NOLA Law Firm: Gulf Seafood STILL Toxic

[Patrick Degan]

Howzabout some degreaser sauce with your unrefined light shrimp?

NOLA lawyer prepares challenge to declaration of Gulf seafood’s safety

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010 -- 4:32 pm

An environmental law firm in New Orleans said it was preparing to challenge the government's public declaration that following the nation's worst-ever oil disaster, seafood from the Gulf of Mexico remained safe to eat.

Stuart H. Smith, Esq., of the law firm Smith Stag, LLC., was leading the charge, rallying additional litigants to his side through a website called Oil Spill Action.

He's the attorney who secured a verdict awarding over $1 billion over the radium contamination of leased land due to oil drilling.

"Mr. Smith’s litigation experience includes a lawsuit against Ashland Oil for contaminating the Lee aquifer, once one of the largest sources of fresh water for residents in eastern Kentucky," his self-published bio claims. "He also sued Chevron Corporation for damages associated with that company’s contamination of the groundwater in the rural town of Brookhaven, Mississippi. His firm also represents clients injured by chemicals and defective drugs."

One of the toxicologists on Smith's litigation team pursuing BP was Dr. William Sawyer, who Raw Story spoke with in November.

Even then, he was calling the Food and Drug Administration's safety test "little more than a farce."

"They did not test the [total petroleum hydrocarbons] (TPH) in their samples," he said, calling his testing methodologies a much more comprehensive way of examining compounds present in seafood when compared to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tests.

Dr. Sawyer added that some of his test samples came from seafood on its way to market, pulled from waters that had only recently been classified as safe for commercial fishing activities.

"The sensory test employed by the FDA detects compounds that are volatile that have an odor; we're detecting compounds that are low volatility and are very low odor," he added. "We found not only petroleum in the digestive tracts [of shrimp], but also in the edible portions of fish. We've collected shrimp, oysters and finned fish on their way to marketplace -- we tested a good number of seafood samples and in 100 percent we found petroleum."

The FDA says up to 100 parts-per-million (PPM) of oil and dispersant residue is safe to consume in finned fish, and 500-PPM is allowed for shellfish.

Adding up the claims

"We are in the process of working up the damage claims on behalf of our clients and hoping to present those as soon as we can because the people need relief now," Smith told Raw Story on Tuesday.

"We represent everything from seafood retailers to shrimpers to crabbers to real estate developers," he said, noting that damages to be claimed will be "all over the place."

The claims were to target firms responsible for the oil spill, including BP, Transocean, Anadarko Petroleum, MOEX Offshore and Halliburton. Smith's clients included the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, among others.

"They want to see if they can get full recovery," Smith said. "Our job at this point is to build the damage claims, find out what it costs these businesses, what sort of environmental damages occurred and how much it'll cost to undo. Once we have all that, and we're pretty close, we'll sit down with them and see if we can get a deal. If not, we'll see them in court."

He added that his firm was "continuing to be retained by litigants with damage claims" related to the oil spill, and that observers could expect further litigation as cases develop.

Smith's efforts were noticed by MSNBC, which covered the gathering challenge to the government's declaration in a Monday feature by reporter Kari Huus.

Huus, who also spoke to Dr. Sawyer, noted that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shared his concern that the FDA's testing is inadequate. MSNBC similarly reached out to Dr. Susan Shaw, who Raw Story also spoke to in November.

Shaw, a marine toxicologist at the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Blue Hill, Maine -- who was not involved in Smith's litigation -- said that all the various components of crude oil "can damage every organ" in the human body.

"There is no safe level of exposure to this oil, because it contains carcinogens, mutagens that can damage DNA and cause cancer and other chronic health problems," she told Raw Story. "Many people in the Gulf have been exposed for months -- not just workers but residents. There are hundreds of health complaints from local people with symptoms that resemble symptoms of oil exposure. It will be years, possibly decades, before we understand the extent and nature of the health effects caused by this spill."

The initial effects of oil toxicity from ingestion include headaches, nausea, fatigue and rapid changes in mental state. It is unclear whether regular consumption of oil-tainted seafood would sicken a person, how quickly its symptoms would begin to show, or in what ways they would manifest.

Scientists with the US Geological Survey and US Department of Energy estimate BP spilled at or near 4.9 million barrels -- or approximately 666,400 metric tons of crude -- making BP's 2010 Gulf spill the worst accidental release of oil in human history.

