“Horribly mutated” seafood found in Gulf Coast, likely caused by BP spill

The United States Food and Drug Administration announced last year that seafood from the Gulf Coast was perfectly safe to eat.

"American consumers can feel confident in the quality and safety of Gulf seafood," the FDA wrote, responding to concerns brought on by BP's 2010 oil spill. 

But a new investigation by Al Jazeera is calling the FDA's findings into question. 

Fishermen are finding fish with tumors on their heads, fish with missing eyeballs, fish with babies still attached to their bodies, and fish "with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills." 

One fisherman told Al Jazeera that some of the crabs she's seen appear to be "dying from within…they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they've been dead for a week." Yum.

All of the fishermen that Al Jazeera interviewed said that they had never seen so many fish with deformities before, and researchers traced the deformities back to the BP oil spill. 

But, when contacted by Al Jazeera, the Louisiana government continued to vouch for the safety of the seafood, and the FDA and BP both declined to comment on specifics.  

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It's not the first time that the FDA's findings have been criticized. The National Resources Defense Council published a study in Environmental Health Perspectives in October, saying that the agency underestimated the risks that the seafood poses to children and pregnant women. 

The federal government reopened most of the fishing waters in the area just five months after crude oil stopped gushing from the broken BP well, MSNBC reported in 2010. Some researchers said at the time that the waters were reopened too soon. 

"It is unethical to 'experiment' with the health of the U.S. population," a toxicologist told MSNBC at the time.