June 4, 2007

 

North Carolina joins Southern States in checking imported seafood

 

 

The North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services said it would start testing imported seafood for the presence of antibiotics and chemical contaminants next month.

 

North Carolina now joins Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in testing imports for contamination.

 

Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi have banned the sale of catfish imported from China and from Vietnam after detecting illegal antibiotics.

 

The agency said it would also look into strengthening investigations of economic fraud in the seafood industry.

 

The programme would test all types of imported seafood aggressively, said Joseph Reardon, director of the Food and Drug Protection Division at the department.

 

Testing for antibiotics in the fluoroquinolones family began last week. The banned chemical were found in catfish shipments from China and other Asian countries recently.

 

Fluoroquinolones, such as ciprofloxacin, are used to treat severe, life-threatening infections in humans. The chemical was banned in human food as it might result in disease strains which offer greater resistance to human antibiotics.

 

Although the US bans the use of such antibiotics, they are used in foreign fish farms to control diseases.

 

The state Department of Agriculture also will test for the presence of other prohibited chemicals, such as malachite green.

 

A suspected carcinogen, malachite green is banned in the use of aquaculture operations in the United States, but has been detected in fish and eels imported from China, where it is used to treat fungal and bacterial infections.

 

Another area which would be given more teeth are the economic fraud investigations.

 

Recent incidents have arosed in which restaurants advertised higher-priced fish species like grouper or snapper, only to serve cheaper Asian fish to diners. 

 

Investigations would work back through the channels of distribution and focus on distributors and importers, Reardon explained. Species identification tests would be conducted with the assistance of the FDA.

 

Unscrupulous companies send their contaminated shrimp to the US market because there is a 99-percent chance that it won't be caught, said John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a group representing domestic shrimp fishermen.

 

Such shrimps are more likely to be tested and destroyed by inspectors in Japan or the European Union.

 

Japan inspects approximately 25 percent of shrimp imports, and the EU requires all shrimp exporters to be pre-qualified with health certifications before they are allowed even to ship shrimp to the EU.

 

Earlier this month, the US Senate unanimously passed an amendment that authorizes FDA to increase import inspections.