On October 5, 2011, the website (www.gillseafood.com) for The Global Initiative for Life and Leadership through Seafood (GILLS) was officially launched at the IAFI World Seafood Congress (Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington DC). This initiative is an outcome from the International Seafood & Health Conference (Melbourne, Australia Nov 2010) and has been organized by an international consortium of universities and individuals.
The GILLS website is designed to be a factual website with a strong science focus to ensure that global consumers will have a definitive resource to obtain important information and data about seafood and health issues.
Other international universities will be encouraged to join the consortium to enable the messages to be spread globally and add value by converting the information into their own language. Additionally a template for seafood consumption study will enable those universities to engage their students and communities in getting some consistency in understanding levels of seafood consumption in a consistent way. Over time this will build into an invaluable resource.
Last July the Spanish Agency of Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN) issued an advisory relating to infants and pregnant women relating to particular species of seafood. This information caused several concerns about the consumption of marine fish, and therefore, from the researchers’ perspective, it is necessary during these cases to be able to rely on a source of information that is open for all of the stakeholders.
As Mexican researcher, Antonio Garza de Yta explained, “The idea is to create a website that is completely neutral on these issues and that can contain information about seafood, fish oil and the health benefits of their consumption; information which is currently dispersed worldwide but will now be available in a centralized location. The objective is to have a platform that allows promoting the healthy characteristics of seafood products, which contains global information about health, consumption and other information generated from Universities and Medical Research Centers.”
GILLS committee is formed by Chairman, Roy Palmer (IAFI Director based in Australia); Treasurer, Antonio Garza de Yta (Auburn University, USA) Secretary, Professor Jose Fernandez Polanco (University of Cantabria, Spain); University liaison, Mudnakudu C. Nandeesha (Dean at TANUVAS, India) and Medical Research liaison is lead by Professor Michael Crawford from the Imperial College of London UK.
