Drugs Found in Systems of Pigs Auctioned at O.C. Fair : Health: Carcasses condemned, live animals held at slaughterhouse. Feed-bag mix-up, not foul play, suspected.

All the little piggies from the Orange County Fair went to market, but a few were halted Tuesday when government tests showed their bodies were laced with drugs.

During routine inspection over the past week, federal authorities discovered traces of an antibiotic in four slaughtered pigs that were raised by local schoolchildren and then auctioned at the fair. Those four carcasses were condemned Monday, and about 150 live pigs have been waylaid at a nearby slaughterhouse until the drug has time to leave their systems.

Fair officials, local veterinarians and the child who raised one of the tainted pigs said the problem was caused by a mix-up in bags of feed given to the pigs. No one, it seems, suspects foul play.

“We don’t know how it happened, but we are certain that it wasn’t malicious. It was an accident,” said Jim Bailey, the fair’s livestock supervisor. In 34 years at the fair, Bailey said he has never before had swine sent back because of a drug problem. “It’s kind of like a death in the family,” he said.

“I’m bummed,” said 13-year-old Justin Parkinson of Silverado Canyon, who helped raise one of the contaminated pigs. “I don’t know where it came from or anything like that.”

The antibiotic, sulfa methazine, is used in piglets’ “starter” feed to ward off infection, but is removed from “grower” feed given to older pigs to ensure that no residue from the drug remains when the pigs are sold for slaughter. Pork containing sulfa methazine could cause an allergic reaction--or even death--in some people who eat it, veterinarians said.

U.S. Department of Agriculture officials tested 12 of the 163 pigs sent to slaughter at the Farmer John plant in Vernon and found enough drug residue in four to make them potentially hazardous. The eight “clean” pigs that were tested were sent on to the people who bought them at the auction, while the four tainted ones were ground up for fertilizer or turkey feed, Farmer John spokesman Ron Smith said.

Farmer John will care for the rest of the pigs until next week, when the drug should be gone from their systems. All the pigs will be tested before they are distributed, and anyone who bought a contaminated pig will have the money refunded, Bailey said.

The 55 fair pigs sent to other butchers and processors will also be tested by the USDA before being released to their owners.

Students in 4-H and Future Farmers of America clubs who raise pigs for the fair are taught about the dangers of sulfa methazine, and told that pigs need several drug-free weeks to be clean when they are killed. But a simple switch of the starter-feed and grower-feed sacks may have caused the problem.

“Maybe a kid had bought some starter and then bought grower, and didn’t pay any attention that they were picking up starter instead of grower,” reasoned Lorrie Boldrick, a veterinarian in Orange, whose own children raised pigs for the fair. “Unless it’s something that you do all the time, you’re not thinking” about drug residue. “You’re just thinking, ‘I have to feed my pig.’ ”

USDA veterinarian Arthur Endo said sulfa methazine is more often found in pigs raised by children for fairs than in those from commercial pig farmers. Smith said the only other pigs stopped at the Farmer John slaughterhouse because of drugs recently were specimens from a Texas fair last year.

Because the four sulfa-contaminated pigs from Orange County were raised by different children, some suspect a feed mix-up at the fairgrounds itself. The pigs stayed at the fairgrounds from July 9 until the July 17 auction, in which the 218 hogs sold for a total of $72,949.50.

Parkinson, who has raised swine for the fair for the past three years, said he switched his pigs from starter to grower feed after they reached the age of four weeks--in plenty of time to get the antibiotics out of their bodies.

Fair officials refused Tuesday to release the names of the tainted pigs or the children who raised them. The grand champion hog, named Kemar, which sold for $1,680, was not one of the contaminated pigs, Bailey said.

Tuesday’s news about the contaminated pigs was the latest in a series of incidents that have brought negative publicity to the Orange County Fair this summer.

A roller coaster accident, controversy over a nude sculpture and the arrest of a carnival worker for allegedly fondling three girls in the haunted house made headlines earlier this month. Overall attendance at the 17-day fair was down.

“I can’t figure it out. I’ve been here many years and this is a year where we’ve had a bad series of things one after another,” said spokeswoman Jill Lloyd, who has worked at the last 19 fairs.

“They’re unfortunate, they’re unrelated. . . . I just don’t know what to attribute it to, except a series of bad luck,” Lloyd said of the spate of incidents. “I don’t know in any of these cases how you could have prevented it.”