Not once did I believe the pronouncement from the EPA that gulf seafood was safe to eat. Mere months after the gusher? Who were they fucking kidding?

[erik_t]

I'd put vastly more stock into a journal article than I will into a for-profit lawsuit.

[Kon_El]

we tested a good number of seafood samples and in 100 percent we found petroleum."

The FDA says up to 100 parts-per-million (PPM) of oil and dispersant residue is safe to consume in finned fish, and 500-PPM is allowed for shellfish.

Where is the concentration level found in the fish? If it is less than the FDA numbers where is the case?

Shaw, a marine toxicologist at the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Blue Hill, Maine -- who was not involved in Smith's litigation -- said that all the various components of crude oil "can damage every organ" in the human body.

"There is no safe level of exposure to this oil, because it contains carcinogens, mutagens that can damage DNA and cause cancer and other chronic health problems,"

No safe level of exposure? What about the oil that just seeps up out of the ocean floor naturally? Are we all going to die?

[General Zod]

we tested a good number of seafood samples and in 100 percent we found petroleum."

The FDA says up to 100 parts-per-million (PPM) of oil and dispersant residue is safe to consume in finned fish, and 500-PPM is allowed for shellfish.

Where is the concentration level found in the fish? If it is less than the FDA numbers where is the case?

Shaw, a marine toxicologist at the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Blue Hill, Maine -- who was not involved in Smith's litigation -- said that all the various components of crude oil "can damage every organ" in the human body.

"There is no safe level of exposure to this oil, because it contains carcinogens, mutagens that can damage DNA and cause cancer and other chronic health problems,"

No safe level of exposure? What about the oil that just seeps up out of the ocean floor naturally? Are we all going to die?

Doesn't pretty much any food that's been smoked, grilled or cooked over any type of flame have carcinogens?

[Sea Skimmer]

Doesn't pretty much any food that's been smoked, grilled or cooked over any type of flame have carcinogens?

That it does, hundreds of different ones in some instances, but not all carcinogens are equally dangerous. I'm sure however everyone also remembers how they said the air at the World Trade Center site was safe to breath and now hundreds of millions of dollars is going to sick cleanup workers just seven years later. Many of them were sick in a year flat.

[Lagmonster]

This article reeks of hyperventilating environmentalist bullshit, with a rich cream of frothy lawyer blood frenzy on top.

I already share most of these scare pieces with my father for the laughs, and he's a former and retired researcher and director at Agriculture Canada's Food Inspection Agency who had been taking this stuff seriously for forty years. At the end of the day, just say fuck it and enjoy your FDA-approved fish. Considering the public scrutiny involved and the piles of cash being applied into assessing food safety from that region, I'll wager that gulf seafood is probably going to remain, at least for the next five years, the most tightly monitored and controlled shit in the world.

From an overall food standpoint (ie whether you, personally, in Bumfuck, Indiana should be worried about your McDonald's McFish sandwich), it's also needlessly alarmist - the US imports between 80 and 90 percent of its seafood. The water the average American schmo should be worried about isn't south of him.

It's also worth mentioning that FDA scientists already state that most common cancer-causing compounds in oil are actually quickly metabolized and taken care of in the bodies of finfish and some crustaceans (unlike mercury). That's obviously not a license to go raw-food fishing off of Louisiana's coast willy-nilly, but it's a reason to calm down and stop panicking.

[Broomstick]

Personally, I'm more concerned about fish imported from China - the land of toxic pet food, baby formula, and dry wall - than caught in the Gulf of Mexico.

The people quoted in the OP have a vested interest in proving Gulf seafood toxic whether it actually is or not. Read with huge grain of salt.

The term "no safe level" should be a quack warning on the same level as an ad for a drug that "cures all ills". ALL food contains detectable levels of toxins, ALL of it, and it always has. Some of it is soaked up from the environment, some comes up the food chain, and some of it is produced by the animal or plant itself as a defense against predators. This is why we have organs like liver and kidneys to detoxify our bodies and get rid of toxins.

[Commander 598]

As someone who has eaten a sizable number of Gulf crustaceans since the spill, meh.

Also, "Louisiana Lawyer" is has got to be the least trustworthy combination of words I've ever seen.

