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Wisconsin Food Safety Lab Helping Test Seafood from the Gulf
Wisconsin Ag Connection - 06/24/2010

Wisconsin's food safety laboratory in Madison is one of four such facilities in the nation 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," said State Ag Secretary Rod Nilsestuen. "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 facility 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.

Meanwhile, 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.


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