Question 1771 — health

Summary

Mr. Boris Tavernier alerts the Minister of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry to a new public health scandal concerning mercury contamination of tuna and the complete bankruptcy of the French and European policy for regulating contaminants in food revealed by the Bloom association. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxicant, considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the ten substances of greatest concern for public health, just like asbestos or arsenic. Numerous scientific studies highlight that chronic exposure to mercury, even at low doses, can have irreversible effects on the neuromotor system, increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases and premature senility, or even have deleterious effects on the immune, reproductive, cardiovascular or still renal. We must therefore do everything to limit exposure to mercury of the population as much as possible, particularly vulnerable groups: infants, children and adolescents, pregnant women, sick and elderly people. However, Bloom's revelations show that if the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) judged in 2015 that “tuna, swordfish, cod, whiting and pike were the main contributors to dietary exposure to methylmercury", tuna, the most consumed fish in France, with a consumption of nearly 5 kilograms on average per person per year in live weight equivalent and some 64,000 tonnes of canned tuna sold each year, benefits from an exceptional regime in terms of standards concerning mercury. So, while cod, sardines, anchovies, mackerel or herring must respect a maximum mercury content of 0.3 mg/kg and that seafood products must, in general, respect a maximum content of 0.5 mg/kg, the maximum mercury content in tuna can go up to 1 mg/kg. But the story does not end there, because we learn from reading Bloom's report that this maximum content applies to fresh tuna and that "between fresh tuna and canned tuna, the mercury concentration can theoretically go from 1mg/kg to 2.7mg/kg. The standard that applies to canned tuna can therefore be up to nine times higher than that of a fresh sardine. And all the more so since, of the 150 cans of canned tuna that the Bloom association collected in France and Europe, 100% of the cans were contaminated with mercury, more than half of them exceeded 0.3 mg/kg, ten percent exceeded 1 mg/kg and one can of the Petit Navire brand purchased in a Parisian Carrefour City showed a record level of 3.9 mg/kg. It is absolutely necessary, urgently, to lift this exceptional regime for seafood products and to ensure that tuna, as the most consumed fish in France, is subject to the strictest standard for seafood products, i.e. 0.3 mg/kg. Furthermore, controls must be put in place. What France, clearly, is not doing, since Bloom reveals that, since 2023, France has not controlled a single can of tuna and that the Directorate General for Food explained, in a letter addressed to the lawyers of the Bloom association on October 3, 2024 that "the DGAL does not have certain information (...) concerning the factors of concentration, dilution or transformation". Thus, he wishes to know how France verified the conformity of canned tuna since the adoption in 1993 of the European regulation on contaminants (EC 93/351) and, following these revelations, how the DGAL will now control canned tuna marketed in France. Furthermore, he asks her if she plans to advocate for a review of the European regulation on contaminants.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

Timeline

No timeline events have been ingested for this record yet.

Votes

No vote records are attached yet.

Versions

No version snapshots stored. Document URLs remain at the source.

Documents

No documents linked.

Sponsors

No sponsors or actors listed by the source.

Related records

No cross-record relationships stored yet.