Gulf Fish Cordoned Off For Seafood Sniffers' Inspection
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Food and Drug Administration are running a seafood safety testing operation in the Gulf. Officials have closed off more than a third of the federal fishing waters to prevent tainted fish from coming to market. They're also training "seafood sniffers" to assess samples for possible contamination.
LIANE HANSEN, Host:
The massive oil spill is taking a toll on the people who live and work along the Gulf Coast. Mike Voisin and his family have an oyster business in Houma, Louisiana. He's also the past president of National Fisheries Institute.
M: There are some challenges. And I'm hoping, you know, last week, we had some openings of recreational fishing here in Louisiana. About 86 percent of Louisiana opened up. We're hoping soon we can get the commercial areas opened up, as well. And we still have about 50 percent of the commercial operations open. So with that, we still produce a lot of seafood products down here. And people need to be aware of that and they need to know that it's being tested.
HANSEN: And to help determine when waters closed to fishing can be reopened, NPR's Kathy Lohr has more.
KATHY LOHR: John Stein is head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's inspection program. He says with all the technology available, one of the most effective tools for sensing tainted seafood is still your nose.
D: And if you think about your ability to detect something in your refrigerator, it has an off odor, you can detect it at very, very low levels.
LOHR: State employees and professors, 56 of them who live along the Gulf Coast, have been called into sniffing duty. The FDA and NOAA conduct training for these people who are the first line of defense.
P: I'm Lucina Lampila. I'm an associate professor with Louisiana State University. We are in a food processing lab here in the food science building.
LOHR: Lampila is one of the local sniffers and she set up a test for us. Covered glass casseroles sit on a table. Some contain corn, cucumbers and watermelon - these are just cleansing agents. Others hold raw shrimp. We open a lid and take what Lampila describes as small bunny sniffs.
P: Really fresh seafood, the typical consumer shouldn't be able to smell much of anything.
LOHR: But when we test a bowl of shrimp that Lampila tainted with a small amount of ammonia, it's pungent and putrid.
P: It smells bad and it's decomposition aroma of that. Eww. I didn't want to use the actual oil with the some of the volatile hydrocarbons that are in there just, you know, for safety purposes.
LOHR: These screeners don't have to determine what type of contamination is in the samples; whether that's oil, dispersant or something else. They only detect whether a sample is normal by testing it against a baseline of seafood caught before the spill.
P: Believe me, I don't believe someone would go ahead and attempt to eat something that is tainted, because it is very aromatic and it's quite unpleasant.
LOHR: Steve Wilson is NOAA's chief quality officer. He participated in the training.
M: You have known experts who are in the room who, in fact, can help direct the trainees towards this is sort of smell you should be getting. You might get it in your tongue. You might get it in the back of your nasal cavity. You might feel it right here.
LOHR: NOAA's Steve Wilson.
M: Even though it may be safe to consume, if you smell oil, people won't want to buy fish and so the market gets depressed as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
LOHR: One of the largest markets in Louisiana is Tony's Seafood in Baton Rouge, where Bill Pizzolato is one of the owners.
M: We have just have an assortment of different kind of fish: catfish, freshwater buffalo and goo. You know, different varieties of fish, our farm-raised fish, red fish out of Texas. Then we have shrimp...
LOHR: Pizzolato says he now has lots of frozen seafood on hand, fish caught in the months before the spill. His father started this market 50 years ago. And he says he knows the locals here, who have continually monitored the spill and the areas open for fishing.
M: We try to be sure that our seafood is safe and knowing the source where it comes from, and just try to just take it and hopefully we'll get through all this and get by.
LOHR: Kathy Lohr, NPR News.
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