Bloomberg cracks open an important (and nasty) issue of food safety with imported food. Over 3,000 people died in 2011 due to food-born illnesses - 10s of thousands “merely” got sick. Many (not all, but a lot) victims caught a bug from food grown overseas, such as China.

The FDA does not inspect food imported into the U.S. to the same standards as food grown locally. Devastating report on the FDA (and arguably the Obama administration).

At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.

“The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,” says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China…

“Many farmers have switched to feces and have stopped using commercial feed,” he says.

Frequently Contaminated

About 27 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from China — and the shipments that the FDA checks are frequently contaminated, the FDA has found. The agency inspects only about 2.7 percent of imported food. Of that, FDA inspectors have rejected 1,380 loads of seafood from Vietnam since 2007 for filth and salmonella, including 81 from Ngoc Sinh, agency records show. The FDA has rejected 820 Chinese seafood shipments since 2007, including 187 that contained tilapia.

Story with videos and interviews: Bloomberg