By: Diana Barnes-Brown for Fibroids1An October 2005 report, recently publicized by Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, provided further evidence to support the healthcare community’s increasing concern about environmental mercury contamination.
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Quick Facts on Mercury
Mercury can enter the body from a variety of sources: contaminated drinking water, contaminated food sources such as larger species of fish, and even mercury amalgams used in dental fillings are thought to contribute to mercury levels in the body.
The list of potential symptoms and outcomes of mercury toxicity is still evolving, but most experts agree that the most common of these include:
Birth defects
Loss of mental acuity, memory functioning, and attentiveness
Neurological damage, including Parkinson's or MS-like symptoms
Vision problems
Delayed language development
Loss of coordination
Other symptoms that are suspected but not yet conclusively proven include:
Chronic fatigue syndromes
Depression
Hypersensitivities to chemicals
Lupus and other autoimmune disorders
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The report, led by Steven Patch, co-director of the Environmental Quality Institute, showed that 23 percent (roughly one in five) of women between the ages of 16 and 49 have mercury levels which equal or surpass the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) safety limit. The study on which the report is based measured mercury in hair samples from 2,834 women, a large enough sample to suggest that the researchers’ findings are significant to the general public. Mercury, a toxin released by industrial activities and also found in nature, builds up in the environment and in the bodies of organisms that eat fish or other contaminated organisms. Mercury at toxic levels has been shown to lead to birth defects, loss of mental acuity and neurological degeneration which can lead to symptoms similar to those of multiple sclerosis. In addition, many healthcare experts believe it causes a host of other ailments from digestive disorders to depression, and are calling for more conclusive research about mercury’s lesser-known dangers. There is also some preliminary research suggesting that mercury may be at least partially to blame for the national epidemic of attention deficit disorder (ADD).
In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the EPA issued a directive for young children, pregnant women, nursing mothers and women of childbearing age to keep fish consumption to less than 12 ounces weekly, and to be especially cautious about consuming canned albacore tuna, while completely avoiding other types of fish (primarily larger fish-eating species).
The study also kept track of the relationship between participants’ fish consumption and mercury levels. In an article published by Greenpeace, Patch noted “we saw a direct relationship between people's mercury levels and the amount of store-bought fish, canned tuna fish or locally-caught fish people consumed.”
Greenpeace and other environmental protection organizations are using this latest evidence of the dangers of mercury to lobby for tighter restrictions on power plant emissions, the greatest contributors to environmental mercury levels.
In the recently published online report, Greenpeace noted that mercury from power plants is released into the air, where it gets caught up in precipitation systems and pollutes “rivers, lakes and oceans and eventually the fish that we consume.”
