Take Action: FDA considering Irradiation of some sea food.

[JPace]

Click on this link or the one below to Public
Citizen, fill out your name and address and
a pre written letter will be sent in your name.
http://www.citizen.org/fax/background.cfm?ID=371&source...
(Irradiation is very bad for your health)
---------------------------------------------------------------

WESTON A. PRICE FOUNDATION
ACTION ALERT
December 14, 2004

Take Action - Tell the FDA Not to Approve Irradiation
for Seafood!

An industry trade association, National Fisheries Institute
(NFI), petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) and the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and
Forestry to allow for the irradiation of mollusks in 1999.
In 2001, NFI filed another petition with the FDA to allow
for the irradiation of crustaceans, including shrimp. FDA is
currently evaluating those petitions, while the industry is
pressuring the agency to move forward and approve the
petitions.

Irradiation is the process by which food is exposed to high
doses of radiation-the equivalent of up to 1 billion chest
x-rays. Irradiation kills bacteria and extends the shelf life
of food, but destroys vitamins and creates new chemical
compounds. Problems include, but are not limited to,
premature death, fatal internal bleeding, prenatal death,
suppressed immune systems, tumors, stunted growth and
nutritional deficiencies.

Irradiation addresses less than seven percent of contamination
found in seafood. In fact, if consumers believe their food to
be safe, they are less likely to follow strict handling and
cooking precautions and are more likely to get sick as a result.
If the seafood industry truly wants to protect consumers, it
should educate them about the real sources of poisonings,
instead of offering them a deceptive security blanket.

Send this letter (free) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by
clicking on the following link:

http://www.citizen.org/fax/background.cfm?ID=371&source...

Lauren Tarantino, Director
Office of Food Additive Safety (HFS-200)
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
Food and Drug Administration,
5100 Paint Branch Parkway
College Park, MD 20740-3835
fax: [phone]

Dear Ms. Tarantino:
Re: Docket No. 99F-4372 and Docket No. 01F-0047, amendment of Food
Additive regulations to allow for the irradiation of fresh
or frozen molluscan shellfish and crustaceans and processed
crustaceans.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my serious
concern over the petitions currently being considered by
the FDA regarding the irradiation of seafood. In 1999 and
2001, two petitions were submitted to the FDA Center for
Food Safety and Applied Nutrition by the National Fisheries
Institute to allow for the irradiation of seafood.Irradiation
is not an acceptable option for protecting consumers from
seafood poisoning. Instead, it may cause unnecessary health
concerns. I ask you to not approve this petition.

The level of irradiation necessary to kill naturally-occurring
bacteria in seafood will cause deterioration of texture and
juiciness, as shellfish are delicate foods. Low levels of
irradiation cannot kill all bacteria present in seafood. Irradiation
does not obliterate food-borne viruses that cause more than
9 million people to become sick annually. It also won't cleanse
seafood of methylmercury, which causes neurological birth
defects, or of the toxins that cause shellfish poisoning. More
importantly, irradiation will not protect consumers from the
top sources of seafood poisoning: unsafe holding temperature,
poor personal hygiene, inadequate cooking, and contaminated
equipment.

Irradiation not only offers consumers a false sense of security,
but also poses a host of health concerns to consumers. Recent
research has shown that one type of chemical created by
irradiation, alkylcyclobutanones, promotes cancer development
and genetic damage in rats and genetic damage in human cells.

As a concerned consumer, I am urging you not to allow the
irradiation of seafood. Thank you for considering my concerns.

Best Regards,
<your name>

[NNadir]

1. Recent research also demonstrates that cooking food promotes

cancer.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/07/020726081009.htm

I therefore submit that we should ban cooking, which given the number of persons who have gotten a false sense of security and actually died from undercooked meat. Cooking is clearly dangerous.

[JPace]

2. "I therefore submit that we should ban cooking,"

If it is such a concern to you perhaps you should start your own thread which should get far more attention than hiding here in this one.

[Muzzle Tough]

3. I see what's going on here!

"...... the irradiation of mollusks ....... the irradiation of crustaceans ....... exposed to high doses of radiation-the equivalent of up to 1 billion chest x-rays ........ creates new chemical
compounds ........"

