Report: Mercury found in every single fish tested in study of US rivers, streams
"No fish can escape mercury pollution" is the bottom line in a federal study of mercury contamination that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the United States. Link to AP article.
Over at Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger says, "I like how the AP writer tries valiantly to put a positive spin on this. It may well be that 100% of all fish in America has some level of mercury contamination, but only one fish in four has dangerously high levels. Dude, we are so screwed..."
Image: "Don't eat an entire fish at once," from mrjoro's CC-licensed Flickr stream.
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I've taken a preparation of calomel every morning of my adult life and am as strong as an ox, madame! Have at you.
Fish are for pussies. I eat thermometers for breakfast.
I think as an example of how wrong our priorities are, you can't beat this:
How much more mainstream press attention will the cocaine on banknotes story from a few days ago receieve than this one about people's involuntary consumption of a known poison.
Yes, the United States is a dump, literally. Unlike countries such as Sweden where you can go fishing off a bridge in downtown Stockholm and have absolute confidence that the fish isn't contaminated with numerous toxins. Glad I don't like in that craphole anymore and I'm surprised more people don't leave.
Can you eat a whole fish tail first?
Just this morning, The Oregonian ran a story about the state Department of Environmental Quality trying to get a waiver allowing a concrete plant to spew out ghastly amounts of mercury. The quarry they get their minerals from has mondo quantities of the stuff.
On the one hand: lots of lost jobs. On the other: a known neurotoxin wafting over the Midwest. (Hey, they could explain a lot.)
Rule of thumb: if it's bigger than a herring, don't try to wolf in down in one piece. The dude in that graphic is going to choke to death long before the mercury gets to him.
Wonder what these guys will have to say about it.
http://www.mercuryfacts.org/faqMercury.cfm
It would be interesting to see a control.. Too bad it's impossible.
How much Mercury was in the fish 100 years ago?
Frontline produced an excellent documentary on the subject of water pollution a while back. Just one more critical environmental issue demanding immediate attention and remediation. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/poisonedwaters/view/
Even more than the mercury, it is the problem of overfishing that has me sworn off fish. I don't want to support an industry that is mining deeper and deeper into the sea as the fish population worldwide just plummets. That's not good. Take a damn break on the fishing already.
We need environmental repair industries, not the culling, mining, blasting operations that we're so intent on today.
"It's a good thing that we didn't listen to all those treehugging hippies back in the 1970s, or else we wouldn't have finished poisoning and wasting the rest of the earth, and we'd all have lost our jobs."
One of the problems with idiotocracy is that the smart people *know* what's killing them.
This must be why America is fat... all the natural healthy food is toxic.
Every single fish tested in positive?
If you have any kind of scientific inclination at all, alarm bells should be going off.
The question to ask is "What is the negative control?"
The next question after that to ask is "What geography is the negative control?"
Sounds like we're getting really good at detecting mercury.
Antinous, you're eating the wrong kind.
It's like the modern version of the Roman lead water pipes...
Just think of the mercury that is going to be coming from all those Compact Fluorescent bulbs that are being mandated. Each one contains mercury. Very few of them will be properly disposed of and recycled. When you drop one and it breaks in your home, you have a hazardous waste issue. Don't use your household vacuum cleaner to clean up the mess- you'll be dispersing the poison into the air. To Clean it safely you need to call a hazmat team. Seriuosly.
The US supposedly releases only 1% of man made mercury emissions. 60% of the mercury measured in US monitoring stations supposedly originates form outside of our country. It looks like we can chalk this up to another global concern that will take a global effort to solve. =/
http://www.mercuryanswers.org/plants.htm
http://iconicphotos.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/flam2991.jpg
Oh hey, purely theoretical health hazard with no documented cases of occurrence vs. extremely well documented health benefits of a seafood-heavy diet. Hmm... I say: eat some fish. The oilier the better. Omega 3s are definitely good for you; trace amounts of mercury will never harm you.
