Toxic Threats to Farmed Fish Food

Science reported that a worldwide assessment of the threat to the salmon market as a whole can be answered by the 13 persistent organic pollutants, including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), known as one of the most toxic and environmentally persistent chemicals ever created.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notes that PCBs (and there are dozens of trade names for them) don’t break down, can remain for long periods cycling between air, water and soil, travel long distances and can be taken up into the bodies of small organisms and fish.

“Studies in humans support evidence for potential carcinogenic and noncarcinogenic effects of PCBs,” it notes, but the list of potential health problems for humans and animals is frankly staggering. Sure, industries are now being regulated to more stringent laws, but once it’s out there, trying to take it back is no longer possible. The EPA site details a list of life-altering and hair-raising consequences PCBs can cause or impact:

Cancer	Immune system
Reproductive system	Nervous system
Endocrine system	Neurological effects

Keep in mind that PCBs are only one of many pollutants associated with farmed fish. One of the most treacherous is ethoxyquin, a chemical developed by Monsanto in the 1950s as a synthetic tire chemical. Ethoxyquin is found only in farmed salmon — not in wild.

It’s used as a rubber stabilizer, pesticide, preservative and antioxidant all in one, and is a suspected carcinogen that “caused chromosomal aberrations, holes and fractures in chromosomes” of human cells and “was chemically toxic, destroyed chromosomes and DNA,” according to a Norwegian newspaper review.

Because it prevents fat oxidation, it’s used in some animal feeds, including fish food. According to Nutraceutical Business Review, the European Food Safety Authority’s description of the chemical was pretty clear: Ethoxyquin is “considered to be toxic to aquatic organisms based on the acute toxicity data provided for fish, daphnia and algae.”

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com  

Threats to Fish Farming Culture

A Timeline of U.S. and World Aquaculture indicates that the multimillion-dollar fish farming industry began, no doubt, with the very best intentions (like feeding people), but as with arguably every other global enterprise, problems occur (and continue to occur) that are as varied and unpredictable as your average fishing expedition. Some highlights:

Carp were farmed in China in rice paddies and freshwater ponds as early as 3500 B.C. Egyptian hieroglyphics show tilapia being rounded up into aquacultures, with Japan joining the ranks in 2000 B.C.

The first real fish farming as we know it may date to the 1400s, when Indonesians trapped young milkfish in coastal ponds when the tide was high. True modern-day methods may be traced back to a German farmer who gathered trout eggs, fertilized them, then nurtured the hatched fish to maturity.

Then in 1853, a trout farm in Ohio became the first official fish farm in the U.S., as it was the first to artificially fertilize its fish eggs. The concept grew to similar endeavors in New England in the late 1800s to raise lobsters and flounder, and Idaho for trout in 1909.

Franklin D. Roosevelt even had a farm pond program in which the concept was encouraged and federal subsidies offered for farms willing to build and stock fishponds. Similar operations began in the Caribbean, South America, the Mediterranean, Norway and Scotland by the 1960s and, by 1985, Australia.

No one could have predicted some of the problems: Sea lice caused the collapse of an Irish Sea trout fishery; Alaska banned netpen fish farms, shrimp farms collapsed worldwide due to disease; British Columbia placed a moratorium on new salmon farms to conduct an environmental review; and Canadian researchers procured a patent for transgenic (aka genetically engineered or GE) salmon. And that was just in the 1990s.

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com