BP's Long Term Effects on Sea Life in the Gulf

A Normal healthy shrimp

Now, see what the BP's negligence and greed have wrought on the Gulf of Mexico

(remember, your government has gone on record saying Gulf Seafood is safe to eat!)

YUM!

Half of all oysters sold in the U.S. used to come from Louisiana's waters
but now the supply is down to one-fifth as the Louisiana Oyster harvest was cut in half in 2010 (hitting a 44 year low).

Yummy shrimp with head tumors! Are they crunchy? Are they soft? Mmmmmm!

Gulf lobsters come with pre-blackened gills from now on...

Dr. Jim Cowan of Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences thinks that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from BP's submerged oil is causing the high frequency of lesions (red snapper).

Abnormal red snapper.

 There are no more "normal" red snapper in the Gulf

More delicious shrimp tumors. Edible?

Bloated with oil.

What BP and their partners--TransOcean and Halliburton--have caused with their negligence is a wholesale environmental catastrophe, irreversible; negligence at every single step from preparing to drill in deep water, to the fake clean-up effort it made by sinking all the oil to the ocean floor, and not even capping the well. Oil slicks are still being spotted all around where Deepwater Horizon exploded. And the government says all these poor wretched creatures above are fit to eat.

BP's disaster has killed the Gulf Seafood industry, the organisms who once were the seafood (shrimp, crabs, fish), the ecosystem that was the spawning origins of several species--all gone. BP's disaster was an extinction event, destroying more livelihoods, lives and animal species than can ever be accounted for. And BP makes record profits 2 years later, as Gulf residents continue to die from the toxins they were exposed to.

FDA Saying It's OK to Eat Seafood 10,000 Times Over the Safe Limit for Dangerous Carcinogens

FDA not only downplayed the risk of contamination, but ignored staff members who proposed higher levels of contamination protection. 

By Brad Jacobson, AlterNet
Posted on December 18, 2011

Ever since the largest offshore oil spill in history spewed into the Gulf of Mexico last year, independent public health experts have questioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's efforts to effectively protect Americans from consuming contaminated seafood.

Now a recent study by two of the most tenacious non-government scientists reveals that FDA Gulf seafood "safe levels" allowed 100 to 10,000 times more carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in seafood than what is safe. The overarching issue the report addresses is the failure of the FDA's risk assessment to protect those most vulnerable to the effects of these chemicals, such as young children, pregnant women and high-consumption seafood eaters.

In an effort to pinpoint how the FDA decided to set its acceptable levels for PAH contaminants in Gulf seafood, researchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which performed the study -- published in the leading peer-reviewed environmental health journal Environmental Health Perspectives -- also scoured documents wrested from the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act.

These include internal emails and unreleased assessments that suggest the FDA not only downplayed the risk of contamination but also that the EPA, and even members of FDA staff, had proposed higher levels of contamination protection, which in the end were ignored.

In vehemently denying the NRDC study's findings, the FDA argues that its chemical risk assessments are inherently biased "on the side of safety" and that setting higher protective health measures for PAHs in Gulf seafood would actually "do more harm than good."

Robert Dickey, director of the FDA's Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory, who's taken the lead for the agency in responding to the NRDC report, elaborated in an email to AlterNet, "Overly conservative estimates would lead you [to] remove a great deal of food from our refrigerators and pantries than is needed."

In an interview with AlterNet, the study's lead researcher, NRDC staff scientist Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, said that such a response from the FDA "begs the question of whether or not it was a political versus a scientific decision" because the agency "does not provide scientific evidence" for the claim that being more health protective somehow carries an increased risk of doing harm.

She added, "PAHs in food have been evaluated and standards set in the European Union without jeopardizing anyone's nutrition."

AlterNet confirmed that the FDA indeed has provided no scientific evidence to back up this claim in either its formal response to the NRDC report or in addressing AlterNet's questions.

More broadly, the FDA declined to directly explain the email correspondence the study's researchers obtained in the FOIA request. They reveal that the Environmental Protection Agency, and even members of the FDA's own staff, questioned the FDA's seafood safety risk assessment criteria for protecting the most vulnerable populations, particularly Gulf residents.

Other documents received via the FOIA request show that the FDA considered multiple other potential calculations and criteria where more health protective risk assessments were considered but never followed.

