Wall Street Journal: Standards for Gulf's Catch Put to Sniff Test After Spill
Gulf seafood is being held to less stringent safety standards than those used after some earlier oil spills, but officials say the overall risk to people remains low.
Among the measures in the Gulf of Mexico seafood-testing program that are less rigorous than those used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska: how much cancer risk from eating seafood is acceptable, and how much of the region's seafood a person is likely to eat.
Government safety tests of Gulf seafood after the BP spill include evaluations by inspectors, above, and chemical tests for oil contamination.
There's no sign any oil-contamination level is high enough to make a person sick from eating a few meals of Gulf fish, shrimp, oysters or crab. At issue is whether the program is strict enough to protect frequent Gulf-seafood eaters from the buildup of toxins years down the road.
The tweaked guidelines were brokered after a debate among regulators who devised the massive testing program in the early days after the BP PLC well began spewing oil in April. Government officials say that even if they used test standards as strict as those in the Valdez spill, all the seafood they have collected from areas now open to fishing still would have passed. According to government tests, many samples have had levels of contamination they are essentially undetectable.
Louisiana, the Gulf's biggest seafood producer, has seen its production plummet since BP's well exploded, largely because many fishing waters were closed as a precaution, the state said.
Even now, with many fishing waters back open, grocery stores and restaurants around the U.S. have canceled orders for Gulf seafood because of concerns about the oil, said Harlon Pearce, chairman of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. "We still have a major perception problem," though it's unfounded, he said.
Officials have subjected thousands of samples of Gulf seafood to chemical tests for oil contamination since the spill started. All, they said, have shown levels of contamination far below those set as "levels of concern." Based on those results, federal and state officials have reopened for fishing thousands of square miles of the Gulf. The chemical test looks for compounds that are in crude oil, some of which have been found to be potentially cancer-causing. Shellfish ingest contaminants that are in water, and fish can ingest them or take them in through their gills. Shellfish typically are the bigger human-health concern, because they take longer to process and purge the contaminants than fish do, scientists say.
When the scientific assumptions underlying the test standards were set in May, "there was a vigorous discussion about what was the appropriate [balance] between precaution and practicality," said Steve Murawski, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official who helped lead the discussions.
The testing program divides the northern Gulf into dozens of seafood-monitoring zones. Any zone where oil is visible or expected to show up will stay closed to fishing, the rules say. In a zone where no oil is visible or expected, seafood is sampled and subjected to two rounds of tests.
If a seafood sample passes a sniff test—in which trained officials smell it both raw and cooked—it is sent for chemical testing. Only after all samples in a zone pass the chemical test can the area be reopened to fishing.
Regulators made judgment calls in setting the seafood-safety standards. One important decision was what level of lifetime cancer risk is acceptable for Gulf seafood eaters.
"There was a conflict there. So we had to work back and forth with the states" in coming up with a compromise, said Robert Dickey, a Food and Drug Administration official who works at the agency's seafood lab in Dauphin Island, Ala., and helped create the testing program.
Fishing waters along parts of the Gulf Coast have shown background levels of the contaminants for years, in part because of industrial pollution. Some Gulf states expressed the concern that, if the cancer-risk limits were made too strict, some seafood from their states might fail the test as a result of that background contamination, which hasn't caused public-health problems in the past, Mr. Dickey said.
The regulators opted for a one-in-100,000 cancer risk. That was the standard used in smaller spills in Maine and Alaska, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study from 2002. A cancer risk of one in 100,000 is within the range that federal agencies consider acceptable when they set standards for food and drinking water, the FDA says.
But the "typical" level used in most cancer-risk assessments is stricter: one in one million, the NOAA study said. Officials used that stricter standard in the Valdez spill and in smaller spills in California, Oregon and Rhode Island, the study said. Standards are set on a case-by-case basis.
A Centers for Disease Control spokeswoman said officials weren't aware of any study showing people got cancer from eating seafood exposed to oil from a spill.
The FDA's Mr. Dickey said the Gulf standard was "more than adequate protection." He noted some Gulf states use a looser threshold—one in 10,000—for some seafood rules in near-shore waters they control.
An even bigger debate, regulators said, was how much Gulf seafood to assume people eat and how often. Assuming a bigger portion would mean tightening the contamination level each sample could have.
The Gulf tests presume, for example, that a person eats about one shrimp meal a week, each with about a fifth of a pound of shrimp. That's about four or five large shrimp a meal. That estimate is based on the consumption rate of the top 10% of U.S. seafood eaters—a standard that regulators say is plenty cautious.
Others say those levels are low, where seafood is central to the culture for the Gulf. The government standard "isn't representative of Gulf consumption," said Gina Solomon, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
Mr. Pearce, the seafood board chairman, figures a typical shrimp meal in Louisiana has eight or 10 large shrimp. That's basically double the amount regulators are assuming.
The FDA's Mr. Dickey said regulators couldn't find any peer-reviewed studies of local seafood consumption in the Gulf, so they stuck with the federal numbers.
Most seafood samples tested by the government showed contamination far below the thresholds set by the government as levels of concern; many samples showed levels so low that test machinery couldn't detect them.
Some question whether the government is taking enough samples. Scott Milroy, a marine scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi, said seafood samples he gathered in September along the Mississippi coast showed levels of one non-cancer-causing contaminant that were as high as one-third the government's level of concern. That's still too low to present an immediate threat to human health, he said, but it's hundreds of times higher than the levels the government tests found.
Joe Jewell, a Mississippi official helping oversee the seafood program, said he couldn't comment on Mr. Milroy's test results until he saw them. Mr. Jewell said he would be quick to recommend closing any fishing waters that reliable tests showed were unsafe.
Many Gulf seafood lovers are cautiously optimistic. Al Sunseri, president of P&J Oyster Co., an oyster processor and distributor, said he eats Louisiana oysters every day. In a decade or so, he said, "I'll be a perfect example to find out if they've caused any long-term problems."
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