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To: Wharf Rat who wrote (54133)	8/25/2004 9:46:34 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

States look harder for mercury Wed Aug 25, 6:33 AM ET Add Top Stories - USATODAY.com to My Yahoo! By Traci Watson, USA TODAY Never before have so many warnings been posted for so many of the nation's rivers, lakes and coastal waters advising people not to eat the fish - and the number of warnings is likely to go up. The Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) said Tuesday that 846,000 miles of U.S. rivers and 14 million acres of U.S. lakes are so tainted with mercury that eating their fish could pose health problems for children and during pregnancy. Federal environmental officials stressed that the numbers don't mean that mercury contamination is worse now than a few years ago. What they do mean is that state officials have been looking harder for such contamination, and the harder they look, the more mercury contamination they find. "Almost every freshwater body in the world is contaminated with mercury, from sources all over the world," said Johan Varekamp, a mercury expert at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. (Related story:Q & A on dangers) Not hard to find The problem hasn't been difficult to document, EPA chief Michael Leavitt said. "More than 85% of the time that you test a water, you'll find some content of mercury," he said. In addition, states are issuing more warnings that cover every one of their rivers and every one of their lakes, rather than specifying a limited number of rivers and lakes. Montana and Washington, for example, decided to place mercury warnings on all their rivers in 2003. That accounted for roughly 250,000 of the 300,000 miles of river that gained warnings in 2003. The EPA has links from its Web site to fish advisory programs in all 50 states at www.epa.gov/waterscience/fish/states.htm. Not all of the states have updated information on their sites, however. The number of warnings is likely to increase as states continue to test lakes and rivers they've never tested before. And though mercury emissions in the USA are going down, there's no guarantee that mercury pollution in lakes and rivers will do the same. That's because mercury travels into the USA from around the world. China and other East Asian nations are especially big sources, as is Western Europe. More than 50% of the mercury pollution in the USA comes from outside the country, Leavitt said. Leavitt declined Tuesday to speculate on when fish in all of the nation's lakes and rivers would be safe for everyone to eat. He said the "good news" is that states are doing more monitoring and that the USA is cutting its own emissions of mercury. But he said cleaning up America's waters will require global cooperation. "Fish advisories and their discontinuance will be dependent on our capacity to persuade others in the world" to cut their mercury emissions, Leavitt said. Famous bodies of water Mercury warnings apply to well-known bodies of water such as Lake Champlain on the New York-Vermont border; San Francisco Bay; Flathead Lake, Montana's second-biggest lake; and Massachusetts' Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau lived in the woods and wrote Walden, a book about his experiences. Environmental officials say U.S. mercury emissions fell from 1990 to 1999. More recent data is not available. The reductions were the result of new federal rules limiting mercury emissions from incinerators, especially those that burn medical waste and garbage. There are still some places where mercury does not contaminate the fish. Denise Keehner of the EPA said Tuesday that more and more states are issuing "safe eating guidelines" highlighting lakes and rivers that have no contamination problems.