A Cancer "Epidemic" in Fish

On the surface the nation's waters look better than ever. Well into the Clean Water Act, noxious bubbles are the exception rather than the rule, and fish have returned to once polluted waters. But all is not well. Hints of a cancer "epidemic" in fish are emerging from New York harbor, Puget Sound, and waters in between and biological sleuths are rounding up the usual suspects: "There's fairly good evidence that chemicals in the water are the cause," says biologist John Harshbarger of the Smithsonian Institution. The extent of the problem is unknown: many polluted waters, such as San Francisco Bay and the Mississippi delta, have not been investigated. The suspicion, according to Paul C. Baumann of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is that fish in these waters are also succumbing to chemicals. Water pollution didn't start yesterday, and neither did cancer in fish. In the mid-1970's scientists noted unusually high rates of tumors in fish from Michigan's Torch Lake and New York's Hudson River, for instance. "But no one cared," says David Leddy of Michigan Technological University." It was considered an oddity, but that's as far as it went." Now the spark of scientific interest is catching fire and more biologists are seeking and finding worrisome cancer rates in fish from just about every polluted body of water they examine. The most seriously affected fish feed on the bottom, where chemicals concentrate and enter the animals' food chain. At recent congressional hearings, researchers reported on six species of fish from five bodies of water that have alarming cancer rates. In the Hudson, William Dey and Thomas Peck of Ecological Analysts, Inc., find that more than 80 percent of the Atlantic tomcod older than two years have liver tumors. Fully 30 percent of the bullheads in New York's Buffalo River have skin or liver tumors, reports John Black of Roswell Park Memorial Institute; so do nearly 80 percent of the bullheads that reach the age of three in Ohio's Black River, according to Baumann. In the inner harbor of Everett, Wash., more than two-thirds of the English sole were found to have seriously damaged, often cancerous, livers. In other parts of Puget Sound and its tributaries, sediments contain more than 360 kinds of aromatic hydrocarbons, industrial chemicals that include known human carcinogens. The closer that flatfish such as rock sole live to the source of such contaminants, the higher their cancer rate, reports Donald Malins of Seattle's Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Center. In Michigan's 2,660-acre Torch Lake, some 25 percent of which is filled with tailings from a nearby copper mine, every sauger caught has a liver tumor, as do many walleyed pike, finds David Leddy. And the once plentiful sauger is now so rare that "you can go your whole life without seeing one," he says. Because such findings, however alarming, are circumstantial at best, scientists have traded in their sampling nets for test tubes to determine unambiguously whether the many carcinogens in water-rather than a virus, for instance-are behind the cancers. In one experiment, John Black scooped up sediments from the Buffalo River and extracted and

concentrated the chemicals. He then either painted fishes' skin with the mixture or fed it to them. The painted bullheads developed tumors like those of wild fish after a year; 8 of 10 bullheads fed the chemicals suffered damaged livers including tumors. Stress: Still, the data do not necessarily mean that, with fish succumbing to cancer, man is next. In the Hudson, for instance, Dey finds that striped bass do not get tumors as the tomcod do, suggesting that other factors-stress or a genetic predisposition, for instanceare at work. Nevertheless, lab experiments show that cancers strike fish in the same organs-and often after exposure to the same chemical-as they do mammals. A "cancer census" by the National Cancer Institute suggests that such similarities hold outside the labs, too. Rates of human cancer near highly polluted sites-including those with diseased fish-often rise above the national average. "This probably means that humans in those areas are exposed to many of the same carcinogens that fish are exposed to," says Harshbarger. And people will keep being exposed. Many pollutants dumped into waters over the years settle to the bottom, where they are nearly impossible to remove. Waiting for nature to deposit more sediment and literally cover up the problem may be the only feasible solution. Although major commercial fisheries, especially in the ocean, do not seem to be affected, consumers have little way of knowing where a fish came from and eating fillets from contaminated waters is not recommended (Because fish concentrate pollutants such as PCB's in their tissues, eating a one-pound fish from Lake Ontario is equivalent to drinking as much as 1.5 million quarts of that polluted water.). Nor are government regulators exactly playing white knight: although the Environmental Protection Agency is under court order to set effluent standards for toxic substances from industry, only twothirds of them have been issued. The contaminated waters and cancer-stricken fish will be around for a while, it seems, and if the fish are trying to tell us something, as scientists believe, one can only hope that their message is not that of the silent canary in the coal mine. SHARON BEGLEY with MARY HAGER in Washington and JOHN CAREY in New York For more information contact: Uchee Pines Lifestyle Center 30 Uchee Pines Road #75 Seale, Alabama 36875 Tel. 334-855-4764 www.ucheepines.org