Asked if these documents, along with the NRDC study's findings, belie the FDA's chief claim that their risk assessments are biased "on the side of safety," Dickey responded, "The seafood safety risk assessment was developed in extensive and open collaboration between FDA, EPA, CDC, NOAA, and public health experts and toxicologists from all five Gulf states impacted by the oil spill."

He added, "During that process many factors and calculations were considered before the final version was agreed on by all participants."

Dickey also claims that the FDA has "built into our assessments, a more than 100-fold safety factor that gives us confidence that sensitive populations are protected."

Yet Rotkin-Ellman countered that this conclusion is based on "outdated science" in which FDA calculations relied on the average lifetime weight of a 176-pound person.

"FDA continues to ignore the best scientific evidence on early-life vulnerability to chemical contaminants, which has shown that it is not sufficient to rely on life-time assessments," she said.

"The National Academy of Sciences and EPA guidelines emphasize that additional steps must be taken to specifically assess early-life stages," Rotkin-Ellman continued, "which includes calculating exposure based on age-specific bodyweights and adjusting to account for increased susceptibility."

The NRDC study found, for example, that the risk of cancer associated with eating Gulf shellfish contaminated at levels the FDA has deemed safe could be as high as 20,000 in a million. In other words, if 1,000 pregnant women consumed Gulf seafood at these levels, 20 of the children they give birth to would be at significant risk of cancer from the contamination.

The report also concluded that based on available testing data on PAH levels in shellfish after the spill, up to 53 percent of the shrimp tested had PAH levels exceeding the NRDC researchers' revised levels of concern for pregnant women who are high consumers of Gulf shellfish.

In the interview with Rotkin-Ellman, she highlighted many other central weaknesses in the FDA's protective criteria for PAHs in Gulf seafood about which she and her NRDC study co-author and UCSF clinical professor of health sciences, Gina Solomon, have long been concerned. These include underestimating the amount of seafood Gulf residents consume, ignoring cancer risk from naphthalene contamination (one of the most prevalent PAHs in petroleum) and projecting the contamination will only last five years.

Another key finding the NRDC report confirmed is that the FDA has no set levels of acceptable PAHs in seafood, but rather creates them on a case-by-case basis after each oil spill.

For example, the FDA made PAH "safe levels" less stringent after the BP oil spill than they had been following the Exxon-Valdez spill.

Asked to explain this practice, Dickey replied, "Each oil spill can involve different kinds of crude oils or refined oil products in different types of environments, so the responses are different to account for the physical environment and the compounds of concern that must be tested for."

He added, "Also, over time scientific knowledge of the toxicity of the many hundreds to thousands of compounds in oil and refined oil products increases, which directly affects the analysis of risks involved."

But Rotkin-Ellman noted his answer simply evades the underlying question.

"There are core PAHs of public health concern that are present in most petroleum products that FDA could set standards for regardless of the specifics of an oil spill," she said. "If analyses prove that those PAHs are not present in the next oil spill then those standards will not be applicable."

But this variability, she went on to say, does not preclude FDA from evaluating health threats from PAHs now.

"The ad-hoc risk assessment performed by FDA without public or outside expert review," Rotkin-Ellman added, "have jeopardized FDA's credibility and they have lost public confidence."

Currently, the FDA has no plans to begin setting standard levels of concern for PAHs in U.S. seafood, as Europe does to protect its citizens. The NRDC recently filed a petition with the FDA to change this practice but has yet to receive a response.

Gulf seafood continues to be tested on a limited basis.


On the FDA's Web site, the agency contends that seafood from the Gulf "is as safe to eat as it was before the oil spill."

Government Withholding Key Data on Seafood Testing, Scientists Say

Is Gulf Seafood Really Safe to Eat? 
Outside scientists, eager to perform independent evaluations of the government's findings, complain the information released contains far too many unknown variables.
By Brad Jacobson, Raw Story
Posted on October 8, 2010

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and FDA officials maintain they've provided results of ongoing Gulf seafood safety tests with the utmost transparency. But outside scientists, eager to perform independent evaluations of the government's findings, complain the information released contains far too many unknown variables that preclude peer review.

In recent interviews, FDA and NOAA officials told Raw Story that they've been completely transparent in sharing ongoing Gulf seafood testing data, protocol and methodologies.

Whenever we reopened [waters], we'd post the data that we used and the FDA certified it as good enough to reopen," said NOAA spokeswoman Christine Patrick. "So that's all publicly available and it has been since we started reopening."

"There's nothing we are withholding," echoed FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott.

