Reluctant Blogger

If you only read one story about this issue, please skip this blog, and make it this one: Bigger than you think: The story behind the pet food recall

Key takeaways:

• This problem is much bigger than you might think, if you’re only casually following the news
• The HUMAN food supply is potentially at risk as well
• We need to track this story ourselves, if we care about it, because neither the FDA nor industry is doing it, and there is no CDC-equivalent for animal illness.

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Ironically, I had told someone just a few weeks ago that if I did start a personal blog, the one thing I would never do would be “cat-blogging.” It took me all of, what, 10 days to get here?…

Sadly it was not by choice - our cat LP is terribly sick, and I’m concerned that there might be a connection to the Menu Foods pet food poisoning situation. The timing and symptoms are a terrible coincidence if not.

It seems, though, like this might be one of those areas where the blogosphere can do some real good. The parties responsible for “taking care of this” are doing a lousy job of communicating, in my opinion. That’s a discussion for another day, though. Today I’m just going to post something here that I was trying to submit to the Usenet discussion at rec.pets.cats.health+behav but which seems to be bouncing.

Scroll directly to the end of this post if you want “the good stuff” (a list of links with good online resources I’ve found.) What follows directly below is an overview of our particular situation. I’m putting it out here so it will be available to others as another data point. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions.

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Hi. I’m doing some research in preparation for a return visit to the vet and you all seem like a knowledgable group, so I thought I would post here.

Our 13 year old cat, LP, became suddenly sick on Saturday of this week with non-stop vomiting. She’s never really been sick before at all; she’s been an indoor cat for a number of years, and she’s energetic and well-cared for, so this is very out of the ordinary. Since Saturday (when she threw up 12 or more times) she hasn’t been able to keep anything down, and won’t eat or drink - she twitches her paw severely when she tries to even drink just water - we’re guessing that perhaps her throat is sore from the repeated vomiting. She acts like she wants to drink - she will sit and stare at her food & water bowl, but can’t bring herself to do it. There has also been some red in her vomit. I hope it’s not blood, but can’t think of anything else it could be.

We took her to the vet emergency room on Saturday night when it first became clear this was serious - they took x-rays and a blood sample, and kept her overnight to feed/hydrate her intravenously.

We cleaned the house thoroughly again Sunday morning with pet-friendly cleaners, just in case there was something in the environment to which she was reacting. They released her on Sunday morning, said her blood work showed that her liver enzymes were slightly elevated, but that she was fine. She was good for several hours after coming home, but resumed vomiting and drooling later in the day. My wife took her in to her regular vet on Monday who gave her more IV fluids as well as an antibiotic shot, said basically the same thing, and sent her home.

Both times, she’s been perky for several hours after returning from the vet, then resumes being sick.

She’s gotten much more lethargic today (probably from not eating or drinking anything other than IV for several days) not even getting up to at least try and eat or drink which she was doing before.

My wife’s been very freaked out, so I’m trying not to be a pet-hypochondriac, but LP is a member of the family and is most definitely not “fine.” The stories I’ve been finding online of people whose pets’ kidney and/or liver problems were misdiagnosed because the test results were only mild is also a bit unnerving, as is the timing of this incident, given the food recall.

The food she’s been on recently is NOT on any of the recall lists - it’s Innova (dry) from Natura Pet Products. My wife switched her about a month ago from Nutrimax dry (also not on any of the lists) in an effort to improve her diet. The vets did not think either of these could be the culprits, and I stress that I have no particular reason to believe otherwise - but we really need to figure out what the problem is and I don’t want to make any assumptions.

Any insights or suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks.

I will keep an eye on this usenet forum for further discussion, but please also feel free to contact me directly. Contact information is on my blog at www.reluctantblogger.com
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There are also some web conversations that I want to bookmark here to come back to as time allows. Gotta head to the vet’s now.

Melamine/pet-food link dump for Tuesday April 10:

Howl911’s pet food recall portal

YAH pet rescue

Pet-food recall: Check your cupboards (good overview, and very good example of *actionable* information,

Pet Connection recall database

Do we need to worry about the HUMAN food supply?? - Tainted Wheat Gluten Sold as “Food Grade”

Wikipedia already has an extensive entry on the recall. Why am I not surprised? :-)

FORBES - Misnavigating the Pet Food Crisis

Melamine in pet food

Menu Foods Victims - terribly sad, but some of the personal anecdotes also contain useful information.

Pet food insider sold shares before recall - (I’m not looking to jump on a conspiracy bandwagon yet, but I do want to check this out later.)

Sparroweye blog

UPDATE April 11:

Thank you very much to Kim who responded in comments. Preliminary results of retesting suggest that LP’s problem is pancreatitis, not poisoning, and while she’s far from out of the woods, at least we have a sense of what we’re dealing with here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 3:06 pm and is filed under , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.