The Food and Drug Administration is warning the public not to eat, sell or serve certain Great Value raw frozen shrimp sold at Walmart due to possible contamination with Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection alerted the FDA about possible Cesium-137, or Cs-137, detected in shipping containers at four U.S. ports, the FDA said Tuesday in a press release. Testing on frozen shrimp from the distributor, Indonesia’s BMS Foods, also tested positive, the FDA said.

However, no shrimp that has tested positive for Cesium-137 has entered the U.S. food supply, according to the FDA.

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    How the hell did Cs137 get into the shrimp?!

    In any case, this is about one shipping container with a really low dose that never made it to the food chain, that we know of so far:

    The level of Cs-137 detected in the detained shipment was approximately 68 Bq/kg, which is below FDA’s Derived Intervention Level for Cs-137 of 1200 Bq/kg.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      My guess is the shrimp were illegally scrapping abandoned medical equipment…

      In all honesty my real guess is that the factory they were processed at were probably doing inspections of their line or building with a defectoscope that may have somehow broken near the food.

      It’s the most usual suspect for small amounts of cs-137 getting loose since they are handheld and relatively commonplace.