Eat fish? Don't read this

The LA Times had a story today on melamine in farmed fish from China, the source of 70 percent of farm-raised fish. This isn’t exactly breaking news. Recent melamine-in-milk stories have mentioned melamine in animal feed, which means fish, shrimp, beef, pork, and poultry were likely to be contaminated. Melamine-in-fish stories go back to the 2007 pet food recall. On that occasion, melamine was an ingredient in gluten and rice protein, found in pet food and animal feed.
Another disturbing source of melamine in fish was suggested by Bill Hubbard, a long-time associate commissioner at the FDA and now an adviser for the consumer advocacy group Coalition for a Stronger FDA. The quotation is from a June 2008 Adweek.

[Hubbard] contends the fish are farmed in “polluted” coastal lagoons in the South China Sea, alongside chicken farms. The fish are fed feces from the chickens and eat algae blooms that grow from the waste …. When they get fungal and bacterial infections, … the Chinese use anti-fungals like melamine (banned in the U.S.) that keep the fish alive long enough to harvest.

Source: Los Angeles Times

What was new (to me) in the LA Times story was the claim that while pigs and cows, like humans, excrete melamine in their urine, “fish appear to be different.” This from Jim Riviere, a toxicologist who has published papers on melamine in pigs. I’m not surprised that fish metabolism is different from that of cattle and pigs and that melamine ends up in salmon steaks but not beefsteaks. I haven’t yet been able to determine exactly why there’s a difference.

In researching fish and melamine, however, I discovered a few interesting facts. Chinese exporters prefer to ship fish to inland ports like Las Vegas, where there are no FDA seafood inspectors. Food exporters can also bring products into the US through countries like Canada, so the country of origin is obscured. Why do Chinese exporters want to avoid inspection? “In May [2007] alone, the FDA stopped shipments of frozen crab meat found to be filthy, as well as roasted eel laced with unsafe additives, tilapia fillets tainted by salmonella and an unidentified fish mislabeled as catfish.” That’s why.
During the 2007 pet food scare, the FDA said that chickens, fish, and pigs were safe for human consumption even though they’d been exposed to melamine-tainted feed. The FDA wasn’t available for comment on the LA Times story. They are admittedly understaffed and overworked. Maybe they hope that bad publicity will increase their funding. Or maybe not.
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