Critical steps toward safer seafood

FDA Consumer, Nov-Dec, 1997 by Paula Kurtzweil

A tender tuna steak lightly seasoned with lemon pepper and grilled over a charcoal fire is one way to please a seafood lover's palate. Stuffed flounder, lobster thermidor, and shrimp scamp) are others.

But blue marlin served up with a dose of scombroid poisoning or steamed oysters with a touch of Norwalk-like virus are more likely to turn the stomach, instead of treating the palate.

Earlier this year, 26 employees of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., developed headaches, dizziness, nausea, and rashes several hours after eating blue marlin served in their workplace cafeteria. An emergency room doctor who treated some of the victims attributed the illness to scombroid poisoning, which is caused by a toxin produced when certain fish spoil.

In 1995, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 34 incidences of food poisoning in people who had eaten oysters harvested from certain southern U.S. waters. Health experts blamed the flu-like illness on a virus similar to the Norwalk virus, which is usually introduced into fishing areas by human sewage.

Generally, seafood is very safe to eat, says Phillip Spiller, director of the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Seafood. "On a pound-for-pound basis, seafood is as safe as, if not more safe than, other meat sources. But no food is completely safe, and problems do occur."

Seafood--the most perishable of flesh foods, according to FDA--comes to this country from all over the world, often traveling long distances before being processed, sold or eaten.

Spiller points out that while FDA has regulated seafood for decades, a new FDA program that goes into effect in December 1997 aims to further ensure seafood's safety. This program requires seafood processors, repackers and warehouses--both domestic and foreign exporters to this country--to follow a modern food safety system known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP (pronounced hassip). This system focuses on identifying and preventing hazards that could cause food-borne illnesses rather than relying on spot-checks of manufacturing processes and random sampling of finished seafood products to ensure safety.

This is the first time that the HACCP system will be required for the processing and storage of a U.S. food commodity on an industry-wide basis.

Seafood safety could be further ensured if seafood retailers integrate HACCP in their operations. Although seafood retailers are exempt from the HACCP regulations, FDA, through its 1997 edition of the Food Code, encourages retailers to apply HACCP-based food safety principles, along with other recommended practices. The Food Code serves as model legislation for state and territorial agencies that license and inspect food service establishments, food vending operations, and food stores.

These efforts will be accompanied by seafood safety programs already in place, such as ongoing research by FDA's seafood safety experts and others, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's voluntary fee-for-service inspection program.

Consumers are expected to continue their role, too, choosing seafood retailers and products carefully, and handling and serving their products with care in the home.

"Consumers are a step along the way to ensuring that only safe seafood goes in the mouth," says Mary Snyder, director of programs and enforcement policy in FDA's Office of Seafood. "They have to know what they're doing."

Reducing Hazards with HACCP

Seafood can be exposed to a range of hazards from the water to the table. Some of these hazards are natural to seafood's environment; others are introduced by humans. The hazards can involve bacteria, viruses, parasites, natural toxins, and chemical contaminants.

The HACCP system that seafood companies will have to consider and, in most cases, establish will help weed out seafood hazards with the following seven steps:

* Analyze hazards. Every processor must determine the potential hazards associated with each of its seafood products and the measures needed to control those hazards. The hazard could be biological, such as a microbe; chemical, such as mercury or a toxin; or physical, such as ground glass.

* Identify critical control points, such as cooking or cooling, where the potential hazard can be controlled or eliminated.

* Establish preventive measures with critical limits for each control point.

* Establish procedures to monitor the critical control points. This might include determining how cooking time and temperatures will be monitored and by whom.

* Establish corrective actions to take when monitoring shows that a critical limit has not been met. Such actions might include reprocessing the seafood product or disposing of it altogether.

* Establish procedures to verify that the system is working properly.

* Establish effective recordkeeping.

Also, under FDA's HACCP regulations, seafood companies will have to write and follow basic sanitation standards that ensure, for example, the use of safe water in food preparation; cleanliness of food contact surfaces, such as tables, utensils, gloves and employees' clothes; prevention of cross-contamination; and proper maintenance of handwashing, hand-sanitizing, and toilet facilities.