Professors investigate effects of oil spill

Penn researchers are taking part in new efforts to assess how last year’s massive oil spill off the Gulf Coast has affected seafood and those who rely on it for food and fishing.

A five-year, $25.2-million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Science will fund several projects to explore what some scientists in the field say is a lack of findings and literature on oil spills in general, as well as their effects on specific populations, marine life and human consumption of seafood from these waters, lead researcher and Penn pharmacology professor Trevor Penning said.

Penn will have a direct hand in three of the four research projects, according Penning, who is director of Penn’s Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology, one of 18 such centers designated by NIEHS. Penn researchers will work closely with a University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston team headed by UTMB professor of pharmacology and toxicology Cornelis Elferink, who said Penn’s role is “absolutely essential.”

This is a “golden example of research collaboration between NIEHS centers,” Elferink added.

Despite concerns from local communities and environmental groups, the federal government has encouraged the consumption of seafood from the area. President Barack Obama was photographed last summer eating shrimp while meeting with residents of Grand Isle, La. about clean-up efforts to help offset images of oil-soaked birds that dominated the news from the early days of the disaster.

The five-month long spill marks the largest oil spill to date, beginning on April 20, 2010, and continuing over the course of the next 86 days. Estimates figure that nearly five million barrels of oil were released out of the Macondo oil well and into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill was eventually stopped in September.

Following a study by the Food and Drug Administration released in December, the federal government officially stated that seafood caught off the Gulf Coast was safe. The study found no sample tested above the “level of concern,” an official term used to describe the lifetime cancer risk within the tested foods.

But the formula for determining such a “level of concern” has been widely criticized, along with the sample sizes and frequency of testing. The Times-Picayune of New Orleans reported that one subject used in the research, for example, consumed four shrimp and one oyster per month and weighed about 175 pounds.

“These figures leave out large populations,” NIEHS spokesman Ed Kang said. Children, older women and various racial minorities — whom Kang called “populations of concern” — wouldn’t be taken into account.

Kang also said that many people in the area are much more reliant on seafood in their diet, pointing to fishermen and other workers exposed daily to the water. The effects, he added, are unknown. “There’s a real absence in the field,” he said.

Penning and his colleagues anticipate finding different contaminants in the seafood than those that have been studied previously. This petrogenic contaminant — meaning that it comes directly from oil — has not been studied extensively enough to know what levels are actually toxic, according to Penning. Some of the research will test the people who consume seafood instead of direct seafood flesh to focus on the populations of concern, he added.

“Findings will be used directly as a dialogue of long and short-term effects within the communities,” Penning said.

In addition to simply recording and analyzing data, the researchers hope to help concerned communities.

“These communities are inherently suspicious of government announcements of security,” Elferink said.

Penning added that the researchers don’t plan “to wait for a peer-reviewed journal to publish” before using any findings to inform those who “rely on this seafood as a staple,” whether it be for food or work.

“That’s ethics,” he said.

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