By Emmanuel T. Erediano
Variety News Staff

FIFTEEN fishermen learned about seafood safety and hazard analysis at a workshop held in the fishermen’s cooperative center in Garapan on Monday.
Guest speakers John Kaneko and Paul Bartram of Pacific Management Resources Inc., which is based in Honolulu, Hawaii, made presentations on seafood safety issues that are of importance to Pacific islanders, particularly seafood hazards like mercury, ciguatera, parasites and histamines.
They led group discussions on good manufacturing practices, sanitation controls and seafood hazard analysis.
Department of Land Natural Resources Secretary Ignacio De la Cruz said the workshop aimed to educate fishermen and retailers with respect to how to preserve fish.
Cases of food-borne illnesses that are caused by fish poisoning were discussed, with the speakers citing ciguatera, hallucinogenic poisons and other marine biotoxins.
Ciguatera is a tropical reef fish poisoning that is produced by a toxic substance attached to the algae eaten by reef fish. It is the most commonly reported marine toxin disease in the world.
Hawaii has an average of 53 cases reported a year, from 1999 to 2003, and an estimated 80 percent of cases involved recreational and subsistence fishing.
Five species of fish in the CNMI are known to be toxic to humans, according to Dela Cruz.
These include the red snapper, or maya-maya, barracuda and the red-orange grouper.
According to the visiting experts, there are a variety of marine bio-toxins of public health concern, and ciguatera fish poisoning is one of the most frequently reported seafood-related illnesses.
The speakers also discussed parasites in raw fish like tuna sashimi.
Although the Food and Drugs Administration believed before 1997 that eating tuna sashimi was dangerous because of parasites, there has never been a single report of it anywhere.
A review of the literature also found no scientific evidence so the FDA did not implement the freezing requirement on tuna that would have killed the tuna industry in Hawaii.