By Staff Writers
Fish from overseas that are contaminated with chemicals not allowed in the U.S. food supply are showing up for sale in this country, including in Tennessee.
Three American fish importers pleaded guilty earlier this year in Mobile, Ala., to federal felony charges of mislabeling fish and seafood.
Their illegal haul included more than 120,000 pounds of imported fish, brought in to Mobile and Seattle, that tested positive for the suspected human carcinogen malachite green, an anti fungal agent, and for an antibiotic that U.S. authorities also prohibit for use on fish that people consume.
Over the past 12 months, officials in Tennessee, one of the few states doing testing, found evidence of a prohibited substance.
Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas and Florida also turned up the same in recent years while screening imported fish.
How much tainted fish might end up on plates in restaurants or homes is unknown, but one Alabama official says it’s coming into the country despite a U.S. Food and Drug Administration effort to block such shipments.
“I can tell you right off the bat that 40 percent of the imported fish we test is positive for banned drugs that are not safe for human health,” said Brett Hall, deputy commissioner for the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report in April saying improved FDA oversight is needed of imported seafood, with recommendations to better leverage limited funding.
Antibiotics found
Over the past year, Georgia and Arkansas found evidence of fluoroquinolones, a banned family of antibiotics, in imported fish. Arkansas detected crystal violet, a carcinogen.
In February, fluoroquinolones residue was discovered in imported fish in Tennessee. Out of 17 imported basa — a mild-tasting Asian catfish — and other catfish samples analyzed, one was positive for the illegal antibiotics over the past year, according to the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.
That was using the FDA’s tolerance standard of 5 parts per million.
No imported shrimp samples have shown a problem.
“We began testing imported fish about five years ago due to growing consumer concerns,” said Casey Mahoney, a department spokeswoman.
After the one positive sample among 78 lots since testing began in July 2006, the distributor was notified and a recall was initiated. Delivery drivers were told to collect any basa fish remaining and deliver them back to the distributor’s warehouse, where the product was destroyed. The product was originally distributed to food service establishments.
Tennessee does quarterly sampling and testing at wholesale and retail establishments. Alabama started such testing earlier and has now dropped it because of funding shortages.
From 2002 to 2009, Alabama records show, 44 percent of basa fish it sampled from Asia were positive for fluoroquinolones, prompting the state to issue nine “suspensions from sale or movement orders” to take the fish off the market.
The United States today imports almost 85 percent of its seafood, and about half of it is from aquaculture, which frequently uses antibiotics to control disease.
Most of the seafood comes from China, Thailand, Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam and Ecuador.
EU tightens rules
When the European Union tightened its standards on what was acceptable, the U.S. market began to be flooded with seafood that didn’t make the grade there, said John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance in Florida.
“When you have this amount of product coming in that could contain illegal chemicals, it has an effect on our prices and consumer safety, too,” he said. “We became a dumping ground for all seafood rejected by the EU, Canada and Japan.”
Improvements have been made with the phasing in of a food safety modernization act that took effect in January, but more are needed, he said.
The handful of states that inspect imported fish do it mainly to protect local fishing industries from what they regard as unfair foreign competition. The others rely on the FDA to protect consumers.
For its part, the FDA says that the presence of banned drugs in imported fish “is a risk we’re actively trying to manage,” and the agency defends the job it is doing.
Inspections are conducted at processing companies, and sampling is done at ports and when fish have reached the market, said Douglas Karas, FDA spokesman. Documentation is required, and importers are inspected.
Companies that are violators are red-flagged for closer scrutiny.
“This won’t protect against all possibilities, but we feel we have a strong system because we have a lot of measures working together,” Karas said.
Also, very small levels of substances can be detected that would be of greatest concern in the case of long-term exposure, he said. Still, new sampling protocol is being developed to help.
“It is very valuable to have state agencies doing testing as well,” he said.
Ted McNulty, director of the aquaculture division of the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, has little confidence in the federal system — largely because of the amount of actual sampling done.
“When you’re not checking but 1 percent of what’s coming into the country … if a load is rejected, they can just go out and put it on another ship, bring it in and they have a 99 percent chance of not getting caught,” he said.
