Drugs Found In The Fish, Safe or Dangerous?

It may sound strange but the fish that you eat on your plate may need a drug test. A certain report from the US Government Accountability Office said that FDA isn’t doing anything good enough to make sure that fishes available for American consumers are free from other form of pharmaceuticals. They found out that FDA lacked procedures, criteria and standards to make sure that the fishes that are being sent to the markets are safe. It’s unlike the European Union which is stricter when it comes to inspection and regulation on sea foods. Click here for more.


80% of the fishes in the US are imported. Half of these imported fishes come from fish farms. The largest producer is China which provides a quarter of the fish imported to the US every single year. Thailand, Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam and Ecuador also provide 5% at the least for US imports. In the past years, FDA has inspected about 1.5% of Chinese facilities that are exporting to US. .1% of the fish are inspected upon import. But it’s not expected for drugs that are legal in China but are banned in US.

In short, the majority of fishes remain uninspected. Their production is also unsupervised. As a result, pharmaceutically absorbed fishes are certainly leaking through the holes in the system all throughout the country.


Like factory beef feedlots, factory fish farms also suffer the same problems. Fishes are crowded into pens. They feed not on their natural diet but with foods that are cheap and easily bought like soy. Waste then builds up inside their pens and is then seeped into the environment. Fishes then become sick, infested and become deformed. They die in higher rates which makes the farmers worry. To solve this, pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, vaccines and other chemicals are used to kill the disease-causing micro-organisms. Get more information from Hootan Melamed Los Angeles. 

The largest source of imported fish which is China produces the most dangerous fishes. China uses a high density model for breeding fishes and they are about ten times denser than any other countries. China Times News Group says that diseases are spreading through these fish farms which can only be treated with heavy doses of antibiotics. Cai Shuanghu, an associate professor at Guangdong Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Biology and Epidemiology for Aquatic Economic Animals, antimicrobial drugs lose their effect in the environment in a couple of years. After those bacteria become more resistant which makes fish farmers get more potent antibiotics.

As a consumer, awareness of these things is necessary. It’s important that you give information to the proper authorities if something happens especially if you have eaten fishes that are contaminated. For more information, just visit http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-286.