Chinese contaminated food surce found
It seems that the person responsible for the contaminated pet food bulldozed his own factory when the reports starting coming out. He has been arrested though.
From the
Seattle Times:
Factory linked to tainted food found closed
Before Mao Lijun's business exported tainted wheat products that may have killed U.S. pets, his factory sickened people and plants around here for years.
Farmers in this poor rural area 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao's factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao's company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke -- until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers tore down the facility.
It wasn't authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory -- days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients.
And more:
In the end, Chinese authorities caught up with Mao and arrested him. And Tuesday, after weeks of denials, China acknowledged that Mao's company and another Chinese business had illegally exported wheat and rice products spiked with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fertilizers. That chemical is banned in U.S. foods. in the U.S.
China's quality watchdog agency said the businesses had added melamine to the food ingredients "in a bid to meet the contractual demand for the amount of protein in the products." Melamine can make animal feed appear to have more protein than it actually does.
Besides turning up in pet food, melamine has been found in feed for thousands of hogs and millions of chickens in the United States. The FDA said Tuesday that melamine-contaminated foods also were fed to fish raised for human consumption. But in each case, U.S. officials said there was little risk to human health.
The number of U.S. fish hatcheries and farms known to have received the tainted feed rose sharply Thursday, with U.S. officials reporting about 60, up from 13 known Wednesday. That 60 included 23 in Oregon. The rest of the feed was shipped mostly to other Northwest states.
Glad the bastard is in jail and I am betting that Chinese jails are not as cushy as those in the USA...
Posted by DaveH at May 12, 2007 9:24 PM