how BP is poisoning the food chain?

The fiasco with the huge ecological catastrophe in the Mexico and the southern states of USA is proving that tracing the hazards of food chain is a tedious task that requires scientific expertise but sometimes it is beyond our capacity...

A brown pelican coated in heavy oil tries to take flight. The US government only removed the brown pelican from its list of endangered species in November 2009. An estimated 40,000 brown pelicans live in the northern reaches of the Gulf of Mexico

It does not count how many books or manuals on HACCP and ISO22000 somebody has written...when such a huge leak takes place few miles away...

The seafood there is getting heavily poisoned with chemical hazards [i.e all sorts of organic molecules (mainly hydrocarbons of high molecular weight)]. These chemicals end up to our food chain. On the other hand, the oil kills fish and seafood and the killed organisms are a really good substrate for pathogens, so there are also some biological hazards for the food chain.

The fishermen need to change job, I am afraid. The ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico will need some decades to recover.

What happens with the affected animals?

The size and duration of this oil spill – 55 days and counting – make returning the animals safely to the wild and ensuring their long-term survival far more complicated.

Getting the animals medical attention is also fraught. A misguided rescue attempt could hurt the animals, or cause them to flee to an area more badly affected by oil. Conservationists say there have been isolated reports of pelicans killed in clumsy rescue attempts.

There is also a risk of an outbreak of disease from contact with humans or domesticated animals. After the Exxon Valdez spill, rescued sea otters contracted a form of herpes from contact with local dogs. The disease then spread through the population when the otters were returned to the wild.

All in all, we are talking about an awful project to manage! BP should be penalised not only legally but also commercially by all the consumers buying petrol. Because, this is clearly the biggest ever pollution of the sea because of anthopogenic activities...And we should not forget the 11 people who died on the BP collapsed platform.