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More Mercury?

Many people know that numerous kinds of fish are tainted with mercury, and that most states have issued warnings advising pregnant women and children to limit their consumption of fish meals. But what about other sources of food?

Until recently, scientists didn’t believe mercury was getting into other food sources. But now they’re not so sure.

Mercury gets into fish when it drifts from coal-fired power plants and other sources through the air and settles into lakes and streams, where it turns into methyl mercury, a toxicant. Worms and other creatures that live at the bottom of lakes and streams eat the mercury in the mud, and they are eaten in turn by the fish. Since each fish eats more than one worm, the mercury it eats begins to accumulate in its system. Likewise people tend to eat more than one fish, and when they do they are eating all the mercury that has accumulated in each of those creatures down the food chain.

A new study which found unusually high levels of mercury in the blood and feathers of 178 woodland birds has scientists concerned that the metal may also be making its way into land-based animals as it works its way up that food chain as well.  A biologist at the Biodiversity Research Institute in Maine believes mercury may be taking a similar path on land – from air to soil to worms to birds and upward – as it does through water-based food chains. Humans, at the top of the food chain, would be ingesting the largest amounts of mercury in that case.

That raises questions about whether the animals that we eat could also be contaminated with mercury and adversely affecting our health. Mercury has been found at elevated levels in people, and has been linked to serious developmental problems in children, such as autism, which has grown in prevalence over the past several decades.

For more information about this story, read the article in the New York Times.

For more information on the dangers of mercury, go to http://www.epa.gov/mercury/effects.htm

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org