Submitted Ideas

How many pollutants are in my fish and seafood?

Industrial chemicals are detected from the depths of the oceans to the poles of the earth, and in the bodies of all people on the planet. These can have particularly adverse effects for the health of vulnerable people, such as babies, infants, and elderly. It is well known that many fish and seafood populations contain high levels of these toxic chemicals, including mercury and pesticides.

To reduce human exposure to these chemicals, there is urgent need to develop a feasible and affordable technique to quickly measure the levels of toxic chemicals from fish and seafood that we buy daily or weekly on our markets and stores. Current methods to do this are expensive, require specialized equipment and staff, and cannot be deployed in a home environment of the average consumer.

As such, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about the pollution level of e.g. fresh fish purchased at the supermarket, separating the consumer from the information needed to protect our family’s health.

To address current fish and seafood consumer concerns and to preserve fish consumption rates beneficial to human health in the US and all over the world, it would be desirable to develop an easy device and/or app to conveniently monitor and estimate levels of toxic chemicals in our dietary fish, seafood, and other food sources. Both the technology for measuring and data for evaluating chemical pollution are already available and simply need to be integrated for in-home applications (please refer to the scheme).