While federal law makes it possible for consumers shopping at grocery stores to learn where their seafood came from, most restaurants are under no obligation to reveal how far the seafood traveled to get to a diner’s plate. And since chances are it did not come from the United States — where chloramphenicol, nitrofurans, and malachite green, for example, are prohibited for use in aquaculture — there is a legitimate reason to wonder how much of the imported seafood that Americans are eating contain these toxic chemicals.
MSNBC’s “Today Investigates” reported that state tests in Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Georgia are finding sometimes more than 40 percent of the imported seafood they tested contain drugs that are considered potential causes for cancer, anemia and birth defects.