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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Researcher seeks food chain toxin tests
  • Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:53:54 -0600


Researcher seeks food chain toxin tests
http://www.mercurynews.com/healthandscience/ci_6359103?nclick_check=1

The Associated Press
Article Launched: 07/12/2007 12:09:19 PM PDT

WASHINGTON-Tests that determine whether toxic chemicals accumulate in food
may be missing some hazardous materials and need to be updated, a Canadian
researcher said Thursday.

It has long been known that toxins can accumulate in the food chain, rising
to higher concentrations as larger animals eat smaller ones.

But current tests for this accumulation focus on foods of aquatic origin,
Frank A. P. C. Gobas, an environmental chemist and toxicologist at Simon
Fraser University in British Columbia said in a telephone interview.

Researchers have found there are chemicals that do not accumulate in fish,
but which do so in air-breathing animals, such as mammals, Gobas reports in
a paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Bioaccumulation testing is done in the same way in most countries, Gobas
said: "We're all basically making roughly the same mistake."

He said testing must be updated to cover chemicals that do not accumulate
in marine life but may do so in air-breathing animals because of their slow
rate of elimination during respiration.

Gobas said he has been studying the food chain of animals in the Canadian
arctic where caribou eat lichen and wolves eat caribou. He said he found
increasing accumulations of potentially toxic chemicals moving up that food
chain, though the same chemicals did not accumulate in marine life. Further
study found the same in other animals.

Was he surprised?

"Well, you're always surprised, of course, but in hindsight I should not
have been. It made us think about the process in a different way," he said.






  • [Livingontheland] Researcher seeks food chain toxin tests, TradingPostPaul, 07/16/2007

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