Mercury Menace: Eat at Your Own Risk

[Mercy!]

Looks like an old style muckraking journalism series of articles on mercury contamination in seafood in the Sunday Chicago Tribune. Some very interesting stuff.

 

Supermarkets throughout the Chicago area are routinely selling seafood highly contaminated with mercury, a toxic metal that can cause learning disabilities in children and neurological problems in adults, a Tribune investigation has found.

 

In one of the nation's most comprehensive studies of mercury in commercial fish, testing by the newspaper showed that a variety of popular seafood was so tainted that federal regulators could confiscate the fish for violating food safety rules.

 

The testing also showed that mercury is even more pervasive in fish than what the government has told the public, making it difficult for consumers to avoid the problem, no matter where they shop.

 

It is not by happenstance that contaminated fish can be found on shelves and at seafood counters throughout the region, from small neighborhood shops on the South Side to sprawling supermarket chain stores in the northwest suburbs.

 

The Tribune's investigation reveals a decades-long pattern of the U.S. government knowingly allowing millions of Americans to eat seafood with unsafe levels of mercury.

 

Regulators have repeatedly downplayed the hazards, failed to take basic steps to protect public health and misled consumers about the true dangers, documents and interviews show.

 

The government does not seize high-mercury fish that violate U.S. limits. Regulators do not even inspect seafood for mercury--not in ports, processing plants or supermarkets.

 

In fact, federal officials have tested so few fish that they have only a limited idea of how much mercury many species contain, government data show. For example, the government has tested only four walleye and 24 shrimp samples since 1978. The newspaper tested more samples of commercial walleye than the government has in the last quarter-century.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/special...ll=chi-news-hed

[3E8]

I can safely eat 3/4 of a can of albacore tuna per week, according to this calculator: http://www.ewg.org/issues/mercury/20031209/calculator.php

 

There was one summer where I ate five cans of tuna each week.

[bmags]

I can safely eat 3/4 of a can of albacore tuna per week, according to this calculator:  http://www.ewg.org/issues/mercury/20031209/calculator.php

 

There was one summer where I ate five cans of tuna each week.

 

my brother did that like through college...

 

i hate stuff like this...i'm glad they did it, but i mean what are teh positive aspects of mercury?

 

god, my familys from near chesapeake bay, all we do is have seafood

[Jake]

This makes so much more of this board make sense...

[Balta1701]

Jesus Christ, wow. That's horrific.

[FlaSoxxJim]

I'd say it's good whistleblowing and not muckraking, actually.

 

But, yeah, scientists are long aware of how significantly mercury "amplifies" up the marine food web even if it hasn't done a whole lot at the consumer level.

 

To be safese, you should either eat consume products from lower trophic levels or top predators who predominantly forage away from waters near industrial point sources. Of course, with the urbanization of all of our estuaries and coasts that is a pretty tall order.