Professor rejects worry over salmon PCB levels

[GLF]

Says meat and dairy products pose greater threat

People may worry about PCBs in salmon, but most Americans actually get their yearly PCB load through beef, chicken, pork and milk, says a University of Idaho professor in a recently published article.

In an article in the March/April issue of Aquiculture Magazine, Ronald W. Hardy, director of Hagerman Fish Culture Experiment Station, University of Idaho, says concerns about contaminants in salmon have been overstated, particularly within the context of the American diet. Americans eat vastly more meat and dairy than they do salmon, he says, and both meat and dairy contain PCB levels as high, or higher, than salmon. Salmon also has health benefits that most meats lack.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate 62 lbs of beef, 57.5 lbs of chicken, 48.5 lbs of pork and 15.9 lbs of fish and shellfish in 2003. Salmon intake was 2.2 lbs that same year, hardy says. The PCB content of most wild and farmed salmon is about the same, in the range of 15 to 20 parts per billion (ppb). In contrast, butter contains 70 ppb, a chicken breast 32 ppb and a beef steak 22 ppb, Hardy says.

What this means is that animal per capita PCB intake from beef is about 640 ppb, about 700 ppb for milk and about 836 ppb from chicken. The average American is getting about 20 ppb from salmon each year, he says. “Levels in most salmon are equivalent to the levels in English muffins,†Hardy says. “Go figure.â€