For the first time in decades, state officials are walking back the most restrictive warning against eating fish from the Illinois River.
There is no longer a “do not eat” advisory for sport fish in the river, the Illinois Department of Public Health announced this week. The most severe advisory level previously targeted channel catfish in two swaths of the river. Now, the advisory has been relaxed to a once-a-month meal.
Concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have declined, state officials said, leading to the advisory’s removal for the first time since the 1970s.
PCBs, toxic contaminants that were used as insulating fluids for electrical equipment, were banned in 1979, but the pollutants build up in fatty tissues and stick around in the environment, leading to ongoing caution against eating too much fish from many Illinois waterways. Exposure to the pollutant can harm infants, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has classified PCBs as probable human carcinogens.
Annual advisories are based on fish samples collected from 40 to 50 streams, rivers, and inland lakes, and four Lake Michigan stations each year.
They are geared toward vulnerable populations including pregnant and nursing women, and children younger than age 15. There’s “no known immediate health hazard from eating contaminated fish” in Illinois, a Wednesday news release from the state health department said, but there are “concerns about the effects of long-term, low-level exposure” to contaminants including PCBs.
Guidance related to some Lake Michigan fish has also been relaxed, including advisories for whitefish and rainbow trout — with recommended consumption now limited to one meal a week, compared to the previous monthly meal.
The Department of Public Health also issued less restrictive advisories for about a dozen bodies of water, mostly related to PCBs, and completely removed four from that advisory list, including Pecatonica, Skokie and Sugar rivers, and Schiller Pond.
But the persistence of methylmercury — an organic and highly toxic mercury compound which also lingers in the environment and accumulates in fish — has led to new and more restrictive advisories for some waterways.
New advisories have been issued for Big Lake at Silver Springs, Kickapoo State Park, Ponderosa Lake, Randolph County Lake and Sterling Lake. And waters now under more restrictive mercury advisories include the Cache River basin, Kinkaid Lake, Little Wabash River and tributaries, Rock River and Siloam Springs Lake.
A statewide methylmercury advisory cautioning sensitive populations to eat at most one meal of predatory fish per week is in place for all waterways not sampled by the contaminant monitoring program led by the state’s Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Natural Resources and Department of Public Health.
Predatory fish — which build up methylmercury by eating other fish — include: all species of black bass and gar, striped bass, white bass, hybrid striped bass, walleye, sauger, saugeye, flathead catfish, muskellunge and northern pike. Larger fish tend to harbor the most methylmercury.
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August 20, 2021 at 05:52AM
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For the first time in decades, ‘do not eat’ advisory removed for Illinois River fish - Chicago Tribune
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