More Truth about Melamine in Our Food Supply

Well, well, well The New York Times has picked up this story finally! It seems that only because of the the recent highlighting of the pet deaths here in the U.S. that anyone at the FDA even cared about melamine in protein supplements coming from China. Even more serious is that, evidently, this has been going on for years!

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly
supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive
that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any
nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural
workers here.
“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as
fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui
Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on
it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing
it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there
won’t be any regulation.”
Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million
packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this
month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of
pets in the United States.

So this has been going on for years and we now know that not only do the dogs and cats get this stuff but that pet food "salvage" routinely goes to hogs and chickens in this country. What does that tell you? You guessed it...there is probably a good chance that any pork and chicken you may have been consuming in the past who knows how many years was potentially contaminated as well.
And now we learn that the FDA is going to take a hands off and wait and see if anyone dies from this pork before we do anything. This is the same team that told everyone that melamine was no problem for animals, now saying that there is no need for a pork recall after tainted pork entered the food supply in the U.S.

"At this time, we have no evidence of harm to humans associated with the
processed pork product, and therefore no recall of meat products processed from
these animals is being issued," the Food and Drug Administration and Agriculture
Department said in a joint statement."Testing and the joint investigation
continue. If any evidence surfaces to indicate there is harm to humans, the
appropriate action will be taken,"

I guess the logic here is that they know we all have been eating this crap for years and nobody was the wiser so why make such a big deal out of it? Sounds good to me.

Update: McJoan at DKos has more as does Goldy at HorsesAss