[
-[Chef] Everything looks good.
-[David] We're in for a treat.
A taste test from an award-winning chef.
Robert, this looks so good.
Anything added to it? Or it's just--
This is as basic as it's gonna come.
Please dig in.
-[David] Okay, I'm gonna go for it.
On tonight's menu, shrimp.
No sauce, no strong spices.
Chef Robert Clark says his shrimp don't need anything.
They're different.
So, what's your secret?
How do you get shrimp to be so much better than I'm used to?
The secret of my success is basically sourcing quality.
The more you can maintain the integrity of the product,
the easier it is.
-[David] Chef Clark believes it's tough to buy quality shrimp
at the supermarket.
I have not eaten a farm tiger prawn imported into Canada
in probably 20 years.
They could be filled with pesticides,
antibiotics, insecticides.
They're grown in cesspools.
-[David] Cesspools filled with antibiotics?
[♪♪]
Time for a
on our shrimp.
Fishmonger.
-[David] And here's what you might not know.
Unlike chicken and beef, in Canada antibiotic use is banned
on all shrimp.
This one is from India.
-[David] But most of our shrimp is imported largely from Asia.
So, I've got some from Vietnam, some from Thailand,
some from China.
-[David] So we buy 51 packages from Montreal,
Toronto, Saskatoon, and Calgary.
Let's get an organic one.
-[David] We even pick a few organic samples from Ecuador
and from Vietnam.
On one of the labels, "raised without the need
"for antibiotics."
"Uncooked pacific white shrimp, de-veined."
"From India, de-veined."
-[David] Then we pack them on ice...
And we are good to go.
-[David] ..and ship them off to a special lab
at the University of Saskatchewan.
[♪♪]
It's run by microbiologist Joseph Rubin.
He's testing to see if there are dangerous bacteria
on our shrimp.
Joe, hi.
What have you got here?
I have some of the results from your shrimp.
-[David] These are our shrimp here or, at least,
bits of them?
Yes, yes. The organisms we grew.
And what are you looking for?
What we're looking for are different types of antibiotic
resistant bacteria and different types of food-borne pathogens.
-[David] Pathogens like E. coli, salmonella,
staphylococcus aureus.
Potentially harmful bacteria that can adapt into superbugs
that many antibiotics cannot kill.
What's this one here?
-[Joseph] What you can see is we have these nice pink colonies.
Which is very characteristic of E. coli.
In addition to showing us that we have E. coli, also
contains antibiotics in it and so we think that based
on growth on this plate, we have an antibiotic
resistant bacteria.
-[David] First result and it's positive for E.coli
but Rubin still needs to run a DNA test overnight
to see if the bacteria is antibiotic resistant.
The possibility is a big concern.
He tells us about recent research from the UK.
They did a large study, and were projecting forward to 2050,
that the number of people who would be dying of resistant
organisms could potentially even surpass cancer.
-[David] They're already killing people.
The superbugs can travel from farm,
to store, to your kitchen.
-[Wendy] I don't know where my place is in this world anymore.
-[David] But especially in hospitals.
-[Wendy] That's my husband.
-[David] It looks like you had the camera ready
at the exact moment.
-[Wendy] His beautiful eyes.
-[David] Two years ago, Wendy Gould's husband George
was diagnosed with colon cancer.
-[David] Did you think he was going to live at that point?
If I had anything to do with it, yes.
-[David] You were going to try to keep him alive as
long as you could.
Everything in my power.
-[David] But Wendy ran into a problem that left her powerless.
George developed a serious infection.
They had him on antibiotics trying to kill this infection.
Yeah.
-[David] Why weren't they working?
Well, it would clear up, but it's still in there.
It didn't kill it, it cleared up the infection.
But the bug's still waiting.
-[David] What was the nature of this bug that meant the
antibiotics weren't working on it?
Well, it was a superbug.
[♪♪]
-[David] They found out in a letter from the hospital telling
them about a contaminated endoscope
that was used on George.
