Posted by Debbie Neustadt MERCURY: GAO report urges FDA to act on threat in fish Colleen Luccioli, Greenwire staff writer A U.S. General Accounting Office report released today makes an explicit recommendation that the Food and Drug Administration "develop milestones for completing the agency's ongoing evaluation of methylmercury and determine whether it is a seafood hazard reasonably likely to occur." Not only should the study be wrapped up, but FDA should also monitor mercury levels when checking seafood safety, GAO contends. "The GAO report confirms that FDA is asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting the public from mercury in seafood," said Michael Bender, executive director of the Mercury Policy Project. "FDA's got to stop ignoring the mercury problem and start addressing the findings in the recent National Academy of Sciences report." According to Bender, FDA has been studying the hazards of mercury in fish for over 10 years, but the agency has never completed its study. The study was requested in December 1999 by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. In soliciting the report, which addresses seafood safety issues, Harkin noted that he had concerns with implementation of the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point systems, under which FDA monitors food for quality control purposes. GAO states in its report that implementation of HACCP plans is shoddy. GAO continues, "Even if the plans were complete, according to FDA requirements, they would still omit a serious hazard because methylmercury, a highly toxic substance, is not identified or covered in FDA's seafood guide as a hazard reasonably likely to occur." In further encouraging prompt action on the FDA study, the report claims, "Without prompt completion of its ongoing evaluation of methylmercury, FDA is unable to give direction to the industry on whether it should establish HACCP controls for this hazard, thus potentially placing consumers at risk of exposure to unsafe levels of methylmercury." FDA says one of its priorities for fiscal year '01 is to review its public health strategy for mercury in commercial seafood and take steps necessary to address public health concerns related to mercury. The GAO report also notes the health hazards associated with eating seafood contaminated with mercury. "Contaminated fish is the major source of human exposure to methylmercury in the United States and can cause, among other things, serious neurological problems, such as mental retardation in young children." NAS issued a report last summer saying that more than 60,000 children born each year may suffer learning disabilities due to mercury exposure in-utero because their mothers ate food contaminated with mercury. GAO then takes issue with FDA's stance on the issue. "FDA's guidance to industry does not discuss the identification and control of methylmercury even though FDA's tests for methylmercury in shark and swordfish found that 9 of 18 samples analyzed in 1998 and 1999 met or exceeded FDA's 1.0-part-per-million action level." GAO also notes, "Even when FDA identifies serious violations at a seafood-processing firm, it does not take timely regulatory action to ensure compliance." Linda Candler, vice president of communications for the National Fisheries Institute, countered, "FDA and the industry have known about mercury levels in fish for a while, but there's never been a single case of mercury poisoning in the United States as a result of eating fish. A change in regulation and oversight would leave one to believe that a single meal of seafood would cause harm, yet there's no indication that that is true." Last month, FDA issued a consumer advisory for swordfish and shark but not for tuna, the most commonly consumed fish of the three types believed to carry the most mercury. The consumer advisory, which was heavily criticized by environmental and public health groups for not including tuna, was directed to women of childbearing age and young children. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - For SC email list T-and-C, send: GET TERMS-AND-CONDITIONS.CURRENT to [log in to unmask]