Imported Sea Food A Health Hazard
Posted on 30 August 2010 by LynThomas in Health
Many environmental activists firmly insist that BP’s Deepwater Horizon impact on food is dangerous as shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico goes on sale.
However, the National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that 90% of shrimp consumed in the United States is imported mostly from China, Thailand, Ecuador, Indonesia, India, Mexico and Vietnam.
“About 80 percent of the seafood we eat in the U.S. is imported, but less than 2 percent of those imports are actually inspected for contaminants like filth, antibiotics, chemicals and pathogens,” Food & Water Watch’s Cufone said.
The Food and Drug Administration makes a small number of random searches, which have revealed an often repeated prevalence of harmful contaminants in imported seafood.
It is believed that many of the health hazards stem from how the shrimp are raised overseas.
Properly run shrimp farms yield up to 445 pounds per acre. Food & Water Watch, which has long studied aquaculture, has documented that many foreign shrimp farm operators densely pack their ponds to produce as much as 89,000 pounds of shrimp per acre.
“The water is quickly polluted with waste, which can infect the shrimp with disease and parasites. In response, many such operations in Asia and South or Central America use large quantities of antibiotics, disinfectants and pesticides that would be illegal for use in U.S. shrimp farms,” the group’s researchers wrote in a recent report.
This is not a “maybe” situation, Cufone says. “With imported shrimp, we see pathogens like E. coli and salmonella, and filth, which is the official name for things like mouse and rat droppings, hair, insects, and the assorted chemicals, antibiotic and disinfectants they’re doused with to fight disease from the filthy conditions in which they’re raised.”
The FDA says that because it lacks personnel and laboratory capability, less than 2% of imported seafood is inspected.
Mike Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, said “There are millions of food products imported from 200 countries.”
Food investigators can’t always be sure where the seafood actually originated from. Import brokers often ship seafood from countries like China to other countries, in order to avoid high import tariffs and intensified scrutiny for dangerous adulterants. In one case, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency says millions of dollars of imported shrimp from Chinese producers were shipped through Indonesia to avoid paying steep anti-dumping duties.
The word is to buy local product you know and can trust wherever possible.
