A friend forwarded this interesting article to me last night. I thought you
all might find it informative.
Sarah Watson
Silver SPring MD
 
 
OYSTER BAY, N.Y. (AP) -- An outbreak of shellfish bacteria detected last month
in Oyster Bay has forced this town -- named by Dutch settlers for its 6-inch
mollusks -- to look elsewhere to supply this weekend's annual Oyster Festival.
 
The bay has been closed to shellfishing, and festival organizers are importing
tens of thousands of oysters from other parts of Long Island Sound.
 
``We will have plenty of oysters and they will be safe,'' said Kathy Wilson,
executive director of the Oyster Bay Chamber of Commerce, which has ordered
40,000 oysters for its booth.
 
Upwards of 200,000 people are expected for the two-day festival, a fund-raiser
for 17 civic groups, in the small village that President Theodore Roosevelt
once called home.
 
The Dutch settlers who named Oyster Bay were said to have found oysters 5 or 6
inches wide in the waters off Long Island's north shore. For generations,
shellfishing was a staple of the local economy, and Oyster Bay remains the top
oyster producer in the state.
 
The first clues of an outbreak appeared in August, when 10 people on Long
Island and in Westchester County and New Jersey got sick. Health investigators
traced the cause to shellfish from Oyster Bay.
 
The suspect: a virulent strain of the bacteria Vibrio parahaemolyticus.
Symptoms included flu-like symptoms such as diarrhea, cramps, nausea,
vomiting, fever and headache.
 
The state closed Oyster Bay to shellfishing on Sept. 10 and has been testing
to see if the bacteria remains.
 
This summer, the same bacteria tainted oysters in Galveston Bay, Texas, and
sickened more than 360 people in the nation's worst outbreak from raw oysters.