Posts Tagged ‘recall’

Salmonella in Raw Pet Food

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Repost from Rudy Westervelt (powerinlearning.com):

On July 1st, the FDA issued a Recall press release on Feline’s Pride Natural Chicken Formula Cat Food. This cat food had tested positive for Salmonella and could cause food borne illness in humans and animals.

The product being recalled is a raw product packed in 2.5 pound containers and frozen.

The product is thawed and served raw to cats and kittens.

Would you eat raw chicken? Don’t people know that raw chicken has a high probability of containing Salmonella or other bacteria that cause food borne illness.

Now this company promotes the product as being similar to raw mouse. Now growing up, I had cats who lived outside and certainly ate mice. However, I think that feeding your cat raw chicken increases the likelihood that they could get ill from ingesting Salmonella.
If the cat owner doesn’t handle this raw product carefully, it could cross-contaminate food intended to be eatend by the owner.

We need to do a better job of educating pet owners on the handling of foods destined for consumption by their pets. Do you think that the owners think that freezing kills bacteria?

Be informed. Read the labels. Understand what RAW means and handle food products accordingly.

Be safe for your pet’s health and your families health.

Rudy

Food Safety Standstill

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Way back in July of last year, the House passed the Food Safety Enhancement Act. A Senate version passed unanimous approval from committee in November. And improvement on food safety has been dead ever since. The current quagmire of health care reform and jobs bills has virtually paralyzed Washington. Meanwhile, recalls like the contaminated sausages in Rhode Island continue to be slow in tracing all impacted products. Rep Dingell recently asked the Senate to act. Please write your senator and tell them food safety is something they could easily all agree on.

One more initiative needed

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

GMA announced three food safety initiatives.
http://www.groceryretailonline.com/article.mvc/Grocery-Manufacturers-Association-Outlines-0001?VNETCOOKIE=NO
I think there needs to be one more: Traceability Modernization. Note that this is different than the Product Recall Modernization GMA is calling for. In focusing on recalls as produce people are doing with the PTI, they are not addressing the real traceability issue. Rather, they are using the GTIN system to standardize how to link trading partners. In the event of a recall, this helps in that upstream and downstream partners can be quickly identified, but the actual input/output mapping of lots and their components is still maintained by each individual company. If they happen to share information on a common system with a trading partner, some automated traceability can be provided, but there is no requirement as such. It’s amazing to me that nobody seems to be picking up on the fact that this is not real traceability. The WFT System is a major step forward in this area. By collecting the ingredient data for every output lot as encoded elements (no propriatary information is collected), we can provide the instantaneous traceability that others can’t. That’s what is really needed for food safety.