Is farmed salmon a flying pig?
The Veterinary Medicines Directorate is an independent body established to inform customers and not merely to rubber-stamp the claims of food producers and farmers.
The VMD in the past has also identified other illegal compounds in farmed salmon.
These include the cancer-causing insecticide Di-chlorvos, now banned but used by Irish salmon farmers for 15 years; Malachite Green, banned since 2002, yet found in 2004; the insecticides Ivermectin and Emamectin; penicillins, tetracylines, sulphonamides; the cancer-causing dioxins and polychlorinated by-phenolds (PCBs).
Finding Malachite Green in Irish farmed salmon raises two questions:
1. How come the Irish authorities perpetually fail to locate these highly dangerous compounds. The Canadian authorities this year alone have condemned 310,000 salmon because of the presence of Malachite Green in their flesh.
2. The spokesman for the involved Irish salmon farm insists, “tests were conducted prior to the salmon leaving the farm to verify no chemicals had been used.”
If Malachite Green had never been used on the farm (as it is claimed), then why in heaven’s name would testing for its presence be necessary?
The public are increasingly concerned about banned, illegal and cancer-causing agents in farmed salmon, ‘organic,’ or otherwise.
In Britain recently, supermarkets cleared their shelves of over 25 spicy products that might have been contaminated by Sudan 1, a cancer-causing agent, most likely introduced from India.
TV, newspapers and magazines shouted health warnings for days. But when similar cancer-causing agents are found in farmed salmon, the same alarm bells remain silent.
Artificial colourants to dye the salmon flesh a counterfeit orange colour, hosed down with insecticides, fed high-calorie artificial diets including animal bone-meal; dosed with antibiotic and medicament; plied with growth enhancers; genetically modified... by no stretch of anyone’s imagination could such breeding programmes constitute an ‘organic’ format.
Organic farmed salmon inhabit the same rarified realm as the Starship Enterprise and the Flying Pig.
The Department of the Marine’s Food Standards Agency, supposedly the guardian of what foodstuffs Irish citizens are exposed to in the supermarket, know well that US federal authorities banned Malachite Green in 1991.
The British authorities followed suit in 2002.
It is totally unacceptable that in 2005 Irish salmon farmers still flout the law and continue to play Russian roulette with consumers’ health in their drive for greater profit margins.
Dr Roderick D O’Sullivan
8 Devonshire Place
London WIG 6HP