"We're writing to inform you that you are one of three
patients who have been identified as having been
infected with the bacterium that is called,
New Delhi Metalo Eso--" I don't know how to say that--
-[David] But the E.coli.
Yup, E.coli.
-[David] How does a New Delhi strain of a bug
end up inside George?
From the endoscope.
-[David] Doctors tried to kill that bug using
half a dozen different antibiotics,
some so powerful, Wendy says George was
violently hallucinating.
-[Wendy] This is July 28th, 2016 so it was about a week
after his surgery.
-[David] He was hospitalized 23 times in just over a year.
George became too weak to continue cancer treatment,
too sick from the bacteria to eat.
And there he is January, 2018.
And that was-- he passed away January 25th.
This is what the bug did to him.
Then everything fell apart.
-[David] Do you think he could've survived?
-[Wendy] Yeah.
Maybe he wouldn't have been here you know--
for years and years but it certainly would've been
longer than two years and he wouldn't
have had to suffer.
-[David] What is the thing that's important
for people to know?
You could have all the best doctors in the world taking
care of you with whatever it is is the matter with you but if
you get one of these infections, that's it.
[♪♪]
I'm terrified by this stuff.
Multi-drug resistance is probably the biggest threat
that we have to modern medicine in the 21st century.
-[David] Biochemist Gerry Wright is the director of McMaster
University's Institute for Infectious Disease Research.
So, this is your lab?
-[Gerry] This is where most of my students and staff work.
What we're trying to do is find new antibiotics and learn more
about antibiotic resistance.
Every time you have a knee replacement,
any kind of surgery, cancer chemotherapy,
you have anyone in your extended family that's had a premature
baby, they all rely on antibiotics because their
immune systems are weak.
-[David] And what happens if we can't use them,
if we've sort of run out of antibiotics because
everything's resistant?
All of what we consider to be modern medicine
becomes incredibly risky.
-[David] One contributor to the crisis,
overuse of the drugs in our food at home and abroad.
And when it comes to shrimp farmed overseas,
they are often crammed into disease-prone pools.
As a result, antibiotics are sometimes added
to keep the shrimp alive, contaminating our food.
Canada is passing laws that say no antibiotics in much of our
food, just banning it.
Doesn't that help?
Our supermarkets are full of food that come not just from
Canada but come from all around the world and the challenge that
we have to deal with now is that those countries don't have the
same regulations that we do.
-[David] That sounds a bit like a backdoor.
That's correct.
That's the challenge that we have.
-[David] That backdoor means that whatever Canada says about
banning antibiotics in shrimp, superbugs are
still getting into the country.
Once these organisms are here, once these genes are in Canada,
then there's no good way to keep them from spreading around.
So, what would be a really good idea is to prevent them
from getting in, in the first place.
-[David] Yeah.
-[David] Cross-country shrimp shopping spree.
[♪♪]
Our mission testing for superbugs on shrimp.
51 packages, shipped to Joe Rubin's lab.
The first results show a troubling bacteria.
Now we want to know if it's also antibiotic resistant.
So, this is the final confirmation?
This is the final confirmation.
So, what we're going to see here is whether or not we've been
able to identify the actual resistance genes.
And here you can see...
there's our bands.
There's proof positive these are ESBL producing strains.
And what an ESBL is, is an enzyme the bacteria produce
that allows them to break down antibiotics.
-[David] The ESBL is almost like an antibiotic killer?
That's not a bad way of thinking about it, yeah.
It's a bacterial countermeasure.
-[David] Overall, Rubin finds 17 per cent,
nearly 2 out of every 10 packages of the shrimp we test
are contaminated with antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Of those, most are resistant to more than one antibiotic.
And of them, 33 per cent test positive for ESBL,
the antibiotic killer.
ESBLs are really effective at degrading
penicillin-type drugs.
-[David] So what about the organic samples?
Turns out Rubin finds an ESBL superbug on
one of those brands, too.
We also had shrimp samples that had this label on them
"best aquaculture practices."
Did any of those turn up positive
for antibiotic resistance?
Yeah, so of the nine samples that we tested where we
identified resistant bacteria, six of those were from products
that had that indication of certification on them.
