Investigation Into Safety Of BP Gulf Oil Spill Seafood Raises Shocking Concerns

  Posted by - July 3, 2010 at 8:40 pm - Permalink - Source via Alexander Higgins Blog
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A recent investigation into the safety of Gulf seafood raises some shocking concerns.

The investigation revealed that there there are pressing questions that still need to be answered.

But several questions remain to be answered for consumers:

  • Petroleum contamination is known to cause cancer and brain damage. But how much oil and gas does it take to make seafood dangerous?
  • Who’s in charge of determining how safe is safe?
  • The Food and Drug Administration is supposedly the nation’s food protector. What exactly is FDA’s role in this process?
  • How can you really tell where seafood is coming from? Is there any way to distinguish a gulf shrimp from a Pacific one?

AOL News spent the past two weeks chasing down precisely who is doing that testing and how they decide what is safe to eat.

The investigation revealed that experts are most concerned with risk of cancer and neurological effects from the consumption of Gulf Seafood.

The analysis is important. Public health experts say they are not concerned about E. coli or salmonella coming from seafood heavily tainted with oil. What they fear is the possibility of cancer or neurologic impact.

The report goes on to say that there are two labs that are responsible for performing “CSI” like tests on the seafood but neither has detected harmful levels of contamination yet.

But what exactly does that mean?

Apparently they have detected levels of contamination at what they deem acceptable levels and so far the levels of contamination have not been detected yet to prevent any of the tested seafood from being sold.

But then the report reveals that the methods being used of how to establish what levels are safe are being influenced by political infighting, minimizing fear among the public and even by economic considerations.

Those with the knowledge and proper equipment can measure the level of contaminants. But the decision to declare the food safe or not appears to be a thornier debate, sometimes fraught with political implications, finger-pointing and, occasionally, debilitating fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.

“Government decisions on what should or should not be done with potentially contaminated food are often influenced by everyone who has a stake in the outcome,” says Jay Shimshack, an assistant professor of environmental economics at Tulane University.

“In his case, we might reasonably expect the oil industry or its lobbying organizations to represent their own interests during the relevant policy making process,” he said.

Great! So you telling me that BP and its lobbyists are affecting the decision making process in establishing the policies that determine the safety of seafood.

This is how the concerns among the players appear to break down:

  • BP and other oil interests want the food declared safe to limit its liability and to halt further erosion of the industry’s reputation.
  • The crabbers, shrimpers, fishers and processors want to continue selling the oil-free seafood they’re harvesting and keep longtime commercial customers — some better restaurants and persnickety shoppers — from fleeing to foreign suppliers.
  • The public health experts just want to ensure the safety of what’s being sold.

The article then points out officials may be weary to label the seafood as contaminated because they fear that people may overreact.

However, the wording of the public advisories is crucial.

Shimshack, an expert on the risks and benefits of seafood consumption, cautions that consumers tend to overreact to negative information.

He says that health officials need to manage the risk trade-offs of potential contamination from fish consumption versus the loss of health benefits from reduction in fish consumption.

Is that trade off similar to the trade off between the risks of using dispersants and not using dispersants?

Seriously, did he just make the argument that it is better to eat fish contaminated with toxic chemicals than to lose out on the vitamins and minerals that fish add to your diet?

The Government also seems to be well inclined to put economic consequences above and beyond the health and safety of the public.

This is evidenced by the decision to declare waters safe for swimming and keep Pensacola Beach open while tarballs wash up on the shore, a slick of oil is present on the water and skimmers collect oil 25 to 50 feet from the shore even while doctors and other officials have advised against the decision to do so.

The report then goes on to describe the attempts the Government is making to keep contaminated seafood off the market.

The professor urges that potentially contaminated seafood be kept out of the food chain and then the public be advised that the remaining available seafood is safe to eat, which is what several government agencies are attempting to do.

The problem is that the Governments radar for where potentially contaminated seafood may come from is pretty small compared to where the oil actually is.

The the oil is many places in the Gulf of Mexico and up the east coast of Florida that are well outside of the area where government has banned fishing.

Furthermore Government proclamations that the seafood is safe tend to lose credibility when there is lack of significant inspections of seafood really happening on the ground as the investigation seems to indicate.

State officials and seafood sellers from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama say inspectors from EPA and NOAA are all over the place.

But most officials and business owners say they haven’t seen FDA personnel on the shrimp or crabbing boats, on the docks or in the processing plants.

