Don't Eat the Shrimp! (90 Percent of Seafood Imports Go Uninspected Due to Shutdown)
from Menzie Chinn at EconBrowser
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2013/10/dont_eat_the_sh.html
From GovExec, "90 Percent of Seafood Imports Go Uninspected Due to Shutdown":
Thanks to the shutdown, food safety inspectors at the Food and Drug Administration, which monitors 80 percent of the U.S.’ food supply, are on furlough until the budget gets passed, as Food Safety News reports.
That means the FDA isn’t carrying out some of its most critical responsibilities. First is the FDA’s oversight of food imports. The furlough means more than 90 percent of the foreign seafood Americans eat is coming through unchecked, as well as half the fruit and one-fifth of the vegetables.
One of the big ways the FDA protects consumers is by blocking shipments from companies with a history of tainted foods, monitoring them through what it calls ”red alerts.” These include categories like filthiness (meaning excrement),fruits covered in pesticides, drug-doped seafood, dairy products with melamine, dietary supplements that might have mad cow disease, e. coli-containing seafood and candy laced with lead.
The story continues with the example of shrimp, of which Americans eat 4.2 pounds per year per person. You definitely don't want to read the rest of the story if you like shrimp.
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