TUNA IS STILL TAINTED
One fourth of the cans of tuna on supermarket shelves were as contaminated as the first tuna scare that destroyed the US swordfish industry and crippled the tuna fishermen.
by HAL SMITH:
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About a year and a half ago Bruce McDuffie—an upstate
New York chemistry professor — prodded by his wife
and a 17-year-old lab assistant, went to a supermarket,
bought some tuna fish and tested it for mercury
contamination. The rest is, as they say, history. The
resulting tuna scare destroyed the U.S. swordfish industry
and crippled the tuna fishermen (see MOTHER NO. 9).
Recently the same chemist went shopping again . . . and
guess what? One fourth of the cans of tuna he found
on-supermarket shelves were as contaminated as those that
caused the public outcry. Meaning: FDA assurances to the
contrary, nothing has been effectively done to end
contamination of tuna.
"I'm very surprised," says Prof. McDuffie, an analytical
chemist specializing in environmental research at the State
University of New York at Binghamton. "I don't know how
much testing the FDA has been doing. Have they been leaving
it to the fishing industry?" If further testing confirms
his results, McDuff ie says, the FDA should institute a
program for "close auditing and continuing inspection" of
tuna. He favors a bill now before the Senate which would
require a daily inspection of each of the 2,000 tuna
packing plants in the U.S.
While the FDA's ineffectiveness hardly makes news these
days — many observers agree it protects those
industries it supposedly regulates — McDuff ie
continues to grab headlines, chipping away at bureaucratic
sabotage of environmental progress. Recently, for example,
he publicly protested the intrusion of Cold War politics
into the UN's Conference on the Human Environment held this
past June in Stockholm.
