Gluten from China to Blame for Much poisoning

SHANGHAI, China - The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef's nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.

news.yahoo.com...

Yet, it took a much more obscure item, contaminated wheat gluten, to focus U.S. public attention on a very real and frightening fact: China's chronic food safety woes are now an international concern.

In recent weeks, scores of cats and dogs in America have died of kidney failure blamed on eating pet food containing gluten from China that was tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilizers and flame retardants. While humans aren't believed at risk, the incident has sharpened concerns over China's food exports and the limited ability of U.S. inspectors to catch problem shipments.

It didn't take much for the pet food supply to get nailed. It wouldn't take much to do some major harm to the human food supply either. We are seriously at risk here .... and I don't know if there is anything we can really do about it.

This is just sad all the way around, I hate that some people lost their family pets because of this. We really need to come up with better inspection policies for consumable goods coming into this country. Just imagine if the same thing happened but it was with baby food instead of pet food. Scary.

well, if the FDA requires certain standards by domestic food suppliers,

it would stand to reason that domestic food producers would be obliged
to maintain that required standard, even for the outsourced foodstuffs
they import from places like China and Mexico as ingredients of their product.
the FDA standard isn't nullified because US customs didn't discover a tainted product at a port.