Rotten fish

Maine dieticians gathered in Bangor last week heard Sen. Susan Collins tell one of the more frightening stories in the battle for safer foods. The story contains a couple of important points about safety, although it is not one to share around the dinner table.

In 1996, according to the senator, U.S. Customs Service and the Food and Drug Administration found a fish shipment coming into Los Angeles was contaminated with botulism, salmonella and assorted unidentified hunks of filth. The shipment, naturally, was stopped. It was then discovered that these fish, like those that come back to spawning rivers each year, were making a return journey to the United States. They had been stopped by the FDA as unfit for consumption two years earlier, but could not be confiscated. The rotten fish sat frozen somewhere until ’96, waiting to make their appearance on your plate.

The morals, if they are not evident, are these:

International trade makes life more dangerous for those who eat anything not grown locally. The amount of imported food to the United States has increased 50 percent in the last decade, and the large majority of it is safe and nutritious — so the government believes, anyway. But enough of it is not safe to cause worry.

A few examples from the last few years show why. Guatemalan raspberries were identified as the culprit behind an outbreak of cyclosporiasis; alfalfa sprouts from the Netherlands were found to have spread salmonella, as did kosher snacks from Israel; Mexican strawberries were suspected in an outbreak of hepatitus A; from Ecuador came crab meat with a side order of cholera; ground beef, mixed from around the globe, has been found spiced with the deadly E. coli 0157:H7. It all adds up, according to the General Accounting Office, to 81 million Americans sickened and 9,000 killed annually by food-borne disease.

The laws are way too relaxed when it comes to suspect food. That rotten fish was tossed back into the import pool not because federal agents failed to do their jobs but because the agents do not have sufficient controls to take the proper action: seize and dump it. That needs to be changed.

While Congress is giving agents more authority it could also give the country more agents. A government report this year concluded that the FDA inspected only 1.7 percent of the 2.7 million shipments of fruit, vegetables, seafood and processed food under its jurisdiction. The FDA needs to ensure it is using inspectors wisely but, no matter how efficient, it cannot do much with the shrinking number of inspectors it currently has.

Penalties should be more meaningful. If the owner of those erstwile fish had suffered some significant monetary loss for trying to slip them in the first time, chances are that he would not have tried a second. But if the major cost in this scheme is the freezer space to store the fish until they are taken for another run at the U.S. border, the nation can expect more poisonous meals.

Sen. Collins, who chairs the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, held numerous hearings on these issues this year and will submit legislation covering many of the loopholes in the import laws this winter. Thoughtful legislation to improve food safety deserves enthusiastic support in the free-trade era. Sen. Collins is off to a good start.