Week's Watch

When a New York chemistry professor announced that he had found mercury in canned tuna last December, the Food and Drug Administration began removing thousands of cans from grocery shelves for testing. Most of the tuna was subsequently pronounced safe for human consumption. Not so for swordfish. Last week FDA Chief Charles Edwards warned the public that 95% of all samples of swordfish tested were contaminated with mercury. Only 5% of 853 samples contained mercury below the .5 parts per million safety limit set by the FDA. The average level was twice that. Therefore, said Dr. Edwards, "the FDA has no choice but to recommend at this time that the public not eat swordfish." The virtually unprecedented warning, Government officials acknowledged, will probably scuttle the swordfish industry --unless the fish stop eating food that contains mercury.

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So many Americans accept "zero population growth" as a new canon of conventional wisdom that it comes as a surprise to hear the notion disputed. Some blacks, in fact, are so proud of the high black birth rate that they attack Z.P.G. as a white scheme to curb black power. Now comes a more surprising attack, this one from Jewish intellectuals, most of whom had endorsed birth control as a sane way to ease world hunger and poverty.

Too much birth control could be a disaster for Jews, argue Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz and Contributing Editor Milton Himmelfarb in the magazine's April issue. Given the low level of Jewish fertility, Podhoretz warns that Jews who advocate Z.P.G. are pushing for ethnic "suicide." Would even the devil, he asks, "have ever dreamed that so many would come to sterilize their very own selves in the name of a greater sense of responsibility to the future, and a greater reverence for life?"

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To avoid using DDT and other pesticides, more and more U.S. communities are turning to nature for help. The latest to do so are Claremont, Calif., and Albuquerque, N. Mex., whose residents have imported thousands of ladybugs to control millions of sap-sucking aphids. Claremonters report that ladybugs are cheaper than chemical sprays: $85 for 375,000 ladybugs v. $180 for a chemical spray used in Claremont last year. Moreover, a single ladybug devours as many as 40 or 50 aphids a day. Ladybugs are also easy to handle. The gardener should first cool them in his refrigerator to make them drowsy, then remove them at sunset and spread them around. When the bugs awaken, they are hungry. They gobble away until most aphids are gone.

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