As the oil well crippled by the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion continues to spill oil into the Gulf, officials from the Food and Drug Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are working to determine whether Gulf seafood is safe to eat, and which fishing waters need to stay closed. And they’re doing it with a panel of olfactory experts who use their noses to test seafood samples for contamination, The Washington Post reports.
“It’s a very specialized skill set,” Steve Wilson, chief quality officer for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s seafood inspection program, told The Post. “There are people who just can’t smell.”
The smell testers aren’t the only line of defense against contaminated food. Seafood that passes the sniff test is sent to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Seattle for chemical analysis, but the tests take three to five days, while the sniffers, who are accurate about 80 percent of the time, can smell their way through 36 samples per day. They are trained to smell contaminants down to 10 parts per million.
Currently, officials are focusing on making sure that the seafood in waters that have not yet been closed is still safe. So far, tests have not found any contaminated food in those areas, the Post reports:
About 34 percent of the gulf has been closed to commercial fishing by federal order. States control waters nearer to shore, and Louisiana has shut down 76 percent of the 2.1 million acres of water where oysters are harvested, according to state officials.
Officials with the state’s Department of Health and Hospitals said the closures are their first line of defense against having contaminated seafood enter the market, but some fishermen — many of whom have been out of work for more than two months — have criticized the efforts as too aggressive.
In Louisiana, officials have issued 460 criminal citations for commercial fishing in closed areas. When fishermen get back to shore, they must document where they made their catch.
If contaminated food did make it to the market, consumers would likely suffer gastrointestinal discomfort. It is possible that long-term exposure could lead to cancer.
But, experts say, if contaminated seafood actually made it to the dinner table, it’s likely consumers would be able to tell by the taste.
