Over at her Lab Notes blog, my NEWSWEEK colleague Sharon Begley ferrets out yet another conflict between Hillary Clinton's public position on an issue and Mark Penn's private-sector PR work.

I have no idea whether a Colombian trade agreement would be good for the U.S. But I do know that Burson-Marsteller’s work on behalf of the high-mercury fish industry is an excellent way to get even more neurotoxins into babies’ developing brains. Burson-Marsteller has worked tirelessly to persuade people—especially pregnant women—that the mercury that tuna (especially albacore) is laced with is nothing to worry their pretty little heads about.

Last year, the New York Sun reported that it had obtained Penn’s internal blog entries, including one from Dec. 20, 2006, in which he brags about landing the U.S. Tuna Foundation’s PR business. His company pitched “ideas for how to act like a political campaign by neutralizing the negatives and bringing out the heart healthy benefits of tuna,” Penn wrote, according to The Sun.

The issue of mercury in tuna makes the industry apoplectic (as you can see from its response to an earlier blog item). But Clinton had, as a senator, stood with those trying to protect children, not the industry, when she signed a 2004 letter criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency for soft-pedaling its own advisory about mercury in fish (especially albacore tuna, since canned tuna is the fish Americans eat more of than anything other fish besides pollock), which “specifically informs women that they and their young children should limit consumption of tuna.”

Burson’s efforts on behalf of mercury hit a high point—or maybe it’s a low point—last fall when it handled the campaign of the National Fisheries Institute (another industry group) to get pregnant women and nursing mothers to eat lots of fish. The industry used something called the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition, to which it wrote a five-figure check to support an "educational campaign" on the issue; it also bankrolled a meeting in Chicago so a committee could hammer out a position statement on pregnant women and fish. Result: a recommendation that pregnant women consume more fish (12 ounces per week) than U.S. government guidelines call safe.

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No one ever accused Burson-Marsteller, let alone Penn, of knowing anything about science. But they sure know PR, having successfully confused untold numbers of women about the health effects of mercury on the developing brain.