DATCP: Feds tap Wisconsin food safety lab for help in BP oil spill recovery

Contact: Donna Gilson 608-224-5130

MADISON — Wisconsin’s food safety laboratory at the Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection is one of four state-run labs in the country that will be testing Gulf of Mexico seafood for oil contamination in an effort to reopen fisheries and assure product safety in the aftermath of the BP oil spill.

“The fishermen, their families and the people who rely on them for work have been among those hardest hit by the devastating effects of the BP oil spill,” DATCP Secretary Rod Nilsestuen said. “We are eager to help the recovery effort and use our food safety lab to test for oil contamination and help the seafood workers move forward.”

DATCP’s food safety laboratory volunteered to help because of the staff’s experience with the necessary instrumentation and history of testing Great Lakes fish, lab director Steve Sobek said. The lab will test seafood, primarily shrimp and oysters, for petroleum and petroleum byproducts. It will receive about $250,000 worth of scientific equipment to conduct the tests. Sobek expects to have instrumentation in place and testing to begin by the end of July.

“Even though we are 1,000 miles from the Gulf, our mission as public servants is to use our special expertise and do our part to contribute to the national response to the oil spill disaster,” Sobek said.

The Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are working together to assure that seafood taken from the Gulf is free of contamination from the oil spill. The first part of the testing will be to take baseline samples to see what is normal. Then, as fisheries closed by the oil slick are cleansed, seafood from those areas will be tested for safety before reopening the areas to fishing.

The other three state labs testing Gulf seafood are in Arizona, California and Florida. Four federal laboratories will also be involved. The laboratories will use a method of testing fish for contamination that was used following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. It is a complicated and time-consuming method, but has withstood both scientific and legal scrutiny.

The Wisconsin lab is part of a network of state laboratories that the federal Food Emergency Response Network, or FERN, can call on during emergencies. It is also one of just 15 state labs to receive extra federal FERN funding for staff, training and supplies equivalent to Food and Drug Administration labs, so they can assist in cases of national food contamination.