Whoo hoo! We haven't had a new Godzilla movie in quite some time.

When do tickets go on sale?

[JPace]

4. Irradiation?

"Experiment, though, showed that IRRADIATION was a very effective means of killing bacteria and removing organics, but the water so obtained was TOXIC owing to a complex array of nitrogen intermediates, including the compounds above as well as diazines, hydrazines, hydrazoic acid, dinitrogen trioxide, dinitrogen tetraoxide, hyponitrous acid salts, oxohyponitrite salts and various organo nitrogen compounds, all radiochemically generated from amines and nitrates. (I would suspect though, that such a scheme would work under supercritical water - i.e. high temperature -conditions in the presence of organics or other reducing species, though to my knowledge this has not been tried.)"

Hmmmmm......

[NNadir]

5. We are talking about very different levels of radiation.

The experiments in the 50's involved very intense and long lived radiation. Complete radiolysis of organics requires this.

To point up the absurdity of your quotation of my post on another topic, I would suggest that you compare cooking a hamburger on a camp stove and comparing it to placing the hamburger in a high temperature hazardous waste incinerator. That the high temperature hazardous waste incinerator would make a less than palatable hamburger really has no bearing whatsoever on the subject of cooking unless you are unduly paranoid about all flames no matter the circumstances of their existence and at all levels of intensity.

In any case, you've made it clear how you feel about the subject. Like all issues involving all technologies, including the decision to create carcinogens by cooking food on stoves or outdoor grills, it is a risk benefit analysis that is important not blanket simplistic remarks like "Fire!" or "Irradiation." One can frame one's understandings in conceptions based on technology explored in the 1950's or for that matter, by 1950's Japanese monster movies in which radiation causes giant man eating ants to swallow Tokyo. Whether one does so or not, does not necessarily mean that one is actually minimizing one's risks.

As a whole, Americans are probably the most poorly educated risk/benefit analysts on the planet. That's our tough luck, because our curious myopias at the expense of our paranoid fantasies are rendering our planet completely uninhabitable.

Don't eat irradiated seafood. I really don't care. You won't have to worry about anything more than mercury toxicity and poisoning by micro-organisms from catches made in polluted waters. I would suspect that your expectation value for injury and/or death under such circumstances will be considerably higher eating food with no treatment than it is eating food that has escaped treatment because of public outcry. For my part, knowing something about radiolysis, I think I'll write the government a letter asking for broader radiation treatments of foodstuffs. I think you're erring on the side of higher risk and attempting to place me and my family at higher risk than we otherwise would experience.

It is true that some radiolytically created compund might in my individual case, end up killing me should it happen to wander by exactly the right piece of DNA, but this risk is infinitely smaller than that I face of being killed by bacterial contamination from seafood from polluted waters. Personally, I'm not really worried about radiolytically induced carcinogens. Most of the toxicity associated with radiation have to do (with the exception of nitrosamines like those found in bacon) have to do with unstable free radicals which do not persist for more than a few microseconds after the radiation has ceased.

Pretty much the same chemical bonds that are broken in radiolysis are broken in cooking food and in combustion. While it is probably true that hundreds of thousands have died from cooking their food, it is also true that many millions of lives have been saved by this by same practice. Salmonella toxicity would be killing millions yearly without cooking, for instance.

Based on my research into the matter, and my understanding of why the 1950's experiments didn't work very well, I hope that radiolysis of water contaminated by toxic organics under supercritical water conditions in the presence of suitable catalysts is explored once again. Catalysis was a very primitive science in 1950, as were many other related subjects, especially materials science. (It really wasn't possible even to create much supercritical water back then.) It is well known in modern times, in the golden age of chemistry and materials science, that one of the best practical means of destroying nitrogen compounds on a large scale is in supercritical water in the presence of reducing agents like organics. For instance, in supercritical water, nitrous oxide, nitrite and nitrate are all powerful oxidants, and under such conditions all are reduced to nitrogen gas. I expect that supercritical water under radiolytic conditions would be an ideal means of destroying many, many, many now intractable toxins besides nitrogen oxides. Polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT, CFC's, and many gasoline related compounds that now contaminate water all come to mind.

