Gulf seafood "horribly deformed"

Eyeless shrimp. Fish afflicted by sores. Crabs without claws or hard shells. Bizarre deformities are becoming common in seafood from the Gulf, according to Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, and pollution caused by the 2010 BP oil spill is the likely cause.

Al Jazeera’s Dahr Jamail:

The [oil] dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists [Al Jazeera]