- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released an advisory about shellfish harvested from Oregon and Washington, as they were found to have elevated levels of paralytic shellfish toxins (PSTs)
- Saxitoxin, a naturally occurring neurotoxin produced by algae, can be harmful to human health as it damages nerve tissue
- Symptoms of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) include numbness of the mouth and lips, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness and nausea, dissociation and respiratory paralysis
- Apart from toxin-contaminated shellfish, radioactive fish may also soon find its way onto your dinner plate, as the U.S. government recently endorsed the consumption of seafood harvested off the coast of Fukushima, Japan
(Mercola)—In a perfect world, fish and other types of seafood are some of the healthiest foods you can consume, as they offer omega-3s and other beneficial nutrients. But with most of our waterways and oceans now heavily polluted with toxic wastes, these once-nutritious foods can become ticking time bombs that can land you in the hospital.
A recent advisory1 about Pacific Northwest shellfish is a grim example of how toxic some types of seafood can be. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), shellfish harvested from Oregon and Washington were found to be contaminated with a dangerous neurotoxin that can lead to severe symptoms, including paralysis.
Paralysis-Causing Toxin Found in Pacific Northwest Shellfish
According to the FDA website, on May 30, 2024, the Oregon Agriculture Department and the Washington Health Department sent out an advisory about the recall of oysters and bay clams harvested from their waters. Apparently, the shellfish were found to have elevated levels of paralytic shellfish toxins (PSTs),2 which can lead to paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP).3
“Paralytic shellfish poisoning, or PSP, happens after someone eats shellfish contaminated with saxitoxin, which can cause gastrointestinal distress, neurological symptoms and a sensation of ‘floating’ or disassociation,” NBC News reports.
Oysters and bay clams that were harvested from Northern Oregon (specifically in Netarts and Tillamook bays) since May 28 are affected. Shellfish harvested since May 26 from around Willapa Bay in southern Washington may also be contaminated with this dangerous toxin.4
As of June 11, 2024, at least 31 people in Oregon have fallen ill after eating the shellfish.5 These contaminated shellfish are also circulating, as they were bought by consumers and distributed to restaurants and food retailers, not only in the two aforementioned states, but also in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada and New York.6
What Caused This Widespread Shellfish Contamination?
Saxitoxin is a naturally occurring neurotoxin produced by algae, mainly freshwater cyanobacteria and marine dinoflagellates. Matthew Hunter, shellfish program manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, explained that the unprecedented levels of saxitoxin in the Pacific Northwest occurred because of a massive algal bloom along the coast of Oregon.7
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, harmful algal blooms (HABs) can occur naturally; however, disruptions in the ecosystem brought on by human activities play a role not only in their frequency but also their intensity.8 The toxin levels don’t immediately subside — in fact it may take weeks, months or even up to a year for the contamination to subside, as noted by Oregon officials.9
“Oregon authorities have closed the state’s entire coastline to the harvesting of mussels, razor clams and bay clams. Agriculture officials have also closed three bays, including those named in the FDA advisory, to commercial oyster harvesting.
Officials in neighboring Washington have also closed the state’s Pacific coastline to the harvesting of shellfish, including mussels, clams, scallops and oysters, a shellfish safety map produced by the Washington State Department of Health shows,” ABC News reports.10
Symptoms of Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning
Saxitoxin can be harmful to human health, as it damages nerve tissue.11 What makes it even more dangerous is that the contaminated shellfish can appear perfectly safe and normal — they look, smell and taste just as other clean shellfish products do.
The FDA also warns that contaminated shellfish can retain saxitoxin for different periods of time. Some shellfish may eliminate this toxin rapidly, while others are slower to remove it from their system. This lengthens the period of time they can be toxic to humans.12
What’s more, PSP toxins cannot be killed or eliminated by cooking or freezing. Once you ingest the toxin, gastrointestinal distress and neurological symptoms may arise within minutes to a couple of hours. The symptoms, which may be mild or severe, depending on how much toxin you’ve ingested, and include:13,14
- Numbness of the mouth and lips
- Vomiting
- Diarrhea
- Shortness of breath
- Irregular heartbeat (in severe cases)
- A “pins and needles” sensation (numbness in the arms and legs)
- Dizziness and nausea
- Loss of muscle coordination
- Feeling as if you’re floating (dissociation)
- Respiratory paralysis
At present, there is no antidote for saxitoxin poisoning.15 Medical treatment requires giving fluid and providing respiratory support.16 The good news is that if you survive 24 hours with the toxin, the prognosis is usually positive, and the toxin will not have lasting effects.
In severe cases, though, poisoning can be serious, and will require mechanical ventilation to help the patient breathe.17 Saxitoxin poisoning can be fatal and can happen in as little as two hours. It occurs because of asphyxiation, as the muscles used for breathing can be paralyzed.18 Because of the range in severity of its symptoms, the FDA advises consulting with a health care provider if you develop the symptoms mentioned above.19
Radioactive Fish for Dinner, Anyone?
