Good Fish, Bad Fish

  • Some grocery stores are training their staff on the benefits and risks of eating some kinds of fish. Nels Carson (pictured) answers customers' concerns about fish contamination. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Fish advisories are confusing. Their guidelines change depending on your gender and age,
and on the type of fish you’re eating. Reporter Kyle Norris boils down
some of the information in advisories and comes up with a few things to think about
when you eat fish:

Transcript

Fish advisories are confusing. Their guidelines change depending on your gender and age,
and on the type of fish you’re eating. Reporter Kyle Norris boils down
some of the information in advisories and comes up with a few things to think about
when you eat fish:


So I did a little informal survey the other day where I asked my friends what they knew about
eating fish. Some of my friends said, “Hey, isn’t eating fish good for you?” Well, turns out they’re right. Fish are
great sources of protein. They’re low in “bad” fats and high in “good” fats, or omega-3
fatty acids, which help your heart stay healthy.


And some of my other friends knew that fish were bad for you. Turns out they’re also right. Fish
take in pollutants through their food and water. Toxins such as mercury, PCBs, and
dioxins. If humans eat enough contaminated fish, those contaminants can build up in our
bodies and cause serious health problems. Contaminants are especially threatening for
small children and women of childbearing age because they can affect children’s
developing nervous systems.


Governments put out advisories so we know which fish are safe to eat. But advisories aren’t
the easiest thing to understand. And anyway, what do you do if you’re in a restaurant, or
cruising through the grocery store and you just want some fish?


“Uh we’re standing in front of the seafood counter at Whole Foods and we’re looking at
our fresh case…”


That’s Nels Carlson. He heads up the seafood department at my local Whole Foods
Market. He says people ask him about fish safety everyday:


“It can be kind of a daunting topic, I think, because there is such a variety. It’s not just a
gross generalization. So it really, it takes a lot of dialogue between customers and team
members and having a very knowledgeable team member base here really helps that.”


They’ll ask him about mercury in the fish, a highly toxic metal that occurs naturally but is a lot more prevalent
mostly because of coal burning power plants. Mercury shows up in higher concentrations
in certain kinds of fish. It’s nice to have a knowledgeable guy like Nels to talk with. Good fish vendors, such as
Whole Foods, go through special training on fish safety. But what if there’s no seafood
expert hanging out next to the fish sticks in the freezer section, if you know what I mean?


Anita Sandretto teaches in the Environmental Health Sciences department at the
University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, and she said that my friends are right.
Okay, well, she didn’t really say that, but she said there are good things about fish and there are bad things about fish:


“If you want to have the benefit of the fat and the omega-3 fatty acids, eat fish with more
fat, but the fat will also be where you will see the contaminants such as PCBs, dioxin.
The flesh will also be where you might have the mercury contamination.”


See, that’s the thing about eating fish: it gets complicated and there are no hard and fast
rules. Sandretto says eating fish is all about treading a line between the advantages and
the risks. So, if there is a risk, you want to reduce it as much as possible:


“…Because if you have any risk in a particular type of food, if you only consume once in
while, you have a less risk of anything bad happening.”


So think in terms of moderation and variety. Sandretto says it’s cool if you want to eat fish once or
twice a week, and to try and vary the kinds of fish that you eat. She says moderation and
variety are actually great rules of thumb to apply to your entire diet. So you could eat a
turkey sandwich on white one day, tuna on whole wheat the next, and a veggie burger the day
after that.


If you eat fish caught from local waters, check with your regional or state health
departments for their fish advisories. Just because a waterway looks clean or is in a
picturesque setting does not mean that its fish are harmless. Contaminants enter the
water in all kinds of ways.


One last thought: imagine a little fish with a little bit of contamination in its body.
Now imagine a medium-sized fish, who swims along and eats that fish and 99 of its closest small
fish friends. That medium guy now has 100 times more contamination than the small fish.
And now let’s say a big fish swims up and gulps down ten medium fish. That big fish has a
concentration that’s 1000 times higher than what that origianal small fish had.


So the moral of that story is, eat smaller fish when possible, also called pan fish. And
at the end of the day, keep in mind that the majority of research, including a recent study
from Harvard’s School of Public Health, say that the benefits of eating fish in moderation
outweigh the risks.