@anonymous When you drop one and it breaks in your home, you have a hazardous waste issue. Don't use your household vacuum cleaner to clean up the mess- you'll be dispersing the poison into the air. To Clean it safely you need to call a hazmat team. Seriuosly.
That is not true. Seriuosly, I get really sick of misinformation people spread so readily. The amount of mercury in a CFL is miniscule -- it saves far more mercury from entering the atmosphere through the burning of coal than is contained within the CFL. The mercury that is there is in the form of a vapour, and if you break a CFL, you just need to open a window and stay out of the room for a few hours. No need to panic. No hyperventilating. No commenting on blogs that those new light bulbs will kill everyone. You get far more mercury eating tuna. In 2007, CFLs accounted for 0.1% of all mercury emissions in the US -- a fraction of what they diverted from our atmosphere by reducing coal-burning.
More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Mercury_emissions
are you guys kiding me? mercury fish polution in our streams and lakes? fishing was the last thing i had that truly brought me great joy in life and now i cant eat the fish i catch? This makes me worry about wildlife that eat the fish and also get mercury poisoning...
There are scientific reports that the presence of selenium prevents the absorption of mercury - but I don't know if it's true.
Part of the issue w Hg is that once released into the environment it really doesn't do anything more than bioaccumulate up the food chain.
and, because mercury is persistent, you have to worry about wildlife that eat the wildlife that eat the fish and also get mercury poisoning.
but i wonder, how much mercury do bears have in their bodies? or raccoon? raccoon probably eat healthier than humans, besides.
Most of the mercury in fish stems from coal-fired power plants, as coal contains traces of mercury (and other nasties, like uranium) that goes up the chimney with the CO2 and sulfur.
@Stefan Jones
Eating fish in Oregon is probably not a very good idea without knowing your local minerology. Wherever you find Cinnabar, you shouldn't eat anything downstream. It does not have to be dug up to leach mercury. Some of it is so rich that you can see free silver droplets.
I'm beginning to get rather disgusted with Boing Boing's coverage of these sorts of science stories. That article is a mess, and the study its referencing seems rather small and unreliable based on the info in the article.
People have already noted there's no mention of any sorts of controls. But lets look at the sample. Only 291 streams out of how many thousands of bodies of water in the US. No mention of how a stream was defined. How big before its a river how small before its a creak? 291 streams as a representative percentage of US streams depends pretty heavily on just what qualifies as a stream and why. And 1000 fish over the course of 7 years? Out of how many millions or billions of fish? How many species? We have mention of three (bass, trout, and catfish) all of which are predatory fish. Predatory fish tend to have higher mercury levels than others due to that pesky escalation issue others have already mentioned.
And did you catch the quick scare tactic medical facts about mercury poisoning? Notice the complete lack of info about how pervasive mercury poisoning is, how much mercury it takes to make you sick, and a realistic assessment of your chances of getting sick from fish.
And lets not forget that the underlying claim of the article is ridiculous. Of course there's mercury in every fish! Its a naturally occurring substance. Its there at a certain level naturally in the water, due to erosion. Its going to get into sea creatures and plants at the very bottom of the food chain. Since mercury persists in the system its going to escalate as it heads up the food chain. Every living thing can be expected to have certain base level of mercury in its system. The article doesn't mention what that base level is, and where the data lines up against that.
And Xeni nicely boils this already sketchy AP article to 2 paragraphs and leaves us 2 links. 1 to the original article and one to an even shorter blog post. The original article was completely lacking in context (how does this stand against accepted scientific knowledge, is it in line with other studies, are the guys who ran it PETA members?) but come on this is even worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisso
ryuthrowsstuff,
It's a blog post. It links to an AP article. if you come to BB looking for research papers, you're hopelessly lost.