AOL News even tried to get answers from the Federal Government as to exactly what the government is doing as part of its monitoring and what has been monitored so far and received no response.

AOL News repeatedly asked FDA’s media controllers where exactly their “surveillance” people are working, and how many samples FDA has collected and analyzed.

Seven people, 11 calls or e-mails. No answer.

How can the government assure the public the seafood is safe when so many are saying that they see no evidence that the seafood is being tested in so many places.

And for what little testing that is happening the Government refuses to answer questions about what is being tested and where.

Then to make matters worse there isn’t even a single standard established as a baseline for the safety of seafood.

And even later today, Vice President Joe Biden, speaking to shrimpers, crabbers and fishermen in the region, said the federal government has reached an agreement with Gulf Coast states to set safety levels for seafood from the gulf. “We want one single standard so you all don’t have to worry about where you fish, if you can fish and if the waters are open,” Biden said, according to The Associated Press.

Does that mean that it is possible for seafood to be declared unsafe in one area and then shipped to another area to be sold where the regulations are less stringent such that the seafood would be declared safe in that area and then sold onto the market?

The manner in which the seafood is being testing doesn’t seem reassuring either.

NOAA is still using people to smell the seafood to detect the presence of oil.

I find problems with that logic being that it is widely reported that the VOC’s of oil evaporate rather rapidly which would means that weathered oil would be much harder to detect.

Another problem with smelling the seafood is that the methods would be unable to detect other dangers like COREXIT contamination.

And even later today, Vice President Joe Biden, speaking to shrimpers, crabbers and fishermen in the region, said the federal government has reached an agreement with Gulf Coast states to set safety levels for seafood from the gulf. “We want one single standard so you all don’t have to worry about where you fish, if you can fish and if the waters are open,” Biden said, according to The Associated Press.

Then there is the seafood that is tested using machines using chemical analysis.

Reportedly the seafood is first frozen and then cleaned with a chemical similar to commercial dry-cleaning fluid which removes remove bones and other tissues from the samples being test.

Once Jon Buzitis removes and logs in the carefully numbered jars from the storage freezer, the analysis of the samples can take three days, but they can and do run multiple samples.

Dickhoff explains that the samples are thawed, homogenized and dried with a sodium or magnesium sulfate. To remove the seafood’s bones or the connective tissue, the samples are then mixed with a dichloromethane, which is similar to the commercial dry-cleaning fluid.

They’re then moved into a high-performance liquid chromatograph that, over eight or nine hours, removes a lot of compounds that could interfere with the analysis.

Finally, Dickhoff says, the samples spend 28 hours running through a chromatograph mass spec machine, which cranks out a detailed chart with separate peaks showing the level of each of the 19 polyaromatic hydrocarbons found in the samples.

I am not a scientist but it totally seems counter intuitive to first clean the samples with a dry-cleaning fluid and then run the samples through a chomatograph that “removes a lot of compounds that could interfere with the analysis” and then testing for contamination.

But taking the Governments word on the claim that it has the “science of detection down” the problem that still remains is determining a level of contamination that is safe for consumption.

“We’ve got the science of detection down,” Dickhoff says. “The discussions that we have been having with EPA and FDA is to determine what’s an appropriate level of (seafood) consumption and risk?”

…

What that means is the seafood is deemed safe if it doesn’t increase a person’s lifetime cancer rate by more than one additional case in a million people. Some states like Maine use a higher risk levels, such as a lifetime cancer risk of no greater than 1 in 100,000 people, NOAA says.

Patrick Banks is a marine fisheries biologist for the state of Louisiana and is responsible for ensuring the quality and accuracy of the testing of market-bound gulf seafood.

So far, the state has tested more than 10,000 samples of fish, crab and shrimp. None has levels of oil contamination that raised health concerns.

Seriously. So what you are telling me is that hundreds of millions of gallons of oil have been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and not a single piece of seafood has been pulled from the market because of oil contamination.

Something sure smells fishy to me.

“Determining how safe is safe can a painful process,” Banks says. “NOAA has a number, the level of contamination at which a closed fishing ground can be reopened for commerce or sport. That’s the level that we test for. Make sense?”

No it doesn’t make sense.

When oil can been seen in the water from outer space on a satellite photo taking a picture of the entire Gulf of Mexico it does not make sense for those fishing grounds to be kept open.

The report then finishes with a solemn warning.

As far as determining whether the shrimp, crab and fish came from the gulf or were farmed in foreign waters, the best advice is to know your fishmonger because buying seafood today clearly demands that the buyer beware.

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