News Coverage
Hold The Tuna
Published April 2, 2004
The FDA is back with new recommendations on fish consumption for women and children, this time with the EPA in tow. Representatives of both agencies congratulated themselves on their collaboration at a press conference this month to release the advice, but this joint effort is no cause for celebration. The new guidelines mark a step backward for the EPA, and fail in their stated goal of protecting women and children from exposure to harmful mercury levels.
This is the first time a federal agency has set a limit on how much albacore or white tuna women who are pregnant, nursing or planning on getting pregnant should consume, which could be called a step in the right direction, but this limit remains too high. While the FDA and EPA now say it's OK for pregnant women to eat up to one six-ounce can of albacore tuna each week, this would expose 99 percent of women to unsafe mercury blood levels for the entire pregnancy, according to the Environmental Working Group.
And the agencies' new, very vague recommendations on safe fish consumption for kids are open to interpretation that could expose children-whose developing brains are most at risk from the neurotoxic effects of mercury-to dangerous amounts of this heavy metal.
Protecting the tuna industry was a major concern for the FDA in creating the guidelines, notes H. Vasken Aposhian, who served on the FDA's Food Advisory Committee and fought to add albacore to the list of fish that are off the menu for pregnant women. Aposhian, a toxicologist and professor of molecular and cell biology and pharmacology at the University of Arizona, resigned from the committee in frustration on the day the guidelines were released.
Here's what the FDA/EPA says. It again lists the four large, long-lived species that pregnant women should not eat due to high mercury levels: swordfish, king mackerel, tilefish and shark. People are urged to check safety advisories before eating locally caught fish, and if there's no such information, to only eat six ounces of this locally caught fish a week-and no other seafood. All this comes directly from the old guidelines. The new advisory also says it's okay to eat up to 12 ounces of a variety of fish a week-again old news-but this time the guidelines list five species said to be lower in methylmercury: canned light tuna, shrimp, salmon, pollock or catfish. And it says that women of childbearing age can eat up to six ounces of albacore tuna each week.
"Follow these same recommendations when feeding fish and shellfish to your young child, but serve smaller portions," the advisory reads.
When pressed on this by reporters, the FDA's Dr. David Acheson said, "In the absence of hard science to come up with specific amounts related to age or size, we felt that the most clear advice was to be fairly general and to say that younger children should eat less or smaller portions."
But there's plenty of hard science on mercury and kids, says Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist at Environmental Defense in New York City. "The evidence is really solid that mercury causes real neurological problems for developing brains, so that's fetuses and particularly young children. It's sort of like lead-you just don't want young children or fetuses exposed to much mercury."
Goldburg's group has combined 38 data sets from federal agencies like FDA, EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as the scientific literature, to create some very specific information on how much of various types of fish it's safe for men, women-and children-to eat.
According to Environmental Defense's number crunching, children six and under can have up to one three-ounce serving of albacore tuna each month, while kids six to 12 years old can have 4.5 ounces of albacore tuna a month, based on the fish's mercury content. But looking at what the FDA says, "one could easily interpret that as two sandwiches a week for a toddler," says Goldburg.
"That advice is not clear," concurs Jane Houlihan of EWG. "Parents won't know what to do when they read this advice."
According to Houlihan, the guidelines are the product of pressure from the tuna industry and reliance on focus groups-rather than science-to make health policy.
The science is clearly missing here. While the EPA has relatively up-to-date, protective standards to determine safe consumption of mercury-standards that are well respected by toxicologists-these standards don't figure in to the new joint guidelines.
"It appears as if EPA has allowed FDA to weaken EPA's science-based mercury risk assessment methodology," Goldburg says.
"This is the first time I have ever heard them capitulate on their own safe dose," Houlihan says of the EPA's signing on to the new standards. "I think that's really significant and points to the amount of political pressure they've gotten on this issue."
An FDA source said that people who follow the new recommendations might occasionally find themselves above the reference dose for mercury-the amount a person could be exposed to every day over their lifetime without ill effects-in a given week. But the FDA representative pointed out that there's a tenfold safety cushion built into EPA's risky mercury blood level benchmark of 5.8 parts per billion (ppb), meaning it's one-tenth of the level that would actually result in harm to human health.
According to Houlihan, this is a pretty thin safety cushion. She notes that the 5.8 ppb figure comes from a study of Danish children that found kids with 10 times this blood level-58 ppb-had twice the risk of scoring very poorly on tests of neurodevelopmental function. And another recent study found that fetal mercury blood levels are actually higher than measurement of maternal levels would suggest-trimming this safety cushion even further.
"We're not talking about a huge margin of safety at all," says Houlihan.
Once again, FDA is going out of its way to protect the tuna industry while failing in its responsibility to protect women and children. By including a list of lower-mercury fish in the advisory the agencies have taken a baby step in the right direction, but by failing to give clear, specific advice on safe fish consumption for kids they've taken a giant step backwards.