Toxin-contaminated shellfish is just one of the many problems plaguing your seafood options. Soon, you may even find radioactive fish in your supermarkets, as the U.S. government recently endorsed the consumption of seafood harvested off the coast of Fukushima, Japan,20 which experienced a major nuclear accident after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Last year, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant started discharging nuclear wastewater, which was used to cool down the nuclear reactors, into the ocean,21 exposing seafood and marine life to radioactive substances. Many fishing groups have opposed these wastewater discharges, which are expected to continue for decades.22
Neighboring countries like China and South Korea, and even Russia, have also expressed concerns about radioactive contamination of marine life and imposed a ban on Japanese seafood imports as a precaution.23 However, the Japanese government claims their seafood is safe, even going as far as having officials eating Fukushima fish on video and declaring it “safe and delicious.”24
The U.S. government supports these claims; in September 2023, officials even attended a “sushi and sake” event at Capitol Hill, where around 40 members of the House of Representatives sampled fresh Japanese fish, such as flounder and seabass, from Fukushima.25
This was followed a month later by an announcement from U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, saying that the U.S. military would buy Japanese seafood in bulk and feed it to service members stationed at military bases in Japan. According to an article in The Defender, Emanuel says they will start with a metric ton of scallops, and then eventually expand to all types of seafood.26
But to bring in potentially radioactive seafood in our food supply is like playing Russian roulette with people’s health. What’s worse, the effects can build up gradually. You may not see any symptoms right away, but they can manifest years later. Hongkong’s Centre for Food Safety reports:27
“According to a report issued by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) earlier, a fish sampled from the port area of the FNPS [Fukushima nuclear power station] was found to contain 18 times the Codex guideline level of the radioactive substance Caesium.
Caesium can be taken into the body by eating food or drinking water. After ingestion, it is absorbed into the bloodstream, distributes throughout the body, and tends to concentrate in muscles. The fish, if consumed, may pose a risk to health and increase the likelihood of inducing cancer.”
Farmed Fish — Another Dangerous Type of Seafood to Avoid
This issue of radioactive poisons from seafood has caused many to either give up eating fish or opt for farmed fish, believing it’s a safer choice. However, you may be swapping one problem for something that’s even more dangerous. Choosing farmed fish to avoid radiation is not going to do your health any favors. You may avoid nuclear radiation, but you’re getting far more of other toxins instead.
Aside from being one of the least sustainable approaches to farming, fish farming also causes many environmental problems and poses unique risks to your well-being, maybe even far worse than radioactive contamination. In fact, fish farms have been called the “CAFOs of the sea,” as they raise many of the same concerns about chemicals and pollutants associated with feedlot cattle and factory chicken farms.
Unlike wild-caught fish, which feed on natural organisms and thrive in its natural habitat, farmed fish are raised on a diet of processed, high-fat, high-protein feed that can include everything from genetically engineered (GE) soybeans and pesticides, to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins, to antibiotics.28
Salmon is one of the most widely sold types of factory farm fish, and salmon factory farms are now the fastest-growing type of food production system in the world.29 However, farmed salmon contain far more toxins than wild salmon, mainly due to their elevated fat content.
Since toxins from fish feed accumulate in salmon fat, farmed salmon generally has higher levels of contaminants than wild salmon. For example, a study found that among 700 salmon samples collected from around the world, farmed salmon have eight times higher levels of PCB concentration than wild salmon.30
How to Find Safe Seafood
With most of our waterways and oceans heavily polluted with neurotoxins, radioactive poisons, and heavy metals like mercury, dioxins and PCBs, it can be a challenge to find uncontaminated fish these days. The key is to be a smart shopper. Be selective in the types of fish you consume, focusing on those high in healthy fats and low in contaminants.
I strongly recommend buying wild fish, and wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon, in my opinion, is one of the absolute best, both in terms of nutrition and potential contamination. Aside from being rich in omega-3 fats DHA and EPA, wild-caught Alaskan salmon has a short life cycle, meaning it has a lower risk of accumulating toxins. It also doesn’t feed on other already contaminated fish, further reducing the risk of contamination.
Other great choices are small, cold-water, fatty fish like anchovies, sardines, mackerel and herring. A general guideline is the closer to the bottom of the food chain the fish is, the less contamination it will accumulate.
If you still want to take precautions, you can take chlorella tablets every time you eat fish and other seafood. Chlorella is a heavy metal chelator and can bind to mercury and other toxins before your body can absorb it, allowing these harmful substances to be safely excreted in your stool instead. In addition, it’s best to avoid larger fish, as they tend to live longer and have higher contamination levels. These include:
- Tuna (tuna steaks, sushi, and canned)
- Sea bass and largemouth bass
- Marlin
- Halibut
- Pike
- Walleye
- Shark
- Sword fish
- White croaker
Sources and References:
- 1, 4, 6, 12, 13, 19 U.S. Food and Drug Administration, June 5, 2024
- 2 Mar Drugs. 2013 Apr; 11(4): 991–1018
- 3, 14 NBC News, June 11, 2024
- 5, 9, 10, 11 ABC News, June 11, 2024
- 7, 17 U.S. News, June 11, 2024
- 8 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- 15 West J Emerg Med. 2014 Jul; 15(4): 378–381, Introduction
- 16 Am J Trop Med Hyg. 2017 Dec 6; 97(6): 1731–1736
- 18 Division of Environment Health Food Safety and Sanitation Program, Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning
- 20, 24, 26 The Defender, Children’s Health Defense, June 6, 2024
- 21 BBC, August 22, 2023
- 22 AP News, September 8, 2023
- 23 The Hill, November 10, 2023
- 25 Japan Forward, September 21, 2023
- 27 Centre for Food Safety, Food Safety Concern on Radioactive Contamination
- 28 Organic Consumers Association
- 29 World Wildlife Fund 2020
- 30 Harvard Health Publishing, April 1, 2004
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.