KUWAIT: Eating locally caught fish and other seafood may be potentially harmful to health, given the high levels of pollution in Kuwait's offshore waters, according to a prominent local environmentalist. Khalid al-Hajri, the chairman of the Green Line Environment Group (GLEG), said that although a year has passed since a disastrous breakdown at the Mishref sewage plant left raw sewage being pumped into the Gulf for a limited period and extensive work had been done to restore them to their former state, recent tests proved that the country's marine environment is still heavily polluted.

Speaking at a press conference held to publicize the issue, Al-Hajri provided documentary evidence, including official papers and photographs demonstrating that marine pollution is still a major problem. He further accused the country's Environment Public Authority of not caring about the issue, saying that the Ministry of Health (MoH) is the only body taking it seriously. "The health ministry's environmental health unit recently took samples of the Kuwaiti waters and tested them," he said. "The results s
howed that the marine environment is still polluted. [The environmental health unit] also issued a detailed report about the dangerous situation - while the EPA is trying to hide the truth.

Al-Hajri also claimed that the Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) has demanded an increase in the levels of chlorine used to purify the local desalinated drinking water supply following the increase in marine pollution levels, despite the possible dangers of this. The GLEG head also indicated that that the disinfectant substances pumped into the Gulf to neutralize the thousands of gallons of liquid waste that went directly into the waters after the breakdown at the Mishref sewage plant were themselves
toxic: "Those substances are highly dangerous and may contain carcinogenic toxins that could enter a fish's body, which are then passed on to the consumer.

He warned that last year's massive release of raw, untreated sewage had also made Kuwait's beaches unsafe, since the waste matter contained "huge quantities of bacteria and potentially harmful viruses and parasites that could lead to serious health dangers and could even cause cholera and other diseases. Another problem highlighted by Al-Hajri at yesterday's event was the harmful effects of often unreported oil spills in Kuwaiti waters. He asserted that the true extent of and damage caused by these is being covered up by the EPA. At the conference, he presented a number of photos, including some showing an oil slick in the waters off Fintas, which he said had been caused by a local petroleum company.

The EPA didn't show the truth to the public, and this disaster caused pollution in the south of the country from Fintas to Mina Abdullah," he pointed out.
Al-Hajri also accused an unnamed senior EPA official of attempting to shut down the GLEG, saying that the government is opposing voluntary environmental protection work. "The same official aimed to spoil one of our events held in April by calling those invited and telling them not to attend the event," he stated. The GLEG head was also critical of the appointment of Dr. Saleh Al-Moudhi as the EPA's Director General, which he insisted was illegal under the terms governing the body.

Al-Moudhi isn't a specialist in environmental affairs, particularly according to an official document from Kuwait University's faculty of Oil and Engineering where he was previously working as a lecturer in oil engineering," insisted Al-Hajri. "I thereby call upon the governing authorities to appoint a properly qualified person to this position to be able to manage the EPA correctly. - Kuwait times