Something They Ate

Maybe somebody at the Food and Drug Administration had a bad episode with an oyster or had some Oysters Rockefeller that didn’t go down well over some fancy lunch at a Washington eatery, but the agency has hit new heights in hubris this past week.

The proposed federal ban on raw in-the-shell Gulf Coast oysters during the summer months, to be imposed beginning in 2011, is a misguided and inappropriate intervention by the government into what is essentially an issue of personal accountability.

FDA officials say the Gulf oyster ban is necessary to protect public health because a naturally occurring bacteria sickens about 30 people each year. The bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, can be deadly for people with pre-existing medical conditions, such as liver damage.

So can alcohol, but there are no proposed bans on selling liquor to folks with liver disease or a proposal to ban cigarette sales to those with lung disease or emphysema.

In fact, the cases of the bacteria found in raw oysters hurting healthy people are all but non-existent.

According to the FDA there are an estimated 76 million cases of food-borne illness annually, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.

But the Vibrio vulnificus bacteria that the oyster ban is supposed to address is responsible for only one-tenth of 1 percent of food-related deaths (about 15 per year are traced to Gulf Coast states) and an even smaller percentage of illness, according to CDC estimates.

So, stated slightly differently, 99.9 percent of illnesses occur in other foods. Yet the FDA has a bee in its bonnets about raw oysters?

Consider this in another light. For a parent, would it be more dangerous to your child for you to have a gun or swimming pool around the house?

The answer is a swimming pool.

A child is far more likely to drown in a swimming pool than they are to die by being shot by a gun in the house yet there is far more in the media about guns and kids than swimming pools and kids.

For gun control enthusiasts, the argument is a strong one, save our kids. But there is yet to emerge a swimming pool control movement of a similar kind, despite the statistics.

To further the inanity of its case, FDA officials acknowledge that they have not analyzed the economic impact on the industry of such a ban, and the industry ripples from oystermen to wholesalers to retailers to restaurants.

In effect this ban would wipe out a seafood industry that is already struggling, an industry that, at least in Florida, has been kicked around by restrictions, passed into law, on how and when men and women who make their living on the water can actually scrimp up sustenance, if it can be called that.

The industry has been kicked around by the development upstream of the Apalachicola River which threatens the very life of the river and bay and in turn an industry.

The seafood industry is on life support, this ban would pull the plug, at a time when jobs count.

After all, an eight month ban might as well be year round – not a lot of folks survive working four months a year.

And the oystermen of Florida will likely not be receiving much in the way of support from their state representatives.

Gov. Charlie Crist has, in action and word, been a consistent antagonist toward the seafood industry since he was the legislative sponsor of what fishermen commonly call the net ban, though there is a nice bow of legal language wrapping up that constitutional amendment.

And the misguided notion put forth by the FDA that pasteurized or otherwise treated oysters would be a replacement for the real thing on a half shell will be a tough sell to the hundreds of thousands of consumers for whom the half-shelled oyster is manna from heaven.

But there are two aspects that are most troubling about the FDA’s proposed ban.

One is how does the FDA arrive as such a proposal to begin with and there does it stop.

This is, after all, the agency that brought us Vioxx, one of the many drugs fast-tracked to market only to discover that they have serious side effects. More people died of heart conditions linked to Vioxx than have died in the past 10 years eating raw oysters.

And why not peanut butter? Allergic reactions to ingesting peanuts annually outnumber the cases of bacterial poisoning from raw oysters.

Why not red meat? Consumption of red meat has long been found to be detrimental to health. Or how about dairy products, which are also considered by many to be unhealthy for a human body?

When does 1984 end for the FDA?

But more pointedly, what is the government doing at the dinner table.

This is just another way in which the government attempts to dictate behavior, behavior that hurts no one but the individual – in this case one choosing to eat a raw oyster.

Maybe a raw oyster is not everybody’s cup of tea, if you will, but it is certainly the right of every person to determine for them what constitutes a danger when sitting down for a meal.

And at a time when jobs are difficult enough to find and hold, it seems the government should be going out of its way to maintain jobs rather than eliminate an entire industry through an act of bureaucratic cowardice.