Pollutant dangers to fish

IS any food truly safe to eat?

With experts regularly disagreeing, it’s often hard to know who to trust. Fish, for instance, is being trumpeted as a healthy food, but marine pollution and its toxic effects on fish, which scientists are regularly discovering, is worrying.

Fish can consume chemicals and cancer-causing agents that humans discharge into the sea, so people who then consume such fish can also be at risk, we’re told.

We have pointed to the large volume of plastic and other pollutants which are dumped into the seas around Ireland and globally — all of which can have an adverse effect on marine life.

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A recent European Food Safety Authority study on the risks and benefits of seafood gave advice on eating fish.

It concluded that limiting consumption of fish with high mercury content is the most effective way to achieve health benefits, while minimising the risks posed by over-exposure to mercury.

It’s up to each EU member country to consider its national patterns of fish consumption and assess the risks involved.

The UK Food and Safety Authority says pregnant women should also limit the amount of tuna they eat to no more than two tuna steaks, or four medium-sized cans of tuna, per week.

This is because tuna contains more mercury than other types of fish, according to the authority. The amount of mercury we get from food isn’t harmful for most people, but if you take in high levels of mercury when you’re pregnant, this could affect the baby’s developing nervous system.

Also to hand is a report that found cancers and other ailments in fish living a kilometre deep in the ocean.

Some had liver conditions, tumours and other problems that are often linked with exposure to toxic chemicals and cancer-causing agents, according to a new study conducted in the Bay of Biscay, France.

The study also discovered the first case of a deep water fish species with an ‘inter-sex’ condition, a blend of male and female sex organs.

The sampling was done in an area with no apparent point-source pollution and appears to reflect general ocean conditions.

Michael Kent, an Oregon State University microbiologist who co-authored the study, said a lower level of contamination might be expected at such a depth, but such is not the case.

The researchers acknowledge that the changes could be caused by naturally occurring compounds in the ocean and that it would take further study to confirm certain links between the diseases found in the deep-sea fish and human-caused pollution.

However, Kent also drew a comparison to fish studies done in other places, including the American west, which found pollution and fish-health impacts, including male fish that had been ‘feminised’.

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