NOAA’s first-ever long term report of the national distribution of parasites and disease in mussels and oysters, using data gathered between 1995 and 2009, provides a new data set for coastal resource management and shows the occurrence and severity of disease and parasite infections to be generally low nationwide during that time.
“The unprecedented baseline data in this new report will be vital for coastal managers as they look at degrading conditions in mussel and oyster population,” said Dennis Apeti, the report’s lead author and an oceanographer with the National Ocean Service’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. “Environmental stressors, including unforeseen natural and human influenced events and climate change, continue to impact our coastal resources.”
Apeti also said that report’s conclusions only reflect a limited number of parasites and disease that can affect bivalves, and that there are other tissue analyses in shellfish that the report does not assess. These include, amongst others, paralytic shellfish poisoning and fecal coliform bacteria, which both can pose significant threats to human health.
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