More New Yorkers are fishing off area piers in this economy, and, in many cases, eating unsafe amounts of fish contaminated with PCBs and mercury. That was the thrust of a NY Daily News report earlier this month. They also reported that there were extremely few signs alerting the public to any kind of danger. New York City official soon responded that they'd put up more warning signs.
CPR Member Scholar Catherine O'Neill discussed the fish contamination issues on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show on Wednesday.
O'Neill says that warning signs have regularly proven ineffective across the country. The information often fails to reach and inform its intended audience. Among other things, signs often don't cover all the languages they'd need to, and advisories frequently fail to convey complex information in a way that is understandable. In addition, the alternatives suggested (or implied) -- e.g., avoiding certain species entirely or altering one’s preparation methods -- may be culturally inappropriate or economically infeasible for some people.
O’Neill contends that a better policy is to involve the communities or groups affected, as they are best able to determine how to reach their members. The immediate goal should be to empower community members to make healthy and culturally appropriate choices for themselves, with complete information about the risks and tradeoffs in hand.
The current fish advisory for New York waters is here.
The photos in this post, taken in the past week at Coney Island and Battery Park, show that signs in the NYC area do not attempt to convey the information from the advisory about the relative dangers of different species of fish, instead giving blanket warnings -- warnings that are regularly ignored.
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Ben Somberg | July 31, 2009
More New Yorkers are fishing off area piers in this economy, and, in many cases, eating unsafe amounts of fish contaminated with PCBs and mercury. That was the thrust of a NY Daily News report earlier this month. They also reported that there were extremely few signs alerting the public to any kind of danger. […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | July 30, 2009
Like Alice's adventure, the development of regulatory oversight in the Obama administration is becoming "curiouser and curiouser." President Obama selected Cass Sunstein to be the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a curious choice since Sunstein, although one of the country’s most distinguished academics, is in favor of extending the use […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | July 30, 2009
On Tuesday, the White House announced the appointment of Dr. David Michaels to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). An epidemiologist and a professor at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services, Michaels will bring substantial expertise and experience to the job. Besides being an active health research – he studies the health effects of occupational exposure to toxic chemicals – he has also written impressively on science and regulatory policy. His book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, offers extensive evidence of how regulatory entities spend millions of dollars attempting to dismantle public health protections using the playbook that originated with the tobacco industry’s efforts to deny the risks of smoking. He is also an experienced public health administrator, having served as the Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health in the Clinton Administration.
Daniel Farber | July 29, 2009
This item cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet. The White House is considering a new executive order to limit floodplain development. The proposal covers roughly the same federal licensing, project, and funding decisions as NEPA. The heart of the proposal is section 4, which unlike NEPA imposes a substantive requirement (preventing or mitigating floodplain development.) […]
Matt Shudtz | July 28, 2009
Last Thursday, EPA announced (pdf) that they would reconsider a rule on monitoring lead in the air that was published in the waning days of the Bush Administration. I wrote about the original announcement, criticizing EPA for turning its back on children in neighborhoods like mine, where certain sources of airborne lead wouldn’t be monitored […]
Rena Steinzor | July 27, 2009
Michael Livermore is right to suggest that environmentalists should be focused on Cass Sunstein’s first official day as regulatory czar for the Obama Administration. After months of delay over the Harvard professor’s eclectic and provocative writings, he will eventually take office if he can placate cattle ranchers concerned about his views on animal rights. Whatever […]
Yee Huang | July 24, 2009
This is the fourth and final post on the application of the public trust doctrine to water resources, based on a forthcoming CPR publication, Restoring the Trust: Water Resources and the Public Trust Doctrine, A Manual for Advocates, which will be released this summer. If you are interested in attending a free web-based seminar on […]
Matt Shudtz | July 24, 2009
The Bush Administration’s anti-regulatory henchmen in the Office of Management and Budget are at it again – fighting to keep EPA and state environmental agencies in the dark about how much pollution is being emitted into the air. On October 16, EPA announced that it was slashing the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for […]
Rena Steinzor | July 23, 2009
This post is co-written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and Policy Analyst Matt Shudtz. Just as the traditional media finished a breathless cycle of reporting on how prospective Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had renounced her claim that a “wise Latina” would make different decisions than a white man, an article in USA Today reminded […]