Tuesday 25 October 2011

KEY DOCUMENT - Fish Farm Tactics: Spinwatch.org, Updated Dec 22, 2018

The Norwegian derivative fish farms spun a communications strategy to render illegitimate a Science article from 2004 about the high level of dioxins, PCBs and other chemicals in Atlantic salmon farmed fish from Scotland.

You may find by the time you finish this investigative document on Spinwatch.org, that you no longer believe fish farm communications: https://www.academia.edu/2939514/Spinning_farmed_salmon

This is the Science article that was neutalized: http://www.albany.edu/ihe/salmonstudy/salmon_study.pdf. 

This report - see abstract - rates fish farms on the basis of their communications programs on sustainability and other issues: 
http://www.seafoodintelligence.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=285.

Multinational fish farms are billion dollar companies that will adopt and change any strategy they think will move them forward.

This occurs at the same time as Marine Harvest is having difficulty making debt payments in Norway, its stocks trade lower than 48 cents, it has plead guilty to charges in BC of having caught wild fish in their nets and they have laid off more than 60 staff as they are having financial trouble..


Read the charges and other fines that Marine Harvest has had to pay. Follow the link through this site:
http://www.salmonaresacred.org/blog/marine-harvest-court-canada-charged-illegal-possession-wild-fish


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Update, Feb 16, 2017

Prof Ron Hites sent me a PDF on the work they did on the chemicals in salmon issue. He gives a class to his students each year. If you want a copy, send me a comment. 

Here are some tables from the Science article:

The first image is:
 
"Concentrations (in ng/g wet weight, except dioxins) of 14 contaminants found in farm-raised (red bars) and wild (green bars) salmon. The vertical lines represent the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles, and the boxes represent the 25th to 75th percentiles. Dioxins are in pg of World Health Organization toxic equivalents (WHO-TEQs) per g of wet weight and include polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans and dioxin-like PCBs. Typically 75% of the total TEQ was due to the dioxin-like PCBs. Other abbreviations are as follows: Tot DDT, the p,p′ and o,p′ isomers of DDT, DDD, and DDE; Nona, nonachlor; Chlor, chlordane; Hep Epox, heptachlor epoxide."

Would you eat these fish? 

Would you eat the fish from Scotland, the Faroes, Norway and the ones at the higher end?
I don't think so.
These are the Science words: "Concentrations of (A) PCBs in ng/g wet weight, (B) dioxins (for detail, see Fig. 1) in pg of WHO-TEQ/g wet weight, (C) toxaphene in ng/g wet weight, and (D) dieldrin in ng/g wet weight in farmed, supermarket, and wild salmon. The concentrations are all given as functions of the locations where the salmon were grown or purchased. Red represents farmed salmon, green represents wild salmon, and yellow represents salmon purchased at supermarkets. The error bars represent standard errors. The number of samples is given in parentheses after the location identifier. The locations are sequenced by average contaminant rank."

The reason the fish are full of chemicals because it is in their feed, meaning it originates from the global forage fish stocks that have been serially depleted by fish farms.
The feed text is: "Concentrations of (A) PCBs in ng/g wet weight, (B) dioxins (for detail, see Fig. 1) in pg of WHO-TEQ/g wet weight, (C) toxaphene in ng/g wet weight, and (D) dieldrin in ng/g wet weight in commercial fish feed purchased at facilities in various countries at various times of the year. Each bar represents the analysis of one sample of fish feed, and the country from which it was obtained is indicated. The concentrations are given as functions of the locations where the fish feed was purchased. Fish feed purchased in Europe is indicated by red, and fish feed purchased in North or South America is indicated by gray. The locations are sequenced by average contaminant rank."

And which fish would you eat? Answer: the green column ones. And they are the wild salmon. Who'd a thunk wild salmon would be better for you than farmed?
The article text is: "Consumption advisories (in meals per month) based on U.S. EPA cumulative risk assessment methods for PCBs, toxaphene, and dieldrin for (A) farmed (red) and wild (green) salmon and for (B) supermarket salmon (yellow). The country in which the salmon was produced or the city from which it was purchased is indicated."

Here is a short bio for Prof Ron Hites - many awards, long career, huge number of publications:  http://www.hitesfest.indiana.edu/about.html.

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Update Feb 26, 2018: Go read this post to find that the BC fish farms employed Hill and Knowlton, the same PR people who helped Big Tobacco sell its products and claim they did not know they caused cancer, several decades after everyone else in the world knew: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2018/02/big-toobacco-big-fish-farms-pretty-much.html.

Update Dec 22, 2018: This 2018 article says that eating farmed salmon causes sterility in males and cancer. The article is from Norway/Morton: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/12/bad-news-bites-global-problems-in-fish.html. It is item 11.
 

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