FDA identifies likely pet food contaminant

Animal rights advocates are calling on federal officials to broaden a nationwide recall on pet food to cover dry varieties as well as wet food.
About 100 brands of wet dog and cat food have already been recalled after animals throughout the Inland and the rest of the country suffered kidney failure.
It is not clear exactly how many pets have died from tainted food, but hundreds of deaths have been reported.

And the Food and Drug Administration has gotten nearly 9,000 complaints of sick cats and dogs.
Now, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants the FDA and pet food makers to recall brands of dry food that have been included in complaints.
The organization is calling for those brands to be chemically tested and for examinations of dead animals to be carried out in order to determine what exactly killed them.

Meanwhile, the FDA announced today that a chemical used to make plastics has been found in the tainted pet food.
New York state's food laboratory last week identified a type of rat poison as the likely culprit in the recall. But FDA chief veterinarian Stephen Sundlof said this morning that researchers at New York state laboratory and Cornell University had discovered a chemical called melamine in recalled pet food samples.

Sundlof said scientists had been unable to confirm the earlier findings of rat poison, and the agency no longer considered that the likely contaminant, he said.
The Canadian company that manufactured the tainted food under contract for dozens of labels began buying its wheat gluten from a new Chinese supplier last December. An FDA investigation focused on the ingredient early on.

A second pet food manufacturer that makes dry and wet food also received a shipment of the potentially tainted wheat gluten, FDA investigator Mike Rogers said.
Rogers declined to name the second company, saying the FDA was not sure how or if the manufacturer had used the ingredient. FDA investigators were working to discover that today.

He said the FDA would name any suspect products as soon as it had evidence.
Sundloff said the recall is so far limited to about 100 brands of cuts and gravy style wet food. But he also said that a substantial number of the 8,800 calls the FDA had fielded from citizens and veterinarians involve complaints about dry foods.

The suspected contaminant melamine is sometimes used as a fertilizer in China. The dean of the Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine, Donald Smith, said today that little was known about melamine's toxic effect in animals because it is rarely found in the food chain.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.