Americans Skipping Seafood On Safety - Missing Health Benefits ff

Confused about which kinds of fish are safe to eat, Americans are skipping seafood all together - and missing out on health benefits, said federal scientists in Seattle. To unmuddy the water, they’re calling for a nationwide program to investigate seafood contamination and educate the public.

“This needs to be done,” said Usha Varanasi, science director of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, a part of the National Marine Fisheries Service. “This is dealing with people’s health, people’s food.”

The national program would analyze seafood for dangerous chemicals and disease, and track their changes over time. It would evaluate the food’s health benefits -which can include protecting against heart and Alzheimer’s disease, and helping fetal brain development- and weigh that against risks posed by contamination.

The new program would translate that research into uniform, user-friendly information for consumers who are swamped by mixed messages about whether they should be eating chunk or whole tuna, sockeye salmon from Puget Sound or chinook from Alaska.

“Every single fish is going to have a level of contamination,” said Rob Duff, manager of the state Department of Ecology’s Environmental Assessment Program. “You want to steer people to where the lowest levels of contamination are.”

The three scientists calling for the new national program are from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and include Varanasi. Their recommendations were published in a column in the current issue of “Fisheries” - a publication of the American Fisheries Society, “the oldest and largest professional society representing fisheries scientists.”

The column came as state and federal agencies are raising numerous red flags over fish safety.

Last week the U.S. government banned the import of Chinese farm-raised shrimp, eel, two kinds of catfish, and dace, which is related to carp. Regulators testing the imported fish found antibiotics and potentially carcinogenic anti-fungal drugs that are banned here for use in farm-raised seafood.

Local fish don’t get a clean bill of health, either. State officials recently warned people to limit their meals of common carp from Lake Washington. People already were cautioned against gorging on Northern pike minnow, yellow perch and cutthroat trout from Seattle’s largest lake.

Last fall, health officials advised eating Puget Sound chinook only once a week and resident chinook, or blackmouth, twice a month because of troubling levels of mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Surveying the Safeway fish counter this week, Seattle resident Lauren Kingston wasn’t too worried if the fish was from Canada or Indonesia, or whether officials were urging her to dine with caution.

“I don’t eat that much seafood,” she said. “It’s stuff I don’t really think about.”

Kingston’s preferred catch -shrimp- is considered a healthy choice by the state Department of Health, though imported shrimp gets dinged for being “harvested in environmentally harmful ways.”

Shrimp are one of the reasons Varanasi wrote the column. Her agency was asked to test the tasty crustaceans for contamination after Hurricane Katrina trashed the Gulf Coast.

But there wasn’t any baseline information to tell the scientists how polluted the shrimp were before the disaster. Without that, how could officials responsibly recommend one seafood over another, or tell people to avoid it altogether? A national program of testing pollution in mud and bottom-dwelling fish was canceled after 10 years in 1994.

Locally, the state’s Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program is credited with doing a pretty good job tracking pollution in the marine ecosystem.

“Monitoring programs are very tedious and expensive,” Varanasi said. That doesn’t mean they’re unimportant. “We need to take the pulse.”

Duff promotes regular testing of fish to watch for new risks - including chemical flame retardants and pharmaceuticals.

And because these and other chemicals can damage the brain during development and disrupt hormone function, Duff urges people to focus on those at greatest risk: women who are pregnant or of child-bearing age and young children.

WHICH SEAFOOD’S SAFE?

Health experts recommend eating seafood because of the numerous health benefits some fish provide, including promoting brain development in infants and protection against heart disease, some cancers, Alzheimer’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.