The Global Initiative for Life and Leadership through Seafood (GILLS) on Monday announced its launch at the seventh World Seafood Congress in Washington, D.C.
Organized by an international consortium of academics and seafood professionals, the new initiative is an outcome of the International Seafood & Health Conference that took place in Melbourne, Australia, in November 2010.
It features a consumer-friendly website, www.gillseafood.com, that will serve as a definitive, objective resource for science-based information on seafood and health. Universities and other institutions will be encouraged to join the consortium to enable the website’s messages to be spread globally.
“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,” said Antonio Garza de Yta, a Mexican researcher and one of the organizers. “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.”
The GILLS committee was formed by Chairman Roy Palmer, International Association of Fish Inspectors director based in Australia; Treasurer Antonio Garza de Yta of Auburn University in the United States; Secretary Jose Fernandez Polanco of the University of Cantabria in Spain; university liaison, Mudnakudu C. Nandeesha, dean at TANUVAS in India; and medical research liaison Michael Crawford of Imperial College of London.
