Mercury in Fish
Mercury can wreak havoc on the brain and central nervous system, as well as on the liver and kidneys. Furthermore, it accumulates in the environment. Because of this, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease registry lists mercury as third on its most hazardous substances list.
– Chemical-Free Kids: How to Safeguard Your Child’s Diet and Environment (2003) by Allan Magaziner, D.O., Linda Bonvie, and Anthony Zolezzi; page 195
“Mad Fish Disease” or “Minamata Disease”
In postwar Japan, mercury, a highly neurotoxic heavy metal, became bioconcentrated in the seafood that was Japan’s principal source of protein as a result of industrial pollution. The mass mercury poisoning that affected the inhabitants of the town of Minamata and environs during the mid-1950s was a first of sorts. Up to then, mercury poisoning had mainly been the result of occupational exposures. But in Minamata, all the conditions for such a catastrophic event came together. The town’s dominant industry, a petrochemical plant owned by the Chisso Corporation, had been dumping toxic waste into the adjacent bay for years and had been opting to pay off the local fishwermen whose livelihoods were being impacted rather than find a safer method of disposal. Among the hazardous wastes were the mercury compounds used in the manufacture of a chemical called acetaldehyde. And as its sales steadily increased, even through the war, the plant, as well as the surrounding population from which it recruited its workers, grew.
But in 1956, a doctor working for the company hospital reported that “an unclarified disease of the central nervous system has broken out.” In fact, scores of people had begun developing devastating symptoms, ranging from slurred speech and tunnel vision to splitting headaches, numbness of the limbs and lips, uncontrollable shouting, involuntary movements, and loss of consciousness. Moreover, cats in the town were thought to have gone crazy, and birds began dropping from the sky. Eventually, more than 900 people died of what became known as “Minamata disease.” But because of a company cover-up and small payoffs to victims, the poisoning of Minamata Bay and those who lived near it continued for another twelve years. And only recently, a study by doctors at Kumamoto Univeristy revealed that tens of thousands more people may have been affected by this brain shattering “disease” than was previously believed. If ever anyone wanted proof of the power of mercury not only to kill, but to utterly destroy the quality of people’s lives, they need look no further than the Minamata disaster.
– Chemical-Free Kids: How to Safeguard Your Child’s Diet and Environment (2003) by Allan Magaziner, D.O., Linda Bonvie, and Anthony Zolezzi; page 195
The victims of Minamata disease became numb in their hands and feet, losing the ability to grasp small objects or to walk without stumbling; they developed difficulties hearing and seeing, and some were gripped by severe convulsions or fell into comas… The people most severely affected by the Minamata disaster, however, were those individuals whose mothers ate the contaminated fish while they were in utero. Some of these victims, now grown, traveled to Stockholm in 1972. There, at the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, they showed the world the wages of developmental mercury poisoning: slurred speech, deafness, blindness, mental retardation, and cerebral palsy.
Recognition that mercury could harm the fetus even at lower levels of exposure was slow in coming. In 1986, researchers in New Zealand reported that children subjected to moderate-to-high doses of mercury via their mothers’ consumption of fish during pregnancy scored lower on developmental and cognitive tests at ages four and six. In 1997, scientists working in the Faroe Islands off the coast of Denmark found that children prenatally exposed to mercury from their mothers’ diets exhibited deficits in memory, attention, and language at seven years of age. And in 2000, the National Academy of Sciences released a report, commissioned by Congress, assessing the dangers of mercury exposure. “The population at highest risk is the children of women who consumed large amounts of fish and seafood during pregnancy,” the report concluded, adding that “the risk to that population is likely to be sufficient to result in an increase in the number of children who have to struggle to keep up in school and who might require remedial classes or special education.”
At last, in 2001, the Food and Drug Administration issued an official advisory to pregnant women, warning them to avoid eating such fish as shark, swordfish, and tilefish, and to reduce their overall consumption of seafood.
– How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul;
pages 31 – 33
