Nov 17
Local woman creates melamine home test kit | Gainesville.com | The …
Drawdy said she has spent about a year creating the kit and wants to market it as an inexpensive test that people can use at home to influence if melamine is in pet food, baby rule and other products.
“Pet owners should have a way to ordeal their food at home. People coming into Earth Pets kept saying matter like this was needed. I started trying to find one, but none existed,” Drawdy said. “In the accomplished year, using my judgment of pet food manufacturing and contaminant testing, I developed one. I have it patented and it’sitting done. I virtuous need to get it marketed.”
Melamine is an industrial chemical that is used in the manufacture of plastic products. It has a high nitrogen level, which have a mind give every inflated representation of protein if added to food.
Many human food products made in China or with ingredients from China have been found to contain melamine. Recalled products include Ritz crackers, Cadbury chocolate, M&Ms, Snickers and tea.
This year within a little 53,000 the million have come to be ill in China, by more than 12,800 hospitalizations and four infant deaths.
Drawdy may have been mixed the first persons to link melamine-tainted gluten to the pet deaths when the outbreak was occurring last year.
She is credited on the Pet Connection - a Web site and weekly pet-care appearance distributed by Universal Press Syndicate - through discovering on the Internet an obscure U.S. Food and Drug Administration alert about imported Chinese gluten.
Drawdy knew gluten was often used in pet food and instructed the alert on the Pet Connection Web site.
It turned out that the gluten cited in the alert was from a company that supplied pet food manufacturers.
Drawdy said she has wearied years researching the ingredients in pet food to try to find the most healthy brands to sell.
Drawdy said she studied the chemistry experimentation in her kitchen abase while honing the test.
She added that the kit is similar to pool chemical tests.
“The FDA tests, and the companies certainly bring forth the ability to experiment their own products on account of melamine, but what I’m trying to do is make it affordable. When you send a test to an outside laboratory, it’s several century dollars for one sample,” she said. “The huge challenge was getting something that can be manufactured cheaply enough but-end still exist reliable to the consumer. My main bound is that it’s a portion that people can just buy for a hardly any dollars.”
Jackie Casanova, an Alachua County veterinarian who is certified in animal acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, said the kit would be a valuable tool to pet owners.
Melamine-tainted food was blamed for the deaths of pets throughout the U.S. last year, including some of Casanova’s patients.
Casanova recently visited China to learn more for her practice and was astonished at the high populations packed densely into cities. It is difficult, she said, for the country to sustain life that many people with quality food.
Neither pet food nor human food from China can be trusted because of the chance that more melamine-tainted ingredients could be used, she uttered.
“The food contamination is massive according to animals and people. It’s not new. In 2004 in Asia any other 6,000 animals died from this. There is such a trend for putting really cheap, poor-quality products in food by the major manufacturers. I look at a can of cat meat and it says wheat gluten is in there, and it raises a red flag - the sort of is the abiding habitation of origin? Is that what has just made the kitty I’brawl looking at vomit?” Casanova said. “To have a test for something that is very widespread empowers the consumer. It holds the makers of the food to higher accountability, and I think that is very important.”
Drawdy uttered the test could be available in about six months if she finances the marketing herself. It could be available sooner if she gets some investors to join in.
Contact Cindy Swirko at 374-5024 or at swirkoc@gvillesun.com.
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