Signs Warning Against Eating Fish From Bay to Be Posted

Nearly three months after a study found that pregnant women should not eat fish caught in the San Diego Bay, county health officials decided Friday to post warning signs to alert fishermen to the dangers of their catch, officials said.

Within a month, said Gary R. Stephany, the county’s deputy director of environmental health services, about eight signs will appear at local fishing piers and boat launch areas.

“Fish from the bay may contain chemicals believed to cause cancer and birth defects,” the signs will read in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, Stephany said. “Eating these fish may be a risk to some people. For more information, please call 338-2222.”

In June, when the results of the two-year $309,000 study were first released, county officials said they would wait for state health officials to evaluate it before posting fishing areas. Stephany said county officials scrapped that plan Friday when it became clear that other pressing issues may push the state’s evaluation back too far.

Dr. Jerry Pollock, a staff toxicologist at the state Department of Health Services, confirmed that he does not expect to get to the San Diego Bay fish study until early next year.

“We have very limited staff,” he said. “It’s not forever. There are some things I would tell you would be two years away.”

The study, funded by the San Diego Unified Port District and conducted by the county Department of Health Services, found potentially harmful levels of mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a group of chemicals suspected of causing cancer, in the muscle and liver tissues of the 340 fish collected at four sites around the bay.

Researchers concluded that a person would have to eat 6 ounces of contaminated fish each day for 70 years before an adverse health effect could occur. They compared the cancer risk from eating bay fish to that posed by eating tainted peanut butter.

At a news conference called to explain the results in June, county officials had been careful not to spark widespread panic by tempering their warnings with exclamations about how much the bay has improved. But, when it came to painting signs in three languages, space limitations left little room for subtlety, Stephany said.

“Ideally, it would have been nice to have a sign up there that wouldn’t (prompt) a lot of phone calls,” Stephany said. “But the risk analysis was so complicated that we couldn’t figure out how to say, ‘If you’re pregnant, don’t eat it, if you’re young, two times a week is probably OK, and if you’re an adult, four or five times is probably OK.’ ”

He continued: “Trying to fit all that on a sign is not an easy thing to do. But we wanted to inform people of the risks as clearly as we could.”