Millions Of Chickens Fed Tainted Pet Food

WaPo reported 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 yesterday.

I can understand them not wanting to waste it, but why feed it to chickens and pigs that we will eat. Send it back to China, that provided the contaminated food in the first place, and see what they want to do with it.

Hundreds of other producers may have similarly sold an unknown amount 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 reported to have entered the human food supply -- pose risks to people who ate them.

Are they willing for tainted chickens or pigs to be sold in the FDA Cafeteria?

... 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. Experts conceded, however, that they know little about how the toxin interacts with other compounds in food.

I know a number of people that have chicken several times a week.