Oregon Water Quality Decision Affects Fish Safety and Indian Diet

By Wil Phinney
Special to Tribal Connections

Luke Fishing From a Scaffold
(Photo courtesy of Wil Phinney)

Hermiston,OR -- The Oregon Environmental Quality Commission in May adopted water quality criteria for toxic pollutants that area Tribes say do not adequately protect people who consume large amounts of fish. The Commission adopted national fish consumption rates recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that are far below the subsistence amounts of fish eaten by members of Oregon Indian tribes.

"In the end, we had to decide which population should be protected – the general population or a sensitive sub-population," said Martin Fitzpatrick, the Water Quality Standards Specialist for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, which presented its recommendations to the EQC. "The choice was made to go with the general population."

The EPA's general public consumption rate of 17.5 grams – about two-thirds of an ounce a day or two eight-ounce fish meals per month – is 2.7 times higher than Oregon's existing rate of 6.5 grams per day. But it is far less than EPA's national subsistence fisher consumption rate of 143.4 grams per day or even the 63.2 grams per day average ingestion for subsistence and non-subsistence consumers identified in 1994 and 2002 studies conducted by the EPA and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

Those studies determined that Northwest tribal members eat six to 11 times more fish than the national average. The study showed, too, that the risk of developing cancer from eating contaminated salmon ranges from 7 in 10,000 to 2 in 1,000, depending on where the fish was caught, the size of the person and how much fish they eat. Tribal members who eat resident fish, the report said, are at an even higher risk of developing cancer. For some locations where sturgeon and mountain whitefish are eaten in large quantities, the risk of developing cancer is as high as 2 in 100