buglady

Cr*p, I dunno what's happening....mashed the wrong button ...sorry about
double post - the url is wrong below, should be:
http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2007/04/09/pet-food-recall-vin-follows-up-
affirms-thousands-of-pets-potentially-affected/


and

recall.


And Banfield has weighed in:

http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2007/04/09/pet-food-recall-banfield-says-3
9000-pets-may-have-been-affected/
Pet food contaminated with an industrial chemical may have sickened or
killed 39,000 cats and dogs nationwide, based on an extrapolation from data
released Monday by one of the nation’s largest chains of veterinary
hospitals.

Banfield, The Pet Hospital, said an ****ysis of its database, compiled
from records collected by its more than 615 veterinary hospitals, suggests
that three out of every 10,000 cats and dogs that ate the pet food
contaminated with melamine developed kidney failure.


............sort of freaking unreal. Looks like the petconx database is way
below the actual numbers. I wonder though if this extrapolation took into
account the there may have been more contaminated food coming out of one
plant than the other. I like Dr. Pion's (of VIN) insistence on stating a
range rather than a number.

buglady
take out the dog before replying

dale atkin

Lets put this in context of the above percentages...

36% of 1500 surveyed vets is 540 vets
17% of 1500 is 285 vets.
29% of 1500 is 435 vets (is there a reason these two percentages don't add?
I would have thought they should...)

So, these 540 vets are reporting a total of 1264 impacted annimals.

These 17% of the 36% were confident of the link, so that is about 47% of
those who believe they've seen an animal impacted, this translates to a
total of 594 pets, or 447 sick and 147 dead. (where the vets were confident
of the link). Or the range would be 447-951 sick pets, and 147 -313 dead
ones.

Now, if we had total number of vets in the US, and we felt these numbers
were representative we could extrapolate to total number of US pets
impacted.

To get the numbers consistent with the Banfield numbers, we'd need 46000
(practicing) vets in the US.

Those numbers are actually pretty comforting. 3/10000 cats/dogs ***that ate
the contaminated food*** developed kidney failure. This would explain the
low incidence that we actually see of problems. How many clients does a
typical small practice have (I'm asking here... I've seen the shelves with
files, but don't want to hazard a guess)? Assuming all of them ate the
contaminated food (which is not a good assumption), how many would have
developed kidney failure?

You're not comparing apples to apples here, I've tried to clarify things a
bit above. The VIN numbers are only number of impacted over the surveyed
vets. Banfield is extrapolating nation wide.

Dale