MOBILE, Alabama - November 10, 2010 - The federal government is going out of its way to assure the public that seafood pulled from recently reopened Gulf of Mexico waters is safe to consume, in spite of the largest accidental release of crude oil in Amerika's history.
However, testing methodologies used by the government to deem areas of water safe for commercial fishing are woefully inadequate and permit high levels of toxic compounds to slip into the human food chain, according to a series of scientific and medical professionals interviewed by Raw Story.
In two separate cases, a toxicologist and a chemist independently confirmed their seafood samples contained unusually high volumes of crude oil and harmful hydrocarbons - and some of this food was allegedly being sent to market.
One test, conducted by a chemist from Mobile, Alabama, employed a rudimentary chemical analysis of shrimp pulled from waters near Louisiana and found "oil and grease" in their digestive tracts.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) tests, which are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have focused on the animal's flesh, with samples shelled and cleaned before undergoing examination.
Unfortunately, many Gulf coast residents prepare shrimp whole, tossing the creatures into boiling water shells and all.
"I wouldn't eat shrimp, fish or crab caught in the Gulf," said Robert M. Naman, a chemist at ACT Labs in Mobile, Alabama, who conducted the test after being contacted by a New Orleans activist. "The problems people will face, health-wise, are something that people don't understand."
Naman also found that the oil was at an unusual high concentration: 193 parts-per-million (PPM).
Though Naman's test did not provide a complete fingerprint of the chemical spectrum, his results are still "an important finding," according to Dr. Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist at the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Blue Hill, Maine.
"193 parts-per-million of petroleum in a crustacean is very high," she told Raw Story. "You have to ask, what is the meaning from a human health perspective? This is another signal that oil is in the food chain in the Gulf. Oil has been found in subsea plumes, in seafloor sediments, where it will degrade very slowly and can be re-released into the food chain," said. Dr. Shaw.