Who Decides How Safe Is Safe

作者：未知     来源：网络     更新：2010-9-4     栏目：心灵鸡汤

【热点导读】：To See You  快乐工作的新奥秘  Beautiful Day, Isn’t It

Who Decides How Safe Is Safe

文 章来源于 www.3edu.net
    The shopper stood staring at the large, ice-covered shrimp in the chiller-case of the high-end Seattle grocery.
    "Fresh. Wild Gulf Shrimp. Never Frozen. $16.99 lb." read the sign.
    "They're my favorites, but are they safe?" the woman asked the fishmonger.
    "We couldn't and wouldn't sell them if they weren't," he answered, and quickly added that someone is testing the hell out of everything coming from the gulf.
    He was telling the truth.
    But several questions remain to be answered for consumers:
    * Petroleum contamination is known to cause cancer and brain damage. But how much oil and gas does it take to make seafood dangerous?
    * Who's in charge of determining how safe is safe?
    * The Food and Drug Administration is supposedly the nation's food protector. What exactly is FDA's role in this process?
    * How can you really tell where seafood is coming from? Is there any way to distinguish a gulf shrimp from a Pacific one?
    AOL News spent the past two weeks chasing down precisely who is doing that testing and how they decide what is safe to eat.
    The analysis is important. Public health experts say they are not concerned about E. coli or salmonella coming from seafood heavily tainted with oil. What they fear is the possibility of cancer or neurologic impact.
    Analyzing whether dangerous contaminants are in the seafood is an intricate process that uses a complex array of CSI-like instruments that can find bad things down to the parts per billion level.
    But these are everyday tasks for marine biologists, toxicologists and other technical wizards in Louisiana state laboratories in Baton Rouge and in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. These are the two primary sites scrutinizing thousands of samples of shrimp, crab and fin fish gathered from the Gulf of Mexico.
    The multiple chemical analyses have detected no harmful level of contaminants, both labs say.
    But the scientific determination of whether the seafood is tainted from the still-flowing oil is only half the battle.
    Those with the knowledge and proper equipment can measure the level of contaminants. But the decision to declare the food safe or not appears to be a thornier debate, sometimes fraught with political implications, finger-pointing and, occasionally, debilitating fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.
    "Government decisions on what should or should not be done with potentially contaminated food are often influenced by everyone who has a stake in the outcome," says Jay Shimshack, an assistant professor of environmental economics at Tulane University.
    "In this case, we might reasonably expect the oil industry or its lobbying organizations to represent their own interests during the relevant policy making process," he said.
    This is how the concerns among the players appear to break down:
    * BP and other oil interests want the food declared safe to limit its liability and to halt further erosion of the industry's reputation.
    * The crabbers, shrimpers, fishers and processors want to continue selling the oil-free seafood they're harvesting and keep longtime commercial customers -- some better restaurants and persnickety shoppers -- from fleeing to foreign suppliers.
    * The public health experts just want to ensure the safety of what's being sold.
    However, the wording of the public advisories is crucial.
    Shimshack, an expert on the risks and benefits of seafood consumption, cautions that consumers tend to overreact to negative information.
    He says that health officials need to manage the risk trade-offs of potential contamination from fish consumption versus the loss of health benefits from reduction in fish consumption.
    Often, he says, those who rely on seafood for their very subsistence because of its availability will switch to a diet of often less-healthy ground meat and macaroni and cheese.
    He warns that it's difficult to match the significant health benefits of fish and shellfish: rich in protein, low in undesirable fats and high in nutrients and healthful omega-3 fatty acids.
    The professor urges that potentially contaminated seafood be kept out of the food chain and then the public be advised that the remaining available seafood is safe to eat, which is what several government agencies are attempting to do.
    Who's in Charge?
    State

[1] [2] [3] 下一页

文 章来源于 www.3edu.net

---

---