Mercury

“Press reports in the Washington Post, AP, Reuters, Fox, and countless other outlets read like a fish industry press release. The lack of critical reporting and fact checking on this report is staggering,” said Richard Wiles, Executive Director of EWG.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) today condemns the Bush EPA's proposed rule allowing power plants to trade mercury pollution credits. It's more evidence that the Bush Administration is abdicating a leadership role on the environment, and promoting policies that allow far more pollution than necessary, particularly for this case in hot spots and sacrifice zones around coal-burning power plants. The "cap-and-trade" plan was spawned from politically-driven science and faulty methods, according to two government investigations. It sets the U.S. forward as a poor example for the world, and does not move the country closer to the clean energy technologies of the future.

Statement from Environmental Working Group Senior VP Richard Wiles and VP for Research Jane Houlihan The coal and seafood industries' interests today beat out the health interests of America's children in the form of dangerous advice from the FDA on so-called "safe" consumption levels for fish contaminated with mercury, particularly tuna. Air pollution from coal burned in power plants is a major source of mercury in fish. If women follow the FDA's advice and eat one can of albacore tuna a week, hundreds of thousands more babies will be exposed to hazardous levels of mercury.

Results of new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fish tests show that mercury contamination of canned tuna and other fish is more serious than agency scientists previously assumed. Top FDA officials meet this Wednesday and Thursday with members of an agency advisory panel to review what the FDA should tell consumers about fish

A joint UN - WHO expert food committee has just recommended a new international standard for mercury in seafood that continues to allow a dangerous mercury exposure level, and is particularly threatening to infant children whose developing brains may be exposed to twice the amount of mercury that the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. EPA consider safe. The developing world, where the UN — WHO standard is widely followed, will now be “protected” by a standard that is better than the outdated, unscientific U.S. standard (which mirrors the old UN — WHO standard), but would still allow twice the mercury considered safe by most American health officials.