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Updated Monday, December 29, 2008 10:42 am TWN, By Don Lee and Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times

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Concerns raised that melamine contamination also in seafood

FDA officials last month opened three offices in China, part of a strategy to deploy agency staff in countries where many of American foods now originate and where they can work with local inspectors and industry.

“We cannot inspect our way to import safety; we have to roll our borders back and work with producers and have (their products) certified by people we trust,” said Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services, under which the FDA operates, during a visit to China last month.

Karunasagar, the United Nations' fishery expert, said governments in China and elsewhere need to tackle the problem at the source. “More than the fish, we should monitor melamine in the feed.”

But that's easier said than done. In the U.S., commercial fish farms have to use feed from a handful of approved suppliers, but in China, there may be hundreds of thousands of sources for feed, said Steve Dickinson, an American attorney in China's coastal city of Qingdao who ran a salmon-farming business in Washington state.

Melamine has “infected the whole system in China,” he said.

More than 15 feed suppliers in various parts of China were contacted for this story. Most of them declined to comment or said they themselves didn't add melamine. But some of them said the practice of spiking feed with it has been going on for at least the last five to six years, with inspectors checking some types of feed products more tightly than others.

“It is not so regulated, for example, in the fish powder industry,” said Zhuge Fulai, manager of Lianfeng Protein Feed Plant in Shandong province.Fang, the feed research manager in Shanghai, says adulterating feed was particularly rampant in 2003 and 2004. He doubts that many feed suppliers today are adding melamine, given the awareness and the government's publicized crackdown, but neither he nor anyone else thinks the problem has been eradicated.

“We still need more government supervision,” Fang said. “We need to have more random checks and to fully execute regulations and standards.”

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