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Doctors Warn Of Mercury in Fish

i have a friend who got mercury poisoning and it was not good.

another who is going to mexico to get his mercury fillings out because insurance doesn't cover changing your fillings over.

Another reason I'm happy to be vegan.
 
Depends on how much is in the fish. Mercury is similar to arsenic in that it accumulates. You can slowly get poisoned over time and not realize until it's almost too late. But didn't doctors know about the harmful effects of mercury and the rather high levels found in fish before?
 
This is nothing new at least to us in Minnesota where fishing goes on year around. Each year there are reminders to limit the number of fish the you eat to a few a week because of contaminants like mercury.
 
All I can say is...glad I'm vegetarian.

Though, with all the polution comming out, I think someday even that wont help...even now with pesticides and stuff, I can't escape!!!
 
Mercury, PCBs, pesticides...

A whole bunch of stuff sitting in the seafood, even farm raised fish and shellfish (PCBs & pesticides).

Though it still turns out that the tuna salad some people love to eat is a good way to load up on mercury.
 
Of real concern is also the salmon spawning areas are showing increasingly higher amounts of PCBs - the fist pick them up in the ocean and then return to die in the streams, dumping it all there.

Kind of scary, but it also shows that again, moderation is an effective way to prevent any problems. I don't think I've ever eaten fish every day of the week, I usually have it only once.

D
 
On the salmon bit, there was an article not too long ago stating it's better to get it from it's source rather than farm raised because of that very reason.

I had smoked salmon for dinner last night though...deelish. :D
 
The problems are worst in large fish like tuna or shark that live for many years. Smaller fish like sand dabs, or halibut don't have the higher concentrations of heavy metals that the big guys do. Thats why pregnant women are told to stay away from the big fish, and to limit the small fish they eat while pregnant.

On a realted note, there was some research floating around showing that prozac and other drugs are also showing up in our water supply and in fish. Waste treatment plants have no means to filter this kind of thing out, and would have to install very costly reverse-osmosis filters to even begin to deal with the problem.

Yuck. I try not to think about it when I go get sushi.;)
 
Originally posted by Counterfit
Well, at least the fish aren't depressed :D
Click to expand...

Lol, no but that was part of the problem. Apparently it causes them to be very mellow and not do a lot of the things fish do. I'll see if I can dig up the article.

Edit:
Link

Here it is. There are actually many articles floating around out the about this, but most of them take the humorous tact that the researcher was complaining about. This one avoids a lot of the "fish feelin' good" jokes other articles have.
In 2002, 80 percent of streams sampled by the U.S. Geological Survey showed evidence of drugs, hormones, steroids and personal care products such as soaps and perfumes. The U.S.G.S. tested 139 rivers in 30 states.
Click to expand...
Bryan Brooks, a toxicologist at Baylor University in Texas, discovered evidence of Prozac, an anti-depressant, in the brains, livers, and muscles of bluegill, caught downstream from the Pecan Creek Water Reclamation Plant in Denton, Texas, near Dallas.
Click to expand...
Sewage treatment plants are not equipped to filter out any of the hundreds of different prescription drugs that are present in wastewater. And it's not clear just how they would approach the cost or technology of such a challenge.

Michael Smith is manager of the R. M. Clayton wastewater treatment plant in Atlanta, the largest such facility in the southeast. The facility treats about 80 million gallons of water each day.

"Trying to enhance this facility to remove those items would probably require some reverse osmosis or some kind of further ultra filtration system," said Smith. "It would require a lot more construction and a lot more cost to remove those items," he said.
Click to expand...
 
I had some delicious salmon Wednesday evening. Doctor's say that the benefits outweigh the risks of the mercury. It is strongly recommended that we consume 2 portions of fish each week.

"Experts say that would be a greater health risk than low doses of mercury. You should try to eat two weekly servings. Salmon, sole, tilapia, cod, pollack, and most shellfish are all considered safe. "
 
Shellfish huh.... Maybe I'll go down and see how much crab is!

Or the spot prawns, or even some grilled jumbo shrimp with lime...

Yum;)
 
No shellfish or bottom fish of any kind for me. Catfish, i'll never eat.

There was an article in Nature not long ago about how these streams and ponds on Kodiak Island are heavily polluted with PCBs. The fish go there to spawn and then die and the toxins in their bodies pollute the water. This in areas where PCBs and mercury have never been introduced by man.

The prescription drugs in the water is very, very scary, especially the hormones.
 
Its all a real shame, on one hand you can argue that we should stop all this and save the enviroment. On the other hand, imagine how vastly different our lives would be. I doubt people are too quick to get rid of their prozac and makeup for this. Its all a compromise, eiither you keep pollution out and live simpler lives or you live life the way you want and somehow cope with what we do to the planet. I think a lot of the real hardcore enviromentalists are shortsighted in that they can't see just how dramatically we would have to change our society. I'd hope that eventually the industries would come up with systems of production that are both more enviromental and economical, that's the only real way we're going to see serious change in the enviroment.
 
It's not so much a case of stopping entirely, but realizing how little we know about just how interdependent a living system is: not only our own bodies, but in relation to each other, the enivronment, other species, the climate, etc.

Compared to the subtleties and nuances of nature, we're still like a two year old trying to tune a fine violin with a baseball bat when it comes to even our highest levels of technological advancement.

Everything affects everything else, and we're only just beginning to realize the truly astonishing degree to which this is true....
 
As in everything, its the amount that determines if its bad.

Lead poisoning is bad, but you would need to eat lots of chocolate to get lead poisoning, and before that happens, you would have other problems first.

Same thing with mercury in fish, arsenic in water, etc.

If trace amounts of mercury is sufficient to kill humans, it would be a wonder how we happen to live to this day. I'm sure that some ancient cultures totally existed off fishing, yet somehow, they managed to survive to produce offspring.
 
I try to get my 2 servings of fish a week. Usually it's salmon & tuna, although sometimes I'll do Redfish or whatever may be an interesting special at the Italian restaurant I frequent. They should be getting some swordfish again soon I imagine. :)

We usually have pretty fresh supply here in the south. There's some that are shipped from wherever they were caught, but we've always got a bounty of fresh seafood. :D
 
Has there been studies of where in the fish the mercury accumulates at? Is it in the scales and bones, or is it just in certain body organs or is is the flesh itself?

Liver, in most species, not just fish are the detox center of the body. So toxins are usually concentrated there. I don't ever remember asking a restaurant for salmon liver, or trout liver.
 
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