FDA Says Quarantined Hogs Are Safe to Eat

A person could consume 800 pounds of meat in a single day from animals that ate feed made with tainted pet food before having any health effects from the toxins in that pet food, government scientists said yesterday.

"Clearly, that is a very unlikely situation," said David Acheson, assistant commissioner for food protection at the Food and Drug Administration.

Reassured by that margin of safety, Acheson and other officials announced that all 56,000 hogs that have been quarantined for weeks because their feed was found to have been supplemented with melamine-tainted pet food will now be released for slaughter and marketing.

The new calculation resulted in a narrower -- but still comfortable -- safety margin than what emerged from an earlier federal assessment, which had concluded that a 132-pound person could eat 8,000 pounds of meat from such animals in one day before having to worry about getting the kind of kidney stones that have killed an unknown number of pets in recent weeks.

The initial assessment, Acheson said, did not take into account the added toxicity that occurs when melamine -- the primary toxin that has been detected in imported pet-food ingredients -- combines with cyanuric acid and related compounds, which have also been found in those ingredients. Those compounds approximately double melamine's toxicity.

The initial assessment also did not recognize that current tests can fail to detect melamine even when the industrial chemical is present in meat at concentrations as high as 50 parts per billion -- not 10 ppb as previously believed.

No tests have found any evidence of the chemical in the meat of farm animals that had eaten tainted feed. But reflecting the new recognition of the test's lower sensitivity, and to be on the safe side, government scientists are now presuming that the melamine concentration in meat could be as high as 50 ppb, not just 10 ppb, when a test fails to detect the chemical.

Some activists complain that authorities are too quickly releasing farm animals that ate tainted food, given the early stage of the investigation. Millions of chickens that had eaten feed with small amounts of melamine-spiked pet food were released for marketing last week.

"They're still revising their estimates of risk, and yet they're releasing this food into the food supply," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union in Yonkers, N.Y. "This is very disturbing."

About 80,000 chickens that may have eaten higher doses of melamine are still being held for further tests. Officials are also about to start testing U.S.-farmed fish that were fed melamine-laden fish food in Hawaii and Washington state, and as many as 196 hatcheries that raise fish for sportsmen.