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March 9, 2017

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Safety warning over raw seafood

By Liu Ya | March 9, 2017, Thursday | Print Edition

SASHIMI enjoys worldwide popularity thanks to its freshness and nutrition, though it sometimes carries parasites that can lead to infection.

According to the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration, the vast majority of seafoods are safe to eat, although they have also been found to contain relatively more problems than other categories of foods that receive regular quality spot checks.

The FDA conducted 4,588 tests on 398 seafood samples last year, with 95 percent meeting national food safety standards. Excessive amounts of heavy metal and microorganisms were leading problems among samples that fell short of these standards.

The Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention said many people falsely assume that sea water acts as a natural disinfectant. However, many parasites can live in sea water.

The center recently issued a story on its public WeChat account to explain that raw aquatic foods can contain parasites and alerted the public that the most effective way to eliminate them is high-temperature cooking.

Last month, nippotaeniidea, a tapeworm that can live in the human body and grow as long as 20 feet, was detected in wild Alaskan salmon by American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A 10 cm parasite was also found last December in the stomach of a 30-year-old man who ate sashimi frequently in east China’s Zhejiang Province, familydoctor.com reported.

Anisakis, another common parasite, has been detected in imported red snappers and mackerels several times by the Shanghai Exit-Entry Inspection and Quarantine Bureau. Although it cannot grow in the human body, it is still unsafe for people to eat undercooked fish that contain it. Anisakis larvae can survive in stomach acid for ten days, in soybean sauce for 11 hours and spicy wasabi for 50 minutes.

Freezing sea fish at minus 20 degrees Celsius or less for more than 24 hours can effectively kill parasites and keep fish fresh. But this won’t prevent against other pathogenic infections. The safest option is to eat cooked seafood because no parasites can survive 100-degree-plus heat.

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