Demands are building for stronger controls over the nation`s seafood industry to protect consumers from the risk of getting both sick and ripped off.
Pressure from an odd coalition of consumer and industry groups already has stimulated proposals for more rigorous laws, federal studies to find out how safe seafood is and a new surveillance system from the boat to the market. But revamping will take at least two to three years and possibly longer.
The current fragmented, inconsistent monitoring program has produced a profusion of fish stories pointing up dangers and deceptions in the current system:
– A Kroger supermarket executive in Ohio tells of a company buyer who was visiting a Florida fish supplier and was dismayed to see the lot of grouper destined for Kroger stores. The fish looked bad and smelled worse, and the buyer said not to bother sending them. By the time the buyer had wandered through the plant and back to the loading dock, the suspect fish had not been tossed out but had been relabeled and readied for shipment to another retailer.
– A pregnant woman in Baltimore stopped by the fish market on the way home from work and purchased a fish she had never seen, but was told was a delicious Great Lakes species from New York state. Having second thoughts, the woman kept the fish on ice till she could check it out with New York authorities the next day. After a series of frustrating telephone calls, she finally learned the fish was listed on a state pollution advisory warning high risk groups such as pregnant women not to eat the fish. The warning didn`t reach consumers outside New York.
– At least 61 people, mostly from Florida, Georgia and Alabama, came down with hepatitis A last July and August after they ate raw oysters in Panama City, Fla. The marine patrol did arrest a local harvester found
”bootlegging” oysters from closed beds-a bayou where broken sewer pipes had dumped 200,000 gallons of raw sewage-but patrollers say the enforcement system is so full of holes that the bad oysters could have come from anywhere on the Gulf Coast.
Private enterprise seldom has begged the federal government to regulate it. But in 1906, after muckraking reports of revolting conditions in meat-packing houses appalled American meat-eaters and foreign purchasers, the meat industry lobbied for a meat inspection law.
The seafood situation today has parallels. Though conditions are not nearly so extreme as those in the slaughterhouses 83 years ago, consumer doubts about polluted waters, sanitary handling of seafood and deceptive trade practices have aroused the industry and consumer activists to action.
”We want to protect the acceptance of our products,” said Lee Weddig, executive vice president of the National Fisheries Institute, a Washington-based trade association leading the charge for stronger regulation.
”In the last two years there`s been such attention to this issue, primarily fomented by pollution scares of last summer. And the fact is that there`s no connection between these concerns and safety of the product,”
Weddig said.
Connection or not, U.S. consumption of seafood fell 3 percent last year after years of growth, a remarkable drop considering Americans` second thoughts about the dangers of red meat as a high-fat, high-cholesterol food. Fish is neither, which helps explain why per capita consumption of seafood increased from 10.6 pounds of fish and shellfish a year in 1967 to 15.4 pounds in 1987, before the drop last year.
Much of the seafood industry considers inspection a form of protection against further erosion in sales.
”The consumer wants to get a wholesome product,” said Don Haynie, the president of Farm Fresh Catfish in Hollandale, Miss. ”With government inspection the consumer believes he is getting a wholesome product.”
The consumer group Public Voice, which is heading a coalition of 35 public interest groups in support of better federal inspection, began warning about seafood quality long before medical syringes and brown tide mingled with seashells last summer along miles of shoreline.
Consumer advocates and environmentalists say the hazards of eating seafood have grown under increasing demand, increasing pollution and sparse monitoring. They are worried not only about the easy fixes, such as sanitation at processing plants, but about complicated unknowns, including the long-term effects of pesticides and chemical compounds that drain or are dumped into the waterways.
”We`re not supplying a means of assuring a good, safe seafood product at the same time we`re encouraging people to eat more of it,” said Elizabeth Hedlund, government affairs director for Public Voice. ”Chances of your getting safe seafood are pretty much hit or miss.”
Officials of the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for assuring that most of the nation`s food, including fish, is wholesome, safe and properly labeled, say they could improve the FDA program if they had more personnel to inspect and sample and do research. But essentially they defend their system.