Yet in wide-ranging interviews with Raw Story, multiple independent scientists involved in studying the effects of the Gulf oil spill not only revealed that government claims of sufficient transparency are wholly misleading, but they also provided several key examples of how withholding this information precludes independent evaluation and opens a raft of critical unanswered questions.

Raw Story's investigation also found that federal officials continue to publicly claim (as they as did as well in our interviews) that Gulf states follow the agreed-upon protocol set by NOAA and FDA for the reopening of previously closed waters.

But scientists in close discussions with these agencies informed Raw Story that the Gulf states are actually making their decisions for reopening waters on a case-by-case basis with no consistent set criteria -- making the basis for state reopenings of previously closed waters an even greater unknown for independent scientists.

Released data insufficient for independent evaluation

"We're a little worried that these samples so far may not be as thorough as they might need to be and there could be areas that are missed," said Gina Solomon, a doctor and public health expert in the department of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

"That's the fundamental concern," added Solomon, a co-author of the recent peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study on Gulf seafood safety.

Timothy Fitzgerald, a marine scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who testified last week to the National Oil Spill Commission, said, "Given the work that we do and the level of resolution we usually rely on, if they're going to provide technical detail I would very much like them to actually provide it in as raw a form as possible."

"What they've done in a lot of instances is [provide] kind of first or second order binning or summarizing or distilling, which makes a lot of the data unusable or unavailable," Fitzgerald continued.

"It's not that it doesn't exist," he said. "It's just that it hasn't been provided in a way that scientists could really make a lot of use out of it."

Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and a contributor to the JAMA study, said there is no clear description of the scientific method being applied to determine how they select the locations to sample, how many samples they take, or how they are sampling to ensure that the areas they are reopening are free of oil.

"All of this remains information that we have asked various different agencies for, and this includes NOAA and the FDA, and they have not provided it," Ellman said. "It's not part of the materials that are on their website and it remains this very big blank to the transparency of how these safety considerations are being made."

Solomon and Ellman said NOAA officials have described a more specific sampling plan for federal waters by phone but have not provided them with a copy despite repeated requests.

"So the question is, why?" Solomon said. "It seems strange that it hasn't been made available for peer review."

Solomon, Ellman and other scientists interviewed by Raw Story noted that while there is much information lacking from the sampling plans and data released for the reopening of federal waters, even less is known about the determinations behind the reopening of state waters.

For every reopening of federal waters for commercial and recreational fishing, NOAA and FDA follow an agreed-upon protocol for the testing of seafood and water samples.

The Gulf states, which must submit a proposal to the FDA for any waters reopened, follow no consistent protocol for the reopening of state waters, Raw Story has found.

Federal officials publicly claim that Gulf states also follow "the same" agreed-upon protocol set by NOAA and FDA. Before reopening any previously closed state waters, Gulf state officials must submit a sampling plan for certification to the FDA.

But according to Solomon and Ellman, who have had several discussions with federal agencies regarding state reopenings, each individual Gulf state makes its decision for reopening waters on a case-by-case basis, with no uniform criteria or protocol.

They asserted to Raw Story that when they requested a specific sampling plan for the reopening of state waters, a senior FDA official, Donald Kraemer, was "really quite clear" that none existed.

Solomon said Kraemer told them "that there are no criteria, that there is no sampling plan, that there is no clear protocol, that there is no minimum number of samples required, that there's no specific buffer zone between oil contaminated areas and reopened areas that the agency's requiring."

Solomon lamented, "All of that was surprising and somewhat disturbing."

When Raw Story emailed Kraemer directly and requested that he respond to these statements attributed to him, he wrote back, "Sorry…you need to come in through the press office."

Yet after forwarding our request to his direct press office liaison, Michael Herndon, Raw Story did not receive a response.

Gaping holes in data may impact integrity of testing

FDA and NOAA officials repeatedly assured Raw Story that they've taken a "conservative" approach to testing Gulf seafood.

At the close of an elaborate presentation to Raw Story on seafood safety procedures, NOAA toxicologist John Stein averred, "We're confident that we have a well-designed seafood safety program and comprehensive testing."

But independent scientists not only said there's no way to confirm this, but also provided specific examples of what's missing from the data and how it can impact the integrity of the test results.

Ellman, staff scientist at the NDRC, noted that there's no information to conclude that there is adequate testing of the water below the surface for the presence of oil before areas are reopened.

