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Introduction: Increasing antibiotic resistance in bacteria is a serious global problem. This study was aimed to extract the antibiotic Chloramphenicol (CAP) from different parts of the fish flesh. Methods: Fish fleshes were excised from two commercially important fishes: Oreochromatis niloticus.(Red Tilapia) and Pangasius hypothalamus (Patin). The fleshes were chosen form head and tail region where generally antibiotics are spiked to avoid bacterial contamination while kept in cold storages of supermarkets. Each fish fleshes were weighed and spiked with 20,40,80 and 160ppm of CAP and stored at 4°C. The CAP residue from the flesh was extracted immediately after the first spiking was considered as Day-1. The whole extraction processes were done for 1,7,14 and 28 days. HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) was used to determine the presence of CAP residue in the tested fish flesh. Results: The results showed variations on the percentage of antibiotic residue recoveries at different concentration. In this study, CAP did not degrade and showed variations on the presence of antibiotic residue in the fish flesh. The recoveries of the entire CAP spiking samples ranged from 4.0% -100%. It also revealed the presence of antibiotic residue in Malaysian freshwater cultured fishes. Thus, the relevant authorities should take immediate action regarding this issue in order to prevent the harmful effects especially to human. Conclusions: Nevertheless, the study portrays that antibiotic residues can be sustained long time in the food products under storage conditions, which might have harmful effects on human when they consumed these frozen fishes.

Increasing utilization of living animals in ecological and biomedical research has drawn serious concerns in terms of animal welfare and ethical practices in animal handling. Significant attention has been given to animals of higher taxonomical hierarchy especially vertebrates such as fishes, rodents, reptiles and mammals, while ethical framework on invertebrate handling and welfare is less addressed (except for cephalopods). The definition of ‘Animal’ itself by any international consortia or Animal Research Act (ARA) does not include invertebrates as an animal entity. This is due to the lack of standard ethical framework to understand the pain and other physiological stress experienced by the invertebrate test animal. One such example would be the living fossil ‘horseshoe crab’ which is extensively bled to obtain its blue blood that is used for endotoxin quantification in biological samples. The biomedical bleeding itself leads to 15-30% post bleeding mortality of crabs, while pain and stress caused by the bleeding practice is not studied. Hence, this paper discusses the technicality of establishing standard framework for invertebrate handling. The paper also highlights the shari’ah (Islamic law) principles on scientific experimentations on animal subjects, particularly the norms related to the adoption of invertebrates in environmental and biomedical practice. Comprehensive review of ethical regulations in animal experiments, especially invertebrates, would be beneficial for revising and improving existing animal ethical practices.