Is the salmon you are buying safe?
Industry representatives say that salmon is some of the safest fish you can buy.
But a report in the February issue of Consumer Reports magazine, which analyzed samples of fish from retail stores in Chicago and New York, stated that 43 percent of the salmon samples contained PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a compound found to cause cancer in test animals and thought to pose a danger to human reproductive sysrtems. The levels found were well below limits set by the Food and Drug Administration.
The National Fisheries Institute, which represents the U.S. fishing industry, questions the article and calls the Consumers Union advice to limit salmon consumption ”totally irresponsible.”
”What puzzles us is that we can`t figure out what type of salmon was being sampled,” Lee Weddig, executive vice president of the National Fisheries Institute, said in a speech to the International Food Media Conference last month. ”The state of Alaska and the Canadian government reports show West Coast salmon to be free of PCBs down to detectable limits. We`ve checked product from other parts of the world and can`t find any at levels reported. The results just do not correlate with the vast body of data produced by the states and federal government.”
”The quality of seafood is the highest it has ever been,” says Bob Rubin, research and development director for the Chicago Fish House and a NFI board member.
The FDA has set the tolerance level of PCBs in fish at two parts per million (ppm). About 70 percent of the samples of salmon bought by Consumers Union personnel in New York had PCB levels ranging from 0.7 to 1.3 ppm, while 30 percent of the samples from Chicago had detectable levels from 0.2 to 0.8 ppm, the CU report stated.
