Friday, August 19, 2005
By RUSS HENDERSON, Staff Reporter
The same antibiotics that prompted officials to ban the Vietnamese fish basa in Alabama and Louisiana have been commonly, and legally, used in U.S. poultry production for about a decade, federal officials said Thursday.
The drugs were never approved for use in U.S. farm-raised catfish, but were approved for poultry in 1995, Food and Drug Administration officials said Thursday.
Just last month, after five years of deliberation, the Food and Drug Administration moved to ban one drug in the fluoroquinolone antibiotic family from use in farmed chickens, but the ban won't go into effect until Sept. 12.
"If these antibiotics present such a health threat, why hasn't Alabama started testing chickens?" asked John Sackton, editor of the on-line seafood industry news service Seafood.com.
Alabama agriculture regulators told a Mobile Register reporter Thursday afternoon they would try to answer that question, but had no answer by the end of the day.
Sackton and other critics have said Alabama and Louisiana's bans are "grandstanding" intended to promote their own farmed catfish industries. But food safety lobbying groups and even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long criticized the FDA's decision to allow the use of fluoroquinolones in poultry.
Chickens, sold as broilers, are Alabama's biggest agricultural industry, representing about $1.8 billion in sales annually, said Jesse Chappell, a fisheries specialist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. Catfish is the state's fourth-largest agricultural industry, representing $85 million annually, he said. Nationally, the value of broilers produced during 2004 was $20.4 billion, according to the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association.
Fluoroquinolones are used to treat tuberculosis, pneumonia and other infections in people and sometimes given to farm animals in other countries, particularly to fight the campylobacter bacteria prevalent in chickens, which is a common cause of food poisoning.
They are forbidden in food animals in the United States, Canada and Europe because of worries that germs would become resistant to the antibiotics, then be passed on to humans, according to the CDC Web site.
Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria are one of the biggest emerging public health concerns, according to the Web site.
Though the drugs first became available in 1986, campylobacter bacteria resistant to fluoroquinolones didn't appear until 1996 and 1997, soon after the drugs' approval for use in poultry, according to a Federal Register notice published in 2000 by the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.
The bacteria causes campylobacteriosis, a gastrointestinal infection, which is estimated to affect over 1 million persons every year, or about 0.5 percent of the general population, according to the CDC Web site.
The FDA started to consider withdrawing its approval of the drugs for poultry in 2000, according to FDA documents. The CDC supported such a withdrawal, and the nonprofit Washington-based lobbying group Keep Antibiotics Working pushed for withdrawal and pressed poultry companies to abandon their use.
In 2002, poultry giant Tyson announced it had discontinued use of fluoroquinolones. Other major manufacturers, Gold Kist, ConAgra, Perdue, Foster Farms and Claxton, followed.
Then in late July, FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford ordered that approval for the use of Baytril, a poultry antibiotic made by Bayer, be withdrawn, effective Sept. 12. Baytril is a member of the fluoroquinolone family of antibiotics.
Keep Antibiotics Working is supported by several national nonprofit public education and lobbying organizations, including the environmental group Environmental Defense.
Karen Florini, senior attorney for Environmental Defense, said Thursday that fluoroquinolone use in foreign fish farms presents perhaps a more serious danger to human health and the environment than their use on U.S. poultry farms.
"It's appalling that anyone would use an antibiotic this important in a fish farm," Florini said. Fish commonly escape from such farms and can migrate over large spans of water to join with others of their species.
"That's is a guaranteed way to spread antibiotic-resistant bacteria all over the world," she said.
Alabama and Louisiana last Friday banned the sale of basa imported from Vietnam, a fish that competes with U.S.-farmed catfish. Mississippi's agriculture commissioner also warned customers to avoid buying "foreign imported basa that may contain unapproved antibiotics."
On Thursday, FDA spokesman Mike Herndon said his agency is nearing its own decision on banning basa catfish from Vietnam, which has already been taken off the shelves in Louisiana and Alabama. The agency is under pressure from an Arkansas congressman for a nationwide ban.
"Right now, this is being handled at the state level, but we will make our own evaluation in the coming days," Herndon said.
Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks said the statewide ban affects about 25 tons of imported seafood raised in confinement. He said the ban, issued Friday, will remain in place until tests show the Vietnamese-grown basa fish do not contain chemicals prohibited for agriculture uses in the United States.
A similar ban was ordered in Louisiana, where more than 300 tons of Vietnamese seafood was taken off shelves the first weekend after sales were prohibited.
In Alabama, inspectors were checking warehouses and taking samples to labs for testing, Sparks said.
The action by the agriculture offices in the three states, where catfish is a prominent industry, came after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found the forbidden antibiotics in import samples.
It also came after a taste test study at Mississippi State University found tasters preferred the basa 3 to 1 over the U.S.-grown catfish.
The nation's biggest consumer base for catfish is in the South -- also the place where almost all of the nation's catfish is farmed.
In per capita consumption, Arkansas leads the way, followed by Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics.
The nation's greatest concentration of catfish farms is in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana. There are more than 190,000 acres of catfish ponds in the United States, and 25,000 acres of those ponds are in Alabama, said Chappell of the Alabama Cooperative Extension System.Mobile Register (AL)
