Yesterday the Sierra Club posted about mercury on the Huffington Post and unfortunately they chose to make erroneous assertions about seafood throughout the column, rhetoric Huffington Post editors should have flagged, researched and edited themselves. But they failed to. So today were making sure theyre aware of the transgressions.

December 6, 2011

Nico Pitney

Managing Editor

Huffington Post

VIA Email

Dear Mr. Pitney,

Avital Binshtocks December 5^th column titled How To Stay Mercury-Free contains demonstrable errors and falsehoods that editors at the Huffington Post should have caught before publication and should now endeavor to correct.

The column begins by stating that, most mercury poisoning happens by eating contaminated sea animals. This is simply a false assertion. There are no cases of mercury toxicity or poisoning in the U.S. attributed to the normal consumption of commercial seafood in any peer-reviewed published medical journal.

The piece claims air pollution is responsible for the mercury consumers find in seafood. This is also false. The trace amounts of mythelmercury found in ocean-going, commercial seafood are by-in-large naturally occurring and originate from underwater volcanoes. A minimum amount of research would have found that a California Appeals Court even ruled on this very issue on March 11, 2009 writing methylmercury in tuna is naturally occurring.

Later in the column Binshtock distorts Environmental Protection Agency mercury levels when she writes, in the U.S., at least one woman in 12 has enough of this heavy metal in her body to harm a fetus –which means that more than 300,000 babies born each year are at risk of mercury poisoning. This statistics simply ignores the fact that the levels she is referring to have a built in 1,000 percent safety factor. AS an example, if you applied the same math to women in Japan you would find that 66 percent of children there would be born at risk of mercury poising. Clearly there is no mercury poising epidemic among children in Japan or this country for that matter.

We are not opposed to the Sierra Club’s efforts to clean up the environment. We believe in the importance of healthy air and uncontaminated water, but we cannot allow them to peddle misinformation that will undoubtedly scare some consumers away from an inherently healthy product like seafood in an effort to affect unrelated coal regulation.

This column is clearly part of an opinion piece that calls consumers to lobby on behalf of the Sierra Clubs efforts, but scientific falsehoods wrapped in opinion are not any less false. Huffington Post has a responsibility to its readers to ensure that the factual assertions it publishes are in fact accurate, even if they are made as part of an opinion piece.

Thank you for your attention to this important issue. We look forward to hearing from you.

Gavin Gibbons

National Fisheries Institute

cc Stuart Whatley

Deputy Blog Editor