Seafood Raised on Animal Feces Approved for Consumers

If you are a seafood lover and wish that you could eat more fish raised on pig feces, your dreams are coming true. Due to fierce competition in the Chinese tilapia industry, farmers are increasingly switching to feces instead of commercial feed. From the article: "At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety. 'The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,' says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China."

Comments

Re:Mad Fish Disease?

[pieterh]

Well, there is in fact a real threat here. A common parasite in fresh water fish in tropical countries is the liver fluke, a worm that lives part of its cycle in the human gut and is responsible, in cases, for cholangiocarcinoma, cancer of the bile duct. The worm attaches near the bile duct and produces chemicals that create cancer so it can eat the by-products. Nice little beast. It's a slow developing cancer that kills suddenly because it has no symptoms until it reaches a late stage. It's one of the commoner reasons for death among 50-year old males in countries where it's endemic.

One assumes there's more resistance in populations that have been exposed to this parasite for thousands of years. Women suffer much less from bile duct cancer than men, so there's variation in individual vulnerability. But as Chinese fish is exported, and ends up in places like cheap sushi bars in Birmingham, the parasite ends up in thousands, perhaps millions of people who have little resistance.

Attack of the Killer Sushi.

I should know, I got bile duct cancer a year or two ago and since there were no antecedents in my family, this seemed the most likely cause.

If we started feeding fish on pig feces, it's a slippery slope (sorry!) to feeding them human feces.

Good news is a yearly de-worming should be sufficient to prevent bile-duct cancer, if anyone cared about this.

Tilapias are natural crap eaters...

[madhatter256]

I remember a Dirty Jobs episode where Mike Rowe was at a fish farm that recycled their water.

They used tilapia/carp to eat the poop.

Here's a clip of the show on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGoR4dbE1os

Regardless, stay away from fish harvested by Chinese. They are either grown in poorly maintained farms, or fished from endangered parts of the ocean where fisheries are nearly depleted.

Re:God bless the free market!

[cusco]

voluntarily informed ingredients

Because an international mega-corp would never lie to consumers, right? If you're under 40 you have probably never heard of the 'truth in packaging' laws, or the reasons why they exist. Things were bad enough that even the frelling Chamber of Commerce joined with consumers groups to lobby for the legislation.

If you're over 40 and still believe this libertardian garbage then your blinders are on so tight you're probably beyond hope. Not sure why you think that everyone can afford to contract with a lab to analyze their corn flakes to see if they're made with mercury or contain measurable amounts of pesticides. You must belong to a distinctly higher income class than the rest of us.