This website has more than once criticized the main stream press (including the AP) for this very same thing. At the same time they routinely strip these articles down to something even more sensational than they already are. My criticisms are for the original article. I have an issue with the post simple posting the main claim as true with out any thought to the quality of the original reporting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
http://www.sicc.sk.ca/saskindian/a71oct06a.htm
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/greenpeace-accuses-unilever-of-negligence-over-mercury-poisoning-of-indian-tourist-resort
http://tinyurl.com/n8rruw
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/3800538-movie-review-the-cove
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/apr/19-how-to-tell-if-you.re-poisoning-yourself-with-fish/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXD8MWYJicg
#20: Thank you!
There's a certain sort of crank who gets all het up about compact florescents but has probably never given a thought to the fate of all the OTHER burned-out florescent lights . . . the ones found in stores, factories, offices and garages. When these burn out, they get tossed in a dumpster.
If you mandated that maintenance men carefully pack and recycle burned-out tubes, the same cranks would start shrieking about regulations strangling business.
I fully agree with Ryuthrowsstuff.
I was part of a large group of academics from across Canada who participated in a multidisciplinary study of mercury in Canada- where it comes from, its fate in the environment, its effects on humans and ecosystems.
There is no doubt that mercury is commonly found in game fish. As a result, regulatory and food safety organizations across North America have provided recommendations re: the number of fish of a given species from a given location that can be eaten safely. Such systems have been in place for decades, nothing new there.
What has changed is that our chemical analysis/detection methods have become highly sensitive. This means that we are detecting more chemicals in more environmental samples. But the basic rule of toxicology is that the dose makes the poison: almost everything is toxic if you ingest enough of it. So the key question should never be, "is a given chemical present?", but rather, "is a given chemical present to an extent that poses a risk to humans/ecosystems?". And this article clearly states that "only about a quarter had mercury levels exceeding what the Environmental Protection Agency says is safe for people eating average amounts of fish". And that the fish with these levels came from streams known to be receiving high levels of mercury. Again, that's hardly news.
The results are sad, they raise red flags about water pollution in North America, but I don't get a ZOMGWEREALLGONNADIERUNHIDE vibe here. And I am both a toxicologist and a game fisher who occasionally eats his catch.
#28, Antinous:
The research paper is here (just a couple of clicks from the AP article).
It's important that 'every single fish tested' was a top predator- these are the fish most likely to accumulate mercury. Non-predatory fish will have far lower (or undetectable) levels.
I live in Virginia Beach, Va. Hampton Roads hosts so many military bases, ship yards, chemical plants, and many other forms of industry that our waterways have been hopelessly polluted since day one. The site of the Dominion Surry Nuclear Power Plant (Hog Island) was once the place where John Smith kept his pigs. Just about every place in the region that pollutes (and they are abundant) were producers of pollution even before the current industry was imagined or implemented. We've had a long time to muck things up here. Levels of PCBs and heavy metals like lead and mercury are comically high.
Yet with all of the information available to the public, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of people that eat out of the streams, creeks, rivers, lakes, the bay, and the ocean in this area. Occasionally I'll see someone fishing from the nearest bridge (if you look at a map, small bridges for roads are EVERWHERE) and tell them about all of the terrible and toxic things in the water and they usually just give a cross-eyed look and the "ain't hurt me yet!" response. I don't argue with people anymore, I just feel like I should warn people in case they don't know. SO NASTY.
Mercury is everywhere. Make sure you recycle your florecent light bulbs.
Maybe they print up a shirt like this one but for fish. Might be tough to get the fish to play along though.
If you are truly worried about the amount of mercury in fish, but still want Omega-3 in your diet, take a supplement. The fish oil ones are all micro-filtered to remove heavy metals. Yeah, not as yummy as scrod, but worry-free.
Now, about those fillings in your mouth...
