WASHINGTON — Joe Jewell has a list, and he’s not afraid to use it.
The deputy director of the Office of Marine Fisheries in Mississippi keeps a contact list of major media outlets and the press, and if he sees something wrong with the state’s monthly seafood samples from the Gulf, the first thing he will do is call reporters.
“I’m not going into this with blinders on, and I’m not going to ignore any data results,” said Jewell, who has been working at the department for almost 14 years. “Our number-one concern is the safety of the public and the consumption of seafood. If any of these samples come back bad, I’ll step up to bat.”
The uncertainty over seafood safety has been a concern since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill April 20. The waters were immediately closed to fishing or catching, and thousands of people were out of a job. Only a small portion of the waters, approximately 4%, is still closed.
Last Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, jointly with the Food and Drug Administration, declared after a second round of testing they again found no harmful traces of the chemical Corexit, a dispersant used to contain the spill that was feared to be even more toxic than the oil itself. The results were that fish, oysters, crab and shrimp from the Gulf are safe for consumption.
The general public, however, doesn’t feel the same confidence.
“I still do eat seafood, but it’s only farm raised,” said Cynthia Howard, 53, a retirement specialist at the Jefferson Parish in New Orleans. “I’m hesitant because of the oil, and because of the chemicals. If I don’t look out for myself, who is going to?”
The same sentiment is shared by many people across the country. Although dozens of government agencies at federal, state and local levels have tested Gulf seafood and water composition, the amount of public doubt still remains high.
As a potential cause for concern, the Environmental Protection Agency has found higher than expected levels of vanadium and nickel – two types of metals – in water samples off the coast. In more than 1,500 water samples analyzed to date, the EPA said they found 49 exceedances of the chronic toxicity benchmark for nickel and three exceedances of the acute toxicity benchmark.
But the EPA says that the levels of nickel were no concern to human health, although there has yet to be an investigation on the possible source of these elevated nickel levels. The EPA is no longer taking water samples, although it will continue to analyze all remaining samples.
Who is doing what?
“There were already fish advisories on some species before the spill,” said Allen Burton, a professor in the school of natural resources and environment at the University of Michigan. “These include warning about sword fish, which is relatively high in mercury. But, there’s no mercury in the oil. [However] there are still unknowns. Will this spill impact the seafood and fisheries population as far as reproduction in the long term effects?”
Burton, who is the newly appointed director of NOAA’s cooperative institute of limnology and ecosystem research, said that though he is confident in the FDA and NOAA’s announcement about safety in the seafood, he is unsure about what will happen down the road to the biodiversity of the fish. The only concern for consumption, he said, would be the shell fish area closer to the marshes where much of the oil was inundated.
“There are research projects [happening], but they are funded by so many different groups that it’s hard to keep track of what’s actually going on,” he said.
Many federal, state and local groups have already started working together to figure out the best response for the disaster.
“We were cooperating way before BP,” Jewell said. “It’s intensified though. We are much more aware of the details of what we’re doing.”
Jewell talks to his counterparts in Louisiana and Alabama on a weekly basis to give status updates. On Wednesday, he was in a conference call with representatives from the Gulf States, as well as the FDA and NOAA on the current status.
The Texas Sea Grant College Program, among other sea grant programs, is also doing a fair share. They have helped determine new additions to the Department of Agriculture’s Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points program to continue to monitor seafood safety. Regulators are charged with verifying that the product is harvested in open waters, and doing the “sniff” test to incoming products to make sure there is no obvious taint of diesel or crude oil.
Domestic vs. international
What most people don’t know is that most of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is actually from a foreign source. Approximately 83% of the fish consumed locally are from places like India, Brazil or China, according to statistics from the NFI. Only about 2.34% of the seafood that Americans eat comes from the Gulf.
“Americans eat about 16 pounds {per capita} of seafood each year. The Gulf wouldn’t have enough ability to supply that much,” Gibbons asserted.
Chris Giragosian, who works in sales at Gold Star Seafood Inc., a seafood wholesaler based in Chicago, said that most of the seafood his company delivers to restaurants through Chicago, Indiana and Wisconsin is foreign product because it’s cheaper.
Though it’s not certain why there is a gap between government confidence and public distrust, some consumers are more moderate.
“There is so much testing going on…so I think it would be okay to eat seafood,” said Kamal Menghrajani, a fourth year medical student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I think because of the oil spill, lots of people heard about it and lots of people knew what was going on. Now, the effort to clean it up is not being as widely covered.”
Menghrajani, 26, who consumes seafood several times a week, says that given the choice between eating seafood at a restaurant and at home, she would feel better knowing she could cook it herself.
“If I get it [seafood] from the grocery store, I’m pretty diligent about asking where it’s from,” she said.