Pet owner alert: aflatoxin prompts dog and cat food recall

More than 20 dogs are known to have died after eating Diamond Pet Food premium dog food from a batch that developed aflatoxin contamination, and many more have become ill. Some Diamond Pet Food cat food has also tested positive for the toxin, but there have been no related cat deaths reported to officials. There is a recall involving 23 states in the eastern United States, and several European Union countries have also been notified. The company issued a recall Dec. 20 and has notified the press and stores and veterinarians and government officials, but there's a fear that not enough pet owners have heard about the recall yet, despite all this. (Hence this blog post. I figure blogs are great for spreading news like this, no?)

From an article by Donna Jackel of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:

Diamond officials were aware that this year's corn crop had a particularly heavy presence of aflatoxin because of a drought in June and July, followed by wet weather in August, Brinkmann [Mark Brinkmann, Diamond's general manager] said. Each truckload of corn is tested for aflatoxin before it's made into pet food, he said.

"We have stringent procedures in place," he said. "We will investigate what happened. Right now, we are trying to save as many animals as we can."

The company has set up a website specifically for the recall. See diamondpetrecall.com.

Since 2005 was a year tailor made for aflatoxin in some parts of the country, I'm going to be pleasantly surprised if Diamond is the only food company that runs into this problem this season. Let's just hope that other companies that find a problem move as aggressively as Diamond to protect consumers.

From the Aflatoxins chapter of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition's "Bad Bug Book" (otherwise known as the Foodborne Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins Handbook) :

In the United States, aflatoxins have been identified in corn and corn products, peanuts and peanut products, cottonseed, milk, and tree nuts such as Brazil nuts, pecans, pistachio nuts, and walnuts. Other grains and nuts are susceptible but less prone to contamination.

...The relative frequency of aflatoxicosis in humans in the United States is not known. No outbreaks have been reported in humans. Sporadic cases have been reported in animals.

Since aflatoxin can be a serious problem associated with food storage, researchers keep working on finding better ways to detect it. See Wasps trained to recognize specific odors, volatile compounds for a recently developed method of using insects to sniff it out.