Canned Tuna Under Scrutiny

An activist group says the Food and Drug Administration should do more to protect children from mercury found in canned tuna. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

An activist group says the Food and Drug Administration should do more to protect
children from mercury found in canned tuna. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports:


The Mercury Policy Project says levels of mercury in canned tuna could be
dangerous to small children or a developing fetus. It’s calling for stricter guidelines
on eating tuna and for more restrictions on mercury pollution from coal-fired
power plants.


But the tuna canning industry says the mercury levels in tuna are lower than
the environmentalists say they are… and pollution is not the chief cause. Melanie
Miller is with the U.S. Tuna Foundation. She say the chief source is
naturally-occurring mercury from underwater volcanoes…


“There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s naturally occurring in the ocean.
So, we can’t really reduce the amount of mercury. The only thing we can do
is monitor very closely and make sure that the levels of mercury that are in our cans of
tuna are as low as possible.”


Miller says tuna fishers try to take smaller, younger tuna which have lower
levels of mercury. Miller adds that consumers should follow the FDA’s
guidelines limiting the amount of tuna eaten each week.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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