“Forever chemicals” are showing up almost everywhere they’re looked for, it seems – including in fish.
That’s the implication of a recent warning to recreational anglers and subsistence fishers to limit their consumption of a wide array of fish if caught from more than two dozen waterways in Maryland, including the Chesapeake Bay as well as the Anacostia, Patapsco and Susquehanna rivers.
On Dec. 8, the Maryland Department of the Environment issued more than 70 new fish consumption advisories after finding potentially harmful levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, in fish tissue. The warnings were location-specific but applied to 15 different species, including popular catches such as large- and smallmouth bass, bluegill, white perch and even striped bass, or rockfish.
“Fish is an important part of a healthy diet, but it is important to share what we’ve learned to help people — including subsistence anglers in underserved communities — make informed decisions about what they and their families eat,” said Maryland Department of the Environment Secretary Serena McIlwain in announcing the advisories.
Some environmental activists, several of whom have helped prod the state to sample fish and shellfish for contaminants, welcomed the state’s move but said it hasn’t gone far enough to protect the public.
PFOS is one of more than 9,000 highly persistent chemicals, many of them toxic, which have been in common use since the 1940s. Known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, they are found in everyday products such as stain- and water-resistant fabrics and carpeting, cookware and even food packaging. Their use in fire-fighting foams has been linked to widespread ground- and surface water contamination, particularly near military bases and airports nationwide.
Animal and occupational studies have linked exposure to PFOS and some other PFAS with increased risk of some cancers, as well as with reproductive problems, developmental delays in children, weakened immune systems and high cholesterol.
MDE’s new advisories join a long list of cautions the state has had in place for decades advising people to limit their consumption of certain locally caught fish that have been found to be contaminated with PCBs, mercury and pesticides. Those still account for most of the state’s fish consumption advisories.
But the number of fishing spots and species affected by the latest advisories provides a sobering reminder of widespread PFAS contamination. The advisories target PFOS contaminated fish in at least one water body in all but two Maryland counties, Howard and Worcester.
For fish found tainted with PFOS, MDE’s recommendations range generally from “no limit,” meaning it’s okay to eat more than eight meals a month of some fish, down to having just one fish fillet every other month from certain waterways. In a few cases, MDE advises not to eat any fish.
Those meal limits are designed to minimize health risks from long-term exposure to the chemical. MDE pairs those with even lower recommended meal limits for children and for women of child-bearing age because of their heightened sensitivity to contaminants.
MDE said it didn’t find enough PFOS in oysters or crabs to warrant any new cautions about eating them. The state had previously suggested limiting consumption of crabs only from Baltimore harbor and the rivers around it because of PCB contamination. It has also urged consumers to avoid the yellowish “mustard” found inside steamed crabs wherever they are caught because PCBs tend to concentrate in that substance.
Up to now, the regulatory spotlight has largely been on the health risks posed by PFAS contamination of drinking water, believed to be the leading means of exposure. MDE detected one or more compounds in half to three-quarters of the community water systems it first tested in 2020 and 2021. According to MDE, 63 systems have levels that exceed the drinking water safety standards proposed in March 2023 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Over the past decade, PFOS also was detected in three-fourths of the freshwater fish collected and analyzed by the EPA. Other studies have likewise linked consumption of shellfish and other seafood with PFAS exposure.
So far, though, the EPA has left it to the states to decide how to deal with the issue. Most have done nothing. Seventeen states — including Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania in the Bay watershed — have published PFAS-related fish consumption advisories for at least one body of water, according to Kaiser Family Foundation Health News. The advice given by those states has varied widely, however.
In its first PFAS-related advisory in 2021, for instance, MDE said it was still safe for men and women of child-bearing age to eat three meals a month of largemouth bass from Piscataway Creek, while children could have two meals a month. That caution came after MDE investigated a fish kill in the Prince George’s County creek and tied it to a spill of PFAS-laden firefighting foam at Joint Base Andrews, an airbase in the creek’s headwaters.
That advice wasn’t nearly as protective as what other states were suggesting to their anglers when finding similar levels of contamination in their fish. MDE had decided then that it would only advise against eating any fish if PFOS levels exceeded 408 parts per billion. All but one other state with PFOS-related consumption advisories advised its anglers not to eat any fish when PFOS levels were half or less than half of MDE’s threshold.
With this round of advisories, MDE has revisited its warning about Piscataway Creek. The agency now recommends avoiding eating any redbreast sunfish or large- or smallmouth bass. It has also reduced the number of yellow bullheads from the creek it considers safe to eat.
Those changes were based not on new sampling but on a revised analysis of the risks posed by consuming PFOS-tainted fish, said MDE spokesman Jay Apperson. In general, MDE now advises against consuming any fish if its sampling finds more than 41 parts per billion — a ceiling 90% lower than what it had been before. “Avoid eating” thresholds for women and children are lower still because of youngsters’ sensitivity to contaminants.
MDE’s methodologies and advisories are now “comparable” to other states, Apperson said. Even so, three states — New Hampshire, Washington and North Carolina — have still lower “do not eat” thresholds for locally caught fish.
Pat Elder, a St. Mary’s County activist who spurred MDE to begin testing oysters and then other fish for PFAS three years ago, contends the new advisories still encourage people to consume dangerous levels of contamination. The state agency based its advice on PFOS alone, he said, and ignored levels of other PFAS that may have been in the fish. That approach understates the cumulative health risk, he said.
John Backus, MDE’s field services manager, said the agency focused its advisories on PFOS because that was the PFAS found most often and at higher levels in sampled fish. He called the recommendations “very conservative.” If someone were to eat more than the recommended meal limits for the next 30 years, he said, they would raise that person’s risk of an adverse health outcome by 1 in 10,000.
Brent Walls, the Upper Potomac Riverkeeper, called MDE’s new advisories “a good start.” He noted that they target water bodies throughout the state and include environmental justice areas where there are likely to be subsistence fishers.
But Walls suggested MDE may not have looked thoroughly enough in all areas for contaminated fish and shellfish. He helped draw attention to PFAS contamination of fish years ago in Antietam Creek, a Potomac tributary in Frederick County.
“They’ve done some testing but not anywhere near what I think they should,” he said.
Theaux LeGardeur, the Gunpowder Riverkeeper, said MDE needs to do more to get word out to anglers and subsistence fishers in particular. MDE posts the advisories online, and the Department of Natural Resources fisheries web page contains a link to those advisories. But LeGardeur questioned why they weren’t distributed with every fishing license issued.
Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said MDE should not only expand its testing of fish but use that information to reduce contamination of waterways. PEER did some testing of its own that found PFAS in an oyster, a crab and striped bass in Southern Maryland.
“The states have to start grappling honestly with not just PFOA and PFOS, which are legacy PFAS, but the others, which also are hazardous,” he said. “They need to find the sources of contamination.”