"No talking to the food"
I meant to say we ought to take a break on the industrial fishing. Sportsmen and women, fishers, hunters, respect. But, you folks need to step right up (in greater numbers, with greater force) to the plate and make the case for conservation, protection, industrial regulation and remediation. NOW. You can keep your guns if we can keep our forests and streams. How's that?
in places where you can, catch your own seafood...see where they come from. Wild fish from protected inlets, are healthier fish.
Did the study consider Alaska's Kenai Salmon? We depend on the personal use amounts.
In Sweden the mercury content in fish exceeds the WHO/FAO limit value of 0.5 mg Hg/kg in approximately 50,000 lakes (about half the lakes in Sweden). Reference.
Please don't pretend your sh*t don't stick.
@#45
Sport fishing can actually cause more damage to fish stocks than commercial fishing. Even when limits are imposed and enforced strictly the number of fish that can be taken by a recreational fisherman in a season often vastly exceeds commercial quotas.
maybe this is why fish float to the top when its hot outside!
48 comments and NOT ONE mention of COAL.
Most of the electricity in the United States is generated by burning coal which releases mercury into the atmosphere. It is INDISPUTABLY the #1 cause of mercury contamination by a HUGE MARGIN.
And not just mercury contamination of fish, mind you, but hotspots of retarded children just downwind of coal-fired electrical plants.
Well done, coal lobbyists. Well done.
@nygenxer, 49:
Indeed, not one mention of it. Two is, after all, a different number.
@djn: Oops, you're right.
In Japan, they grow the seaweed specifically so that it contains proper amounts of iodine, which is a mercury chelator. You don't find the same levels of iodine in seaweed taken from North American waters, if at all. So, take it from the Japanese, mercury is not going to be avoided, but learning how to counteract it is a worthy study.
Little note: flax seed contains omega-3s. So if that's the only reason you're eating fish, you have an alternatve.
#54 Yes flax and a great number of other plants contain omega-3s. This is in fact where all omega-3s come from. Issue is our bodies aren't designed to absorb plant based omega-3s we do much better getting our omega-3s from animal sources already properly altered for animal systems.
Duck fat is actually a really great source of omega-3s. Its predominantly poly-unsaturated fat, the remaining saturated fats are mostly omega-3, omega-6 and other poly-saturated fats.
Any excuse to eat duck fat is a good excuse.
Cooked over rice and rounded out with a few generous spoonfuls of flax oil, oh yes. Then you have hemp oil which is high in the omegas. Good to drink and very good for topical applications. (Directly on to the 3rd eye is good.) :)
duck fat ?
NEWS FLASH! your grey/metal tooth fillings? 50% mercury by volume. No, seriously, you've got more than a couple of grams of mercury RIGHT IN YOUR MOUTH that comes in contact with your food, etc etc. EVERYBODY PANIC. Studies have proven that these fillings give off mercury vapors at very measurable rates during and after eating. People have had mercury dental fillings for the last 100-150 years and I have yet to see anyone prove that it causes a drop in lifespan or brain activity, liver function or other. Doctors in ancient china used to prescribe weekly doses of Mercury to emperors for immortality, who took them for years without any effect. The mercury content you consume through seafood and general daily life is orders of magnitude less. You'd be better off campaigning against using Americanium (radioactive! eek!) in smoke detectors in houses with children, or removing coal power plant ash from bricks used in housing, which contain about 0.01% radioactive material by weight. With all the things in the world out there to get you, it's a wonder we make it to reproductive age at all.
Yes duck fat. Whether we're taking still in the meat or rendered out and used as a cooking fat. It makes everything delicious. Super high smoke point and great browning properties.
Try cooking a nice steak in about 3 table spoons of the stuff, over medium low heat. Beats the butter steak:
http://thepauperedchef.com/2009/04/the-butter-steak-whats-the-best-way-to-cook-a-steak.html
by a long shot. And it works on smaller thinner cuts.
