Melamine discovered in hatchery fish food.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Fish bound for Oregon's rivers and streams have eaten a steady diet of melamine-tainted food since late December.

A half-dozen state hatcheries - including those at Leaburg and Oakridge - immediately ceased using their regular fish food on Tuesday after the state learned from the federal Food and Drug Administration about the contamination, Oregon officials said.

The state hatcheries fed about 8 million spring and fall chinook and rainbow trout the contaminated meal. The state Department of Fish & Wildlife last month released about half of the fish - all fall chinook - into Big Creek, a tributary of the lower Columbia River.

None of the melamine-fed fish have been released in Lane County, said Steve Williams, a deputy administrator at the Department of Fish & Wildlife.

The department is analyzing when and how to release the rest of the young fish, Williams said.

"We're going to continue to rear the fish as planned, and we'll make those decisions down the road," Williams said.

"The FDA is not associating risk to fish or humans as a result of melamine, so we'll continue to work with the (FDA), but I don't have any reason to believe I won't be able to release those fish on schedule," he said.

Melamine is an industrial chemical that is used to produce fire retardant products. It got into the hatchery fish meal through wheat flour imported from China, said Greg Deacon, nutritionist for the Holland-based Skretting Company, which produced the fish food.

The melamine is from the same stream of wheat flour that since mid-March has killed and sickened hundreds of U.S. dogs and cats that ate melamine-laced pet food.

The wheat flour was also used in hog and chicken feed. Because of that, the FDA initially blocked the sale of 20 million chickens. About 6,000 hogs remain in quarantine pending further testing.

Fears about the human food chain have risen since the discovery of the tainted wheat in pet food.

On Tuesday, seven government agencies released an assessment that concluded that the level in the meat or eggs of animals that ate the melamine-tainted feed were safe for people to eat.

The agencies - including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture - found that even if a person were to consume large amounts of meat and eggs, the amount of melamine they would ingest would be 18,000 to 30,000 times lower than the level considered safe.

The same is true of fish, said Deacon, who is based at the Skretting Company's offices in Vancouver, B.C.

"It seems very low risk. It's not something that persists in the fish. It just passes right through the fish. It doesn't seem to be presenting any health problem," he said.

The FDA, however, did not take samples of the Oregon hatchery fish, the tank water or the bottom sediment to test for the presence of the chemical, Williams said.

The hatchery salmon are released into streams, swim to the sea and do not return for three or four years, when they then can be caught by anglers. But when the rainbow trout are released they may be caught immediately.

The geography of the fish food contamination is not known yet. The FDA traced the melamine back to one lot produced by Skretting. The company shipped food from that lot to 20 hatcheries in Washington and Oregon, Deacon said.

"We only know about that one batch of feed," he said. "We're analyzing all the different lots to see what we can find."

Skretting is the largest fish food producer in the world. It supplies 40 percent of the feed globally for aquaculture and hatchery use, Deacon said.

Farmed fish produced in parts of the country were also fed melamine-tainted food, FDA officials said, but it isn't immediately clear whether any of the farmed fish had entered the food supply.

Federal officials are still deciding whether to quarantine the farmed fish.

``Depending upon what we find in ... testing, that is going to drive the next steps,'' said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection.

The fish food contained what China-based sellers said was wheat gluten, a protein source. The material was actually wheat flour spiked by the chemical melamine and related, nitrogen-rich compounds to make it appear more protein rich than it was, officials said. Higher protein grains fetch higher prices.

The FDA is considering enforcement options, Acheson said. The ingredients came from two Chinese firms: Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. and Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd.

Deacon said Skretting has switched to wheat gluten produced in North America. He said the company has offered to replace any of the remaining product.

Oregon has only 900 pounds of its 4,800-pound order. The rest was consumed by the young salmon and trout.

"From our point of view, it won't happen again because we won't be dealing with China ever again, after this," Deacon said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.