"We know that dispersants made the oil move from the surface, so it's less likely to be a surface slick and much more likely to be below the surface, a sub-surface plume," she pointed out.

Carys Mitchelmore, an aquatic toxicologist and associate professor at the University of Maryland, agreed.

"Most of this oil is below the surface. So I would be more concerned with the stuff you don't see," Mitchelmore said.

Indeed, Raw Story confirmed that the language in the protocol is vague regarding the testing of waters for the presence of oil before reopening waters to commercial and recreational fishing. Under "Specific Re-opening Criteria" in the protocol, it states:

"Evaluation of oil movement -- Confirmation that the closure area is free of sheen on the surface by visual observation and/or aerial reconnaissance, or the presence of oil in the water column through visual observation or water testing."

Chris Pincetich, a toxicologist and marine biologist at the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, criticized the "very ambiguous" nature of this passage.

"That doesn't define anything. It doesn't give you any detection limits," Pincetich said with a note of exasperation.

He continued, "In one case, they may say, ‘My satellite shows a cloud. Oh, what about aerial? Well, no one saw anything. What about water sample? We didn't get a water sample either.' Well, they may be able to say, ‘Well, our aerial survey didn't see any oil. Let's reopen it.' That's really ambiguous."

Specificity on buffer zones -- areas between closed oiled waters and waters open for commercial and recreational fishing -- is also conspicuously absent from the protocol and is a point of contention for outside scientists.

The only mention of buffer zones in the protocol states:

"Fishery closure areas also include areas that NOAA projects will have surface oil and a precautionary buffer zone around known contaminated waters to account for uncertainty."

When Raw Story pointed out to the FDA that there's insufficient information for other scientists to ascertain how buffer zones are being determined, the response was less than forthcoming.

"Are they proposing something different that they think would be a better [method]?" agency spokeswoman Scott replied.

After Raw Story reiterated that outside scientists are merely trying to pinpoint how such determinations are being made, Scott said, "By hundreds and hundreds of scientists."

Raw Story then noted that while it may be based on findings by "hundreds and hundreds of scientists," independent scientists are saying that these kinds of determinations are not clear enough in the materials being released online.

"Uh, sure," Scott said. "If that's what they're saying, I agree that's what they're saying."

Additionally, scientists pointed out that knowing what the contaminant levels of the fish and shellfish in the closed areas are would help them assess how safe it is to fish outside the buffer zones.

But to date, no information has been released on contaminant levels of marine life within closed areas.

"I would like to see the data from a polluted site, from a closed site," Mitchelmore said. "Just for me as a scientist, I would like to see the flip side. I'd like to see what these organisms look like when they've taken them from a closed area."

Raw Story found a related passage in the protocol that alarmed scientists.

"After confirming through subsequent evaluation that oil did not enter an area," it states, "the area may be re-opened without subjecting seafood samples to evaluation under this protocol. This protocol is an added layer of protection being applied to seafood only in areas known to have been contaminated."

That seafood may be deemed uncontaminated based solely on water sampling, scientists said, does not adequately take into account the movement of both oil and marine life.

"There's a defined spatial and temporal context here -- oil moves," explained Mitchelmore. "With these undersea [oil] plumes, you're not going to see sheens on the surface. Sediment resuspends. Organisms move from one area to another."

"So how representative is each sample in a huge big area on a temporal and a spatial scale?" she continued. "What if there's something in the sediment or a plume you're not seeing? Waters are not well mixed."

Bottom-feeders such as shrimp, which also migrate daily from the seabed to the surface, are at an even greater risk for undetected contamination in waters where seafood is not being tested, scientists said.

"The ecology of shrimp is that they stay on the bottom all day long and at night they come up and that's when they fish for them," said Pincetich. "So any oil in the sediment, any oil in the bottom of the ocean, is interacting with the shrimp on a daily basis."

"So now we're talking about long-term chronic exposure of these shrimp to the oil," he added. "And that's a concern, that's really a concern for public safety."

Many scientists also expressed frustration over the lack of clarity in the released sensory and chemical analyses of the seafood, which they say may be inflating both the quality and quantity of the testing.

Scientists explained that while the data might show that ten different fish have been tested, those ten fish are often ground up into one sample. Then one test would be run on that sample.

So ten fish may have been tested but only in one sample, which, in some cases, scientists said, could inflate the number of seafood tested.

