Toxic Foraged Fish for Dinner in NYC

— Flickr user JMazzolaa, used under creative commons license

New York City's Daily News reports that people who eat the fish they catch in the city's polluted waterways could be ingesting a smorgasbord of toxins, including mercury and PCBs. According to the story, health officials haven't tested the city's fish in a decade, so the paper decided to do send samples to a lab in Long Island. The results:

The News found the highest levels of mercury and PCBs in a striped bass caught off Gantry Plaza. The fish are highly prized among local fishermen for their size and flavor.

Bluefish samples from the Gowanus Harbor off Red Hook, Brooklyn, also had unsafe levels, tests conducted by Long Island Analytical Laboratories in Suffolk County showed.

A winter flounder caught off Hunts Point in the Bronx was slightly cleaner, with elevated levels of mercury but lower amounts of PCBs.

Hard times mean that a free meal is hard to pass up—fishermen at one pier told the Daily News that subsistence fishing has doubled in the past year. All the more troubling, then, that the polluted waters usually aren't marked: Health advisories about local fish's toxicity are seldom posted, even in the city's most popular fishing spots.

Of course the city should post the advisories, but if it does, that won't necessarily solve the problem. Eating potentially toxic fish vs. going hungry? Talk about a tough choice.

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