The Last Meow

The Last Meow is dedicated to all the pets who died or became seriously ill due to the Menu Foods Pet Food Recall, and the fur siblings they left behind.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Pet food scare in USA had a precursor

From USA Today

The Asian outbreak was little-known in the USA until it was reported last week by the blog Pet Connection. In the American public's view, the U.S. outbreak several years later appeared to be the first of its kind.

It was a comment by a Korean graduate student amid the 2007 outbreak that led Cathy Brown, a specialist in renal pathology at Georgia's Athens Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, to suspect this had happened before. Brown eventually tracked down tissue samples from the pets that died in 2004 at the Kyungpook National University in Korea.

The sample contained the same type of insoluble crystals found in U.S. pets in the 2007 outbreak, which killed at least 347 cats and dogs, according to preliminary data gathered by Wilson Rumbeiha at Michigan State University-Lansing. The exact number is believed to be much higher but in the absence of a structured reporting system has not been determined.

The Georgia paper was published last fall in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation but largely went unnoticed until it was picked up by the blog.

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