"The takeaway number from that is one and not ten," said Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund. "But that's why you may see numbers like 40,000 fish have been tested. Well, not really -- 40,000 fish may have been collected."

Mitchelmore pointed out that government scientists utilize such sample sizes in analyses to reduce variability, because even within the same species tested there's a great deal of individual variability -- from size, age and sex to "whether one of them just fed on a big plump oil-laden oyster."

She said this methodology would be sound but only if they're repeating such analyses of the same species multiple times in a given area before and after waters are reopened, thus increasing their sample sizes to make up for dilution.

"If you think of the scenario where you've got nine little things that haven't accumulated [contaminants] but one big one that has accumulated a lot, then that one gets diluted out by those other nine," Mitchelmore explained. "So your levels appear lower."

"Increased sample sizes is key," she added.

But based on the data released, it's not clear this is occurring.

Fitzgerald also noted that the numbers are "not nearly as convincing" when you start to get into a finer level of details.

When he analyzed how many sensory tests (or "sniff tests") versus chemical tests have been performed, he found that the number of samples actually sent to a lab to be chemically analyzed is far lower.

"If you count up every single animal that was collected to be tested either by the sniff or the chemical, it's probably in the tens of thousands," Fitzgerald said. "But then if you actually look at how many tests they've done, whether it's sniff or chemical, it's much lower than that."

Catastrophic spill and sluggish response demand greater transparency

Every researcher interviewed by Raw Story -- from marine biologists and toxicologists to public health experts and oceanographers -- agreed that the massive size of the spill, the unprecedented use of dispersants and early ineptitude in responding to the disaster puts the onus on federal and state officials to maximize the transparency of their seafood safety testing.

"Part of food security is the sort of peace of mind that people have about eating it," said Ian MacDonald, an oceanography professor at Florida State University and an expert in measuring oil spills. "People are deeply anxious about the security of all aspects of the Gulf following this spill -- whether it's seafood safety or the dispersants or food chain effects and all that. That's the legacy of this."

Testifying before the National Oil Spill Commission last week, MacDonald said that, contrary to Obama administration claims that the majority of oil is "gone," he estimates that over fifty percent of the oil remains in the Gulf in "a highly durable material that resists further dissipation," with much of it "now buried in marine and coastal sediments."

"Everybody's credibility has been damaged by all this," MacDonald continued in his interview with Raw Story. "Many changes of course that NOAA took. The great concern about EPA and the licensing of dispersant use. The fact of the way it was handled has undermined public confidence."

"So I think it overwhelms the sort of standard approach towards reassuring the public in terms of food safety," he added.

Pincetich, the marine biologist and toxicologist from the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, cautioned, "They really need to throw out their old rulebook. This is a massive, toxic situation with millions of peoples' health at risk."

"And if they're not using the best technology in the most transparent, comprehensive ways," he continued, "then they're really falling short of being public servants and protecting our health and well being with their decisions."

"They have a long, long way to go to restore public trust," MacDonald said.

Gulf oil spill still a threat to seafood, JAMA study indicates

By Fred Tasker | The Miami Herald | Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill still poses threats to human health and seafood safety, according to a study published Monday by the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report comes two days after President Obama and members of his family swam in the Gulf at Panama City Beach and ate fish caught there, and hours after this year's commercial shrimping season officially kicked off along the Louisiana coast.

Federal officials disputed the new report and said ongoing testing is aggressive and sufficient to protect public health.

In the short term, study co-author Gina Solomon voiced greatest concern for shrimp, oysters, crabs and other invertebrates she says are have difficulty clearing their systems of dangerous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) similar to those found in cigarette smoke and soot. Solomon is an MD and public health expert in the department of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

In the longer term, she expressed worries about big fin fish such as tuna, swordfish and mackerel, saying levels of mercury from the oil might slowly increase over time by being consumed by fish lower in the food chain and becoming concentrating in the larger fish.

As time goes on, she said, doctors may be warning pregnant women and children to strictly limit the amount of such fish they eat. Some of the fish had relatively high levels of mercury even before the oil spill, she said.

"It's like iron filings to a magnet," she said. "Several years from now the concentration will go up in fish at the top of the food chain -- tuna, mackerel, swordfish."

Solomon said she based her new report on studies from past oil spills including the Exxon Valdez event off Alaska in 1989, plus her own monitoring of current Gulf data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. She also is a member of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which calls itself "the nation's most effective environmental action group." Solomon's co-author is Sarah Janssen, MD, a staff scientist with the NRDC.

