Christie Keith has a thought provoking story out on SFGate.com about the FDA and how well they work (or don’t!) for us. She talks about Nutro being in the news lately, but it’s the way the whole issue has been handled that points to a much bigger problem than just whether or not Nutro is safe for our pets.
I hear reports all the time about someone’s beloved dog or cat getting sick from pet food, stories that usually come with a request (or demand) that I investigate the matter. Often, it’s simply a grieving pet owner looking for someone to blame, but now and then I wonder if there isn’t something there.
If only, I think at such times, there was an agency in charge of protecting the U.S. food supply that could independently investigate these types of complaints.
Maybe we could call it the “Food and Drug Administration” and it could be “responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety, efficacy and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices [and] our nation’s food supply.”
Call me crazy. Call me a dreamer. Call me a radical progressive liberal socialist.
Or instead, call the real FDA a failure as a watchdog on the American food supply — both human and animal — that it was created to protect. Because the more you dig into stories about pet food safety, the more you realize no one’s effectively looking out for the public’s welfare when it comes to the products we buy to feed our dogs and cats — and in many cases, ourselves.
Christie goes on to talk about how she tried to get information about the recent Nutro issue. The FDA wasn’t very forthcoming in the information they were willing to give and sent her a response that she isn’t even sure how to interpret.
The FDA works for us. We pay its bills. And it’s supposed to ensure the safety of the American food and drug supply for both people and animals.
But consumers only have to consider the recent, seemingly endless recalls of peanut products contaminated with salmonella, the discovery of candy and dairy products tainted with melamine and the 2007 pet food recall to wonder if the FDA isn’t doing a pretty terrible job of that.
These are our government officials, who we pay, saying they can’t tell us what they’re doing. I don’t know about you, but I find that rather unsettling, to say the least.
Read the rest of Lax oversight of pet food safety hurts us all at SFGate.com.
Technorati Tags: pet food safety, FDA, Nutro, food safety
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I read her article this am…found it during the “every morning google search for pet food recall I have done since March 17, 2007”.. I still trust the pet blogs 2+ yrs later to tell me the latest…kind of sad…I had hoped something might change with all our canaries meowing and barking their cries for help….
Saw you mentioned…and felt proud…don’t really know why!!!
I know there are a lot of us who hoped things would have changed and it’s beyond sad that it hasn’t happened. What really riles me up is that it’s the agencies and people who are supposedly working (in essence, our employees!) for us that are causing us so many problems.
And, just so you know, you aren’t the only one who does the daily “pet food recall” google!