Category: pet food

Recalls and Alerts: August 26, 2012

Here is today’s list of food safety recalls, product withdrawals, allergy alerts and miscellaneous compliance issues. The live links will take you directly to the official recall notices and company news releases that contain detailed information for each recall and alert.

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United States

  • Allergy Alert: True Nutrition recalls Whey Protein Concentrate (1 lb; Batch/lot 0120712; Exp 05/2015), Whey Protein Isolate Cold-Filtration (1 lb; Batch/lot 0030812; Exp. 07/2015), Whey Protein Isolate MicroFiltrated (1 lb; Batch/lot 0040812, Exp. 07/2015), Whey Protein Isolate Cross-Flow Microfiltration (1 lb; Batch/lot 0730712; Exp 07/2015), and Hydrolyzed Whey Protein High Grade (1 lb; Batch/lot 0680512; Exp. 05/2015), because the labels fail to declare milk as the source of the whey. The recalled products were distributed through the website www.trunutrition.com.
  • Pet Food Safety Withdrawal: Bil-Jac withdraws Adult Select Formula Dog Food (6 lb bags; Batch #1792-02; Exp. 27 DEC 13), after receiving a few reports of mold in bags from this batch, caused by higher moisture content in the food. Bil-Jac has requested retailers to removed this batch from warehouses and stores.
  • Food Safety Alert: Rudolph Foods, a Dallas pork rinds producer has stopped production for one week after finding Salmonella on the floor in a “pre-cook” area of the production facility. None of the four positive Salmonella samples were from product contact surfaces or from finished products.

Canada

  • Food Safety Recall/Outbreak Alert: North American Produce Sales (Vancouver, BC) updates its earlier Health Hazard Alert to include additional product brand information. The company has recalled Daniella brand Mangoes (Product of Mexico; sold as individual fruit with sticker bearing PLU #4959), because the mangoes have been linked to an outbreak of Salmonella Braenderup infections. The recalled mangoes were sold at various (as yet unnamed) retail stores between July 12 and August 14, 2012 and were distributed in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon. As of August 22, 2012 the Public Health Agency of Canada has confirmed cases of Salmonella Braenderup in British Columbia (17 cases) and Alberta (22 cases).
  • Food Safety Recall: Odra Deli and Wholesale Meat Ltd. (Mississauga, ON) recalls Krakowska Sausage (variable weight pkgs of sliced sausage), because the product may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. The recalled meat was sold from the deli counter at Odra Deli and Wholesale Meat Ltd. in Mississauga, ON during August 9th to 20th, inclusive.

Some supermarket chains post recall notices on their web sites for the convenience of customers. To see whether a recalled food was carried by your favorite supermarket, follow the live link to the supermarket’s recall web site.

*The Kroger umbrella encompasses numerous supermarket, marketplace and convenience store chains, listed on the Kroger corporate home page.
**Includes Safeway, Vons, Pavilions, Dominick’s, Genuardi’s, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Carrs and Pak N’ Save.

FDA Dumps More Jerky Data

FDA has done it again. Another chicken jerky pet treat data dump, this time listing 171 consumer complaints from January 1, 2007 through July 2, 2012.

And, with this data dump, the FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs has reached a new nadir.  The latest release of “information” is clearly incomplete, impossible to regroup by any criteria other than the assigned complaint number, and impossible to correlate to the lab analysis data dump issued by FDA last month.

What can we learn from this list of 171 consumer complaints? We can read about the pain and suffering – human as well as animal – that the mysterious jerky treat problem has caused.

I don’t understand the rationale behind this partial data dump, unless it’s an attempt by FDA to pander to the goal of “transparency” without actually being either informative or transparent.

The consumer complaint data were released in the form of a pdf document, rather than the original spreadsheet. Had the actual spreadsheet been provided, it would have been possible to group complaints by year, by brand of treat, or by FDA District Office that acted on the complaint – to get a small feel for the nature and scope of the problem.

At the time of the July data dump, FDA had already received more than 1,000 pet illness reports associated with feeding of chicken jerky pet treats. The 97-page pdf file released last week lists only 171 complaints received since January 1, 2007, and only 81 since last November, when FDA reissued a warning against feeding the treats to pets.

In its efforts to appear “transparent,” FDA is doing a good job of making itself look ridiculous. Who does the agency think it is fooling?

Government Transparency – An Oxymoron: Updated

Oxymoron – a rhetorical device or figure of speech in which contradictory or opposite words or concepts are combined for effect

– Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc.

