Monday Magazine (Victoria, B.C., Canada), March 14, 2007

TOXINS ON THE MENU

Fish full of mercury are just one symptom of a poisoned planet

[Rachel's introduction: Victoria [British Columbia] member of parliament Denise Savoie says it is hard to trust the argument that there are "safe levels" for mercury and other contaminants. "Is there any safe level for things like that?" she asks.]

Now it's the fish that are poisonous. The Madison Declaration on Mercury Pollution -- based on a conference in Wisconsin last summer and released this week -- says children and women of child-bearing age should avoid certain kinds of fish because they are high in mercury.

Mercury is a toxin that can have various effects, depending on how it is taken into the body. Exposing a fetus to mercury, according to the Madison report, will impair the child's development and is associated with learning difficulties. It's long been known that mercury poisoning can cause a lack of coordination, memory loss and mood swings even in adults.

In short, it is nasty stuff that you don't want in your body. And as the Madison report authors point out, there is a lot more of it in the environment now, thanks to burning coal. The scientists acknowledged the level has increased three-fold in the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, but they stopped short of calling for cleaning up the mess. Instead they advised people to change their consumption patterns, picking fish like salmon or sole over predators like tuna and shark that are further up the food chain.

Environmentalist and author Guy Dauncey argues we shouldn't ignore the source of the problem and should act accordingly to reduce the amount of mercury to which we and other species are exposed. "It's another nail in the coffin of coal-fired power," says Dauncey. "It's not coming from fluorescent light bulbs and thermometer tubes; it's coming from air pollution."

Victoria member of parliament Denise Savoie describes the Madison report as, "Really worrisome. Not surprising, but worrisome." She says, "This was just much more specific and maybe a little more alarming." For populations that rely on fish as a mainstay of their diet, she adds, the report is really bad news.

She points out that in Victoria mercury is one of the metals present in sufficient quantities at both Macaulay Point and Clover Point sewage outfalls to warrant a "contaminated site" designation.

In 2005 the Capital Regional District, which is responsible for the region's sewage, announced that over the previous seven years it had reduced the amount of mercury going into the ocean with our wastes by 70 percent. The region achieved the reduction mainly by requiring dental offices, which use a mercury amalgam for fillings, to capture the metal instead of flushing it down the drain.

Still, though reduced, mercury continued to enter the ocean with our sewage and large amounts of the metal that had been flushed over the years remained on the ocean floor. The 2006 report An Evaluation of Sediment Quality Conditions in the Vicinity of the Macaulay Point and Clover Point Outfalls, found levels of mercury that were five times what you would typically expect in ocean sediments.

MP Savoie says it is hard to trust the argument that there are "safe levels" for mercury and other contaminants. "Is there any safe level for things like that?" she asks. Over time, she says, scientists and regulators keep reducing the level of mercury and other contaminants deemed acceptable in the environment. "Why do the thresholds keep going down? Maybe it's because we know there are no safe thresholds."

She adds, "There are some products that shouldn't even be in circulation."

The problems caused by higher levels of mercury in the environment are indeed part of a much larger story. As Dauncey explains it, we emerged from World War II into the 1950s era where people really believed chemistry and industry would help them live better. By the 1980s, he says, the problems were obvious. "Ozone layer, oops. Climate change, oops. Cancer, oops."

After four years of work, Dauncey and two co-authors are putting the final touches on a new book, Cancer: 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic. Not enough public attention goes to the environmental and chemical causes of cancer, he says. The incidence rates of many types of cancer are steadily rising in the industrialized world, he says, and it can't be explained by better diagnosing. "At some point you think this is wrong. This has to be wrong."

We should be acting on the precautionary principle, he says, and not allowing the widespread use of chemicals when we know little about their effects on human health and other species. We know even less, he says, about how chemicals work together in our bodies, and since we live in a chemical soup, it's something we should be concerned about. "We are exposed to hundreds simultaneously."

It's not enough, says Savoie, to say avoiding toxins is a matter of consumer choice. Yes, you can choose not to buy tuna or not to put pesticides on your lawn, but when harmful chemicals are spread throughout the environment that affects future human generations and innumerable other plants and animals. "That's no longer consumer choice," she says. "We're more than consumers. We're part of that web."

On the whole, though, governments aren't acting cautiously to control toxins. The NDP [New Democratic Party] pushed a bill in recent months that would have banned the cosmetic use of pesticides throughout Canada, but it didn't get enough support from the other parties. "I find that frustrating," she says. "I think there's movement on some of these issues, but we're going very, very slow."

Dauncey predicts that the environmental causes of cancer and other diseases are going to be more and more on the public agenda, much the way it took decades before governments committed to act on climate change. He says, "Cancer is the next big one that's going to wake up with a bang."

Copyright Copyright 2007 Monday Magazine