Don’t Order the Fish

Posted on July 17, 2007
by Maureen Keene

Unless you don’t mind eating decayed flesh, carbon monoxide, mercury, antibiotics, feces and God knows what else along with it.

The New York Times today reported on testimony before a House subcommittee elaborating how weak the FDA is, and how it may get even weaker. The FDA currently only inspects about 1% of the food imports coming into the U.S., and actually conducts tests on about half of that 1%. Seven of the agency’s 13 labs are scheduled to be shut down. (Rep. John Dingell D-MI, has managed to put a temporary hold on this.) Meanwhile, importers have found a way around the miniscule chance they have of getting caught by the FDA. According to the article:

Another witness Tuesday was David Nelson, an investigator on the oversight subcommittee’s staff who spent more than four months visiting F.D.A. laboratories and customs offices at ports, as well as talking with former and current F.D.A. employees. He said the agency allowed importers to take possession of suspect goods and arrange for their testing by private laboratories that are not approved by the F.D.A.

The subcommittee staff report quoted an F.D.A. official whom it did not identify as saying private lab results were “shoddy” and “driven by financial rather than scientific concerns.”

Once there have been five consecutive analyses of an exporter’s products by private labs, with no violations, importers are no longer required to test products of that exporter.

Importers of swordfish, tuna or mahi mahi, the largest of which are likely to have unacceptable levels of mercury, will switch to smaller fish that can pass the mercury test, the report said. Once the importers have passed the five consecutive analyses, they switch back to the large fish. The report quoted one F.D.A. seafood expert as saying that over half of the imported swordfish probably contains unacceptable levels of mercury.

Take this in conjunction with an excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times, by Taras Grescoe, the author of “Bottomfeeder: A Seafood Lover’s Journey to the End of the Food Chain.”

If you want to spend a sobering half hour, go to the import alerts section of the administration’s Web site. There you will find claw crab meat from Indonesia rejected because of filth (meaning it may have carried rodent hairs or parts of disease-carrying insects), shrimp from Thailand rejected because of salmonella (in fact, 40 percent of rejections for salmonella were for shrimp) and tuna from Vietnam turned back for histamines (responsible for scombroid poisoning). Most troubling is the number of rejections because of banned veterinary drugs and antibiotics like chloramphenicol, a cause of aplastic anemia, and nitrofurans, which are suspected carcinogens.

In May, 48 seafood shipments from China were rejected. According to the nonprofit group Food and Water Watch, of the 860,000 separate seafood shipments imported into the United States, a mere 1.34 percent were physically inspected and only 0.59 percent ever made it into a lab for more rigorous testing. To put this in perspective: if the F.D.A. were responsible for inspecting that 108-story tower of shrimp, they would barely make it past the second floor before calling it quits.

The European Union has a fully functioning food safety system, but looking at its food alerts Web site is sobering for another reason: it gives you an idea of how much unsafe seafood the F.D.A. isn’t catching. The European Union physically inspects at least 20 percent of all imported seafood, and when a product is proving problematic — when they’re finding too much salmonella in Vietnamese shrimp, for example — inspection increases to 100 percent, until the problem is resolved. Sometimes the situation gets so bad that seafood has to be embargoed until the exporting country brings its standards up to snuff. When seafood from Pakistan was proving particularly unsafe, the union banned Pakistani seafood for several months.

Seriously, I would skip the seafood altogether.

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