Government urged to take action to better ensure safety of Gulf seafood

As shrimping season opened this week along the Louisiana coast, environmental and community groups called on federal agencies to strengthen the system for determining whether seafood harvested from the region is safe in the wake of the BP oil disaster.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and almost two dozen organizations based in the region asked the Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to strengthen protocols to determine whether seafood is safe to eat.

"With the opening of shrimping season and near-daily re-opening of fishing areas, seafood safety is a major issue right now," said Dr. Gina Solomon, an NRDC scientist. "The government needs to show it is putting strong safety criteria and testing standards in place to ensure that the seafood from the Gulf will be safe to eat in the months and years to come."

The groups are concerned that current procedures may fail to protect communities and groups most vulnerable to contaminated seafood, including children, pregnant women and subsistence fishing communities. For example, they point out that the FDA's risk assessment uses the assumption that the average American bodyweight is 176 pounds.

"This may be appropriate for adult men," the groups write in their letter to the FDA [pdf], "but it will not protect smaller segments of the population."

They also raise concerns about the impact the chemicals in the oil and dispersant could have on developing fetuses, and about the fact that the agency's safety calculations are based on national seafood consumption rates that may underestimate the risk to Gulf Coast residents.

The organizations called on the agencies to make sampling protocols and data publicly available to boost public confidence in the safety monitoring program.

The groups' action comes the same week that Georgia ocean scientists released a study that found far more oil remains in Gulf ecosystems than suggested by a recent government report.

In a commentary [pdf] published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Solomon and her NRDC colleague Dr. Sarah Janssen identified four main health hazards associated with the oil spill. They include cancer and other long-term health risks from eating contaminated seafood, as well as breathing in chemical vapors, direct contact with chemicals, and mental health problems related to stress.

Something Solomon and Janssen discovered while writing the JAMA article was how little research has been done on previous oil spills. To help rectify that, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences this week held a webinar to discuss its Gulf Worker Study, which aims to learn more about the health of oil spill workers and volunteers.

(Photo of traditional Louisiana shrimp po' boy sandwich by Jason Perlow via Wikimedia Commons.)