Gulf Seafood Safe to Eat Says FDA
Seafood from areas of the oil-packed Gulf of Mexico has been declared safe to eat by the government. The FDA based its results in part on human smell tests. Inspectors simply smell the seafood for any scent of chemical odors.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said the government is “confident all appropriate steps have been taken to ensure that seafood harvested from the waters being opened today is safe and that Gulf seafood lovers everywhere can be confident eating and enjoying the fish and shrimp that will be coming out of this area.”
While this may be cause for celebration, few are celebrating and even fewer eating Gulf of Mexico shrimp, oysters and other seafood. Many researchers and fishermen are calling for much stricter and more thorough examinations to determine the fish safety.
The smell test is used so widely because it is cost-effective and time-efficient. Currently, a tissue-sampling test which would provide a more thorough examination of the existence of oil and chemical dispersants, is still in development stages.
Federal scientists say that the most common cancer-causing compounds in oil are quickly metabolized and eliminated in the bodies of finfish and crustaceans like shrimp, crab and lobster.
Just this past week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal requested that BP fund a 20-year testing and certification program to restore confidence in seafood from the Gulf of Mexico.
BP has not yet replied to the Governor’s recommendation.
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In June, with critics comparing the Gulf to Hurricane Katrina, Obama announced the “British Petroleum” oil spill the “worst environmental disaster the US has ever faced”. America’s grubby politicians, green-lobby tub-thumpers, compensation claimants and their mega-bucks lawyers went completely ballistic every night on prime-time TV. However with more than 4,000 oil wells in the Gulf, the ecosystem is used to seepage, the light oil dissipated quickly in its warm waters, and powerful currents from the enormous Mississippi Delta swept much of it away from the shore. Today the pristine beaches are back to normal but Obama’s poisonous remarks have wiped £45 billion off the value of BP, damaged millions of US and UK pensions, and wrecked the tourist trade.