Ensuring Seafood Safety from Toxic Marine Organisms
Workshop on “Enhance the awareness on toxic marine organisms”
Nha Trang, Vietnam, 13-15 December 2010
Background
Seafood is one of the most important natural resources in Western Pacific region. People, especially fishermen, consume various types of marine lives as food, which are either caught from the sea or obtained from the market. It is known that some marine organisms possessing natural toxins cause food poisonings. They either produce toxins by themselves or accumulate toxins from known and unknown origins. Some natural toxins produced by microalgae such as PSP, ASP, DSP, CFP, and NSP toxins, could be accumulated into filter feeding organisms and even transferred to other organisms through food web and make the predators become toxic. In contrast, some other natural toxins as tetrodotoxin (TTX) are not derived from microalgae and its origin has not been clear yet. The organisms containing these toxins include puffer fish, goby fish, blue-ringed octopus, marine snails, xanthid crab and horseshoe crab. They are commonly found in almost all Asia countries, and people eat them intentionally or unintentionally in some areas. Consumption of such toxin-possessing organisms leads to food poisonings in people, and sometimes even results in fatal accidents.
The ever-increasing expansion of seafood poisoning episodes in the Western Pacific not only causes huge economic loss to aquaculture activities, but also poses a threat to human lives. According to some preliminary findings, these poisonings occur mainly because of the lack of public awareness on seafood safety and appropriate knowledge in a potential heath risk from toxic aquatic animals. It is, therefore, becoming an urgent need for the countries in the region to enhance the awareness of their general public, particularly the coastal communities on the risk of seafood contaminated with toxins, especially those potentially causing health problems.
To this end, the IOC Sub-Commission for the Western Pacific (WESTPAC) established the project entitled “Enhance the awareness on toxic marine organisms” at the Eighth Intergovernmental Session (10-13 May 2010, Bali, Indonesia), aiming to improve the awareness of local community on the natural biotoxins in marine organisms and its risks to human health within the Western Pacific Region through the identification of toxic marine organisms and dissemination of relevant scientific information to public. This project will be carried out mainly through two workshops, as well as other associated activities in between meetings in 2010-2011.
Objective and Scope of the Workshop
The workshop, considered as the starting-up of this project, is designed to exchange current information on the poisonings due to the consumption of seafood contaminated with natural toxins in member states in order to analyze the features of poisonings from various viewpoints such as causative organisms and toxins, their distribution, frequency of occurrence, medical treatment and prevention measures. Importantly, the workshop will aim to prepare some appropriate outreach materials on the toxic marine organisms and discuss the future activities to be carried out in the next year.
Expected Outcomes
The workshop is expected to come up with one Project Implementation Plan, together with one outline for outreach materials.