Strange Brew

Alarming Levels of Oil and Toxins Found in LA Oysters

Results of sampling performed by the Lower Mississippi River Keeper in the Lower Atchafalaya Bay area on August 2, 2010

East of Oyster Bayou, LA:

* Soil: 378 mg/kg Hydrocarbons and six Polynuclear Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) (0.222 mg/kg)
* Oiled vegetation: 2.3% Hydrocarbons and 31 PAHs (0.554 mg/kg)
* Fiddler & Blue Crab: 2,230 mg/kg hydrocarbons
* Oysters: 8,815 mg/kg Hydrocarbons

Results of sampling performed by the Lower Mississippi River Keeper in the Mississippi River Delta on August 3, 2010

Mouth of Pass-a-Loutre:

* Sediment contained 71 mg/kg Hydrocarbons and 14 PAHs (0.8713 mg/kg)
* Mussels: 6,900 mg/kg Hydrocarbons and seven PAHs (0.386 mg/kg)
* Oysters: 12,500 mg/kg (1.25%) Hydrocarbons and two PAHs (0.063 mg/kg)
* Sandy soil: 29 to 38 PAHs (3.7259 to 3.934 mg/kg)
* Soil from vegetation behind beach: 0.4 to 1.16 % Hydrocarbons, and 20 to 40 PAHs (49 to 189 mg/kg)

Wait, I thought there was no Gulf oil disaster and that the beaches and marshes were cleaner than ever? I thought that BP says there never was a problem, and I know I saw Barry Soetorobama on TV eating a fish taco... Only if you paid attention, as Mike Rivero pointed out, the president brought all of his food with him from Washington for his brief Gulf trip.

I do not like oysters or any other seafood, luckily for me, but if you want to grab some fresh Gulf oysters in Louisiana, you'll be eating only 98.75% oyster. The remaining 1.25% will be oil. And not the healthy Omega oils found naturally in fish, but BP's heavy crude. What is even more alarming are what this article for some reason refers to as "polynuclear" aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs for short -- I've always heard that class of poisons referred to as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, but the semantics are not important. What is important is what these things do to people and animals and vegetation. Wikipedia says:

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), also known as poly-aromatic hydrocarbons or polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons are potent atmospheric pollutants that consist of fused aromatic rings and do not contain heteroatoms or carry substituents.[1] Napthalene is the simplest example of a PAH. PAHs occur in oil, coal, and tar deposits, and are produced as byproducts of fuel burning (whether fossil fuel or biomass). As a pollutant, they are of concern because some compounds have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic.

Carcinogenic is a term everyone is familiar with, and nearly everyone knows that mutagenic means that a chemical, a radiation source or what have you causes damage to DNA. Most people who do not have a background in a hard science do not know what the third term refers to, and it is the most frightening. Teratogenic means that the chemicals now being found in the soil, vegetation and marine life in Louisiana can cause damage to future generations -- to human fetuses as well as to new oysters, fish, plants and everything else trying to survive BP's oil disaster.

Barry Soetoro has officially announced that Gulf seafood is perfectly safe to eat, and the FDA issued a report stating that unless the seafood should smell strongly of oil, it is safe for human consumption. This is patently false and the president knows it. This is part of the continuing cover-up in the Gulf of Mexico, and Soetoro is trying to keep the true scope of the environmental damage under his new rug he ordered for the Red House until November. Then, after the Dimocrats suffer their worst-ever losses, maybe he can be bothered to start letting the truth out and begin actually cleaning up the Gulf states.

But so far the government has done nothing whatsoever to investigate the safety of the seafood and the crops in the Gulf region. It has been individual citizens, local news teams and universities who have taken up the initiative and gone around sampling and sending the samples to labs for tests. The government does not seem to care a whit about the toxic brew of water, oil, methane and poison chemicals which BP is responsible for, and which the people of the Gulf states are being harmed by. Those two entities must be held accountable for their crimes and punished justly.