“Seafood sniffers” deployed to Gulf states to monitor and prevent contamination

Now that the Gulf has been subjected to almost two months of oil contamination and with fishermen still bringing in their catch, one might ask, "How safe is this seafood now and how is it being tested?"

A third of federal waters and hundreds of square miles of state waters were closed off to fisherman. Now, trained inspectors in federal fisheries labs and on the docks of the four-state region of the Gulf are diligently sniffing out (literally) traces of oil contamination on seafood that is being hauled in.

William Mahan, agricultural extension director with the University of Florida and now a trained inspector at a fisheries lab in Pascagoula, Miss., stated to Huffington Post: "We're being trained to detect different levels of taint, which in this case is oil. We started out sniffing different samples of oil to sort of train our noses and minds to recognize it."

This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2010.