Though the agency plans to end an allowance for canned albacore tuna under the program, it may still offer light tuna, which critics say also can contain enough mercury to cause health effects.

If a woman with a typical weight of 132 pounds ate 12 ounces of canned albacore tuna per week, she would ingest nearly three times EPA's safe dose, she said.

Summed over all seafood categories and for all geographic regions, modeled intake rates are most sensitive to variability in Hg concentrations in imported canned light tuna (64% of the total variance), followed by imported fresh and frozen tuna (11%), imported swordfish (7%), Pacific pollock (6%), imported canned albacore tuna (5%), Atlantic crab (3%), and imported shrimp (1%).