Thanks by the way for quoting my post on the other thread in the manner that you have done. I was very surprised when no one jumped on it as you did, and I was just itching for the chance to respond as I have.

[JPace]

6. "Cooking is clearly dangerous"

http://www.citizen.org/cmep/foodsafety/food_irrad/articles.cfm?ID=6516

"Ionizing radiation is a well-documented teratogen, mutagen and carcinogen whereas some other procedures for food decontamination/sterilization such as heat and steam ARE NOT."

[Maurkov]

10. Wow, talk about a misleading quote

Yes, ionizing radiation is a well-documented teratogen, mutagen, and carcinogen. But the procedure exposes food, not people, to the radiation. Allow me to be similarly alarmist:

They're using heat for decomtamination/sterilization? Did you know that heat can cause reproductive sterilization, and at significantly lower temperatures than used for decontamination? I demand they halt heat sterilization until the process can be made safe.

I actually agree with Dr. Au's other points, but damn.

[NNadir]

11. Minor point: Sworn affidavits in legal proceedings with paid witnesses

is not typically how science is done.

Scientific issues are usually sorted out in refereed journals. Anyone who has watched Court TV with conflicting "scientific experts" should have a notion of the how desperate referring to a "sworn affidavit" in a court case to prove a scientific point actually is.

Be that as it may, it is, however true, that ionizing radiation can be teratogenic (which is usually construed informally as being exactly the same as mutagenic) and carcinogenic. This is the case however, ONLY, in the case where the organism is directly exposed to this radiation and has nothing at all to do with eating something that has been exposed to it. There is a tremendous difference between these two states of affairs.

For the record, all seafood is naturally irradiated. There are three billion tons of Uranium in the ocean. Even ignoring the 20 or so nuclides in the Uranium decay chain, where most of the radioactivity resides, this amount of radiation represents 45 trillion Bequerels of radiation. If we counted the thorium, the radium, the radon, the polonium, radiolead, the Protactinium, the actinium (and let's not forget the Francium), not to mention radiopotassium, radiorubidium (about half of the Rubidium on earth) we could go crazy when we see that all of our fish are irradiated. (This may account for why flounder look so funny, with their eyes on the sides of their heads for instance.) In order to prevent the irradiation of fish, you might need to take them to a planet that is 15 or 20 billion years older than ours. Unfortunately a space ship capable of taking you so far will require that you have a (gasp) nuclear powered engine and even worse, that you get irradiated by flying through space where everything is irradiated.

Anyone who claims that heat and does not have properties that are carcinogenic is not very well informed. Heat is the item that causes re-arrangement of molecules into carcinogenic forms, most famously to benzopyrans (related chemically to agent orange), on well done beefed, "blackened" fish, grilled vegetables, etc, etc. Heat is also the form of energy that releases the carcinogens in cigarette smoke. Clearly to claim that heat is not dangerous is to deny to me the reality of the experience of the death of my father. Fire (on the end of his cigarettes) killed him, not radiation. I saw it myself.

Steam is not typically carcinogenic however, though it can be quite deadly if you burn yourself. If you're English, it's highly unlikely you'll get cancer from your cooking since most English recipes, as far as I can tell anyway, involve boiling dead things until they fall apart. Some people claim, however that boiling potatoes and cow stomaches and beef brains or beef kidneys or sheep intestines or sheep hearts or whatever it is that the English boil, if the boiling is accomplished in Aluminum pots, causes Alzheimer's disease. I have no idea if this is true.

I recommend that you eat boiled shrimp that you have personally caught and wrestled to the ground in a death defying struggle. This will certainly improve your safety profile, if, to repeat myself, you are careful not to burn yourself and careful not to use aluminum pots.

[TO Kid]

7. Many cooks also use the deadliest chemical

Many cooking methods make use of large amounts of dihydrogen monoxide, a colourless, odourless substance that is fatal when inhaled.

[JPace]

8. "deadliest chemical"..... ?

dihydrogen monoxide = water

Fish would disagree with you. However humans should try to
keep it out of their lungs.

[Massacure]

9. LMAO! Water vapour is fatal when inhaled???

Wow, when you read articles you really should look at who is writing them. There are far to many websites with idiots running them. I see you read one of them.