Communicating the Health Risks of Persistant Bioaccumulating Toxicants To Fish Consumers. D. D. Petersen, US Environmental Protection Agency, OH
The primary route of exposure to many persistant bioaccumulating toxicants (PBT) such as methyl mercury, PCBs or dioxins is though foods. Many people, but particularly subsistence fishermen, pregnant women and children, are at high risk for Mercury toxicity because of their consumption of contaminated fish. Often health risks of PBT are underestimated because of their amplification in the food chain results in toxicity even though ambient levels of these PBT in lakes and streams are within acceptable limits. Two concerns have developed from this situation; most of the affected groups have not been identified, and a means of effectively communicating the possible risk to the affected groups does not readily exist. We are working to address these concerns by increasingly defining regions and specific lakes and streams that have high levels of consumption of native fish, and where high mercury or other PBT concentrations occur, and identifying populations of subsistence fishermen or other high-risk groups who consume fish from these waters. The final product is a user-friendly risk communication tool (the Fish Quality Index (FQI)), which is a color-coded pictogram for various fish species (for example; green ones are safe to eat, even at subsistence consumption levels, yellow fish once a month while red ones are safe only once a year). This GIS tool transcends language and literacy boundaries and should inform users of the relative health risks according to the kinds of fish that they regularly consume in an easy to understand format. It has the benefit of steering people toward safer lakes and species of fish. The FQI has been developed for several States, and is currently being tested. It will eventually be available on the internet, but the individual maps can be printed in wallet-size formats. A demonstration of the software will be featured at the presentation.
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