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teria and other substances that are found and the marine life and 
the substances found in the Bight. 
Mr. Wuite. I am not modest, I am just cowardly. Let’s let Dr. 
Segar respond to that because, frankly he and Dr. Mattson and 
some of the other people that we have consulted, including the 
NACOA report, the people from the Southern California Coastal 
Water Research Project have heard presentations by Dr. Goldberg 
who is coming later on in the hearing, make me believe that it is 
otherwise. 
Mr. Hucues. I know that Dr. Segar knows about the NACOA 
report because he helped write sections of it. 
Dr. SEGAR. Congressman, that is not correct. 
Mr. Wuite. Even if he did, and I don’t know that he did, that 
committee is not about to accept the judgment of somebody blindly 
simply because the draft is put in front of them. I think frankly 
that the scientific community does not need me to defend them. 
Mr. Huaues. Well, the fact of the matter is, that it can’t be dis- 
puted by any of the scientists that in fact we are finding traces of 
mercury, cadmium, PCB’s, and bacteria in seafood. 
Dr. SeGAR. I am glad you said traces, Congressman. There are 
traces present in seafood naturally in any event. 
Let me address the first issue, which is not really an issue, the 
NACOA report. As you know from material that has been provided 
to your office, my only involvement with the NACOA report was to 
provide a literature review which was a basis, for one chapter of 
the report, the scientific synthesis chapter. 
As you also know, the later drafts of that particular chapter that 
were put together by NACOA’s staff were, in fact, altered or were 
changed in ways that I found objectionable. Some of the caveats, as 
far as the unknowns, things that we did not know about what was 
happening in the marine environment were, in fact, removed from 
the materials that I provided to the committee staff. I made several 
objections to this and they are on the record. You can review it if 
you like. It is on the record of subsequent NACOA meetings which 
I attended that, in fact, I had objections to interim drafts of the 
report, because they simply did not include a number of the cave- 
ats that I put into the original materials that I supplied to the 
committee. 
Now, leaving that issue as dead and going on to your comments 
about the various observations of so-called impacts in the New 
York Bight, we could sit here for perhaps several hours or more 
and I could review technical information, literally many thousands 
of technical papers and reports which I have reviewed of informa- 
tion regarding the New York Bight. I personally have been work- 
ing on the New York Bight since 1974. 
Mr. Hucues. If we took 2 hours to do that we would lose the 
chairman and the rest of the audience. 
Dr. SecaR. And so I will not do it. 
Most of the things that you refer to come from reports which are 
several years old. For example, the fin rot fish diseases, the whole 
spectrum of fish diseases that are carried in the New York Bight; 
the initial data that you referred to was a very limited study that 
the National Marine Fisheries Service conducted a number of 
years ago. The most recent studies conducted by NMFS covering an 
