Last week Florida’s Sun Sentinel published a three-part series about the Gulf Coast’s raw oyster industry and consumers who have been sickened or killed after consuming raw oysters containing Vibrio vulnificus, a type of bacteria that thrives in Gulf waters. The series describes how elected leaders in Gulf states distorted facts about the cost of regulating Vibrio vulnificus. It also chronicles how some in the oyster industry don’t even comply with the weak food safety standards already on the books:
State wildlife officers have caught harvesters leaving oysters unrefrigerated overnight, hidden in the bottom of boats and marshes, stored in bilge water that smells of gasoline and in the bed of a pickup truck dirty with wild animal blood and hair. They’ve hauled them in trucks with no shade and left them on boats in the summer sun.
Read the full series starting with Part I here.