For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

STUDY FINDS PDBEs IN HOUSEHOLD DUST

  • Babies and children are frequently in contact with dust. Some scientists worry that potentially-harmful chemicals found in household dust will result in negative health effects. (Photo by Jason Sellers)

Chemicals that are suspected of being hazardous to human health are being found in household dust. The chemicals are flame retardants used in everything from carpet padding to TV sets. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Chemicals that are suspected of being hazardous to human health
are being found in household dust. The chemicals are flame retardants
used in everything from carpet padding to TV sets. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:


The chemicals are known as poly-brominated-diphenyl-ethers, or PBDEs.
Scientists already knew that these flame retardant chemicals where found in
food. Now researchers are finding the chemicals, in household dust.


Heather Stapleton is a research chemist at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology. She authored a study recently published by the
American Chemical Society.


“I went out and collected some house dust samples from areas within the
Washington D.C. metropolitan area, and brought these samples back to the lab
and just did a preliminary measurement looking at PBDE’s in the house dust
samples and found surprisingly high levels in the house dust.”


Researchers are most concerned about how the chemicals affect developing
babies. Babies have more contact with household dust than the rest of us.
The chemicals have been found to cause developmental and nervous system
damage in rats and mice.


For the GLRC, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

How Far Will Dow Chemical Cleanup Go?

For years, a big chemical company has been negotiating
with government officials on cleaning up an area contaminated with dioxin. Environmentalists say Dow Chemical has used its power and influence to drag out the talks. The chemical company has agreed to plan for some kind of clean-up… but it’s still not clear how far that clean-up will go. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta reports:

Transcript

For years, a big chemical company has been negotiating
with government officials on cleaning up an area contaminated
with dioxin. Environmentalists say Dow Chemical has used its
power and influence to drag out the talks. The chemical company
has agreed to plan for some kind of clean-up… but it’s still
not clear how far that clean-up will go. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Rick Pluta reports:


Dow Chemical is a huge employer in Michigan, it employs almost 60 thousand people, not including outside suppliers. In a state that has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, a big company like Dow is important. The state of Michigan has been negotiating with Dow for nearly a decade over cleaning up dioxin downstream from the company’s big plant in the central part of the state. Just recently Dow and the state struck a deal on the next phase of coming up with a clean-up plan. But it’s not clear how long it will take to design the plan and it’s not clear exactly how far the plan will go to clean up the contamination.


The people who live in the floodplain of the Titabawassee River, downstream from the Dow Chemical plant in Midland, Michigan, say they’ve waited long enough for a cleanup plan. Almost a decade has passed since dioxin was first discovered in the river sediment.


(sound of river)


At Immerman Park in the town of Freeland, downriver from Dow, signs dot the riverbank. They warn parents to keep their children from playing here, because there’s dioxin in the soil.


(sound of hand-washing)


An earlier agreement with the state led Dow to put handwashing stations up here for children to clean up after playing in the dirt. Mary Whitney lives nearby. She says the sinks and faucets in the hand-washing stations are too high and too complicated for children to use, and they’re located too far from the banks of the river. She doesn’t think the kids are getting the dioxin contamination off their hands let alone off their shoes and clothes. She says it’s typical of how the dioxin question’s being handled in Michigan.


“It’s like, well, let’s do a little bit to show we’re doing something, but let’s not maybe address the whole issue. We’ll do just a little but to keep the peace and to keep everybody from not getting so much up in arms. But I think, they’re trying to do, Dow is, trying to do some things to help. But it’s just putting a little Band-Aid on the whole issue. It’s not fixing the main problem.”


For decades one of the by-products of the chemicals Dow produced was dioxin. It’s believed dioxin has been in the soil around Midland since the early 20th century. The fact that dioxin contaminated the sediment along the river downstream was only discovered within the last decade.


Studies have linked dioxin to health problems, including cancer and damage to the nervous system. The state says dioxin has spread to the environment round the Titabawassee River to the point that it issued warnings to hunters to limit how much wild game they eat from the area. That’s because the state says deer, squirrels and other game might be contaminated with dioxin.


Dow and its supporters say the risks posed by dioxin are being overstated. Dow officials say there’s no evidence that the dioxin levels in the Titabawassee floodplain pose a threat to the public health. Dow researcher Jim Collins says the company has six decades of research on employees who’ve been exposed to high levels of dioxin, and the worst health effect is a mild form of chloracne in some of the company’s employees.


Chloracne is the skin condition that disfigured Ukraine’s president, Victor Yushchenko, after he was poisoned by a large dose of dioxin.


