MELBOURNE:
Australian officials are seeing a rising
number of Asian fish imports containing banned antibiotics, a report said
Wednesday.
Five
consignments of fish from Vietnam have been stopped by authorities this year
because they contained enrofloxacin, an antibiotic barred in Australia,
official figures show.
This
compares with three loads of fish from that country stopped last year for the
same reason.
The
Melbourne Age said experts were concerned that increasing amounts of seafood
contained the chemicals, which are used in the growing or feeding of
aquaculture fish to reduce the occurrence of disease.
"The
trend that we see with fish, and it's generally about antibiotics, is that they
are very low levels of residues but they are there nonetheless," Narelle
Clegg, from the agriculture department's food safety branch, told the paper.
While
fish imports, including basa fillets and frozen fish cutlets, were stopped from
Vietnam because of antibiotics, it was not the only country providing affected
food.
China,
France and Italy were among many source nations shipping food which failed to
meet Australian standards, the newspaper said.
Its
analysis of public records showed that since 2010, some 1,050 imported foods
had not made the grade -- with some 400 foods stopped at the border because of
micro-organisms such as E. coli.
Others
contained banned additives or contaminants, or failed chemical analysis.
Most
likely to fail the Australian tests was Chinese food, followed by products from
India, Italy, Japan, South Korea and France, it said.
Experts
said antibiotics were a concern even at a low level as they can lead to the
evolution of resistant strains of bacteria in both fish and humans.
"If
you are taking them into your intestine, they could have some effect on your
own (bacteria) in your bowel and it can leave your own bacteria that used to be
sensitive to antibiotics resistant," Peter Collignon from the Australian
National University told the paper.
- AFP
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