The U.S. food inspection system is so haphazard in screening imported seafood that fish tainted with potentially harmful drugs may be winding up on Americans’ dinner plates, warns a report by the Government Accountability Office.
The year-long GAO audit found that the Food and Drug Administration inspection system is less rigorous than the European Union’s, among others, and it has not kept up with the 20 percent increase in the nation’s consumption of foreign seafood over the past decade.
The report notes that a substantial share of the imported seafood is farmed fish, which often is treated with drugs — including medications not permitted to be used in aquaculture in the U.S. — because bacterial infections are common in farmed fish. Some of these drugs, the FDA has found, can cause cancer, allergic reactions and resistance to antibiotics.
Yet, as the report put it, the FDA “still uses the same approach it developed more than 10 years ago to ensure the safety of imported seafood, even though the United States’ reliance on imported seafood has increased and aquaculture has emerged as a major source of those imports.”
The FDA relies heavily on paperwork reviews, the GAO said, and focuses too little on sampling imported fish and screening them for drug residues. “The sampling programs of Canada, the EU, and Japan test for significantly more drugs,” the report said.
In 2009, for example, the FDA tested only about 0.1 percent of all imported seafood products for drug residues. The report said “inspectors generally do not visit the farms to evaluate drug use or the capabilities, competence, and quality control of laboratories that analyze the seafood.”
There was one hopeful note in the report — it suggested that the nation’s major new food safety law might enable the FDA to strengthen its practices to ensure the safety of imported seafood.
Last year more than 80 percent of seafood consumed in the U.S. —such as shrimp, salmon and tilapia—was imported, with about half coming from fish farms.
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