An official website of the United States government.
It is known that the presence of domoic acid, the biotoxin responsible for Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (ASP), associated with contaminated king scallops can be reduced in the end product through effective shucking (removal of the hepatopancreas, mantle and gills). As a result, shucking has been recognised as an important process in controlling the risk of ASP and is incorporated in to the HACCP plans of most UK scallop processors.
However evidence for the distribution of PSP and DSP in king scallops is lacking and the efficacy of shucking techniques in reducing the risk of these biotoxins has not been verified. <P>
There is currently an EU funded project, SPIES-DETOX (WP4) being conducted, which aims to develop processing techniques for removing PSP toxins from naturally contaminated scallops. S14037 aims to complement the SPIES-DETOX project by providing supplementary material to enable the localisation of PSP toxins in these bivalves to be accurately determined. A similar investigation on DSP toxins is being carried out under a separate project funded by FSAS (S14043).
Find more about this project and other FSA food safety-related projects at the <a href="http://www.food.gov.uk/science/research/" target="_blank">Food Standards Agency Research webpage</a>.