Labor Comes The Raw Prawn On Seafood

[Dreamtime]

THE nation's food regulator is considering allowing prawns contaminated with antibiotics to be sold in Australia for the first time.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand has backed an application from the Food and Beverage Importers Association to set a maximum residue limit for the antibiotic oxytetracycline in prawns.

No such limit exists, which means any trace of the substance, no matter how small, in prawns is deemed unacceptable.

"FSANZ considers that there are no health or safety concerns associated with the requested oxytetracycline maximum residue limit of 0.2mg/kg for prawns," its recommendations says.

If approved, it will be the first time that any level of residue from any antibiotic is allowed in prawns, a Food Standards spokeswoman confirmed. But minute levels of the same antibiotic - oxytetracycline - were already permitted in fish, she said.

Oxytetracycline is used in Australia and overseas to treat bacterial infections in aquaculture, and maximum residue limits have been adopted in some countries.

Scientists have expressed concern, however, that overuse of antibiotics in livestock or seafood could result in resistance to the powerful drugs building up over time in the people who eat them.

FSANZ said this would not be a problem in this case, because oxytetracycline was not in the medical arsenal used to treat people.

Australia imported about 33,000 tonnes of prawns in 2006-07 - including 6000 tonnes from Thailand, which already allows low levels of oxytetracycline in prawns.

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke did not respond yesterday to requests for comment on FSANZ's proposal.

But Labor took a hard line last year when the Howard government released a survey showing that 31 per cent of a sample of prawns, fish, crabs and eels from Asia contained low levels of antibiotics and-or anti-microbial agents.

One of those antibiotics was a tetracycline, the family of compounds that includes oxytetracycline.

The Howard government promised increased testing of imported seafood in response, but earned Labor's censure for not ramping up the testing quickly enough.

Then federal fisheries minister Peter McGauran was "allowing potentially unsafe seafood imports into Australia through his continued inaction," Labor agriculture spokesman Kerry O'Brien said at the time.

"The minister must act urgently to maintain consumer confidence in the seafood market."