”I think seafood in this country is generally safe, and people should enjoy it without hesitation,” said James Benson, deputy FDA commissioner.
”One area that we`re concerned with is raw shellfish. The risk is much higher than in eating other kinds of seafood.”
Only incomplete figures exist to compare the relative safety of beef and poultry, which are subjected to carcass-by-carcass inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with seafood, which gets a fraction of such scrutiny under the FDA.
Doctors are required to report to the government only a few food-borne illnesses, including salmonella poisoning and a group of infections related to eating raw shellfish, so information is limited.
The figures that do exist show relatively more illness has been reported from seafood than from poultry or red meat. The FDA recently computed that from 1973 to 1987 there were 171 cases of illness reported per billion pounds of seafood consumed, compared to 101.8 cases of illness per billion pounds of poultry and only 56.55 cases per billion pounds of beef.
When cases of illness related to the more hazardous raw shellfish are subtracted, the number of cases from fish drops to 75 per billion pounds consumed-fewer than the stomachaches attributed to poultry, but still more than beef.
Legislation introduced in Congress and generally backed by industry and consumer groups would have the USDA take over fish inspections. It would not imitate the system of carcass-by-carcass surveys used on meat and poultry, which would be impossible to copy in an industry that includes uncountable numbers of shrimp, oysters, clams, crabs, mussels and scores of species of fin fish, which arrive on nearly 200,000 commercial fishing boats and in more than three million tons of fresh, frozen or canned imports a year.
The group Public Voice is one proponent of switching to USDA, criticizing FDA surveillance as ”woefully scanty.”
Benson of the FDA says the agency must target its inspection and sampling, and has enough experience to know where to look for trouble.
”We try to do smart sampling. We don`t look for problems in areas where we don`t think we`ll find them,” said Benson, who nonetheless said FDA would like to double or triple its sampling if it had the funds.
A recent self-analysis conducted by the FDA shows that it inspects about one-quarter to one-third of the nation`s seafood processors, retailers and other businesses in a year. It analyzes only between 1,200 and 2,100 samples of seafood each year and in the last three years has found 12 percent to 30 percent of those to be too contaminated or unfit to eat.
The samples don`t represent ”the product group in general,” the study noted, since they are chosen for analysis because a problem is suspected. Likewise with seafood imports, the FDA normally samples a small percentage and finds a heap of trouble-violations in 35 percent to 50 percent of the samples. State governments may help fill in the gaps, but they often don`t have many resources for monitoring, even when they have the legal responsibility.
They and other seafood operations are also inspected by the Illinois Department of Health inspectors on a spot-check basis. In Chicago, the city`s Department of Health also has jurisdiction over inspecting seafood operations with two inspectors who pay surprise visits to pull samples of shellfish in 79 locations in the city.
Jumping the gun on increased inspection, the Chicago Fish House, a wholesale seafood distributor, just added a full-time Department of Commerce inspector to certify that its products follow federal specifications for clean, safe, wholesome seafood.
States with any shellfish industry have agencies run by federal standards and devoted to monitoring the water where shellfish are harvested and firms where they are processed.
The problem is keeping harvesters from sneaking into closed, polluted waters and simply saying they got the oysters elsewhere.
Every bag or box of oysters is supposed to carry a tag showing the bi-valves came from approved waters, but Major Ed Thomas of the Florida Marine Patrol said workers have been known to steal hundreds of tags from reputable bosses and go into business tagging bad oysters with good tags.
Sometimes restaurants and markets will buy untagged oysters and knowingly sell such ”bootlegged” products to unsuspecting customers, he said.
Industry officials acknowledge their business is riddled with deceptive practices, most of which are not so dangerous as selling oysters from dirty water.
”The main problem I see is that when you buy steak you don`t expect to get pork chops, so why should you buy grouper and get sea bass?” said Dr. Donna Blythe, a Miami specialist in fish toxins.
