who benefits from the salmon scare?
This is the true story of the salmon scare which threatened last weekend to bring British salmon farming to its knees. It is a sorry saga of flawed science, selective research and hidden commercial bias. That it was allowed into the pages of the apparently respectable journal Science is inexplicable. Its worldwide promotion by an organisation with a vested interest in undermining farmed Atlantic salmon in favour of the wild Alaskan variety is a scandal. Its central claim, that farmed Atlantic salmon have higher levels of pollutants than wild ones, is simply unproven, since the report itself concedes that it never actually examined wild Atlantic salmon. That a British expert could nevertheless describe the report as “definitive” is dumbfounding. The report hit the headlines on Friday with a vengeance. Based on a worldwide survey of salmon bought in supermarkets in March 2002, it said that fish raised in Britain and other Northern European countries were so contaminated with carcinogenic
