In Chicken of the Sea, Steven Shaw points out the silliness of many dietary rules for pregnant women:
When my wife was pregnant with our son, her obstetrician gave her a list of food dos and don’ts. Chief among the don’ts: alcohol, unpasteurized cheeses and raw fish. Meanwhile, every French mother I know consumed alcohol and unpasteurized cheese in moderation during her pregnancy, and my friends in Japan laugh at the notion of avoiding sushi when they’re expecting.Indeed, in Japan, eating raw fish is considered part of good neonatal nutrition. The Japanese government is fanatical about public health, and Japanese medical scientists are among the best in the world. You can be sure that, were there documented complications resulting from pregnant women eating sushi in Japan, there would be swift government intervention. Yet, in the United States, it is taboo for a pregnant woman to eat raw fish.
But this isn’t because scientific research has concluded that unborn children have been damaged by sushi. Rather, it’s because the speculative risk of food-borne illnesses, especially parasites, has captured the public imagination.
There are several reasons, however, that these fears are unfounded.
While Americans tend to associate raw fish with sushi and Japan, we have been eating raw seafood for centuries — namely, oysters and clams. And it is these raw mollusks, not the fish typically used in sushi, that are responsible for the overwhelming majority, about 85 percent, of seafood-related illnesses. As the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine concluded in a 1991 report on illness from eating seafood: “Most seafood-associated illness is reported from consumers of raw bivalve mollusks. …The majority of incidents are due to consumption of shellfish from fecally polluted water.”
If you take raw and partly cooked shellfish out of the equation, the risk of falling ill from eating seafood is 1 in 2 million servings, the government calculated some years back; by comparison, the risk from eating chicken is 1 in 25,000. (Over all, 76 million cases of food poisoning are reported a year.)