... "Fresh. Wild Gulf Shrimp. Never Frozen. $16.99 lb." read the sign.
"They're my favorites, but are they safe?" the woman asked the fishmonger.
"We couldn't and wouldn't sell them if they weren't," he answered, and quickly added that someone is testing the hell out of everything coming from the gulf.
He was telling the truth.
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 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.Analyzing whether dangerous contaminants are in the seafood is an intricate process that uses a complex array of CSI-like instruments that can find bad things down to the parts per billion level.
But these are everyday tasks for marine biologists, toxicologists and other technical wizards in Louisiana state laboratories in Baton Rouge and in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. These are the two primary sites scrutinizing thousands of samples of shrimp, crab and fin fish gathered from the Gulf of Mexico.
The multiple chemical analyses have detected no harmful level of contaminants, both labs say. ...
The bible that most risk assessors seem to be relying on is a lengthy 2002 NOAA report, "Managing Seafood Safety After an Oil Spill," issued after the Valdez spill. It explains that the acceptable cancer risk assessment is derived from how much seafood a person eats, over what period of time and the level of contamination found.
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. ...
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.
via Gulf Seafood After the Oil Spill: Who Decides How Safe Is Safe?.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Gulf Seafood After the Oil Spill: Who Decides How Safe Is Safe?
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2 comments:
Hi -
the article just before this one says to enter your password. Would you like to give your readers what they need to write?
Protected: The Government can kill anyone covertly without a trial?
(I'm commenting here because that article has comments turned "off").
Who Decides How Safe Is Safe?
Oh, this is a silly, silly question.
It is our PATRIOTIC DUTY, because OUR GOVERNMENT does it all the time. And, our gov't knows absolutely who are the best decision makers.
In our deregulated world, we must let ... No! we must demand that corporations and big business decide!
You see, the way it works is this way: Corporations make profit from what they sell, because they exist only to make profit. And, they sell only good stuff. By doing this they'll keep their customers always healthy and happy. And, in this way they'll end up with more customers, because there is no better advertiser than the satisfied voices one's neighbors, friends and family members.
Oh, can you imagine what a tragic world it would be if our democratic government made the decisions? Or even worse, could you imagine how sad our world would be if our government worked along with scientists, instead of allowing big business to make the decisions? God, especially those awful environmental scientists! Just imagine what scientists would do! Our oceans would be full of chemicals, plastics and trash. There would be dead zones along the coast. The air would be polluted and our streets congested with traffic. There would be industrial chemicals in our blood, and .... Be proud of America! of peace-loving, free and green America!
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