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."
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