"The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella..."
"... packs shrimp headed for the U.S. in dirty plastic tubs. He covers them in ice made with tap water that the Vietnamese Health Ministry says should be boiled before drinking because of the risk of contamination with bacteria"
Beef contaminated with even small quantities of feces would not pass USDA inspection, so how could shrimp grown in pig feces be considered safe? (Yes, the shrimp are grown in water that has pig feces in it; there's no other way to get a shrimp to eat something.)
That article doesn't sound in the least bit silly to me. It's saying that a large fraction of our seafood supply is dangerously contaminated with bacteria. Would you eat a shrimp that accidentally fell in your toilet and got rinsed off with water?
I agree gently with SamonellaEater. Food is not sterile, and some foods need to be carefully prepared, or the eater needs to be aware of and consent to the risks. But still, I'd like it if people could start with clean food and keep it that way, rather than start with something covered in fresh poo.
Too much manure, and environmental protection laws were causing a problem in some EU countries with "slurry lakes" and "manure mountains". Some regions were deemed to be nitrate vulnerable zones, and thus not suitable for too much manure.[2]
> until very recently in human history it was either decomposing trash
Untreated waste was probably the source of the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK. This cost the UK £8bn.[3]
> The consensus today is that the FMD virus came from infected or contaminated meat that was part of the garbage being fed to pigs at Burnside Farm in Heddon-on-the-wall. The garbage had not been properly heat-sterilized and the virus had thus been allowed to infect the pigs.
Animal manures can carry a number of pathogens. E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, Yersinia, Cryptosporidium, Giardia, etc. Some of these kill people, so it's not trivial upset stomachs. Well rotted, or heat treated, manure should be safe. I'm pleased that regulatory bodies are taking this seriously.
(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ynCJrnxolsUC&pg=PA30&...)
[2] (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1387466/Farmers-warn-...)
[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_United_Kingdom_foot-and-mo...)
It discusses the unsanitary conditions at a seafood exporter, specifically the unsafe water that's used to create the ice used for packing shrimp, and a tilapia farm that feeds its fish with manure that could be "contaminated with microbes like salmonella."