Monday, April 30, 2007

Poison Filler In Animal Feed Is An Open Secret in China

Melamine, which is created from coal, is routinely added to animal feed to artificially raise the levels of protein.
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.”
I am at a loss to understand why as a country we can not manufacture our own pet food. Profit has taken the place of everything. Does anyone really believe that this substance did not make it into the human food chain?
They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. “Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional.”
In the age of terrorism how can we allow our imports to not be inspected and protected just to save the profit margins of large multi-national corporation? This is exactly what the Democrats were talking about when they said less than 1% of containers coming into our ports are inspected. It is time to put our security over profits. How can anyone take the Republicans seriously on Homeland Security when it was there policies that allowed an almost 100% open border policy at our ports?

Read the rest of this article here.

No comments: