Is chloramphenicol still used in shrimp farming?
Most countries, including the United States, have banned the use of chloramphenicol in animal-food production. The Food and Drug Administration has a zero-tolerance policy for the antibiotic in food sold in the marketplace. The agency, which currently has a detection level of 0.3 parts per billion, has tested seafood for chloramphenicol since 2002 and has detained product containing the antibiotic. Ive talked to people at FDA who say a lot of shrimp-farming countries have initiated educational campaigns to discourage the use of [banned] antibiotics at the farm level, says Thor Lassen, president of Ocean Trust in Reston, Va., who released a report called Shrimp Sustainability Review last August. Research over the past 25 years has consistently found that any amount of chloramphenicol is potentially lethal to humans, according to the Public Citizen report Chemical Cocktail: The Health Impacts of Eating Farm-Raised Shrimp, which was released last December. The report is the second of six
