Assessing and Communicating Benefits and Risks of Eating Fish with Subsistence-Fishing Ethnic Communities

Subsistence fishing is a common strategy for ethnic communities to obtain high quality protein that partially compensates for economic inequalities that they experience. At the same time, subsistence fishing provides a way to transmit cultural traditions across generations. While fish is a source of high quality, low fat protein and health-promoting omega-3-fatty acids, fish also contain varying concentrations of environmental contaminants. Our Children's Environmental Health Sciences Core Center has conducted several fish benefit/risk communication projects with ethnic communities in Milwaukee and Anishinaabe tribal members. For our current project, we collaborated with community partners to understand patterns of fishing, cooking, and consumption of fish (by species, size, and specific waterways) through key informants and focus group participants in the urban African American community. We used these data together with existing published data to estimate the concentration of omega-3-fatty acids and data from creel surveys, provided by the Department of Natural Resources, to estimate the uptake of mercury and other contaminants for men, women of childbearing age, and children. We describe the process and outcomes of estimating benefits and risks of eating locally caught fish for community members. In addition, we discuss multiple methods that we have employed to develop culturally sensitive communication processes and tools that involve community members, scientists, communication and outreach specialists, and videographers.