Fish poisons from China

Can a single barcode of DNA record biodiversity and keep us safe from
poisons?

By Bob Grant

The problem with plants

Jonathan Deeds picked up the phone in his College Park, Md., office on
a spring morning earlier this year, and what he heard on the other end
of the line made him break into a sweat. An official at the Illinois
Department of Public Health told him that a couple in the Chicago area
was extremely ill, with one bedridden in a hospital.

The couple had become sick after eating fish bought at their local
seafood market. First they felt tingling in their extremities. Then
the wife started having difficulty walking.

The symptoms made Deeds, a marine toxins chemist with the US Food and
Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition,
think immediately of tetrodotoxin, a poison found in puffer fish. So
his first step was to test the chunks of fish for the poison, which
can kill within four hours of being eaten. When he did, his worst
nightmare came true. The test results were positive.

"When I first got that call, I thought it could have been an isolated
incident," says Deeds. He had no idea whether there was any
contaminated fish beyond one pot of soup in Chicago.

It turned out that many more of the suspect fish were out there. The
California-based distributor of the fish, Hong Chang Corporation, had
sent 22 cases of the product to Chicago, and that shipment was part of
a larger shipment of 282 cases sent around the country. A total of
6,000 pounds of potentially deadly fish circulated in the food chain.
All these boxes were imported into the United States labeled as: MONK
FISH GUTTED AND HEAD-OFF PRODUCT OF CHINA.

The FDA moved swiftly. They prompted a recall from Hong Chang, and
press releases from the company and the FDA went out about nine days
after the toxic incident in Chicago. Deeds would later learn that one
person was poisoned in a New Jersey restaurant, and two had been
poisoned in California restaurants after eating fish from that same
shipment. None of the poisoned diners died, and after the recall, the
remaining tainted fish were removed from the food chain.

Though US consumers were safe for a while, questions lingered for
Deeds. Tetrodotoxin should not be found in monkfish. So how did it get
there? Were more poisonous fish being brought into the country? Was
this indeed monkfish, as the supplier was insisting?