Pet Food Safety: When Pet Food Makes Pets and Humans Sick
BY
JAMES ANDREWS | DECEMBER 30, 2013
Between late 2011 and spring 2012, dozens of people across 20 U.S. states and Canada were falling ill with apparent Salmonella infections all coming from the same source. For nearly six months, the illnesses slowly cropped up around North America, with health investigators unable to connect the dots about how they were being caused.
It wasn’t until April 2012 that the puzzle finally came together, when the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development performed a routine test on a retail product that came up positive for Salmonella. When they checked the exact strain against a federal disease database, they realized that the food had been sickening people for half a year.
But the food in question was not something like raw chicken or leafy greens – it was dry dog food. More specifically, it was Diamond Naturals Lamb Meal & Rice produced at a Diamond Pet Foods plant in South Carolina....
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