TUNA IS STILL TAINTED

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by HAL SMITH:

About a year and a half ago Bruce McDuffie—an upstate New York chemistry professor — prodded by his wife and a 17-year-old lab assistant, went to a supermarket, bought some tuna fish and tested it for mercury contamination. The rest is, as they say, history. The resulting tuna scare destroyed the U.S. swordfish industry and crippled the tuna fishermen (see MOTHER NO. 9).

Recently the same chemist went shopping again . . . and guess what? One fourth of the cans of tuna he found on-supermarket shelves were as contaminated as those that caused the public outcry. Meaning: FDA assurances to the contrary, nothing has been effectively done to end contamination of tuna.

"I'm very surprised," says Prof. McDuffie, an analytical chemist specializing in environmental research at the State University of New York at Binghamton. "I don't know how much testing the FDA has been doing. Have they been leaving it to the fishing industry?" If further testing confirms his results, McDuff ie says, the FDA should institute a program for "close auditing and continuing inspection" of tuna. He favors a bill now before the Senate which would require a daily inspection of each of the 2,000 tuna packing plants in the U.S.

While the FDA's ineffectiveness hardly makes news these days — many observers agree it protects those industries it supposedly regulates — McDuff ie continues to grab headlines, chipping away at bureaucratic sabotage of environmental progress. Recently, for example, he publicly protested the intrusion of Cold War politics into the UN's Conference on the Human Environment held this past June in Stockholm.