Farmed Fish Ate Melamine: FDA

It's not clear how much, if any, contaminated stock made it to stores.

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Tuesday, May 8, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

TUESDAY, May 8 (HealthDay News) -- After finding its way to America's dinner tables via pork and chicken, the melamine contaminant in recalled pet food may have also been fed to farmed fish, federal health officials announced Tuesday.

Levels of melamine in the fish are probably far too small to affect human health, stressed officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The FDA has so far not disclosed which fish farms received the contaminated food, or how many fish, of what type, may have eaten it.

"We have a preliminary list of fish farms, but I can't share it with you," Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection, told reporters at a teleconference.

It's also not clear how much of the potentially tainted fish -- if any -- has made it to supermarkets. But Acheson noted that at least one firm's fish had not yet reached a size suitable for sale.

In addition, he said, the contaminated material used in the pet food and imported from China turns out to be wheat flour, not wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate, as had been widely reported.

"We have discovered that the wheat gluten and rice protein was mislabeled," Acheson said. "It actually contained wheat flour contaminated with melamine and melamine-related compounds. These are from the two Chinese firms we have already identified."

Some of the mislabeled wheat flour was shipped first to Canada and then to the United States as fish meal used to feed commercially raised fish, Acheson said.

However, he added, "the levels we are seeing in the fish meal is comparable to that seen in other feed. We have no reason to believe that this is harmful to humans."

Acheson also told reporters that Canadian officials were aware of the contamination. "We used it to make pet food. They used it to make fish meal," he said. Officials said the investigation is ongoing.

U.S. officials have contended that companies in China added melamine, a compound often used to create fire-retardant products, to exported wheat flour, later used in pet food manufacture. The addition of melamine can falsely inflate the protein content in the foods.