The White House, the FDA and the Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board are teaming up with a group of celebrity chefs to promote the eating of Gulf Seafood.

It isn’t “sexy news” to discuss a higher percentage of cancers for small children who eat Gulf seafood more than once a month. But pointing out to the media that the FDA has flawed testing protocols and have ignored safety concerns is news. NOAA using only 12 shrimp to prove the safety of 5,000 miles of the Gulf should be news to the media.

This Monday the media will be shoveling shrimp into their mouths and they might be concerned for their own health if they aren’t concerned for others.

It’s not my job to care about the little kids and pregnant women eating Gulf seafood. Nine years from now when questions are being asked the folks at the FDA can say, “Nobody could have anticipated…”

Where have I heard that line before?

Hurricane Earl is bearing down on the east coast this evening; tell us here at the Watercooler if you’re ready.

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger

Yesterday, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) took Obama administration officials to task for encouraging Americans to believe that the majority of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico had dispersed.

If there is no newsy disaster regulations won’t change.
When it comes to food safety an uptick in long term cancer rates is a snoozer. But if the children of rich white people who ate seafood from the Gulf start vomiting blood and bleeding from their rectum next Thursday then people who matter will make phone calls to people who can make changes. And things will change. Unless this happens the FDA can get away with not testing seafood from the Gulf for the chemicals in Corexit.

Yesterday, Time magazine published a disgusting screed telling us all to calm down about the hundreds of millions of gallons of crude oil BP has released into the Gulf of Mexico and then even sent the author to push his drivel on Hardball. In starting the corporate media’s push-back against the level of damage arising from BP’s irresponsibility, Time has joined a team that previously consisted of BP, Thad Allen, EPA and NOAA.

The federal government and many local agencies have been working with BP to limit access to information and scientific analysis of the oil spill in the Gulf. The time has come to place the entire response in the hands of an independent commission with access to BP and government resources to implement its response.

NOAA Director Dr. Jane Lubchenco last week called for plume sampling to pause while researchers coordinate sampling methods, saying that the large signal falloff shows that researchers need to know better what they are doing before they proceed with current sampling.

Dr. Samantha Joye, professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, whose research team first spotted evidence of vast undersea plumes of oil near the BP oil disaster, was on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night to explain the theory of how plumes form and the steps they were taking to confirm and plot the plumes’ size and reach.

As we are receiving guardedly optimistic news about the progress of the “top kill” operation, it is important to remember that capping the Deep Horizon well is only a small part of dealing with this disaster. The independent assessment group set up by the Obama administration puts the amount of oil spilled somewhere between 14 and 34 million gallons. This is a huge amount of toxic crude and it is still out there in the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the reasons that many in the public have been willing to accept the low-ball and self-serving estimates of BP is while there has been a huge amount of oil seen on the surface, it did not seem to be enough to give credence to the higher spill numbers. This maybe changing as a new and massive undersea plume has been found by a University of South Florida research vessel.

The plume is six miles wide and 3,300 feet deep, assuming the plume is a cone shape that gives it an area of 5.6 cubic miles. This is a huge and hidden section of oil. There is no way to know what will happen with this mass of oil. It could sink and coat the floor of the Gulf with oil, or it could come to the shore in Mississippi or Alabama. In any case the amount of toxic crude oil in the Gulf is going to be the ongoing problem.

We have very little understanding of the plumes that come form deep water leaks like this one. Yesterday in the Natural Resources Committee hearing on the BP oil disaster National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Director Lubchenco was grilled as to why this kind of plume had not been studied, even though there was a National Academy of Sciences’ recommendation going back to 2003.There has been some research done by MMS that predicted that there would be plumes, but up to now the independent scientists claims of plumes have been basically treated by the Administration as BS. Scarecrow gave us all the details in this post.

Too bad we can’t get any submarines down there to start tracking all that Oil, which scientists previously reported, looked to be spreading far and wide, at the mid-levels of the Gulf waters.

Luckily, the Scientist behind the first effort to track the underwater oil plumes, is mounting a second effort, with some new sciencey gadgets …