FDA may be lax when it comes to laws on sea food safety: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDOct 16 2011

Due to the last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a new study contends that current federal standards underestimate the risk to pregnant women and children of cancer-causing contaminants that can accumulate in seafood from such spills.

The study by the Natural Resources Defense Council was published Wednesday in the online journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It found that because of outdated assessment methods and assumptions, the Food and Drug Administration's standard for certain carbon compounds in seafood is off by 10,000 times.

The group is calling upon the FDA to enact a rule that sets a limit on the amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) deemed safe for pregnant women and young children. PAHs are chemicals found in oil, industrial pollution and urban run-off that can cause cancer, birth defects, neurological delays and liver damage.

“Everybody is using the numbers FDA published, and they are flawed,” said study co-author Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, who added that her analysis did not find any significant concerns for other adults. “Our findings add to a long list of evidence that FDA is overlooking the risks from chemical contaminants in food,” said Rotkin-Ellman. “We must not wait for people to get sick or cancer rates to rise, we need FDA to act now to protect the food supply.”

However, FDA and Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services officials stand by their testing methods. They say that seafood from the gulf harvested in areas reopened since the spill and those that were never closed, remain safe. “We're very confident that the steps that we have put in place to assure the safety of seafood have worked,” FDA spokesman Doug Karas said. “We put in an extensive program of sampling, at that time and since then, and the results have consistently been 100 to 1,000 times below our levels of concern.”

Sterling Ivey, spokesman for Florida's agriculture department that has been tasked with monitoring seafood safety, agreed. “We've been continuing to test, and we haven't found any issue with the seafood we are testing,” Ivey said. “We haven't found any contaminates or high carbonates in the samples we are testing that has showed the seafood is not safe for anyone to eat.”

Between August 2010 and August of this year, the department has screened 358 seafood samples, and all were below the FDA's levels of concern. Ivey added that there have indeed been concerns about seafood safety. In response to that concern, Florida has received $20 million from BP to increase the state's testing capabilities and launch an aggressive marketing campaign to inform the public that gulf seafood is safe to eat.

The Natural Resources Defense Council study found about 50 percent of the shrimp the FDA tested after the BP spill had harmful carbon levels exceeding the level of risk deemed by the group to be safe for pregnant women.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals calculated that every day for five years the average person could eat 1,575 jumbo shrimp or 130 oysters without health concerns.