I'd be reluctant to eat any fish caught in the Ohio River. Do you guys realize how many different chemicals are flushed down the toilets and sinks of all the houses along the Ohio River?
Think of all the drugs and other chemical products that we pour down the sink drain every years. And this is just from regular house holds. Go look under your sink in the kitchen or bathroom and read the lables on some of the chemical cleaning products. And every time you wife takes a birth control pill and pees down the toilet think of the left over byproducts going into the Ohio River.
Yes we have primary (removes sediment) and secondary (removes the crap) sewage treatment on a lot more cities these days which helps remove raw sewage and dangerous pathogenic bacteria from the waste water BUT, there is very little done to remove the other chemicals that are dissoved in the water. All those different chemicals are being discharged into the Ohio River without any effective treatment.
Now industry is suppose to treat their waste water better these days but enforcement is a problem and not all these factories are treating everything they dump into the sewers all the time.
Cities can't treat large quanities of raw sewage when we get a lot of rain as the stormwater runoff has to be dumped directly into the creek and rivers so as not to upset the delicate balance of good bacteria in the treamtment tanks. So when we get heavy rains all the raw sewage and stormwater is dumped directly into the Ohio River. This big slug of sewage will travel down the river for miles before it's dicipated.
Sorry guys but there's water that's less polluted than the OHIO RIVER where I can go fishing and catch fish that are clean.
And the guy above who said he cleaned the fish and they LOOKED clean, well I don't you can see those toxic chemicals like PCB's with the naked eye. Sorry but a lot of toxic chemcials and mercury are stored in the fish and you can't see these chemicals with the naked eye. The fish flesh can look good but it's still full of mercury.
Eating something in small concentrations that can't be excreted from the body easily can add up inside our body to toxic levels over time. It may take years to get enough small dose of mercury before the damage shows up in our nervous system or brains. Why take the chance?
And the guy who talked about the coal fired power plants and the mercury coming from the smoke stacks is right. That mercury can fall from the sky into small lakes and ponds near the power plant's smoke stacks and build up in the bottom of a lake. There it's taken up from the small animals and plants that live in that mud and then it's eaten by small fish and other invertibrates. There it's consumed by bigger and bigger fish until we eat the bigger fish and get it inside our body. This is called Bio Accumulation up the food chain.
Sure you can eat some fish and do it for a while in large number or do it for a long time in small numbers but someday you may be sorry that you did that. You may get get a nervous disorder later in life and wonder what caused it.
It's almost impossible to prove what caused a disease when there are so many potentially toxic chemicals in our waters. Any one of them alone or in combination with the others can potentially cause some disease down the road. Proving which chemical did the dirty deed would be nearly impossible.
But I do know this. We are not slowing the number of cancers in people and more and more people are dying horrible deaths from cancer of all kinds.
I'll error on the safe side and not eat fish out of a river that I know is not the healthiest.
One more thing. Do you swim in the Ohio River or water ski in those water? Ever go home and notice that your skin is borken out into hives or small red bumbs? That's because the bacteria got into your skin's pores and is creating an infection. Sort of like a diaper rash that a baby gets when you forget to change thier diapers in time.
Check the fish consumption advisories and pay attention to what's being dumped into our waters.
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things out of that river that would make you sick. Still the river is cleaner of harmful chemicals than it has been in 60 years. The river looks nasty brown but it has and always will look like that, its a mud bottom river. I read in KY game and Fish a few years back that if you are really worried about it take the fish alive and put it in a back yard pond for a month and it will completely clean itself of any chemicals that may be in the fish. Not exactly a logical idea but still interesting. I wouldn't have any problem eating fish out of the Ohio in moderation.