Talk About Your Pets

[NYBob]

Shanghai seller stops sales of suspect dog food
57 minutes ago
By ELAINE KURTENBACH
Associated Press Writer

(AP:SHANGHAI, China) A local distributor of a popular brand of dog food said Monday it had suspended sales of the product following reports that dogs who ate it had died from aflatoxin poisoning.

A customer service manager at Shanghai Yidi Pet Co. said the company stopped selling Optima brand dog food last week and notified its customers not to feed it to their pets after receiving complaints that dogs became sick after eating it.

"It's upsetting to see so many dogs getting sick from the food. There must be some serious problems," said Gu, who gave only his last name as is common with many media-shy Chinese.

The announcement came the same day Chinese regulators said they were stepping up food safety inspections ahead of the country's biggest holiday, Lunar New Year.

The campaign is China's latest effort to improve the country's shoddy food safety record. The manufacturing industry has been shaken by recurring scandals, including one last year where hundreds of thousands of children were sickened by milk contaminated by the industrial chemical melamine. The deaths of six babies have also been linked to the scandal.

Melamine was also blamed for killing dogs and cats in North America in 2007, after they ate pet food with a Chinese-made ingredient that was laced with the chemical.

Staff at a well-known local pet shop and clinic, the Shanghai Naughty Family Pet Co., said they had seen about 10 dogs fall sick after eating Optima dog food. Two had died and a third was gravely ill, said a staffer at the shop, who would not give her name because she was not authorized to speak to media.

Worried pet owners were coming in to have their pets checked after reading local news reports about the problem, they said.

All the sickened pets were believed to be suffering from aflatoxin poisoning. Aflatoxin is a naturally occurring chemical that comes from a fungus sometimes found on corn and other crops. It can cause severe liver damage. It was unclear how the dog food might have been contaminated, though some reports said it might have spoiled in storage before reaching retailers' shops.

A sales person at Optima Co., the local representative for the product, said the dog food had been sent for analysis, but he would give no details.

"I'm not authorized to speak about this," said the man, who gave only his surname, Zhang.

Ryan McLaughlin, a Canadian living in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, publicized the problem after his own 1-year-old golden retriever, Addie, fell sick after eating Optima dog food.

"When it's an imported dog food, you don't expect this sort of thing to happen," Ryan, who comes from Welland, Canada, said in a phone interview. "Here we were paying the extra cash to try to ensure she was healthy and instead it made her sick," he said. Addie died on Jan. 5.

Tainted products scandals in the past have centered on Chinese-made foods that were cut with chemicals such as melamine to hide the fact that they had been watered down to boost profits. Melamine, like protein, is high in nitrogen, and was used to fool tests for protein levels.

While Optima is the name of an American dog food brand, it was unclear if the food sold in China came from the U.S.

Gu, of the local distributor, said only that his supplier was based in Taiwan.

Zhang said the product his company sold came from "somewhere in Australia."

In the United States, Optima products are made by Nashville, Tennessee-based Doane Pet Care Co.

Doane's U.S. operations were acquired in 2006 by Mars Inc., which makes Pedigree brand pet foods. The company's Web site does not list any international operations, and it was unclear if Doane was the manufacturer of the brand sold in China.

Mars Inc.'s regional office did not immediately respond to a call and e-mailed inquiries on Monday. Doane's phones rang unanswered before business hours Monday.

Calls to China's food and drug safety agency rang unanswered late Monday.

Authorities have struggled to clamp down on tainted products because of murky supply chains and numerous small, sometimes illegally operated establishments, which are hard to monitor.

Health Ministry spokesman Mao Qun'an said Monday that inspectors would target supermarkets, restaurants and food additive producing factories in seven provinces, including Hebei, the heart of last year's melamine-tainted milk scandal.

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Associated Press writer Audra Ang in Beijing and researcher Ji Chen in Shanghai contributed to this report.