Gulf Seafood!
I enjoyed hearing about the science that’s being conducted, both in similar fields and outside of the research that I’ve been working on. Unfortunately we flew out the day of the session most relevant to my work, so I missed most of the talks about the concurrent research that’s happening on my project, but I did get to talk to a variety of people about my work during the poster session and received a wealth of useful and interesting feedback. However, I found the talks on public health extremely interesting (don’t tell Helen). For one, seafood in the Gulf is safe to eat! They haven’t found traces of toxic contaminants at levels of concern for human health in fish, oyster, crab, or shrimp samples for months since reopening the fisheries in the Gulf. That said, I still see room for improvement. It was interesting to compare the science and public health talks: A number of the scientific presentations showed data about the components of oil that people haven’t traditionally looked at when studying and discussing the effects of oil on the environment, while the public health talks tended to present data on the compounds that have been known and studied extensively (PAHs). It was very apparent to me that more studies need to be conducted about the toxicity and effects of these other oil components to truly determine food safety and the impact on humans.