Brain Food. What Women Should Know About Mercury Contamination of Fish

The White Paper:

2001. http://www.pirg.org/toxics/reports/brainfood/brainfoodreport.pdf

Review This White Paper’s Executive Summary:
http://www.pirg.org/toxics/reports/brainfood/brainfoodreport.pdf

The Purpose of this White Paper:
This white paper reviews mercury emissions and their impact on public health. These authors list their nine recommendations to remedy what they perceive as shortcomings in current methylmercury regulation.

These authors also explore whether methylmercury contamination of fish in the United States is well-regulated according to their standards – and if U.S. women are well-informed about the mercury and fish/seafood issues according to these authors’ standards.

Some Background, Methods, Results, Caveats, and Other Select Points:

• This is not a peer-reviewed, scientific paper.
• This white paper was first publicly distributed in 2001.
• This white paper is written by people representing several activist groups who disagreed with U.S. mercury regulation in 2001.

A Bottom Line:
The report includes nine recommendations of these authors to improve the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) methylmercury health regulatory efforts.

1. “The list of fish to avoid during pregnancy must be expanded.
2. FDA’s recommendation that pregnant women eat 12 ounces a week of any fish (except the four that are not allowed) must be radically revised.
3. Women who want to eat fish during pregnancy must have information about which species are least contaminated with methylmercury.
4. Even though FDA has no authority to regulate methylmercury in freshwater fish, FDA does have a responsibility to provide critical health information to the public.
5. FDA must immediately expand its methylmercury sampling program to include a host of fish where the data indicate that pregnant women and their babies could receive a potentially unsafe exposure from a relatively small amount of fish.
6. FDA should now post the results of all of its methylmercury testing on the Internet.
7. FDA needs to move beyond its antiquated and biologically implausible risk assessment methods based on average people and average fish and adopt state-of-the-art risk assessment techniques that provide a much more realistic picture of mercury exposure and risk as it is distributed throughout the population.
8. Federal decisionmakers should require power plants to reduce their mercury pollution by 90% and ultimately move away from polluting sources of power.
9. The United States must develop a comprehensive program to track disease and exposure to contaminants like methylmercury.”

Find This White Paper for Your Review:
Brain Food. What Women Should Know About Mercury Contamination of Fish.
http://www.pirg.org/toxics/reports/brainfood/brainfoodreport.pdf