Is Sniffing Seafood Enough to Determine if it's Safe to Eat?

Lots of folks say that in order to save the Gulf's seafood, we've got to keep eating it. And while I'm all for supporting the beleaguered seafood industry, I'm concerned about saving myself, too. There are a ton of toxins swirling around the Gulf of Mexico right now, everything from oil to heavy metals to arsenic. So I wonder what's being done to ensure that the dispersants and oil impacting the Gulf's fish, shrimp, crabs, and other critters won't, well, kill me.

The most popular safety measure out there is the "sniff test," a scarily simplistic strategy where "olfactory experts" literally just take a whiff of Gulf fish to see if they can smell any oil. The process is startlingly similar to my boyfriend's does-this-shirt-really-need-to-be-washed test. If experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detect oil, the fish gets ditched. If it smells alright, it gets the stamp of approval.

Call me paranoid, but I don't totally trust one dude's nose with my health and well-being, so I dug into the issue. According to NOAA, sniffers (and yes, that's their technical term) are correct about 80 percent of the time (a pretty high percentage considering the success rate of that aforementioned laundry test). But luckily, fish don't stop at scientists' noses. According to the Washington Post, some fish from the Gulf also get sent on to NOAA labs, where they are subjected to hydrocarbon testing. These labs consistently test fish from areas still open to fishing to make sure oil isn't infiltrating these regions.

These tests, in addition to the fact that consumers can likely taste immediately if seafood is super-contaminated with oil, make me feel pretty secure that my fish isn't marinating in petroleum. But dispersants are another issue. According to the Palm Beach Post, BP dumped about 1.8 million gallons of Corexit into the Gulf. Environmentalists and scientists question whether Corexit isn't more toxic than the oil itself because the substance contains heavy metals, arsenic, chromium, and copper. Yet despite Corexit's known hazards, no one is testing to see if seafood's soaked up dispersants. What gives?

Some say that because dispersants bond to oil, Corexit is unlikely to be present in the absence of oil. But given Corexit's toxicity and its widespread usage, that assumption seems pretty risky to me. According to the Palm Beach Post, toxicologist Beth McGee studied dispersants in a 2005 study. She says that dispersants' potential impacts on human health are largely unknown. "We hadn't even assumed that we would have a spill that would drag on this long and be using the amount of dispersants that they've used," McGee told the Palm Beach Post.

What's worse is that toxicity in fish could actually get worse as time goes on. According to Gina Solomon, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), heavy metals like lead and mercury will gradually bioaccumulate up the marine food chain. Sure, agencies may be testing for heavy metals now. But monitoring needs to continue in the long-term to really ensure that Gulf seafood is safe for consumers. At this point, it's unclear how long agencies like NOAA and the FDA will study the region's fish and shellfish.

The Gulf's struggling industries need national help, but consumers need help from national agencies, too. Let's not let the Gulf's safety outweigh the need to protect citizens' health.

Photo Credit: Beth Rankin via Wikimedia Commons