Apparently the FDA and EPA are supposed to finally release some standards in the coming months to let those of us who scarf the seafood know what is OK and what is risky. Interesting article today in the WSJ, which I will post internally to the thread as it is kind of long.
EPA and FDA, Long in Dispute,
Plan Mercury Standards for Fish
By JOHN J. FIALKA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
After years of feuding, two federal agencies – the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency – are promising to finally reach agreement in coming months on a question that has perplexed fishermen, fish sellers and consumers alike: how much mercury fish-eaters can safely consume.
The issue, though rising in public concern, has long resisted any kind of consensus because of the deep rift between the agencies. Each regulates some aspects of the seafood business.
Forty-five states offer a wide range of health warnings on mercury in seafood, while some of the others post none at all. A sport fisherman might get state guidelines based on those of the EPA, which governs recreationally caught fish. But if his luck was bad on the water, he might hit the seafood counter at his local supermarket. Grocery stores, which sell about 90% of the fish that Americans eat, follow the FDA, whose domain includes commercial seafood and whose mercury standard is much less rigorous than the EPA’s.
“We tell people not to eat certain types of fish, so then they go to the store and buy a fish that has a much higher mercury content,” says Henry A. Anderson, chief medical officer for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health. “This really makes no sense.”
Now there is hope for clarification. Early this year, under pressure from states demanding an end to the conflicting federal advisories, EPA officials launched an effort to craft with the FDA an agreement on common standards to better protect women of childbearing age and children. To end the impasse, the two agencies agreed to pick a new team of experts, supplanting those who were unable to work toward common ground. “Some of these people saw red whenever they saw each other,” says G. Tracey Mehan III, the EPA’s assistant secretary for water issues. “We had to find people who had less historical baggage.”
The two agencies predict an accord by the end of the year.
For consumers, the differences are significant when it comes to protecting the highest-risk group: women of childbearing age and young children. The EPA, along with some states, issues warnings about specific kinds of fish – both fresh and saltwater varieties – and it advises pregnant women to limit consumption of fish to no more than eight ounces a week. The FDA says they can eat 12 ounces of cooked fish and urges them to select from a “wide variety” of fish. The FDA is testing more than 300 samples of canned tuna for mercury, weighing whether to apply special warnings because more Americans eat it than any other seafood, with the exception of shrimp. Because it doesn’t regulate tuna, the EPA offers no advice.
The split has been aggravated by inconclusive scientific research and intense lobbying that has pushed federal experts in different directions. The National Academy of Sciences recently estimated that the health of as many as 60,000 newborn infants may be at risk each year because of neurological damage from mercury in some seafood. Yet the basic research into mercury’s effects on human health is of recent vintage and far from conclusive. The two main studies on children, in fact, reached opposite conclusions.
Meanwhile, Congress and the EPA are trying to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, but they differ on levels and timetables. Stoking the confusion and frustration are lobbyists trying to ensure that any measures or standards do their industries as little harm as possible.
The story of mercury and fish starts with an ecological mystery in Florida. Something was killing the state’s top predator.
In the 1980s, in remote parts of the Everglades, researchers began discovering the bodies of Florida panthers whose cause of death was unclear. After years of biological sleuthing, the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory brought in more sophisticated equipment and tests that found the culprit: tiny bacteria in the Everglades’ swampy soil that ingested mercury deposited by polluted air and excreted a much more potent form.
Mercury, an extremely toxic metal, comes out of smokestacks or volcanoes as a gas or a vapor that is light enough to travel for thousands of miles in weather patterns. It often settles back to earth with rain or soot in minuscule concentrations. In this form, it is relatively harmless.
In swampy soils, though, the scientists found it was being transformed by bacteria into a variant called methylmercury, which quickly moved up the food chain. Going from one-celled organisms to tiny fish to midsize fish and largemouth bass, the mercury was repeatedly concentrated in the fishes’ muscle tissue. The bass had seven million times more mercury in them than the water in which they swam. Then raccoons dined on the bass, and panthers ate the raccoons.
Brenda Lasorsa, an environmental chemist for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, believes the concentrated mercury attacked the panthers’ nervous system. “They developed a numbness and an inability to think clearly, which meant they could no longer successfully compete as a predator,” Ms. Lasorsa says. “They probably stopped eating properly.”
After that finding, two large international studies took shape. Based on indications in prior studies that mercury appears most damaging to children, researchers did repeated intelligence tests on children in populations that subsisted mainly on seafood. Children tested on the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic showed marked symptoms of learning disabilities, including poor attention and low performance on tests for language and drawing skills. Children tested on the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean performed well on the same tests.
While these tests were under way, several states and the EPA issued new advisories based on their own research to let the public know about the dangers that fish with high mercury levels posed to women of childbearing age and their offspring. But the FDA, which tested commercial seafood, did not.
In 1997, the Clinton administration ordered the two agencies to try to develop a common advisory. EPA negotiators pushed hard, but FDA officials backed up their scientists, who saw no reason to change their assessments.
The two sides “got downright nasty at times,” recalls George W. Lucier, a toxicologist who led the effort for the Clinton administration. The sticking points had to do partly with turf fighting and partly with energetic lobbying by the commercial-fishing industry, which convinced some FDA officials that any tightening of the agency’s more lenient standards might destroy the industry. There also was a kind of generation gap: The FDA’s fish studies were done mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, while the EPA’s were done in the 1990s.
Congress stepped in at one point and asked the National Academy of Sciences to referee the dispute. After pondering both the Faroe and Seychelles studies, the academy decided in 2000 that the EPA’s tougher standard was safer.
