Study: FDA seafood standards flawed

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Updated: November 20, 2011 8:40AM

In wake of last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a new study from an environmental watchdog group contends that current federal standards underestimate the risk to pregnant women and children of cancer-causing contaminants that can accumulate in seafood from such spills.

The Natural Resources Defense Council study, just published in the online journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that because of outdated assessment methods and assumptions, the Food and Drug Administration’s standard for certain carbon compounds in seafood is off by 10,000 times.

The group is requesting that the FDA enact a rule that sets a limit on the amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons deemed safe for pregnant women and young children.

“Everybody is using the numbers FDA published, and they are flawed,” said study co-author Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, who added that her analysis did not find any significant concerns for other adults.

However, FDA and Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services officials stand by their testing methods. They stress that seafood from the gulf harvested in areas reopened since the spill and those that were never closed, remain safe.

“We’re very confident that the steps that we have put in place to assure the safety of seafood have worked,” FDA spokesman Doug Karas said. “We put in an extensive program of sampling, at that time and since then, and the results have consistently been 100 to 1,000 times below our levels of concern.”

Sterling Ivey, spokesman for Florida’s agriculture department that has been tasked with monitoring seafood safety, agreed.

“We’ve been continuing to test, and we haven’t found any issue with the seafood we are testing,” Ivey said. “We haven’t found any contaminates or high carbonates in the samples we are testing that has showed the seafood is not safe for anyone to eat.”

Between August 2010 and August of this year, the department has screened 358 seafood samples, and all were below the FDA’s levels of concern.

But concerns about seafood safety have continued to be an issue, Ivey said.

Gannett News Service