by Chip Martin

Created on: April 06, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

A Chinese company, Xuzhou Anying, is at the centre of a contamination scare that has led to a recall of pet foods in North America and Europe. But they say that they never exported wheat gluten to the United States.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that wheat gluten from China's Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company Ltd. contained an industrial chemical called melamine which is used as a fertilizer. So far 16 cats and dogs have died but there have been more than 8,000 complaints.

But a manager at Xuzhou Anying insists that the firm was only a domestic feed dealer and has never sold an ounce of wheat gluten to the U.S.

Anying's company profiles on the Internet describe it as a feed manufacturer and exporter.

China officials say they never exported wheat or wheat gluten to the United States, a main wheat producer, or to Canada, where Menu Foods is based.

The FDA had said the suspect wheat gluten had been sold by Anying to ChemNutra Inc. of Las Vegas, which in turn had sold the wheat gluten to Menu Foods and a few other companies that have since recalled pet products.

Investigations are still underway with ChemNutra Inc as the problem may have been started on American soil and not China.

All of this finger-pointing to China has evoked questions from Chinese officials and American pet owners because FDA officials said they were uncertain whether melamine had actually caused the pets to become ill in the first place. They said limited studies have found melamine is ``fairly nontoxic,'' but investigators are considering whether dogs and cats might be especially sensitive to it, or whether another chemical may also have been present.

Chinese authorities have also dismissed New York state officials' earlier claim that Chinese gluten might have contained aminopterin, a toxin used in rat poison, and might have caused the pet deaths.

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