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A risk hidden in fish, mercury contamination
By Roger Witherspoon
The Journal News
10th April 2004
For years, taking a big bite out of a fresh, raw tuna was part of Joe DiMauro's daily routine.
"We sell a lot of rare or raw tuna here," said DiMauro, owner of the Mt. Kisco Seafood fish market and restaurant, "and if the fish isn't really fresh, then people can get sick."
So each morning, he personally selected a 300- and a 400-pound tuna at the Fulton Fish Market, cutting a chunk out of the fish near the tail and tasting it. But that practice stopped in 1985 when he got a telephone call from his physician. He had been feeling lethargic, he said, and was prone to wild mood swings for no apparent reason.
"He had taken a hair sample to do a mineral analysis and see what I might be lacking in my diet," DiMauro said. "And he told me my mercury reading was off the charts and asked me if I ate a lot of fish. That's when I found out there's a problem."
That news resulted in two changes in his life. First, he stopped eating fish for six months to get the mercury out of his body, "and the mood swings stopped. They had been wild. They were scary."
Second, he began telling his customers about mercury contamination in fish.
"I would tell people it's safe to eat fish," DiMauro said. "I have 30 to 35 different types of fish here on any given day, and there are plenty of healthy fish to choose from. But I would talk to women, particularly if they were pregnant or had little kids, about moderation in what fish they ate to avoid a build-up of mercury."
The subject of mercury contamination has come up a lot lately at fish markets and restaurants, following warnings last month by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration about the dangerous levels of mercury in many types of fish. For the first time, the government decreed that the threat of mercury poisoning was serious enough to caution women of child-bearing age and young children to avoid some types of fish altogether. Everyone else was advised to limit the amounts of fish they eat, or balance their fish intake by eating less swordfish and other fish with similarly high levels of mercury, and more shrimp or salmon, which have lower levels.
Vito Russo, manager of C&M Seafood in Pomona, said many of his customers want to discuss the mercury issue and to learn which species, such as salmon, are safer to eat than albacore tuna or swordfish.
"There's definitely been more of a call for salmon," Russo said. "But the Alaskan salmon season ended in October. So I just started carrying farm-raised salmon from New Zealand."
Laurie Young, 31, of Putnam Valley, who was pregnant with her daughter last year, said she has cut out swordfish completely. While her family now eats tuna only once a month, they have been trying to eat other kinds of fish once a week.
"We believe it's worth it for the health benefits," Young said.
A naturally occurring metal, mercury can affect the nervous system if ingested in sufficient amounts. Young children and foetuses are particularly susceptible to the toxic metal, said Gina Solomon, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, because it interferes with the development and operation of neurons within the brain.
Mercury contamination in adults has been linked to headaches, mood swings, confusion, memory loss, tremors and some forms of heart disease.
"There is far more concern with pregnant women and infants because, in the adult brain, the cells are no longer dividing," said Solomon, a specialist in occupational and environmental medicine at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. "The total number of cells we have in our brains are pretty much formed in the first couple of years of life. That's why children and foetuses are so much more susceptible."
Most of the mercury tainting the nation's waterways comes from chlorine-chemical and coal-burning power plants. Mercury is a trace element in coal, and is vaporized and released into the atmosphere when the coal is burned to turn electric generators. Collectively, the nation's 1,100 coal plants pour about 48 tons of mercury into the air each year.
U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., was among 45 senators this week who unsuccessfully petitioned EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt to strengthen regulations on mercury pollution. On Wednesday, Clinton called on the Senate's environment and government affairs committees to hold hearings on how the Bush Administration developed its proposal to regulate mercury emissions from power plants.
"EPA researchers concluded earlier this year that one in six women of child-bearing age have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies," Clinton said in an interview. "That translates into 630,000 babies born each year at risk of neurological impairment from mercury exposure."
According to an ongoing research project by New York state's Health and Environmental Conservation departments, studies indicate that virtually all of the state's more than 4,000 reservoirs and lakes — including the 21 in the New York City water system — are contaminated with mercury and that larger fish in those waters have unhealthy levels in their bodies.
Once mercury is deposited in a body of water, state officials said, it remains dangerous for more than 10,000 years.
In the mid-1990s, the DEC caught and examined game fish in three major reservoirs in the New York City system — the Neversink, Ashokan and Roundout — and found that all had fish with relatively high mercury levels.
"That caused the Department of Health to issue consumption advisories for certain species," DEC spokeswoman Maureen Wren said.
In 2001, the two state agencies decided to test at least six species of fish in 80 major lakes and reservoirs, including all the reservoirs in the New York City system, which provides drinking water to 9 million people daily, including 15 percent of Putnam and 85 percent of Westchester residents.
All the fish had some mercury in them, though the highest levels existed in the dominant predators in each water body. The mercury does not dissolve into the water, which remains safe to drink.
As a result of the studies, the Health Department issued general advisories to limit fish consumption from all state waters, and specific warnings about fish in the 80 lakes tested. Health warnings for specific species are issued if mercury deposits exceed 1 part per million.
"The highest reading of an individual fish in the Croton system was from a walleye caught in the East Branch Reservoir, at just over 2 parts per million," Wren said.
The testing is continuing, and the agencies will examine fish in another 126 lakes by the end of 2005, she said.
The federal Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set strict standards for the reduction of hazardous air pollutants through the use of "maximum available control technology.” Chemicals fall into this regulatory category if the agency rules such reductions are both "appropriate and necessary."
The EPA included mercury in this category in 2000, but did not impose restrictions on emissions. But as a result of a federal lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the agency agreed to establish draft regulations by last December and final regulations by the end of this year. The EPA last year proposed changing mercury's classification, finding it was "appropriate" only to reduce mercury emissions, and power plants did not need to use the best available technology.
Leavitt, the EPA administrator, also proposed setting a "cap" on power plant emissions and allowing more-efficient plants to "trade" their pollution rights with less efficient plants.
"The government should not be in the business of permitting some places in America to become hot spots of mercury contamination," Clinton said. "But that is what would happen if we let the worst offenders engage in trading for the right to pollute."
There are 15 coal-fired power plants in New York, including the two Mirant-owned Lovett Generating Station plants in Rockland County's Tomkins Cove, which generate 365 megawatts of electricity and release about 40 pounds of mercury into the atmosphere each year, according to state environmental records. Nationally, the average coal-fired plant releases about 87 pounds of mercury each year.
The Lovett plants have a consent decree with the state Attorney General's Office to drastically reduce their emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide, which contribute to acid rain, Mirant spokesman Louis Friscoe said. But they do not have agreements to reduce mercury emissions.
The attorneys general of New York and nine other states sent Leavitt a letter last week stating that the federal plan to let companies continue to spew mercury into the atmosphere until 2018 violates the Clean Air Act.
"The president's proposal for a weak level of control is bad law, bad policy and bad economics," said Deputy Attorney General Peter Lehner, who heads the office's environmental protection bureau. "It is much better and cheaper for society as a whole to address pollution at its source rather than let it spread all over the environment and have its impact on humans and wildlife for generations."
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