Chinese chemicals in seafood - the casual Australian response ...

Excerpt from Sydney Morning Herald:

Seafood rejected by US deemed OK for Aussies

4 July 2007

The Chinese fish the Americans reject may end up on Australian plates, despite the Federal Government calling for better monitoring of farmed seafood from China.

The US Food and Drug Administration has imposed rigorous testing on Chinese farm-raised seafood - including prawns, basa and eel - after finding that produce tested between October last year and May this year was repeatedly contaminated with banned antibiotics.

Last week, the US regulator ruling that each shipment from China must be tested at the border by suppliers to prove it was antibiotic-free.

But Australia will not alter its "low risk" classification for Chinese farmed prawns, which means only 5 per cent of shipments will be tested.

It is understood that nitrofurans, malachite green and fluoroquinolones have been repeatedly detected by the US regulator in shipments of Chinese seafood over the past eight months. But only one of those banned antibiotics - nitrofuran - is being tested at the border by the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service - in one in 20 randomly selected shipments.

The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Peter McGauran, said yesterday that Food Standards Australia New Zealand saw the problem "as a compliance issue and not a health issue".

But he said Australian quarantine would nevertheless step up its monitoring of imported farmed seafood by testing for a wider range of chemical residues.

A quarantine spokesman said Australia was waiting for more information from the US to determine if the levels found in Chinese seafood rejected represented health risks.

"On that basis, it will be decided whether our current system needs to be changed."

China is the largest producer of farmed seafood in the world.

See - China exporting residual chemicals.