The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) today released information regarding entry line refusals for the last week of November and the month of December. In total, 7 of the 270 (2.6%) entry line refusals in the months of November and December were of shrimp for reasons related to banned antibiotics.
For all of 2016, as the table below indicates, the FDA has refused 133 entry lines of shrimp for banned antibiotics – the third highest annual number of refusals since 2002.
The steep drop in entry line refusals of shrimp contaminated by antibiotics between 2015 and 2016 was due to an Import Alert imposed by the FDA early in 2016 on Malaysian shrimp imports. As shrimp from Malaysia has exited the U.S. market, the number of overall refusals has substantially declined.
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