Washington – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration created a senior position Tuesday to supervise the regulation of food safety, even as the agency disclosed that 3 million chickens raised on 38 Indiana poultry farms have been added to the growing list of animals that consumed feed tainted with a chemical used to make plastics.
FDA and Department of Agriculture officials said they chose not to issue a recall for the chickens because they were given the feed in February, meaning most already have been processed and sold to consumers.
David Acheson, the FDA official who assumed the new post of assistant commissioner for food protection, said that the amount of feed contaminated is minimal by the time it is fed to livestock that is eventually consumed by humans.
“The dilution factors here are enormous,” Acheson said. “We have a raw ingredient that is made, wheat gluten; only some percentage of it is the melamine compound that’s used to manufacture pet food, and only a small amount of the pet food is used to manufacture the feed to hogs and chickens.
“If you multiply all those factors in, we believe the likelihood of illness to humans is extremely small, really no likelihood of a problem,” he said.
Congressional critics dubbed the new FDA position the “food safety czar” and derided it as likely to be ineffective.
The news came four days after it was disclosed that tainted feed, which began as dog and cat food, was sent to hog farms.
The FDA has expanded an import alert on wheat and protein concentrates from China, hoping to stem further exports that may be contaminated.
The FDA said it cannot state how many pets have died due to contaminated feed, but one official said that about half of the 8,000 animal food complaint calls the agency has logged involved a claim that a pet has died. The scare has led to the recall of 153 pet food products.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., introduced a bill Tuesday to allow the FDA to order recalls of contaminated food, create an early-warning system for problems with human or pet food and broaden the agency’s power over food labeling, importation and record-keeping.
