The Carcinogen That Stopped Ship Fires—Now in Your Seafood — SkimNews
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- Cargill introduced ethoxyquin in 1967 to prevent spontaneous combustion in fishmeal, a problem tied to at least 90 ship and plant fires from the 1950s through the 1970s, cutting reported ship fires from about 16 a year to five.
- The U.S. Coast Guard mandated ethoxyquin treatment for fishmeal shipments in 1976, and the International Maritime Organization (the U.N. maritime body) recommended it in 1979 to prevent spontaneous combustion.
- A 1987 British study found ethoxyquin caused "severe damage" and a potentially carcinogenic effect in rats, and the European Food Safety Authority ruled in 2015 that an impurity called p-phenetidine could cause genetic mutations.
- The European Commission suspended ethoxyquin's authorization in animal feed in 2017; it is banned in the U.K., Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, but still permitted within limits in the U.S., Australia, Japan and South Korea.
- Class-action lawsuits against Aldi (2022) and Gorton's (2022) alleged false "sustainable" labeling on seafood products containing ethoxyquin; both cases were settled out of court.
- Canada's Food Inspection Agency completed only about 40 percent of its planned inspections, according to a 2024 EU audit that cited "systematic and significant under-delivery" in seafood testing.
- BHA, the most popular ethoxyquin replacement, was identified as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen" by the U.S. National Toxicology Program in 1991, and the FDA announced a reassessment of its safety in February.
Why it matters: With more than half of global seafood now coming from fish farms fed ethoxyquin-treated fishmeal, and with **BHA**—the industry's leading replacement—flagged as a probable human carcinogen since 1991 and now under FDA reassessment, regulators in the U.S., Australia, Japan and South Korea still permit ethoxyquin use while the EU has banned it, leaving consumers and producers in a regulatory patchwork with no clearly safe substitute yet adopted at scale.
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