But that didn’t end the impasse. The FDA had begun to use focus groups to test specific warnings about the health hazards to women of childbearing age, according to internal FDA documents obtained by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington. The FDA came to fear, as one agency scientist wrote, that given “detailed information” about the mercury content of some seafood, women “would stop eating fish altogether.” That attitude would work against the FDA’s promotion of the positive health benefits from eating fish.
Lobbyists have also made it harder to close the rift between the agencies. The U.S. Tuna Foundation has bombarded the FDA with warnings about potential harm to its $1.1 billion industry. It has been issuing its own advice to pregnant women and children, saying they can “benefit significantly from increased fish consumption.” One of its advisories, which makes no mention of mercury, notes that fatty acids in fish can reduce mothers’ depression after childbirth and can also lower blood pressure.
That approach has angered environmental groups. “The message about health risks is just not getting through,” says Mike Magner, an analyst for the Public Education Center, an environmental group based in Washington.
Coal-fired power plants are the nation’s largest source of man-made mercury: 48 tons a year. Congress and the EPA are both seeking ways to reduce those emissions. The Bush administration’s proposed Clear Skies Act would cut this to 34 tons in 2010 and 15 tons by 2018. A pending alternative regulation being prepared by EPA could force mercury down a bit sooner, by 2009.
Industry, which estimates the cost of mercury regulation at between $6 billion and $19 billion during the next two decades, says there are no commercially proven devices to control mercury emissions. In addition, the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto, Calif., that does research for the utility industry, has found that putting tighter emission controls on coal-fired power plants in the U.S. could be expensive and have only a limited result.
Working with U.S. agencies and some foreign governments, the institute’s scientists have spent two years tracking plumes of pollution entering the U.S. from the Pacific. Leonard Levin, who heads a technical team at the institute, says computer models show that about half of the man-made mercury emissions in the U.S. come over the Pacific from sources in Asia.
Some of his institute’s research grants have provided support to University of Rochester scientists working on the Seychelles Islands study, which detected no learning disabilities among 700 children tested. Thomas W. Clarkson, the lead scientist on the study, says that while the institute provided some incidental support, the financing for the study came from the U.S. government.
Mr. Clarkson also notes that neither side in the debate should draw comfort from his study because undetected defense mechanisms may have evolved on the island that block the effects of mercury on its children. Other scientists have recently theorized that the form mercury takes in fish may be less toxic than previously thought.
“We’re pretty early in this game,” Mr. Clarkson says, referring to mercury research. “What it presents is a dilemma for regulators. Something may have to be done.”
Some retailers aren’t waiting for regulators. Costco Wholesale Corp., which operates 321 supermarkets in the U.S., pulled swordfish from its shelves earlier this year. After California began requiring warnings for seafood, explains Craig Wilson, the chain’s vice president for food safety, Costco tested its swordfish and found higher mercury levels than other fish. “We took the decision after asking: If we had to label it as a health risk in California, should we really be selling it at all?” Mr. Wilson says.
The lack of clear guidance from the government also has left doctors mostly on their own. Jane M. Hightower, an internist in San Francisco’s wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood, found in 2000 that some of her patients were complaining of numbness, fatigue, muscle aches and having difficulty thinking clearly. The group comprised mainly professionals, many of whom were highly health-conscious.
After three years of testing, Dr. Hightower discovered that nine out of 10 had abnormally high levels of mercury in their blood, apparently from an intense diet of fish. When she stopped them from eating fish, the mercury in their systems subsided and so did their symptoms.
On a sidenote:
Costco now adds color (why) to the farm-raised salmon that they sell.
So much for the natural wild salmon…
I’ve read that color is added to the farm-raised fish because their flesh is almost colorless – apparently due to either the diet, the water temperature, or some combination thereof. I’ve heard various things about whether to worry about the color, but mostly it seems that there is more to worry about in what they feed the fish.
However, on a bright now, no mercury!
It’s not that they “now” add color, they always have. It is only recently that retailers have been required to tell the consumer.
Farmed salmon are crap. Don’t buy them.
This makes me sad.
I love fish but I’m wondering if some of my arm numbness and lack of ability to concentrate have to do with this aspect of my diet.
Actually there is methylmercury in farm fish, both because of the fact that moat are raised in active waters and they they are fed fishmeal, which contains mercury as it is. I can’t even stomach the idea of eating farmfish. Blechh.
I agree that farmed salmon has lots of problems. However the ingredient added to produce the color is a carotene, the same one that wild salmon has. From BAC:
“ASTAXANTHIN, a powerful antioxidant carotenoid obtained from microalgae, is found widely in nature including shellfish and salmon. It has no vitamin A value, but protects against lipid peroxidation that causes plaque formation up to 500 times that of vitamin E…”
Yet another reason to eat (wild) salmon.
the farm salmon don’t change color because of their diet.
“the farm salmon don’t change color because of their diet.”
www.rittersysco.com/salmon_color.htm
"Wild salmon obtain carotenoids from their diet of small shrimp and small fish. A specific carotenoid, astaxanthin, is the carotenoid responsible for the color of salmon flesh in the wild.
Farm Raised Salmon Color
The fish in the wild obtain this colour from what they eat - algae, shrimp, or other fish. Farmed salmon do not have access to this source of astaxanthin. Thus, their diet must be supplied with astaxanthin to mimic what they would receive in their wild diet. Farmed salmon are provided with astaxanthin, which is the same as wild salmon."