicine specialist on a regular basis for her liver and GI issues, started feeling funny on Thursday. Kitty hadn’t been eating as well as before. This was the only sign of illness and something she'd suffered before.

She called the internist who made an appointment to see her Monday (she’s off on Fridays). Assuming this was another one of her bouts of cholangiohepatitis, the internist prescribed the meds that usually help this kitty.

Kitty went downhill fast. By Sunday she was in the ER, but the internist had no idea why her kidneys were shutting down—she had spent the weekend throwing a party we all attended (i.e., being a normal human being). The ER staff was too busy working to read the paper but had already started treating her obvious kidney disease vigorously.

On Monday, the ultrasound confirmed not the chronic renal failure we might have considered possible in a cat with a chronic disease, but a full-blown acute renal disease consistent with the toxic effects typical of the pet food fiasco. The owner was asked to go home and bring back her foods—the by-now notorious pouches.

This kitty probably won’t make it, though her kidney values are moving in the right direction. Treatment on Thursday might well have made all the difference in this case. Her owner is heartbroken. And the internist is beside herself with guilt. If only…

…they had told us sooner. Just one day. Even one day could have saved lives.

I don’t want to hear there’s no way they could have predicted the outcry. If that’s true, then they have no idea how pet owners think. They have no idea how much trust we’ve sunk into their products over the years. And they obviously have no idea how much they’re losing in this still-developing debacle. Moreover, if all this is true then they had no right to our trust in the first place and they certainly had no business taking up space in the pet industry.

From this veterinarian’s point of view—and from my insight as a former marketing executive—they f----- up big time. Unless Menu Foods didn’t inform their own customers (the likes of Iams and Eukanuba whose production was outsourced to them)—and I don’t think that’s likely—these brands should have done back flips to set up company-wide protocols for dealing with the crisis.

And vets should have been informed—if not on Friday (or sooner) then at least by Monday morning. Yet even our distributor was caught off guard. One finally faxed us a list of their products on recall. But our Eukanuba distributor? Not a peep. Our Hill’s distributor? Silence. Calling them reveals more confusion than it offers answers.

I have the list, sure, but I downloaded it along with every other concerned pet owner. And it took me a long time, what with Sunday’s overwhelmed websites and phone lines. More servers, maybe? More customer service lines, maybe? One little fax to every vet in the country? That’s not as hard to do as it sounds. They certainly know how to get to us when it comes to selling their food.

It’s bad enough that the brands outsourced their production. It’s bad enough that Menu Foods bought from known poor quality suppliers. It’s bad enough everyone in-the-know sat on their heels for a month. It’s bad enough they released the information on a Friday. Did they also have to display their disregard so flagrantly as to fail to provide proper support for the vets who recommend their foods and the people that feed them to the pets they care for?

Perhaps you believe that we vets are partially to blame for not having a reliable network for news distribution. But guess what? Human docs are in the same position. It’s just that their news gets on the front page. Ours gets tucked away between the folds.

However you see it, the pet food companies are directly to blame for the widespread mishandling of this crisis. These companies need to get serious about our pets. Better yet, if they don’t care enough to understand the importance of our pets, they should get out of this business altogether.

http://www.dolittler.com/index.cfm/2007/3/20/pet.vet.dog.cat.iams.%20nutro.pet%20food%20recall.3.20.07

[liberalla]

15. Thank you for this thread!

The best info and links I've seen on this subject.
:kick: