The secret cost of Oyster testing: Mouse mortality…

Independent

For the third time in a year, Arcachon’s world-renowned oyster farms have been shut down – following the deaths of two people who had consumed the local produce. Furious at the threat to their livelihood, the farmers insist a good bivalve never hurt anyone.

The Bay of Arcachon is a large, triangular lagoon, a beautiful inland sea, scooped into the otherwise sheer face of the extreme south-west coast of France. […] [This] weekend, the climate is not temperate. Storm clouds are gathering. The clouds take different shapes: anger or despair, fear or paranoia.

Two tourists have died abruptly in the past few days. One was elderly and frail; the other fit and healthy. In both cases, the symptoms were roughly the same: a seemingly banal malaise, leading to unconsciousness and kidney failure, a few hours after the patients arrived in hospital. They were the only members of their family to do so. No one else in their families has been sick. The deaths have not been explained by initial post-mortem examinations. They are the subject of a judicial investigation and a complex series of further medical tests which may take days or even weeks to complete.

Meanwhile, the consumption of all Arcachon Bay oysters is banned

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The bizarre shellfish safety test used in France, Britain and all over Europe, is utterly outmoded and unscientific, they claim. The test – called the “mouse bioassay” – is a maritime version of the old miner’s canary in a cage. Concentrated digestive fluids of oysters are injected into three mice. If two out of three die, the local oysters are declared unsafe.

The only method is the mouse method. If the mice die – even for an unknown reason – the oysters are a threat to human health. (Several cockle fisheries in England and Wales, especially in the Thames Estuary, have been periodically closed during the past five years for the same reasons.)

The mouse test – so long as the mice survive – has allowed the abolition of the old rule that you should never eat shellfish in the summer (or during months without an “r”). It has also revealed, not only but mostly in Arcachon, serial, periodic new threats to the safety of oysters. As one of the most southerly oyster fisheries in Europe – with some of the warmest water – marine biologists fear that Arcachon may be especially prone to attacks by the mystery algae.

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