“We’ve studied heart disease, diabetes, immunologic effects, reproductive effects, and cancer. And other than some increased risk of chloracne in these workers, we find no health effects that have been related to dioxin exposures.”


Backers of the company say critics should be careful about calling for penalizing Dow. Janee Valesquez is the the local economic development group “Midland Tomorrow.” She says Dow’s impact on the local economy amounts to almost a billion dollars a year.


“So Dow is absolutely… an anchor for mid-Michigan.”


Businesses and workers don’t want to damage relations with the chemical giant. Jim Ballard is an economist at Michigan State University. He says there is some risk that Dow could abandon Michigan. Texas is the new home of the chemical industry, he says, because energy’s cheap and it doesn’t burden industry with a lot of environmental regulations.


“I think Dow might consider leaving if they felt the business regulatory climate in Michigan was excessively onerous. On the hand, it would be very costly for them to leave. They’ve got a large investment in infrastructure and human capital in the Midland area, and to reverse would be a decision that I’m sure they would not take lightly.”


But critics of how the dioxing clean-up has been handled think the economic concerns should not be more important than the health risks to people who live nearby – people such as Mary Whitney. She and others filed a lawsuit seeking a lifetime of medical tests paid for by Dow. That case is before the state Supreme Court. Whitney says she’s afraid a cleanup plan will get bogged down in talks, or delayed by studies.


“We want them to clean it up. Take responsibility for what they’ve done and clean it up and make it safe for all of us. Now I’m not sure what all that would entail. Surely maybe dredging the river to make it deeper. Shoring up the shores, so it doesn’t flood any longer. And fill in the yards with clean soil. And that’s going to be a big thing to do.”


Many critics of the state’s handling of the dioxin clean-up believe anything less than an extensive clean-up is putting business and jobs ahead of the health of the people in Midland and downstream along the Titabawassee River.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Rick Pluta.

Related Links

Doctors Publish Fish Buying Guide

Last month, the Federal Advisory Panel re-evaluated the food pyramid. The panel’s now saying Americans should increase the amount of fish they eat to two servings a week. But sorting through the various recommendations on how to avoid some contaminants in fish can be tricky. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports on a group of doctors, who say their new guide will help clarify the concern about mercury in fish:

Transcript

Last month, the Federal Advisory Panel re-evaluated the food pyramid. The panel’s now
saying Americans should increase the amount of fish they eat to two servings a week.
But sorting through the various recommendations on how to avoid some contaminants in
fish can be tricky. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports on a
group of doctors, who say their new guide will help clarify the concern about mercury in
fish:


Health officials continue to warn citizens about the dangers of mercury in fish. The EPA
indicates that eight percent of women of child-bearing age have elevated unsafe mercury
levels. Exposure early in life can damage the nervous system, leading to a variety of
learning disabilities.


Susan Marmagas is with the Physicians for Social Responsibility. She’s traveling the
country promoting a new wallet-sized guide to help consumers make informed choices.
She says the guide is stricter than federal guidelines.


“What we said is let’s make a very clear guide so that people can continue to eat fish as a
part of a healthy diet, but fish that are low in contaminants.”


Marmagas says the guide encourages the consumption of small fish, like tilapia and
halibut. These fish are at the bottom of the food chain, and therefore contain less
mercury.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton.

Related Links

EXTRACTING MERCURY FROM THE DENTIST’S OFFICE

  • Lorraine Kellerman operates the mercury separator in one dental office. Kellerman says it's easy and satisfying to recycle the mercury.

Health officials warn pregnant women and children to avoid eating certain kinds of fish. Mercury built up in the fish can damage the nervous system and impair children’s mental development. The National Academy of Sciences says at least 60,000 American children are born at risk for impaired development every year because their mothers were exposed to mercury. Mercury has been eliminated from paint, batteries, and other products. Now, some dentists are doing their part to reduce the mercury going into the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Health officials warn pregnant women and children to avoid eating certain kinds of fish.
Mercury built up in the fish can damage the nervous system and impair children’s mental
development. The National Academy of Sciences says at least 60,000 American children
are born at risk for impaired development every year because their mothers were exposed
to mercury. Mercury has been eliminated from paint, batteries, and other products. Now,
some dentists are doing their part to reduce the mercury going into the environment. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:


Mercury is an essential part of dental amalgam, the silver stuff used to fill cavities. The
mercury keeps the amalgam soft until it’s pressed into the cavity, then it bonds to form a
very stable, durable filling. The problem is the small bits of amalgam that are left over
after the cavity is filled. The suction hose that cleans them out of your mouth generally
dumps them down the drain. So they can easily end up in a lake or river, where they can
be eaten by fish.


