Why is farmed salmon a particular risk?
Tiny amounts of dioxins enter the food chain as by-products of industry, so almost all foods contain tiny trace elements of these chemicals. Studies by the World Health Organisation and the EU both show that the levels of these chemicals in food have fallen overall in the past decade in line with greater awareness of food health and regulation. But farmed salmon are fed “fish chow”, a feed which, among other things, contains ground-up fish. The same concerns which triggered the BSE scare – that beef by-products were being fed to cows – are in evidence here, and the fish chow increases the concentration of the potentially harmful substances in fish. How great are the risks? At the moment the risk of a direct causal link between eating salmon and cancer or other health problems is perceived to be small. The findings of the Science article that prompted the latest scare indicated that eating more than half to one meal of farmed salmon a month boosts the risk of cancer by a factor of one i
