About 10 years ago I listened to Molly Ivins (now dead from breast cancer) in one of her books on how bad the Republicans under Bush were.  She described how without changing the law, they dismantled the regulatory agencies.  One striking examples was a memorandum sent by the head of the FDA which warned food inspectors not to stop the production of slaughter animals for anything other than yellow contamination, and if they did so, it was implied that their job could be terminated.  Thus fecal matter, which isn’t yellow, has been exempted as a cause for regulatory action.  Stats on how many Americans are poisoned by foods are not gathered in a believable way by the FDA, our hospitals, or reported by physicians.  One article I read when I researched the issue in 2009, said that are rate was greater than France by a factor of 10.  Furthermore the staff has been sliced from 35,000 domestic food inspectors in 1973 to 8,000 in 2006, and as a consequence “on an average, FDA inspects most facilities only once every ten years.” (FDA report on its state of affairs released December 07; a 2-page summary at http://healthfully.org/fda/id4.html from http://www.strengthenfda.org/documents/two-page_summary_science_mission_at_risk.doc).   “The FDA's $2 billion budget has dropped by $400 million in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 14 years. Meanwhile, more than 100 statutes over the last 20 years have handed the agency new duties….  the FDA is so understaffed that it would need at least 27 years to inspect every foreign medical device plant and 13 years to check every foreign drug plant. Think that's bad? Catching up on food inspections would take a mind-boggling 1,900 years…. In 2007, the FDA inspected just 30 of several thousand foreign drug-making plants. It inspected just 100 of 190,000 foreign food plants”   Article at http://healthfully.org/dnd/id3.html.  Another example of corporate freedom and façade regulating. 

Today I received an email on fish farming.  I knew it was like every other industrial food production, shocking.  I wouldn’t switch to meat, since the GMO corn and soybeans have an orally active pesticide, and thus the meat served is a source for the pesticide (see bottom for links to documentaries on this topic).  What can harm the gut of the Ostrinia, the Corn Borer, can probably harm ours.  However, I wanted to check out to see if farmed fish was fed fecal matter.  Bloomberg confirmed the allegation: 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/asian-seafood-raised-on-pig-feces-approved-for-u-s-consumers.html

By Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen and William Bi  Oct 10, 2012  --  from  Bloomberg News

Asian Seafood Raised on Pig Feces Approved for U.S. Consumers

At Ngoc Sinh Seafoods Trading & Processing Export Enterprise, a seafood exporter on Vietnam’s southern coast, workers stand on a dirty floor sorting shrimp one hot September day. There’s trash on the floor, and flies crawl over baskets of processed shrimp stacked in an unchilled room in Ca Mau.

Elsewhere in Ca Mau, Nguyen Van Hoang packs shrimp headed for the U.S. in dirty plastic tubs. He covers them in ice made with tap water that the Vietnamese Health Ministry says should be boiled before drinking because of the risk of contamination with bacteria. Vietnam ships 100 million pounds of shrimp a year to the U.S. That’s almost 8 percent of the shrimp Americans eat.

Using ice made from tap water in Vietnam is dangerous because it can spread bacteria to the shrimp, microbiologist Mansour Samadpour says, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.

“Those conditions -- ice made from dirty water, animals near the farms, pigs -- are unacceptable,” says Samadpour, whose company, IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group, specializes in testing water for shellfish farming.

Ngoc Sinh has been certified as safe by Geneva-based food auditor SGS SA, says Nguyen Trung Thanh, the company’s general director.  [For private companies it is in their financial interest to perform perfunctory inspection, rather than offend their employer.  This arrangement has been used, for example, in the US certification of Organic foods.  Failure to certify is infrequent.]

No Record

“We are trying to meet international standards,” Thanh says.

SGS spokeswoman Jennifer Buckley says her company has no record of auditing Ngoc Sinh.

At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.

“The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,” says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China.

On a sweltering, overcast day in August, the smell of excrement is overpowering. After seeing dead fish on the surface, Chen, 45, wades barefoot into his murky pond to open a pipe that adds fresh water from a nearby canal. Exporters buy his fish to sell to U.S. companies.

Yang Shuiquan, chairman of a government-sponsored tilapia aquaculture association in Lianjiang, 200 kilometers from Yangjiang, says he discourages using feces as food because it contaminates water and makes fish more susceptible to diseases. He says a growing number of Guangdong farmers adopt that practice anyway because of fierce competition.

“Many farmers have switched to feces and have stopped using commercial feed,” he says.

Frequently Contaminated

About 27 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from China -- and the shipments that the FDA checks are frequently contaminated, the FDA has found. The agency inspects only about 2.7 percent of imported food. Of that, FDA inspectors have rejected 1,380 loads of seafood from Vietnam since 2007 for filth and salmonella, including 81 from Ngoc Sinh, agency records show. The FDA has rejected 820 Chinese seafood shipments since 2007, including 187 that contained tilapia.  [Notice there is no mention of regulatory penalties or the method of inspection.  Is it mere visual inspection?}

To contact the reporters for this story: Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen in Hanoi at uyen1@bloomberg.net or William Bi in Beijing at wbi@bloomberg.net to contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Neumann atjneumann2@bloomberg.net

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The World according to Monsanto DVD documentary 109 minutes, 260,000 views, covers all aspects http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6_DbVdVo-k most entertaining, very convincing §

Genetic Roulette Jeffery Smith for sale on YouTube very convincing §

Seeds of Death, by Garry Null, 120 minutes, 1,000,000 views, on GMO, book by William Engdahl, 2007, mostly interviews,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUd9rRSLY4A very convincing, Very good basics

 More on the FDA and the drug industry they regulate: 

BAD MEDS, BAD REGULATORS, BAD PHARMA

***** President’s Lecture Series 2009-2010   MD.  Marcia Angell PhD Harvard 78 minutes, 7,600 views, based on her best-selling book, “The Truth About Drug Companies: and how they deceive us”   Her lecture is an example of clarity, organization, and logic used to arrive at a conclusion on the broad topic, bad pharma; the gold standard for public lectures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqKY6Gr6D3Q  Highly recommended §.  

As they say, “capitalism is a rush to the bottom.”  I call it tobacco ethics.