When regulators began looking for traces of potentially-harmful substances to ban a half-century ago, scientists were capable of finding traces as small as parts per million. Unfortunately, activists continue to panic -- and make news -- each time science improves our ability to detect minuscule traces, even if there's no new evidence these smaller and smaller traces can harm us. Now that we can detect parts per quintillion, it isn't hard to find traces of virtually any substance on the planet in virtually any place on the planet, if that's your hobby. Given regulations banning the presence of any trace whatsoever of forbidden chemicals, this pursuit inevitably becomes a hobby for countless scientists who could be better employed studying other things.
If you want to cut to the chase and make the chemicals around us sound maximally scary, you can find cyanide in all apples -- it's naturally occurring (though it's not in large enough amounts to worry about). Apple seeds release hydrogen cyanide gas when ingested. No, I'm not joking. Look it up. And most humans have traces of strontium-90 in their bones from nuclear-test residues in the atmosphere. But that doesn't mean we're emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity.
A November 18 Associated Press article by Mort Rosenblum (brought to our attention by ACSH Director Dr. Henry Miller) is a reminder that nothing short of absolute certainty of the absolute absence of all (arbitrarily) targeted chemicals will satisfy anti-chemical activists. And when uncertainty = fear, anything less than purity can be spun into a "crisis" (to use the article's terms).
Start with the obligatory creepy headline: "Scientists Warn of Undetected, Unmeasured Toxins in World's Fish." Then open with a science-free sentence out of a horror movie, just to set the proper tone: "Each day at 4 p.m., the trawlers come back, alive with giant bass, mackerel and squirming eels, at the end of a food chain that links family dinner tables to poisons in the sea."
Poisons in the sea? Are these substances in large enough amounts to do harm? No. Is there any evidence whatsoever the small amounts do harm? No? Ah, but there must be a way to (a) gloss over the question of how big the dose is while also (b) turning lack of evidence into point in favor of fear instead of calm. Sure enough, behold sentence two, which accomplishes both these goals: "Besides mercury, which can damage the brains of fetuses and young children and can affect healthy adults, there are PCBs, dioxins, and flame retardants with unknown long-term effects." This piece is almost ready to become 11 o'clock news fodder.
And on it goes, briefly quoting a sane expert from France's National Institute for Agronomic Studies who says "People overreact to these things," but giving even more time to people like San Francisco internist Jane Hightower, who says things more useful for the enterprising horror writer, like "We really have to ask, why are we poisoning ourselves?" and "The Mediterranean is a toilet that no one has bothered to flush." The most succinct statement of lack of evidence gussied up to look like grounds for fear comes in the form of a quote from Kate Mahaffey, a toxins expert at the Environmental Protection Agency, who worries about effects on pregnant women of chemicals in fish: "We just don't know."
What we do know, or rather, what we appear to have mounting evidence for, is that fish is good for the heart, and it would be a shame if people were frightened away from it by undetected -- but nonetheless feared -- trace amounts of (nigh-omnipresent) chemicals.
Todd Seavey will be on vacation for two weeks and may sit in his apartment eating fish.
