PORTLAND, Ore. - When you order seafood at a restaurant, or buy it at the grocery store, do you ever think about where it came from?

We don't want our kids playing with toys laced with lead and we don't want to feed our pets contaminated dog food, yet every day we eat seafood that comes from the same third-world countries, with very little being done to make sure it's safe.

"Seventy-five percent of seafood we eat in the United States is imported," said Mike Morrissey, the Director of Oregon State University's Seafood Research Laboratory in Astoria.

Morrissey has traveled overseas and seen shrimp farms in Indonesia where conditions ranged from immaculate to what he calls rustic. "They just didn't have the sanitation controls that some of the other plants have," he said.

How Bad Is It?

• In worst case scenarios, seafood is farmed in sewage water. 
• The antibiotic Chloromphenical is routinely found in imported shrimp. It is banned because it is a suspected carcinogen and may cause Anemia and Leukemia in humans.
• In the roughly one percent of imported seafood that the FDA inspects, they found catfish from China with veterinary drugs in them, swordfish from Vietnam that was poisonous and snapper from Malaysia that was filthy.
• Only a handful of states in the United States have their own seafood safety programs to test imported fish - Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Florida. Oregon and Washington are not among them.
• A state program to inspect foreign seafood would have to be created by state lawmakers. Until then, the FDA is charged with the job, but researchers say the understaffed agency does not have the manpower to get it done.

What Can Consumers Do?

• Imported seafood is supposed to be labeled with the country of origin, so at the very least you can check to see where something came from.
• You can also periodically check the FDA's Web site for alerts or sign up for a recall alert.