FDA officials disagreed with Solomon's fears about PAHs.

"We don't agree that's currently a problem,'' said Vicki Seyfert-Margolis, from the office of the chief scientist of the FDA. She said federal officials have a "mussel watch'' program to test for such contamination in all shellfish, and so far it has not found any problems.

As each Gulf area is reopened for fin fish harvest, she said, officials are testing shellfish separately, approving various species only as studies are completed, she said.

For example, shrimp harvesting was reopened off Pensacola on Monday, she said.

Crabs and oysters take longer to test and clear because people eat the entire animal including the liver, where toxins can accumulate, while almost no one eats the liver of a fish, she said.

Seyfert-Margolis agreed that testing must continue for fin fish to make sure toxins don't build up in the future. Such testing will begin if similar early problems come up in the mussel-watch program, she said.

"We have the ability to test it in fin fish. We can study it as long as necessary,'' she said.

Concerning the human effects of the oil spill, Solomon says: "The good news is that the levels of benzene, the most dangerous chemical from oil, have been quite low. It's not likely there's a long-term risk from inhaled vapors for coastal residents.''

She went on: "For oil workers it might be a different story. The people out there deploying boom and burning the oil have been exposed to higher levels of vapor.''

She decried the lack of studies of long-term health effects of past spills such as the Exxon Valdez accident. But she said that on Tuesday the National Institutes of Health will announce a long-term health study of 20,000 Gulf workers and residents.

She pointed to a study of 858 cleanup workers in the 2002 oil spill by the tanker Prestige off the coast of Spain that found DNA damage, although Spanish health officials have said it was not permanent.

On Aug. 10, another 5,144 square miles of Gulf waters were reopened to commerecial and recreational finfish fishing by NOAA, the EPA and the FDA. It reduced the part of the Gulf still closed to 22 percent, from a peak of 37 percent.

NOAA said chemical analysis of 153 fin fish including grouper, snapper, tuna and mahi mahi found contaminants ``well below the levels of concern.'' Also, fish and shellfish harvested from areas unaffected by the closures are considered safe to eat, the FDA said.

"We are confident that Gulf fish from this area is safe to eat,'' said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco at the time.

Over the weekend, FDA tests also cleared shrimp from Louisiana's Barataria Bay, making possible the opening of shrimping season there, the Associated Press said. Crabs and oysters, the slowest to metabolize toxins, have not yet been cleared. NOAA will continue sampling, including at dockside.

"We're not going anywhere,'' said Lubchenco.

"I'm not disputing the reopenings,'' Solomon said. ``Many areas of the Gulf are quite likely safe for fishing. But what's true now might change in the future.''

Ronald Kendall, chairman of Texas Tech University's Department of Environmental Toxicology, agreed that PAHs can be a problem.

"They can accumulate in shellfish, and some can be carcinogenic. On the other hand, they are testing a lot for them.''

Kendall tested a small sample of shellfish from the Louisiana coast with gas chromatography on Monday for the ABC News program Good Morning America and said he found all to be clean.

But he added that, while oysters are stationary, shrimp can move about. And so can oil.

"So we must continue to monitor this very closely. Shellfish may be clear now, but in two months maybe not, depending on how the oil moves. You can't just test once and stop. There's a lot of oil in the Gulf, and we don't know where it all is.''

Kendall also agreed that toxins could build up in large fin fish.

"That's another reason we need to keep testing.'' Asked about the Obamas swimming and eating fish in Panama City, Solomon said: ``There are areas along the Gulf Coast that are safe for swimming and fishing. They were in one area that's considered safe. But people all across the Gulf Coast shouldn't assume that if it's safe where the president swam, it's safe where they live.''

People should avoid waters with any trace of oil, she said.

"Use your own eyes. If you see tar balls, oily sheen, don't go in the water. If you're eating fish, make sure they come from an area that's open for fishing and you get it from a reputable fish market or restaurant. If there's any oily smell, don't eat it.''

In her report, Solomon cites a 2002 study in the peer-reviewed journal Marine Environmental Research of the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that concluded: "Our data show that 10 years after the spill, nearshore fishes within the original spill zone were still exposed to residual hydrocarbons. All biomarkers [for contaminants] were elevated in fish collected from sites originally oiled, in comparison to fish from unoiled sites.''

