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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
While the Bush administration stalls on mercury at home, global mercury pollution is expected to rise. China, already believed to be the world's largest producer of man-made mercury emissions, where three-quarters of the electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, will double its electricity-generating capacity by 2020, according to that country's State Power Economic Research Center. Most of those new plants will be coal-fired.
The mercury in fish is actually worse for people than when it leaves the power plant. When coal is burned, mercury is released into the atmosphere as a gas, which turns into aerosol droplets as it cools. Airborne, these droplets can travel hundreds, even thousands of miles, before settling to the ground, where they're eventually washed to the bottom of lakes, rivers and streams.
The bacteria in the sediment at the bottom of the water have a chemical reaction to the mercury, which makes the substance less toxic to the bacteria. But that chemical process also turns it into a form that is most toxic for people: methylmercury. As worms and other organisms in the sediment consume the bacteria, they absorb this methylmercury and pass it on to the critters that eat them. The methylmercury becomes concentrated as it travels up the food chain -- with little fish being eaten by bigger fish -- until it ends up in high doses in the large sports fish that Americans have such a taste for.
And mercury pollution knows no boundaries. Rainwater in California has been found to contain mercury pollution from as far away as Asia. Moreover, our seafood supply is global: The sea bass you eat in New York or Austin could have come from waters literally half a world away.
The Bush administration, however, has strenuously fought international efforts to curb the pollutant. Just last February, in a meeting in Nairobi, it battled the establishment of international mercury rules, arguing that any reductions should be voluntary.
It adds up to conflicting messages from the EPA on mercury. The agency issues dire warnings about the hundreds of thousands of children potentially exposed every year, warns women against eating the most mercury-laden fish, but then fails to regulate the pollution that's causing the problem.
Those failures come just as some women are starting to get tested before they start a family. Alisa MacDonnell, 34, of Montara, Calif., recently participated in the hair-testing program organized by Greenpeace. What MacDonnell found out made her swear off her beloved spicy tuna roll. Her result came back 1.75 micrograms of mercury per gram of hair, 0.75 over the limit recommended by the EPA. "I went completely cold because I was so petrified," she says. Six months later, after giving up fish, her level has gone down 46 percent, to 0.94 micrograms. "Then it was really clear to me that it had something to do with my eating fish."
The cost of not cleaning up mercury pollution in our environment is not just lost sales for the tuna industry, which has been grumbling that sales are down because of concerns about the toxin. A new study from Mount Sinai, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, of which Trasande is the lead researcher, states that the economic fallout of mercury pollution is nearly $9 billion a year. The study calculates the economic cost of the hundreds of thousands of kids likely to be brain damaged by mercury.
"That's our best estimate of the economic impact of methylmercury toxicity from man-made sources," Trasande says. "The cost will occur in each year's birth cohort. Hundreds of thousands of children each year will continue to suffer this level of brain damage, costing Americans billions of dollars each year if mercury pollution is allowed to continue at this level. On each of these children, methylmercury has a permanent impact that lasts a lifetime. These children enter school with lower IQ, and they don't perform as well."
The doctors based their economic estimates on children who have suffered from lead poisoning, a neurotoxin that has been studied for decades. In those studies, researchers found that even a 1.6 drop in an IQ score could cost that person $31,800 in earnings over a lifetime. They discovered that adults who suffered from lead poisoning as children were at a persistent economic disadvantage to their peers. The Mount Sinai study found that the U.S. coal-fired power-plant industry is responsible for foisting $1.3 billion of the $8.7 annual cost of mercury on all of us. Industry sources dispute the figure.
