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On November 13, the FDA announced indefinite postponement of rules requiring raw oysters from the Gulf of Mexico to undergo postharvest processing to destroy their content of Vibrio vulnificus, a particularly nasty "flesh-eating" bacterium. According to accounts in the New York Times and in industry newsletters, the FDA caved under pressure from the oyster industry and members of Congress representing oyster-harvesting regions in the Gulf.
The FDA has been trying for years to get the oyster industry to clean up its act and use post-harvest technologies to sterilize oysters in order to prevent the 15 or so deaths they cause every year. The technologies include quick freezing, frozen storage, high hydrostatic pressure, mild heat, and low dose gamma irradiation. When used, the methods reduce bacteria to undectable levels and deaths from Vibrio vulnificus infections to zero. As the FDA puts it, "seldom is the evidence on a food safety problem and solution so unambiguous." ...
The newspapers and the Internet are full of reports that men exposed to bisphenol A (BPA) have higher levels of erectile dysfunction. Before going into a panic, take a look at the study details. This one was a survey of factory workers in China exposed to exceptionally high levels of this endocrine-disrupting chemical.
(BPA is found in many plastics, food packaging and in the lining of most cans.)
What does the study mean for men exposed to much lower levels? We don’t have a clue. But we’ve heard plenty of unsettling things about BPA (see previous posts), including accounts by Jill Richardson and others of the extraordinary efforts of industry lobbyists to prevent officials from banning BPA. This new research suggests that a ban is a pretty good idea, even if most people are not harmed by small amounts.
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