-[David] BAP says to be certified,
farmers should only use antibiotics minimally.
As a shopper, we asked Rubin what he thinks certified means.
A product that has maybe higher quality than other products.
Now, whether that's true or not and, and what the
particular certification is actually aiming to certify
is maybe an open-ended question.
-[Female Narrator] We are the one-stop shop
for aquaculture certification.
-[David] We share our findings with BAP.
They agree that antibiotic resistance is a worldwide
problem but emphasize their shrimp isn't "unsafe".
Still, their certification doesn't guarantee it wasn't
treated with antibiotics.
Many unanswered questions, including why one country has
more positives for resistant bacteria than any other.
Of the nine contaminated samples China accounts for two,
Vietnam and Thailand, one each,
and India, five.
Does it prompt questions for you that five of the nine
contaminated samples came from India?
Absolutely.
Yep, I would be really interested to know,
sort of, where there may have been breakdowns in the
production cycle that would have allowed
this contamination to occur.
-[David] Most shrimp in Canadian supermarkets come from India-
15 million kilograms a year.
India also uses more antibiotics than any other country,
doubling their use in less than 20 years.
How did these bacteria that we found in the shrimp become
resistant to antibiotics?
There's always a low level of resistance but the kinds of
resistance that you-- that were detected,
is really connected in a very straight line towards--
with antibiotic use.
-[David] So, it's pretty clear to you that someone has used
antibiotics on these shrimp?
Or in the ponds at some point for other organisms,
or something, there's got to be a way
for those resistance genes to be there.
-[David] We can't say for sure the shrimp in our test
were farmed in antibiotic contaminated pools.
When we share the results with the companies, including
the organic brand, they tell us those superbugs may have
been picked up during processing,
shipping, or elsewhere in the environment.
-[David] How safe is your shrimp?
On your
Our tests have found antibiotic resistant
bacteria on supermarket shrimp.
Imported from around the world.
Pandora's box is open when it comes to resistance.
We can't scrub the planet of this problem.
-[David] Companies and certifiers say these superbugs
can be killed by cooking your shrimp thoroughly.
Easy, right?
We're putting that to the test.
[♪♪]
Researchers at the University of British Columbia coat shrimp
with an opaque gel and then invite home cook Charlotte Lee
to prepare a dish.
So, over here we have your shrimp for you,
all your ingredients.
-[David] She has no idea what she's getting into.
The gel will stick to everything she touches,
a way to illustrate how easily bacteria
on the shrimp could spread.
She is very careful in her preparation.
Constantly wiping her hands and her cooking area.
-[David] Hi Charlotte, I'm David.
Hi, David.
-[David] That was really quite something.
-Thank you.
This is scrambled egg with shrimp, yeah.
I think the way to make it is to make the egg
really creamy and silky.
-[David] So, one of the things that we're doing
in our little experiment here that we didn't tell
you about before is that the raw shrimp is actually
-Okay.
-[David] We just want to see where it ended up.
We're going to turn all these lights off and give it a go.
Okay, yeah, you see there's some on the counter,
there's more on the counter.
Gel from the shrimp on the corn-starch box.
On the egg carton.
Even on the tap where Charlotte washed her hands.
And remember that handshake when I introduced myself?
Watching with us, food safety scientist Siyun Wang.
So, we've just done this experiment,
you've seen the results.
Does that surprise you at all?
Well it doesn't surprise me.
The lady who was doing the cooking,
she actually handled the things really well but as a result we
are still seeing the dye while in reality it could be harmful
bacteria being spread to the utensils,
to the other parts of the kitchen.
-[David] If this were bacteria, it could live on this surface
for months.
The thing is, they are capable of just staying there,
and once there are better conditions
they might be able to grow again.
So, this is pretty alarming.
-[David] It's a good reminder for us that even if we cook
meat, shrimp, really, really well, that there's still a way
for bad stuff on it to get into us.
We actually saw, for example, that dye ended up getting onto
the green onion.
