Tainted waters: B.C.’s oysters are making people sick. The cause is disturbing.

Mark Kapczynski had been looking forward to it for weeks.

He had VIP tickets for him and his wife to attend an upscale seafood festival in Los Angeles last December where they would feast on the food he grew up eating as a kid in Boston.

Surrounded by shellfish presented raw on ice by some of the city’s best chefs, Kapczynski said he chose to sample a few “Fanny Bay” oysters harvested from the southern B.C. coastline.

“After three or four hours, I wished I was dead it hurt so much,” said Kapczynski, who was hit with severe abdominal pain and vomiting every 30 minutes for five hours. “It was the most painful thing I’ve ever felt.”

Over the past six years, more than a third of all federal recalls triggered by Canadian oysters on both sides of the border trace back to Baynes Sound, a pict