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WHEN it comes to seafood safety in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration is the thin red line between the public and the fish farmers of the world. While the United States Department of Agriculture has the mandate for certifying meat, the F.D.A. is responsible for inspecting imported seafood. And although it oversees the safety of 80 percent of all food products, the F.D.A. gets only about 35 percent of the overall food safety budget.

That is not only a shame, it may also be a real danger for anybody who has a weakness for barbecued shrimp, blackened catfish or sautéed scallops.

Every year about 6.6 million tons of seafood are imported into the United States from 160 different countries. That’s a lot of fish: the frozen shrimp alone would make a shrimp cocktail the size of the Sears Tower. Yet the Food and Drug Administration has only 85 inspectors working primarily with seafood.

If you want to spend a sobering half hour, go to the import alerts section of the administration’s Web site. There you will find claw crab meat from Indonesia rejected because of filth (meaning it may have carried rodent hairs or parts of disease-carrying insects), shrimp from Thailand rejected because of salmonella (in fact, 40 percent of rejections for salmonella were for shrimp) and tuna from Vietnam turned back for histamines (responsible for scombroid poisoning). Most troubling is the number of rejections because of banned veterinary drugs and antibiotics like chloramphenicol, a cause of aplastic anemia, and nitrofurans, which are suspected carcinogens.

In May, 48 seafood shipments from China were rejected. According to the nonprofit group Food and Water Watch, of the 860,000 separate seafood shipments imported into the United States, a mere 1.34 percent were physically inspected and only 0.59 percent ever made it into a lab for more rigorous testing. To put this in perspective: if the F.D.A. were responsible for inspecting that 108-story tower of shrimp, they would barely make it past the second floor before calling it quits.
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By: TARAS GRESCOE - The New York Times