So if the different ingredients are mixed up then there's
a chance that these harmful bacteria can still get to people
through other means.
-[David] Make a salad from that green onion and you're
potentially eating live antibiotic resistant bacteria.
And that can now sit in your gut building up resistance
for years to come.
So who's making sure that doesn't happen?
That our food is safe?
That's the job of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
But we tried for weeks to get an on-camera interview
with no luck.
So we're here in Quebec City to ask their Minister,
Ginette Petitpas Taylor, about why CFIA isn't testing
for antibiotic resistant bacteria on imported shrimp.
They're only testing for traces of antibiotic residue,
and that's supposedly going to prove whether antibiotics were
ever used on the shrimp.
If they find it, the CFIA can send the shipment back.
But that test provides no clues about what kinds of superbugs
are coming into the country.
Should the CFIA be doing the test we did,
testing for antibiotic resistant bacteria?
It's a gap. They need to close the gap.
We need to get on top of it.
The problem right now is other than your little study,
we don't know.
-[David] So we should be watching for it?
We should definitely be watching for this.
So we're going to try to ask the Minister of Health,
right here why no one seems to be watching.
I'm David with
I'm trying to understand whether you, whether your government,
is concerned with antibiotic resistant bacteria showing
up on our shrimp.
Well, they absolutely need to be watching it on our shrimp
and I'm convinced the CFIA is doing the work that
is needed to be done in order to protect our food supply
here in Canada.
-[David] If they aren't doing it should they be doing it now?
This is absolutely an area that is a priority
for our government.
-[David] Is it your commitment to look in to the issue
of what is on our shrimp being imported into this country?
I am absolutely committed to make sure that I get in touch
with our CFIA officials to find out what exactly is being done
in this area and then from there making sure that we ensure that
Canada's food supply is safe for all Canadians.
We'll follow up with that, thanks very much.
Thank you so much.
[♪♪]
-[David] While we wait for our government to act,
others are already finding solutions.
So these are all the tanks.
This is the farm.
-[David] We're visiting a Canadian shrimp farm,
Berezan Shrimp in Langley, B.C.
-[David] It's huge.
There's a lot to take in.
-[David] Like if we look up here through all of this,
how many shrimp live here?
At peak there's going to be about 3-4 million shrimp
in this building.
3-4 million shrimp in all these?
Yes.
-[David] And it's just an early start.
If things go well, they're hoping to boost production and
become a major supplier to the Canadian market.
You don't use antibiotics?
There's no antibiotic use in this farm.
Why is it that abroad we see antibiotic use en masse,
and you've got zip in this huge facility?
We're an indoor facility.
We control the engineered air, engineered water.
-[David] Keep the water clean, the shrimp stay healthy,
so there's no need for antibiotics.
We even checked, running our test on Berezan Shrimp.
No antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Overall, their approach seems to be working.
-[David] You want to go fishing?
Or, I guess, shrimping?
Shrimpin'.
-[David] Oh, yeah.
So how old are these?
These guys are batch 12, so they've been on the farm here
now for a couple of months.
-[David] With Chef Robert, we taste test that Canadian shrimp.
Delicious, though a bit pricey,
about 30 per cent more expensive.
But this top cook says cleanliness has a cost.
Food shouldn't be cheap.
Our priorities in North America, our priorities are wrong.
It's more important to us that we have the right car
than we feed the right food to our children.
That's where our society is.
-[David] Do you think our demand for food at the lowest
possible price has somehow caused us to live in the
world that we now live in?
Absolutely, you get what you pay for.
-[David] Do you eat shrimp?
Yes, I do.
I love shrimp.
-[David] And when you think about what we're finding
in imported shrimp, what does it cause you to do?
I'm very careful when I'm cooking shrimp for all the same
reasons I'm careful when I'm cooking chicken.
I just assume that there is going to be bacterial
contamination on it.
-[David] What you need to know.
Look for wild shrimp.
Always cook shrimp carefully and thoroughly.
Buy local shrimp whenever possible.
Buying organic is no guarantee the shrimp
are free of antibiotic resistant bacteria.