Florida Officials: Testing fishing areas for toxic dispersants “a waste of money and resources”

[link to www.floridaoilspilllaw.com]

Gulf seafood tested for oil but not dispersant, Palm Beach Post, July 12, 2010:

[N]o one is testing seafood to tell whether it has absorbed the toxic compounds found in the nearly 1.8 million gallons of dispersants BP has poured into the water to break up the oil. …

In Florida, state officials deemed lab tests on open harvesting areas “a waste of money and resources,” [Alan Peirce, bureau chief at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services' Division of Aquaculture] said. …

State officials only plan to test harvest areas again if they must close oyster beds, for example, and then move to reopen them, Peirce said.

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based environmental nonprofit, said it is “irresponsible” for the petroleum industry and the government to use dispersant, which contains heavy metals, arsenic, chromium and copper, with so little understanding of its long-term effects.

Indeed, little research has been done on that question.

Beth McGee, a toxicologist and one of the authors of a 2005 National Academy of Sciences report on dispersants, said the researchers never studied human effects.

“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 said.

Federal agencies can’t seem to agree on whether the dispersants are a threat to humans or sea life.

In May, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson warned that “BP has used dispersants in ways never seen before. That is in terms of both the amount applied —— which is approaching a world record – and in the method of application.”

The agency asked the company to cut back on its use of dispersants, but ruled that it was the lesser of two evils, with oil the greater threat.

Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist who founded the Marine Environmental Research Institute, criticizes the use of dispersants for a number of reasons, including that they can cause heart palpitations, chronic headaches and even bleeding if they come in contact with a worker’s skin or are inhaled.

But Shaw said the current lab testing for the presence of oil may be enough to detect dispersants in seafood because dispersants are unlikely to be present without oil.

Sniffers who smell dispersant during their tests must flag the sample as an adulterated product, which is illegal to sell. But the FDA has not included compounds found in dispersants as part of its lab testing protocol.

“Available information indicates that the dispersants being used to combat the oil spill do not accumulate in seafood,” spokesman Sebastian Cianci said. “Therefore, there is no public health concern from them due to seafood consumption.”