The average dental office creates about a half pound of waste mercury every year. Just a
tiny portion of that would be enough to warrant fish advisories.


“The amount that’s sewered from dental offices is probably the largest input to the sewer
system.”


Tim Tuominen is a pollution prevention specialist with the Western Lake Superior
Sanitary District in Duluth. He’s been working with dentists in the city for nearly ten
years to reduce the mercury they wash down the drain.


He started with the vacuum systems nearly all dentists already have. When the suction
hose whisks amalgam out of your mouth, the pieces are held in a container to keep them
from damaging the vacuum pump. Tuominen showed the dentists how to empty the
container and bring the contents to the district’s recycling program.


In the first two years, the amount of mercury coming into Duluth’s wastewater treatment
plant was cut in half, and it’s been reduced even further since then.


To cut down on mercury even more, Tuominen got a grant to buy more expensive
equipment that captures up to 99% of the amalgam. He offered the equipment free to any
dentist who would agree to use it.


“I’ll go in and install them, train the assistants and the dentists how they operate, that only
takes about half an hour, then after six months I show them how to manage the solids
particles that collect in them over that time period. So it’s really pretty simple.”


Most of the dental offices in Duluth have installed the systems, and Tuominen expects the
rest to follow suit.


Lorraine Kellerman operates the system in one dental office. Once a week she empties
the chair-side traps and puts the chunks of amalgam into a container for recycling. Then
she goes down to the basement where a tank, like an aquarium, collects the finer particles.
The heavy amalgam settles to the bottom of the tank.


“We just put the hose in the drain, turn the lever, and you just wait ’til the fluid runs out
and then you can come back down, it doesn’t take long, it only takes a few minutes
basically.”


Once a year the amalgam that collects at the bottom is cleaned out and recycled.


Kellerman’s boss is dentist Jim Westman.


“The beauty of this technology is in its simplicity. Gravity works, it’s simple, it’s very
inexpensive.”


Westman says the dentists in Duluth are happy to use the equipment. It costs about
$500, and the recycling charge is about $50 a year.


Westman is chair of the Minnesota Dental Association’s environmental committee. It’s
been working on a plan to help dentists around the state of Minnesota reduce their output
of mercury. Westman says they want to make it easy for dentists.


“No matter where someone has question in regards to what’s going to work in my
equipment, there’s so many variations from one office to the next, who are my resources
to call or handling, transport, process materials, it’s that who you going to call side of the
question that’s going to make a difference as we build a bigger program. ”


If the voluntary program catches on in Minnesota, it could spread to other states. Michael
Bender is director of the Mercury Policy Project, a national organization working to
reduce mercury in the environment. He says dentists around the country are beginning to
feel they should do their part.


“It’s part of the cost of doing business. It’s not going to break any dentist’s back
financially to cover the cost of doing whatever it takes to be a good business, responsible
to the community, responsible to the environment.”


In December, the Environmental Protection Agency is convening a meeting on dental
mercury. The agency will publish information on ways state and local governments can
keep dental mercury out of the environment.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Educating Parents About Mercury

Over the years, parents have become more aware of the dangers
in their own homes. So they keep kids away from things like pesticides,
electrical cords, and plastic bags. Still, most people remain unaware of
another threat from a common household item. Ironically, it may be the
first thing you reach for when your child is sick. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports:

Educating Parents About Mercury

Over the years, parents have become more aware of the dangers in their ownhomes. So they keep kids away from things like pesticides, electricalcords, and plastic bags. Still, most people remain unaware of another threatfrom a common household item. Ironically, it may be the first thing youreach for when your child is sick. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s WendyNelson reports:

Feds Test for Endocrine Disrupters

The U-S Environmental Protection Agency is working to identify whether certain chemicals disrupt human reproductive and neurological systems. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports that the process will take years, and for now, scientists recommend avoiding suspect chemicals found in some foods:

EPA Re-Examines Effects of Pesticides on Children

For the past few years, environmentalists have been warning consumers that pesticides applied to fruits and vegetables could be extremely dangerous to children. Soon, the Environmental Protection Agency will tackle the issue. Armed with a new federal law, the EPA is taking a fresh look to see if pesticides applied to produce carry health hazards. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Edelson Halpert has more: