Here is a comment I received:


They've been reporting that Aminopterin levels of at least 40 ppm were detected in the tainted cat food.

According to a relative of mine (who is a chemist in the pharmaceuticals industry), this is a high- and extremely dangerous- quantity of this particular drug.

I found a bit of an abstract from an article posted in the Annals of the NY Academy of the Sciences suggesting that aminopterin was found to be toxic to rats and chicks in quantities as low as 3 ppm, which is in line with the numbers proposed by said relative.

As far as the death toll, according to petconnection.com's tally, they've received over 1,300 complaints of pet deaths believed to have been associated with these foods. (They are no longer reporting tallies for sickened pets who have survived.) These numbers have continued to grow by the hundreds daily since PC set up their database.

Additionally, some individuals who have gotten through to the FDA are reporting that the representatives they spoke with have discussed totals 'in the thousands'.. and I read earlier today that they've received somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,400 complaints thus far. Anecdotal evidence, to be sure- but it's pretty clear at this point in time that there have been far more than 16 casualties at this time.

As far as IgA nephropathy related to gluten sensitivity, my cat has been eating products containing wheat gluten for much of his life without incident. He became ill (acute renal failure) almost immediately after having consumed a relatively small quantity of the recalled food. I have been offering him another cat's dry prescription diet as he recovers, because I'm leery of purchasing any pet food at this time. He has shown no sign of problems on the prescription food, despite the fact that it too contains wheat gluten. As such, while gluten may be a serious problem for some animals, I'm inclined to believe that the gluten itself was not the problem for him.

Just a few thoughts.

Here is my response:

Thanks. I do now believe it was the aminopterin, especially with the numbers now being posted. That was the illogical part of all of this....the small number being reported at first. But, as far as the IgA nephropathy, it is a fact that gluten can do this and this point needs to be remembered because this story is much bigger than the poison and people are starting to see that.

The fact that a pet was eating this gluten-containing food all along may just be the cofactor in why they died when the aminopterin was introduced. There has to be a reason why some were affected and died and while others didn't. It also helps to explain why the cat was so much more affected. This story is likely to be the "syndrome" effect that I talk so much about, where multiple factors come together to produce the disease state, such as in the case of epilepsy, cancer, MS and many other disease states.

For example, carcinogens don't "cause" cancer in most cases. Viruses do. The carcinogens simply "motivate" the virus into causing the cancer. But, the viruses alone don't do it. In fact, some need helper viruses to do this. But that alone doesn't result in cancer. We have to have an incompetent immune system ("governor") for cancer to develop. It takes a fair amount of wrong-doing to end up with an incompetent immune system, such as a poor diet (for quite some time), air pollution, lack of sleep, immune-suppressive drugs or chemicals, etc etc. So, the combination of all of these things results in cancer, which used to occur in the elderly and now occurs in the young. Why? We all know the answer to that one.

God in His infinite wisdom and love actually made it quite hard for His beloved Creation (man and animals) to get sick. It's just that we've made it sooooo much easier, with our harmful diets, crazy lifestyles and polluted environments. Most people can see that inconvenient truth, I believe.

John