Rethinking seafood tissue monitoring for regional risk assessment

Seafood tissue monitoring in Santa Monica Bay, CA, has historically been focused around the two large municipal discharges in the Bay: Hyperion (City of Los Angeles) and White´s Point (County Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles). While these compliance monitoring programs did provide information about contaminant trends in the vicinity of the outfalls, they were not especially useful in health management for several reasons. They did not always focus on species caught by sport fishing, the primary contaminant pathway to humans. Neither did they include areas where most sport fishing occurs. The two programs were not coordinated, using distinct sampling patterns to collect different species. Most importantly, the programs were not explicitly designed to feed information into any kind of formal health management process. The Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, a part of the U.S. EPA´s National Estuary Program, oversaw development of a comprehensive and regionally coordinated environmental monitoring program. One organizing principle was that monitoring should produce information directly useful to California EPA´s periodic health risk assessments of seafood consumption rather than routine compliance data for the Regional Water Quality Control Board. As a result, data from the monitoring program will be used to help set and/or modify seafood consumption advisories. This primary principle led to secondary principles, including, for example, that monitoring should focus on species important in the sport catch and areas where sport fishing occurs, even if these are not adjacent to the outfalls. The revised monitoring program was designed specifically to support health management decision making. Its central feature is that sampling occurs much less frequently (as little as once every five years) for those species and sites where tissue contaminant levels are far from that at which a management action (setting or modifying a consumption advisory) would be taken. Sampling would occur more frequently as tissue levels neared such levels. Another important feature is that the results of California EPA´s periodic health risk assessments are used to target monitoring at specific sites, fish species, and contaminants