Photo of feed pellets from www.rivards.com
In an interesting twist on the melamine contamination saga, FDA officials announced on Wednesday that an Ohio company has been putting melamine into its animal feed ingredients for quite some time. They added that there’s no reason to be alarmed—it wasn’t very much melamine, and it’s probably not dangerous anyway. Next thing you know there’ll be a minimum daily requirement for the stuff. The company, Tembec BTSLR of Toledo, a subsidiary of a Canadian forest products company, said that it put melamine in a resin that is used to hold feed pellets together. Tembec sold the resin to a Colorado company, Uniscope, which incorporated it into two products:
Aqua-Tec® (“pellets made with Aqua-Tec lasted from one to eight times longer in water than pellets made without”) and Xtra-Bond® (“used in wild game feeds, base/premix pellets, calf creep feeds, range cubes, blocks and urea feeds where improved weatherproofing is desired.”).
Improved weatherproofing? Won’t dissolve in water? That melamine is so useful! But, unfortunately for shrimp farmers who don’t want their feed pellets to dissolve before the shrimp can eat them, the products have now been recalled. The FDA said it is not yet sure whether or not some of the contaminated feed was exported to China.
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December 1, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Melamine found in U.S. infant formula « What on Earth Are We Eating?
[...] in the infant formula may have come from cows that ate animal feed containing melamine. We have previously reported on the presence of melamine in U.S. animal feed, and it has also been found in Chinese animal feed. [...]