Eating Fresh Water Fish

July 18, 2008 | By User Image bokjae | In Life Experiences, Useful Information

I am a fish person and I love all types of fishes, fresh water as well as sea and deep sea fishes. A fellow blogger Wan Noorizan hosts a health blog and she posted an article on eating fish as an important part of diet programs. River fish is not as clean as deep sea fishes simply because of the pollution going into our ponds and rivers! Many of these river fishes, pond fishes or fresh water fishes contain harmful chemicals in their flesh whereby we ourselves would be contaminated, poisoned by eating them.

Years ago while we were still in Kuching, Sarawak we were told of this local guy who loves 'Raw Fish' so much so that he literally eat it daily! Years later, he discovered worm like creatures crawling underneath his skin! Apparantrly these worms got into his body system through raw fish! Scary! How would you like to see these worms crawling underneath your skin? Creepy!

Have you heard of the Pangas? Well it is actually a type of Cat-fish from the Mekong Delta in Vietnam popularly known as Pangasius, Tra, Basa. I think in Malaysia we have them too but not sure whether they are of the same kind. The Pangas become very popular not only in Vietnam but also in France and even UK!

However according to certain reports; the Pangas breed in ponds contain industrial effluents, arsenic, and toxic and hazardous by-products of the growing industrial sector, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT and its metabolites (DDTs), metal contaminants, chlordane-related compounds (CHLs), hexachlorocyclohexane isomers (HCHs), and hexachlorobenzene (HCB).

Here are some photos of the commercially packed Pangas sold in Germany.

Here is the Link where you can read all the details why you should not take Pangas. Below are more photos of Pangas being sold or harvested and prepared for packaging for export.

I guess you have to check these information out and decide for yourselves whether to eat or not to eat such Pangas. I am not sure our local breeds are as poisonous???