Wednesday, October 15, 2008 Literatus: The one that got away By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T. Breakthroughs
GETTING away from something can be a rich source of hilarious mischief as the latest episode of the US TV animation series American Dad, aptly subtitled “The One That Got Away,” would show. But letting important information away from the radar of health authorities can be fatal at best.
The recent outbreak of acute renal failure in China that killed four infants and brought 6,200 more into the hospital as report in the Sept. 18 issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Barely a week later, BMJ reported that almost 13,000 babies have already been hospitalized.
This development created frenzy at the Dept of Health, (DOH) which led to confiscations of China-imported milk and milk products that tested positive in melamine.
US health authorities presumed that melamine, a high-nitrogen content chemical, has been added intentionally by suppliers in China in order to boost the protein content of pet foods sold, albeit falsely.
Standard testing methods for detecting protein content in foods detected nitrogen content instead. It is a manufacturing sleight-of-the-hand at its most rewarding, if it got away undetected.
However, news reports coming from the wires talking on the passionate search for melamine in milk apparently missed a deadlier chemical that may have gotten away frantic radar of DOH.
That chemical is cyanuric acid, which has been isolated, together with melamine, in wheat, corn, and rice proteins—all sources of pet feeds.
Either the Philippine health authorities or the press lost it, that’s beside the point. Three published studies, in 1945, 1984, and in Sep 2008, have found out the same thing. Melamine alone does not cause renal failure in dogs and rodents.
However, together with cyanuric acid, melamine forms insoluble crystals that obstruct and damage renal tubules, and which scientists believe explains the appearance of acute renal failure.
Three scientists—Kathin Jutzi, Alasdair Cook, and Ralf Hutter of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich—performed a biochemical study on melamine in 1982 and found out that melamine can be degraded by bacteria (e.g. Pseudomonas species and Klebsiella pneumoniae) into a by-product called ammelide, which in turn gets converted into cyanuric acid.
This would explain renal failure in melamine-contaminated milk, even without detecting cyanuric acid (assuming that testing for cyanuric acid was done). Bacteria may have contaminated milk and degraded some of melamine. But this does not provide an excuse for not testing milk for cyanuric acid.
G. K. Chesterton hints similarity with lost love and lost information: “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” Love good information, my friends! (Check more details at the columnist’s blog: http://breakthroughstoday.blogspot.com)(Mobile: 0929-592-8962)
