FDA says chickens' food had melamine

WASHINGTON — At least 2.5 million broiler chickens from an Indiana producer were fed pet-food scraps contaminated with the chemical melamine and subsequently sold for human consumption, federal health officials reported Tuesday.

Hundreds of other producers may have similarly sold an unknown number of contaminated poultry in recent months, they added, painting a picture of much broader consumption of contaminated feed and food than had previously been acknowledged in the widening pet-food scandal.

Officials emphasized that they do not believe the tainted chickens — or the smaller number of contaminated pigs that were previously reported to have entered the human food supply — pose any risk for people who ate them.

"We do not believe there is any significant threat of human illness from this," said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) chief medical officer, whom FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach named yesterday morning as the agency's new "food czar" — officially, assistant commissioner for food protection.

None of the farm animals is known to have become sick from the food, and very little of the contaminant is suspected of having accumulated in their tissues. Thus, no recall of any products that may still be on store shelves or in people's freezers is planned, officials said.

Nonetheless, 100,000 Indiana chickens that ate the melamine-laced food and are still alive have been quarantined and will be destroyed as a precautionary measure, as will any other animals that turn up as the investigation continues to expand.

The revelations are the latest in a rapidly widening scandal that started out with reports of just a few deaths of pets and has mushroomed into a major debacle that, even if no human injuries emerge, has exposed significant gaps in the nation's food-safety system.

Meanwhile, the FDA expanded the number of plant-based protein products from China on its "do not import" list, pending the completion of further tests on various kinds of glutens, protein concentrates and other products.

At the center of the problem are pet foods spiked with melamine, a mildly toxic chemical that can make food appear to have more protein than it does. Most of the food went to pets, but scraps were sold in February to the Indiana poultry producer, officials said. The contaminated material may have made up about 5 percent of the chickens' total food supply.

That small fraction, and the fact that people, unlike pets, do not eat the same thing day after day, suggests that consumers who ate contaminated pork or chicken would probably have ingested extremely small doses of melamine, well below the threshold for causing health effects, officials said — though experts conceded they know little about how the toxin interacts with other compounds.

Investigators are tracking various streams of the contaminated food through several states.

"Our sense is that the investigation will lead to additional farms where contaminated feed may have been fed to either animals or poultry," said Kenneth Petersen, of the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the Department of Agriculture.