Sounds good. Sounds good. But I plan to stay way the hell away from Sardine on Toast sorbet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fat_Duck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang_Di#Death_and_aftermath
http://tiny.cc/PowA2
Glad to see they've put an inter-agency task force on ocean issues. Let's hope they get it together and work fast to deal with the problems of pollution, overfishing, acidification, warming... it's a lot but I think they can do something.
Takuan, I'm glad you're here.
I'm sure that means alot coming from you, Anonymous. :)
(that's my maiden name)
Pills of White Mercury
As I was a walking by the banks of the Ugie
Come my dear friends and a story I'll relate
I spied a dear comrade all dressed in white flannel
Dressed in white flannel and cruel was his fate
The mercury was beating, the limestone was reeking
His tongue all inflamed hung over his chin
A hole in his bosom, his teeth were a closin'
Bad luck to the girl that had gi'ed him the Phlegm (flame?)
Chorus:
And had she but told me, oh when she dishonored me
Had she but told me of it in time
I might have been cured by those pills of white mercury
Now I am a young man cut down in my prime
My parents they warned me and oftimes they chided
With those young flash girls do not sport and play
But I never listened, no I never heeded
I just carried on in my own wicked way
[Chorus]
It's down on the corner two flash girls were talking
One to the other did whisper and say
There goes that young man who once was so jolly
But now for his sins his own body must pay
[Chorus]
Oh doctor, dear doctor before your departure
Take all these bottles of mercury away
And send for the minister to say a prayer over me
So they can put my poor body in the clay
[Chorus]
Now get you six fellow to carry my coffin
Six pretty fair maids to bear up my pall
And give each of them there a bunch of red roses
So when they pass by me they'll not know the smell
"Streets Of Laredo"
As I walked out on the streets of Laredo.
As I walked out on Laredo one day,
I spied a poor cowboy wrapped in white linen,
Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.
"I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy."
These words he did say as I boldly walked by.
"Come an' sit down beside me an' hear my sad story.
"I'm shot in the breast an' I know I must die."
"It was once in the saddle, I used to go dashing.
"Once in the saddle, I used to go gay.
"First to the card-house and then down to Rose's.
"But I'm shot in the breast and I'm dying today."
"Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin.
"Six dance-hall maidens to bear up my pall.
"Throw bunches of roses all over my coffin.
"Roses to deaden the clods as they fall."
"Then beat the drum slowly, play the Fife lowly.
"Play the dead march as you carry me along.
"Take me to the green valley, lay the sod o'er me,
"I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong."
"Then go write a letter to my grey-haired mother,
"An' tell her the cowboy that she loved has gone.
"But please not one word of the man who had killed me.
"Don't mention his name and his name will pass on."
When thus he had spoken, the hot sun was setting.
The streets of Laredo grew cold as the clay.
We took the young cowboy down to the green valley,
And there stands his marker, we made, to this day.
We beat the drum slowly and played the Fife lowly,
Played the dead march as we carried him along.
Down in the green valley, laid the sod o'er him.
He was a young cowboy and he said he'd done wrong.
I love the Dogs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iiJMgUlIR8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KliIYyGBnPo
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/574/88944-96475-mercury_large.jpg
http://www.easypedia.gr/el/images/shared/archive/1/12/20050814153309!Freddy_Mercury_Statue_Montreux.jpg
http://displaystatues.com/bronze_statues/images/lgbrz03statue2136.jpg
My fifth grade class sang Streets of Laredo at the school concert. I played the corpse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHJdqCyJ_Os
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOJPvxgkvn8&feature=related
we walked under the heat of noon in the mud, brown silt, faintly sulfurous of ancient mountains come back to their seas with the dogs running before us. A foot dislodged a bottle, ten sided glass with stopper long gone and "Santal de Midy" embossed on one facet. It spoke to me. Pale hands filling it with grape-colored pills in Paris a century before, paper wrapping and a voyage halfway across a planet, around the Land of Fire and north to the giant trees and salmon people...
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4055
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation
interesting
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-fish-diabetes-bdaug23,0,7994362.story