June 26th 2009
Are Pulau Ketam Farmed Fish safe to eat?
As more and more people are eating ‘farmed fish’ nowadays, especially Klang people…..the question on ‘How safe are those farmed fish to human?”… arises. After reading some article posted from the Internets, i decided to do a find out whether our farmed fish especially those from Pulau Ketam are safe to eat? We, Klang people are overly exposed to eating farmed fish although many do not realize this fact. Most of the fishes we eat at Klang Restaurants are farmed fish from Pulau Ketam basically those from the snapper and grouper family spices.
So, is Pulau Ketam Farmed fish safe to eat? According to a Pulau Ketam Fish Farm Marine Scientist, Laura(Triwizardfan) our farmed fish expert at Pulau Ketam is safe to eat. According to her, our Pulau Ketam Farmed Fish are not fed with terrestrial animal protein espeacially cows byproducts. This is what she had to say in respond to a article written on Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, or mad cow disease in farmed fish…
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In a paper that shows just how strange our modern world has become, Robert P. Friedland, neurologist from the University of Louisville, warns that farmed fish could be at risk of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, or mad cow disease.
Currently, farmed fish are fed cow byproducts—a food source they would never find natural environment (unless society started dumping cow carcasses in oceans or lakes).
Friedland and co-authors raise the issue in the Journal of Alzhemier’s Disease and call on food regulators to ban feeding cow bone or meat to farmed fish until it can be determined if the practice of feeding fish cow-parts is safe.
“We have not proven that it’s possible for fish to transmit the disease to humans. Still, we believe that out of reasonable caution for public health, the practice of feeding rendered cows to fish should be prohibited,” Friedland said. “Fish do very well in the seas without eating cows.”
Mad cow disease is a fatal disease that can be contracted by eating parts of a cow infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). After an outbreak in Britain due to infected beef, 163 people died.
“The fact that no cases of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease have been linked to eating farmed fish does not assure that feeding rendered cow parts to fish is safe,” warns Friedland. “The incubation period of these diseases may last for decades, which makes the association between feeding practices and infection difficult. Enhanced safeguards need to be put in place to protect the public.”
Along with cow, farmed fish are also fed significant amounts of antibiotics to keep them disease-and-parasite free. Farmed fish pose additional health hazards due to the possibility of mercury contamination.
Source :- mongabay.com
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In response to the article:
In a recent article dated June 17 2009, found at the following website http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0617-hance_madfish.html , the author addressed the possibility of transmitting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or more popularly known as mad cow disease, to humans through fish. This is based on the fact that some fish feed includes terrestrial animal protein as part of the ingredients.
What the consumer needs to know in this case, is the traceability of the farmed fish from feed to harvest point in the production chain. For example, some fish feed in overseas countries are given ‘branding’ or product packaging to assure consumers of the safety level of their fish products i.e. fed non-GMO (genetically modified organisms) products. Likewise, the same can be done in Malaysia. Some companies have already achieved this through the SPLAM or Malaysian Aquafarm Certification Scheme whereby certification is provided to farms that comply with the country’s standards in terms of traceability and food safety. The next step towards food safety is to get HACCP or Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point certification through stricter compliance with international standards and regular audits (HACCP certification is required for export of fish into the EU)
To put it simply, the consumer has to know the source of their fish and what it has been fed. It is true that there are some fish feed which include terrestrial animal products such as meat, bone and even feather meal in their concoction. For fish feed, of course the best option would be to use fishmeal as the protein source. However, good quality fishmeal is expensive and the demand for this product has caused the population of wild fishes (from which fishmeal is derived) to decline. Thus, many have switched to terrestrial animal protein or even plant protein (i.e. soybean meal etc.) to replace fishmeal. And THAT’S where the problem of contamination from terrestrial animal by-products comes in. In a feed mill, chemical purification is often skipped to save cost. The fact that prions (prions are abnormal proteins which bind to normal proteins and cause them to malfunction), which are the causative agents of mad cow disease, can only be eliminated through incineration, does not help (cooking the infected parts long and well enough to ascertain that the prions are destroyed would probably destroy all the required nutrients in the animal meal along with it anyway). Since there is no proven treatment for mad cow disease and the lifespan of the prion may outlast the host animal itself, it is better to be prevent contamination of farmed fish by feeding only fishmeal-based formulated feed.
As for the unease revolving around the use of antibiotics, as long as the farmer allows for an adequate withdrawal period after the treatment has ended, there should be no worries as the fish would have flushed the drug out of its system by that time. Fish have fast metabolism, and as long as the farmers adhere by the withdrawal period for each type of antibiotic used, the residue of harmful chemicals in fish consumed by humans should not reach a harmful level.
Aside from that, there are also concerns regarding the amount of organochlorines or pesticides found in farmed fish due to accumulation in their tissue from agricultural run-offs from rivers. The DoF carries out periodical sampling of fishes to determine the level of pesticide contamination in fishes, and thankfully, the most recent results (January 2009) have shown that Pulau Ketam-reared fishes have no detectable amount of these pesticides in their tissue, hence abiding by the international safety standards.
Laura(Triwizardfan)
Pulau Ketam Fish Farm Marine Scientist
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