On June 27, 2012, FDA posted the following notice on its Enforcement Report web page:

FDA is pleased to present a new format for its weekly Enforcement Report. When you select the link below for this week’s report, you will hopefully find a simpler, clearer report that offers downloadable data for analyses while also providing savings and encouraging future innovation for Government. This data-driven report provides FDA a baseline as it moves forward in its efforts to integrate the Agency’s compliance and enforcement data.

The new reporting format is, indeed, easier to use – so much easier, in fact, that it highlights the purely cosmetic nature of FDA’s interest in transparency.

One of my pet peeves with FDA is its refusal to release retail distribution information for food safety recalls. The agency claims that this information is proprietary to the companies who “voluntarily” recall their products. In contrast, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) maintains a policy of releasing retail distribution lists within seven days of a recall announcement. Same government. Different department. Different policy.

Another of my gripes is FDA’s equally adamant refusal to provide a list of countries to which a recalled product was exported, unless the company itself releases that information. Particularly frustrating was the recent series of Diamond Pet Foods Salmonella recalls.

Diamond Pet Foods – and several other companies for whom Diamond manufactured dry dog food – recalled a long list of products after three separate batches of the pet food were linked to a Salmonella Infantis outbreak that sickened 49 people (47 in the USA and 2 in Canada). One of the companies caught up in the recalls was Natural Balance Pet Foods.

On May 4th, Natural Balance recalled 833 tons of dry dog foods in response to the Diamond Pet Foods recall notice. At the time of the recall, consumers were told that the products “may have been” distributed in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming and Canada.

Consumers were NOT told that the recalled Natural Balance products also were shipped to Taiwan and Israel. That information, which was in FDA’s hands at the time of the May 4th recall, was released today (July 25th) in FDA’s Weekly Enforcement Report.

What is the logic in refusing to release an international (country-level) distribution list at the time of a recall, when the information will eventually be made public anyway?

On June 27th, when FDA introduced its new Weekly Enforcement Report format, I sent the following request to the agency’s Office of Public Affairs:

I’ve been thinking of using the new format of the FDA Weekly Enforcement Report as the jump-off for a blog story about the recall process. I would greatly appreciate answers to a couple of questions. Specifically,

1. What are the criteria that determine when information on a specific recall is included in a Weekly Enforcement Report?

2. Why does FDA not release retail distribution lists for Class I recalls (as FSIS does)? When does consumer protection trump “proprietary” interests?

3. Why does FDA not release information (when it is available) on the foreign countries to which a recalled product was exported? While I realize that FDA’s primary responsibility is to US citizens, the FDA web site is often the SOLE source of this type of information for people (including expatriate US citizens) living in many foreign countries.

I plan to comment on each of these issues in my article, and would appreciate a clear statement of FDA’s current policies and the reasons for these policies.

I received an acknowledgment of my request the next day, asking for my deadline. I indicated that I would appreciate a reply by the end of June. On July 12th, I sent a reminder. As of today, I’m still waiting for answers.

FDA is not the only culprit – or even the worst culprit – when it comes to timely public disclosure of recall and outbreak information. Canada’s federal and provincial health and agriculture agencies are just as bad. Information requests sent to Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and some of the provincial departments often are ignored completely – acknowledged at times, but rarely answered substantively. Some US states are equally at fault. Idaho, for example, requested that the name of an Idaho mail-order hatchery be withheld from a CDC Outbreak Investigation Report. And the EU publishes a daily list of food and animal feed safety notifications (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) without providing any identifying information – neither brand names nor lot numbers – even when the food is implicated in a disease outbreak.

Government agencies are inherently secretive. They can’t help it; it’s in their DNA. President Obama’s earlier promises notwithstanding, we shall never see true transparency from US government departments. Not today. Not next year.

Sadly, the best we can hope for is a reduction in government opacity.

FDA’s response

After sending a link to this article to FDA’s Office of Public Affairs, I received the following replies to my questions:

1. What are the criteria that determine when information on a specific recall is included in a Weekly Enforcement Report?

When the recall is classified it is available for the weekly (by CFR part 7 section 21 CFR) published Enforcement Report.

2. Why does FDA not release retail distribution lists for Class I recalls (as FSIS does)?

Freedom of Information regulations do not permit us to release this commercial confidential information (CCI) information. The following link should be helpful and will provide greater clarity. http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12600.html. In addition, I would need to refer you to USDA of which FSIS is a subpart. 

  When does consumer protection trump “proprietary” interests?

Congressional mandate when the Freedom of Information Act was passed.

3. Why does FDA not release information (when it is available) on the foreign countries to which a recalled product was exported? While I realize that FDA’s primary responsibility is to US citizens, the FDA web site is often the SOLE source of this type of information for people (including ex-patriate US citizens) living in many foreign countries.

See response #2