Published: February 02, 2008 09:16 pm         

Anglers’ mercury levels not bad

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has completed its analysis of blood from people who eat fish from Deep Creek Lake and found fewer problems than expected, according to a report titled “Blood Mercury Levels Among Fish Consumers Residing in Areas with High Environmental Burden of Mercury.”

This past September, CDC sent a medical team to Garrett County to take blood from folks who said they ate at least four 6-ounce servings of locally caught fish during the preceding four weeks.

The scientists already knew that the fish in Deep Creek Lake have mercury in their bodies.

Consumption advisories for those fish, such as bass and sunfish, have been in effect for some time now.

The mercury in the fish, of course, comes through the air from coal-burning power plants.

It attaches to the rain, falls to Earth and is naturally transformed into the kind of mercury that can do bad things to human bodies.

Let’s go straight to the conclusion portion of the report from which I will try to put in layman’s terms what was found.

Only 29 percent of the more than 90 participants had enough mercury in their systems to place them above the 50th percentile of the overall human population.

In spite of that, the amount of mercury running around inside the bodies of that 29 percent is still not close to the established danger level.

This surprised the CDC people, who indicate they expected to find higher levels of mercury if, indeed, the participants were eating the amount and type of fish from Deep Creek Lake that they said they were.

There were 29 female and 63 male participants whose blood was taken. They ranged in age from 18 to 75. They said they ate a lot of largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, yellow perch and walleye from the lake.

Each participant was paid $25.

The CDC folks think that it could be, just maybe, that the monetary incentive may have induced some fish eaters to inflate on their application forms the amount of fried sunnies they had been ingesting so as to qualify for the study.

To be fair, the CDC believes, according to the information in the conclusion, that fish eaters likely made some honest mistakes. After all, who determines when they fry a walleye filet whether it weighs 6 ounces or 9.

“... many individuals admittedly could not recall their serving sizes, fishing locations, and/or types of fish consumed,” the scientists wrote.

Science is science.

You do the study and you report the results.

In this case, CDC says the results aren’t what was expected and provides some reasons why that could be so.

Does that mean that the fish in Deep Creek Lake are more dangerous than the report shows? Or less dangerous?

That’s confusing to the average Mike, who loves the taste of a fried bass or a stringer full of panfish such as bluegills.

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.