[Rogue 9]

I can't help but be reminded that it was a law firm looking to cash in that brought us the vaccine scare. I'm not inclined to trust lawyers touting what they say is scientific fact.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

I'm hedging my bets both ways. I'm running a five-year shrimp boycott (crawfish is ok) and trying my damnedest to stay the hell away from all Louisiana 'Gators of both the toothy and the legal kind. I wish our fishermen the best, however. We didn't deserve to have an oil company blow up our ocean with Powerword: Corporate Malfeasance anyway. Our people have suffered enough in the last three decades as it is!

[Alyrium Denryle]

Knowing what I do about how horrendously corrupt the upper echelons of the EPA (and the entire department of the interior) are, and then given the amount of oil, where it was, and bio-accumulation...

Yeah no. I do not believe for a second that this shit is safe. We are talking about the government body that gave Atrazine a clean bill of health, even though concentrations a couple orders of magnitude lower than what is permitted in drinking water makes transsexual frogs.

No.

[Lagmonster]

Jesus Christ, Alyrium, can you say anything without sounding like you're crazy? Unless you have a different explanation for how it sounds when you say that researchers from the FDA who monitor Gulf fisheries are somehow deceptive assholes because of a beef you have about a completely separate conclusion by the EPA on an herbicide.

"Knowing what I know about the corrupt EPA", my aching ass. Fuck, if we're going to point fingers at people on suspicion of being shifty agenda-pushing assholes, how about we start with how Tyrone Hayes is an unprofessional dickhead whose idea of a good time is to spam obscenities at corporations he doesn't like and whose conclusions have been found highly questionable by independant researchers who have evaluated or tried to replicate his work?

[Broomstick]

Alyrium, it is possible to say "I think the lawyer has an agenda and is mis-representing the facts" while also not trusting the EPA at the same time.

You know, there's a reason my landlord independently tests the water supplied by wells on his property and doesn't just rely on the government to check for contamination. I understand the trust problem.

But, seriously - this kind of lawyer is exactly the sort that brought us the "vaccines cause autism" bullshit that has probably destroyed more lives than actual adverse vaccine reactions.

[Alyrium Denryle]

It is not the researchers or line regulators I am worried about. It is the people making the end decisions about what is permitted. I know of cases--in this very region, regarding contractors working on oil cleanup--where someone paid a lot of money to be allowed to dump oil/dispersant slurry into a major drinking water source. It was actually the line regulators who got the document essentially by mistake that did the internal whistleblower thing.

I was talking to that regulator at a nerd party not long ago. That is what she dealt with that day.

Pardon me being cynical.

Fuck, if we're going to point fingers at people on suspicion of being shifty agenda-pushing assholes, how about we start with how Tyrone Hayes is an unprofessional dickhead whose idea of a good time is to spam obscenities at corporations he doesn't like and whose conclusions have been found highly questionable by independant researchers who have evaluated or tried to replicate his work?

You mean the same researchers who are actually paid by the company making the pesticide? Those ones? Oh wait, you mean this failed replication?


Langlois VS et al. 2010. Low Levels of the Herbicide Atrazine Alter Sex Ratios and Reduce Metamorphic Success in Rana pipiens Tadpoles Raised in Outdoor Mesocosms. ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES 118(4):552-557

How about a meta-analysis, which incorporates a few more?

Rohr JR, McCoy KA. 2010. A Qualitative Meta-Analysis Reveals Consistent Effects of Atrazine on Freshwater Fish and Amphibians. ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES 118(1):20-32

Now, is there inconsistency in the data? Sure. Of course there is. Amphibian development is really really flexible, and a lot of stuff can mess with it. However when you get down to it, the studies that fail to replicate Hayes results come from a set of sources which is rather suspect. Those who are funded by Sygenta. In fact, if you run a Fisher's Exact Test on the data, you find that the funding source (Sygenta vs Non-Sygenta) has a strong effect on the results, which is accounted for by experimental methodology. I hardly call that "independent". TB Hayes' methods are squeaky clean. He goes through hoops few other researchers bother with to keep his analyses blind.

Of course Tyrone is pissed off. I would be pissed off too if the EPA said "no further study is needed" with such inconsistent and suspiciously arranged experimental results. Particularly when the guy who runs the EPA panel used to be on Sygenta's board of directors IIRC. Can you define "conflict of interest" for me? I do not exactly trust the people making the decisions to be honest under those conditions, and considering the issues I laid out above, and the lack of real accountability for BP, which should have by all rights been forced to restore every square meter of coastline as per the Clean Water Act, and been debarred from US oil contracts forever, I do not trust our government to do its job in general, in this respect. Also, see below about some of the methodological flaws in how the EPA does business.

