Angry in the Great White North

I wrote that a challenge facing investigaters trying to understand how a massive pet food contamination happened would be dealing with Chinese authorities:

China said Thursday that it had no record of exporting any agricultural products that could have tainted the pet food that has been linked to the deaths of at least 16 cats and dogs in the United States.

The Chinese government said that wheat gluten, which has been linked to a pet food recall in North America, had not been exported from China to the United States or Canada. The government also disputed some reports that a chemical called Aminopterin, a rat poison, could have entered the pet food supplies in North America from China. The government said the chemical is not used in rat poison in China.

"China has nothing to do with the pet poisoning incident," the government said in a statement on the Web site of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

The Chinese are pleading ignorance, and suggesting mysterious shadowy figures are responsible:

ChemNutra, a Las Vegas company that supplies pet food makers, said it imported 792 metric tons of wheat gluten from Xuzhou between November 29 and March 8. The products were then shipped from its Kansas City warehouse to three pet food makers and one distributor of pet food ingredients in the United States and Canada, it said.

The wheat gluten ended up in pet food made for several companies, including Menu Foods, of Ontario, and Hill's Pet Nutrition, a division of Colgate-Palmolive.

Xuzhou Anying said it never shipped the packages.

"Maybe some company bought our product and exported it without our knowledge," said [Mao Lijun, the general manager of Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development].

This despite insistence that the product was indeed bought from China:

Earlier Thursday, The Associated Press reported that another official working at Xuzhou Anying had acknowledged that the company shipped wheat gluten to the United States.

Despite the confusion, the United States has halted all wheat gluten imports from the China. I think there's a fair chance the Chinese will suddenly "discover" the responsible manager, punish him very publicly, and insist that the problem has been solved in order to start up exports again.

That would a shame, because there is still a lot of doubt as to whether the melamine contamination could really be responsible for the deaths of the pets reported. If the Chinese continue to be obstructive, or switch gears to play a deceptive role, then we might never know what really happened. And that means it could happen again.

Check out other entries from the Colgate toothpaste category
Results will open in a new window.

Check out what Canadian bloggers have posted about Colgate toothpaste
Results will open in a new window.

Check out what has been written about Colgate toothpaste on the web
Results will open in a new window.

Check out other entries from the True Crime category
Results will open in a new window.