Rogers and Blackham downplayed the risks to human health, stating that the animals that had been sickened in the pet food incident were predominantly the vulnerable — small, either very young or very old, or with their health compromised already. The hogs are much larger, Blackham said, and the small amount they likely ingested, if any, means that the risk to humans if they consumed tainted pork would be minimal.

"There is no reason to put off eating pork," Blackham said. "The likely possibility is that there no contamination out there."

There are about 300 hog farms in Utah. The hogs under the voluntary hold constitute about 1 percent of the state's total number, Rogers said. In total, the three hog farms under the hold order house 1,000 to 2,000 hogs.

Clell Bagley, a professor and Extension program leader in the Agriculture and Natural Resources Department at Utah State University, said Wednesday that melamine "has been considered relatively harmless in the past."

"People in general thought it was fairly innocuous," Bagley said. "But because it got into the pet food and caused such problem there, that's grabbed attention. So we apparently still have lots to learn about it."

Jeffrey O. Hall, a USU toxicologist and head of the university's diagnostic toxicology lab, said melamine is thought to cause kidney damage because of the formation of crystals in kidney tubules, tiny tubes in the kidneys that act in parallel to filter blood and produce urine. That can lead to kidney damage and failure, Hall said.

"There is still ongoing work as to whether or not it would contaminate meat," Hall said. "Because it's a compound that there's not much known about, there's a lot of investigation being done about what type of concentrations might be occurring in other tissues that might be edible."

However, Hall and Bagley agreed that at this stage, there's no need for public panic or a ban on pork products.

"In the United States we don't typically eat pork kidney, so the concentrations (of melamine) that might be in the skeletal muscle are likely to be quite low," Hall said. "In which case, it would be of low to no concern. But again, there is a lot of ongoing testing being done."

Bagley emphasized that the melamine contamination is toxic in nature, rather than microbial. As such, there isn't the risk of illness spreading from animal to animal, herd to herd, person to person. And, Bagley said, it does appear that the FDA is "near the front of it, and will be able to get it stopped."

But there is one other, broader point worth considering, according to Bagley.

"There are major regulations on our producers in the U.S., both plant and animal products," he said. "Yet we're accepting things from other countries because they're cheap, things that don't necessarily go through every regulation as rigorously as we have to go through. So we're putting our producers out of business to buy cheap food, and we're taking them with less than the quality control they ought to have."

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