Alyrium, it is possible to say "I think the lawyer has an agenda and is mis-representing the facts" while also not trusting the EPA at the same time.

Naturally, I never said otherwise.

Hell, Gulf Coast Seafood might even be safe currently. However, that is because the toxins which do bioaccumulate may not have had the time to work their way through the food chain, concentrating with each successive generation of zooplankton being eaten fish etc.

Now, lets pretend for a moment that the EPA is a shiny beacon of incorruptible light in the otherwise corrupt and industry beholden department of the interior, and that they all uniformly have the best of intentions. Their actual methodology is shit. They rely almost exclusively on acute toxicity testing of active compounds. In terms of oil, that means that only doses directly harmful (like, for example, causing liver failure in mice) are disallowed, with some wiggle room to adjust for differences between people and lab rats in physiology. They do not (or cannot for practical reasons) do long term studies, and they do not actually use the peer reviewed literature in their analyses to look for that. They also do not examine the effects of supposedly inactive ingredients, or combinations of compounds that may be taken up by organisms in the same system. The FDA and USDA have the same issues.

So, lets take a pesticide again. Roundup. Roundup is safe for amphibians. It really is. The surfactant used in order to help it bind to plant tissues is not. However, because that surfactant is not the active ingredient in roundup, it is simply not regulated. Moreover, they will not prohibit combinations of pesticides--individually approved--which can have some really horrific non-additive effects, or regulate the additive effects. If certain concentrations are "safe" on their own, they are safe in any combination, even if the effects of dual/multiple exposures are acutely toxic. If the peer reviewed literature says that these things are toxic, that is not grounds to re-evaluate regulatory approval as a general rule.

So, even if the organization itself was not corrupt--which it is--they are still not trustworthy when it comes to things like long term health/environmental impact, or combined exposure to multiple toxic compounds.

[Lagmonster]

Pardon me being cynical.

The OP talked about how the plaintiffs feel that the test employed by the FDA on seafood is insufficient to ensure public safety.

You countered with "The plaintiffs are probably right about the FDA because the EPA dismissed research which may indicate harm towards something unrelated". Do you see how that looks a lot like personal paranoia being extrapolated?

However when you get down to it, the studies that fail to replicate Hayes results come from a set of sources which is rather suspect. Those who are funded by Sygenta. In fact, if you run a Fisher's Exact Test on the data, you find that the funding source (Sygenta vs Non-Sygenta) has a strong effect on the results, which is accounted for by experimental methodology. I hardly call that "independent".

So you're saying that the other attempts at replication by the Germans (Werner Kloas, Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin), by the Japanese (Iguchi, Okazaki Institute for Integrative Bioscience) and the review by the Australians (Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority), etc., were all biased by liaison to Syngenta. And even if you do tie every single one of these replication attempts to Syngenta, I can't even begin to imagine how you decided that the only side capable of pushing flawed data in order to further an agenda would be the corporation.

TB Hayes' methods are squeaky clean. He goes through hoops few other researchers bother with to keep his analyses blind.

The SAP that made the EPA determination - twice - made a point of noting that they found flaws in his methodology. The white paper they reviewed is available online. I'll even spot you the link, so you can read the criticisms of Hayes' work. Full disclosure: I can't debate the science with you. Even if I wanted to, I lack the knowledge of the subject. But you might just possibly want to read the white paper regardless of what you take away from it, because I get the feeling you're so tied to your devotion to the frogs that you don't want to see criticisms that might take away both a valueable ally and a tangible enemy.

My point has always been that a) Hayes is a giant dickhead who went unpunished for his bad behaviour, for which there seems to be no excuse b) that criticism exists of his work which must be considered in any sensible continuation of the subject and not just dismissed with "agrees with Syngenta, therefore is wrong", and most importantly that c) even if Hayes was right about your little side-quest it has an insignificant bearing on the OP's FDA dispute other than as a manifestation of your distrust of government.

[Xisiqomelir]

I hadn't heard of Tyrone Hayes before this thread, thanks Alyrium.

On-topic, I wouldn't eat any Gulf seafood either. I've been going off seafood in general because of the mercury levels.