Lead author of the Exxon Valdez study was Stephen Jewett of the School of Fisheries & Ocean Sciences at University of Alaska.

Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food chain

(But the FDA and USDA just said Gulf seafood was OK to eat. Who trusts the government any more? It is comprised of lying corporate shills from top to bottom. Don't eat Gulf seafood. It's bad for you now.--jef)

***

Scientists watching Gulf of Mexico's blue crabs for evidence that oil is entering food chain
JOHN FLESHER | AP News | Aug 09, 2010 05:33 EDT

To assess how heavy a blow the BP oil spill has dealt the Gulf of Mexico, researchers are closely watching a staple of the seafood industry and primary indicator of the ecosystem's health: the blue crab.

Weeks ago, before engineers pumped in mud and cement to plug the gusher, scientists began finding specks of oil in crab larvae plucked from waters across the Gulf coast.

The government said last week that three-quarters of the spilled oil has been removed or naturally dissipated from the water. But the crab larvae discovery was an ominous sign that crude had already infiltrated the Gulf's vast food web — and could affect it for years to come.

"It would suggest the oil has reached a position where it can start moving up the food chain instead of just hanging in the water," said Bob Thomas, a biologist at Loyola University in New Orleans. "Something likely will eat those oiled larvae ... and then that animal will be eaten by something bigger and so on."

Tiny creatures might take in such low amounts of oil that they could survive, Thomas said. But those at the top of the chain, such as dolphins and tuna, could get fatal "megadoses."

Marine biologists routinely gather shellfish for study. Since the spill began, many of the crab larvae collected have had the distinctive orange oil droplets, said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

"In my 42 years of studying crabs I've never seen this," Perry said.

She wouldn't estimate how much of the crab larvae are contaminated overall, but said about 40 percent of the area they are known to inhabit has been affected by oil from the spill.

Tulane University researchers are investigating whether the splotches also contain toxic chemical dispersants that were spread to break up the oil but have reached no conclusions, biologist Caz Taylor said.

If large numbers of blue crab larvae are tainted, their population is virtually certain to take a hit over the next year and perhaps longer, scientists say.

How large the die-off would be is unclear, Perry said. An estimated 207 million gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf since an April 20 drilling rig explosion triggered the spill, and thousands of gallons of dispersant chemicals have been dumped.

Scientists will be focusing on crabs because they're a "keystone species" that play a crucial role in the food web as both predator and prey, Perry said.

Richard Condrey, a Louisiana State University oceanographer, said the crabs are "a living repository of information on the health of the environment."

Named for the light-blue tint of their claws, the crabs have thick shells and 10 legs, allowing them to swim and scuttle across bottomlands. As adults, they live in the Gulf's bays and estuaries amid marshes that offer protection and abundant food, including snails, tiny shellfish, plants and even smaller crabs. In turn, they provide sustenance for a variety of wildlife, from redfish to raccoons and whooping cranes.

Adults could be harmed by direct contact with oil and from eating polluted food. But scientists are particularly worried about the vulnerable larvae.

That's because females don't lay their eggs in sheltered places, but in areas where estuaries meet the open sea. Condrey discovered several years ago that some even deposit offspring on shoals miles offshore in the Gulf.

The larvae grow as they drift with the currents back toward the estuaries for a month or longer. Many are eaten by predators, and only a handful of the 3 million or so eggs from a single female live to adulthood.

But their survival could drop even lower if the larvae run into oil and dispersants.

"Crabs are very abundant. I don't think we're looking at extinction or anything close to it," said Taylor, one of the researchers who discovered the orange spots.

Still, crabs and other estuary-dependent species such as shrimp and red snapper could feel the effects of remnants of the spill for years, Perry said.

"There could be some mortality, but how much is impossible to say at this point," said Vince Guillory, biologist manager with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Perry, Taylor and Condrey will be among scientists monitoring crabs for negative effects such as population drop-offs and damage to reproductive capabilities and growth rates.

Crabs are big business in the region. In Louisiana alone, some 33 million pounds are harvested annually, generating nearly $300 million in economic activity, Guillory said.

But fishermen who can make a six-figure income off crabs in a good year now are now idled — and worried about the future.

"If they'd let us go out and fish today, we'd probably catch crabs," said Glen Despaux, 37, who sets his traps in Louisiana's Barataria Bay. "But what's going to happen next year, if this water is polluted and it's killing the eggs and the larvae? I think it's going to be a long-term problem."