Tony Wardle investigates the extent of industrial pollution in fish and
discovers…
A Perfect Poison
Two or three years ago, a young female reporter on a daily newspaper had her blood tested for industrial chemicals as part of a story she was writing on pollution. The laboratory discovered traces of 300, including highly-toxic persistent organochlorine pollutants, better known as POPs.
There are two closely-related poisonous POPs that are of particular concern – PCBs and dioxin. They have polluted the entire globe, particularly the oceans, and are present in almost all sea creatures, including those we eat. No matter what half-hearted attempts have been made to control new sources of pollution, these compounds are extremely long- lasting and are going to be around for decades. As China and India industrialise, so new sources will come on stream and so the situation is likely to worsen not improve.
By sinking into the sea bed, POPs are absorbed by plants and small organisms and are then concentrated as they work their way up the food chain. In large fish and particularly sea mammals, the concentrations may be many thousands of times greater than at the start of the process. As POPs are stored in fat, the flesh of oily fish are amongst the worst affected. Those people who eat them are at the very top of the food chain and every fish they eat contains these potentially deadly toxins.
They can cause a range of cancers, birth defects, attack the central nervous system, produce a ‘gender bending’ effect in children, weaken the immune system and promote a string of other deadly ailments. Despite this, the Government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) persists in promoting fish and encourages everyone to eat at least two portions of oily fish every week. What it doesn’t shout quite so loudly is that ‘two-a-week’ is also a maximum recommendation. Eat more than this and you risk damaging your health.
An Alice in Wonderland quality was added when the FSA told pregnant women, nursing mothers, infants and children to avoid marlin and swordfish entirely and cut back on tuna because of these pollutants. This is a supposedly nourishing food and one which it considers essential for good health. Next it will be extolling the virtues of smoking.
The latest science shows just how unsafe these so-called safe levels are. The Microchemical Journal reported this year that eating just 400g (14oz – equivalent to two small portions) of mackerel, bluefin tuna or swordfish would exceed the ‘tolerable weekly intake’ of PCBs and certain pesticides. Unsurprisingly, many scientists believe that the FSA’s levels are arbitrary and damage is inflicted on the body at much lower levels. They say the ‘safe’ levels take no account of the many other sources from which humans accumulate dioxin (which include meat and dairy products), they ignore the toxic load already in the body and fail to consider possible interactions between dioxin, PCBs and the other POPs that lurk in our fat deposits or swirl around in our blood.
The excuse used for continuing to urge us to eat fatty fish is that its omega 3 oils are essential to protect us against heart disease. The Vegetarian & Vegan Foundation’s research has shown this to be nonsense and has revealed that omega 3s from plant sources such as flax seeds are a far more effective protection against heart attacks.
Another rather sick irony is the sale of cod liver oil as a health food. Oily fish have their oils distributed throughout their flesh while white fish, such as cod and haddock, have them concentrated in their livers and it is this which is removed and sold as a wonder supplement, despite being another storehouse for POPs. Read the labels on the brands being sold in your high street and you’ll see a wonderful array of claims – pure, wholesome, filtered, cleanest possible, safe and so on, which give no clue as to the possible dangers the oils may contain.
And it’s no use turning to Government departments for information
because they
have essentially cut you adrift. Despite having researched which common
brands of cod liver
oil are the most contaminated, they refuse to release the results.
The
Government’s Food Standards Agency persists in promoting fish and
encourages everyone to eat at least two portions of oily fish every week.
What it doesn’t shout quite so loudly is that ‘two-a-week’ is
also a maximum recommendation. Eat more than this and you risk damaging
your health.Last year she tested the same brand names again and found little difference in the magnitude of the pollution. So much for claims of filtering out contaminants. This time, however, Jacobs was able to extend her research and test for PBDEs, which she found in significant quantities – almost twice as high as a test she carried out four years earlier. Equally as important, she tested omega 3 oils from plant sources and found ‘little or no contamination’.
Like smoking, the deadly effects of dioxin have been known since the 1950s and the chemical industry, like the tobacco industry, have spent the intervening 50 years trying to obscure the truth, shrugging off responsibility, seeking political protection, using the law to silence people and clouding the issue with false science so they can continue business as usual – that’s according to a new book by Robert Allen, a sub-editor on the Sunday Times (The Dioxin War, Pluto Press).
Dioxin is the common name for hundreds of chemicals – and includes some PCBs – produced by chlorine chemistry. They are released by incinerators, chemical factories, paper mills and pesticides, some wood preservers and chlorine-coated paper.
During the course of an ordinary day you will touch or see hundreds of
things in whose production dioxin plays a part – plastics, solvents,
detergents, cosmetics, electrical wiring, man-made fibres, electronic appliances,
soaps, shampoos, deodorants – the
list is, literally, almost endless, including many substances connected
with modern intensive livestock and arable farming.
In his extremely well-referenced book, Allen says: “We all have some dioxin in our blood and 90 per cent of it gets there through food. An extremely persistent chemical, it now exists in quantities in the environment at levels capable of extreme and violent damage to living systems. This damage, however, is subtle.
“It infiltrates the body. If exposure is high it will do its work quickly. If the exposure is low it will make itself familiar with the body’s biological mechanisms, settling down to cause a variety of illnesses many years after the initial exposure. The violence dioxin inflicts on the body is internal and not easily identified. There are no piles of rotting bodies. Instead there is slow and subtle weakening of the body’s functioning systems.”
Its beauty from the manufacturers’ point of view is that there are no diseased or disfigured people demanding retribution and very few death certificates that say ‘death due to dioxin’. They simply read ‘cancer’ or ‘liver failure’ or some other descriptive phrase. This inability to point the finger allows those who are responsible to shrug off blame and avoid costly compensation claims and regulation. But make no mistake, they know precisely what their product does and the long-term damage it is wreaking on the entire globe.
They know because of the large number of explosions, leaks, exposures suffered by workers and lawsuits they’ve faced over the decades. And of course, there’s their Vietnam experience.
The Vietnamese live with the devastating effects of dioxin because the US military doused their country with it in a defoliant used to strip the forests of leaves in the vain hope of revealing the supply routes used by the Vietcong. That defoliant was the infamous Agent Orange which has left the country with a legacy of cancers, deadly childhood diseases, grotesque birth defects and a string of other appalling diseases.
US veterans who served in this despicable war can also testify to its devastating effects as tens of thousands of them struggle with similar deadly diseases. The chemical companies who manufactured Agent Orange responded predictably – to the Vietnamese not a penny and the US vets, barely more than a penny.
It is here that some familiar names come into play – Dow Chemical (also manufacturers of napalm) and Monsanto – the two biggest of several Agent Orange manufacturers. The war ended in 1969 and it wasn’t until 1984 that this consortium of chemical giants finally lost a ‘class action’ by veterans seeking compensation. They coughed up $180 million dollars – petty cash to them – on condition that no more claims would be allowed after this date. Their battery of highly-paid lawyers must have known, of course, that many, many more cases would occur long after this date because of the slow nature of this poison.
Only in 2003 did a US court finally remove this cynical block preventing anyone else damaged in Vietnam from taking action to expose the dangers of dioxin and seek compensation. It will be years before their cases succeed or fail. There are millions more potential cases. This gives some indication of the power of the chemical industries and their determination to defend a technology upon which possibly half the world’s employment depends and a great deal of their profits.
You’ll wait forever for the FSA, Government departments or industry to take meaningful action so effectively it’s down to you. And the starting point has to be to reject as food every animal which comes out of the sea.