Fresh v/s Farmed Salmon

There was a report published in the January 8th issue of Science Magazine (subscription required) TOXICOLOGY: Salmon Survey Stokes Debate About Farmed Fish which stated that Farmed Salmon had much higher levels of 14 toxins, all rated as likely to cause cancer in humans by US authorities, including dioxins and PCBs. A good debunking of this report can be found at Spiked bq. The Daily Mail ran a photo of a salmon under the heading 'What's in your dinner?', listing PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, chemicals, radioactive waste and malachite green (4). Environmental groups, of course, had a field day. 'I would not feed farmed salmon to my cat', said Don Staniford, a spokesman for the Salmon Farm Protest Group (whoever that might be) (5). Members of the public were wheeled out to proclaim that they would no longer feed salmon to their kids, and news reports issued grim warnings about falling salmon sales and supermarkets slashing prices in desperation. bq. Almost as swiftly, industry and the UK health authorities moved to counter the panic. 'The levels of dioxins and PCBs found in this study are in line with those that have previously been found by the FSA and are within up to date safety levels set by the World Health Organisation and the European Commission', stated the Food Standards Agency (FSA) on 9 January. 'This study does not raise any new food safety concerns. This applies to all the salmon: farmed as well as wild, Scottish as well as imported.' (6) The FSA stuck to its standard advice that people should eat two portions of fish per week. The article is well documented. The issue here is that technology marches on and what used to be an exotic lab technique is now becoming cheap and commonplace. It used to be that detecting the presence of a few molecules of XYZZY in a sample was big science requiring big and expensive machines and trained operators. Now, this sort of analysis can be done with equipment about the size of a portable sewing machine and operated by a button-monkey (ie: untrained lab rat - see "Grad Student"). The values found in farmed fish are higher than for wild fish but the farmed fish values are still so far below the minimum FDA values that there is really no point.