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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
I'm a toxic waste dump, loaded with mercury -- and I don't even eat very much fish.
Nov 17, 2004 | Too bad Superfund is bankrupt, because I recently discovered that I'm a toxic waste dump. Yes, I'm a walking, talking contamination site, liable at any moment to freak out my friends, colleagues and acquaintances by announcing that my mercury pollution level exceeds federal health guidelines for women my age.
In fact, trace amounts of the neurotoxin are in the very fingernails that I'm using to type these words. And you too, may be swimming with mercury, depending on how much tuna or other big carnivorous fish you like to gobble.
Curious? You can find out your own mercury levels by sending a few strands of your hair to a testing lab. A few weeks before the presidential election, environmental advocates at Greenpeace offered to test me as part of a study on mercury contamination conducted by the Environmental Quality Institute at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.
I agreed, and shortly thereafter my own mercury test kit arrived in the mail. I enlisted a colleague to play the role of medical assistant/hair stylist. She donned the enclosed plastic gloves to cut a sample from the back of my head close to the scalp. I managed to cough up an adequate sample under her scissors, despite worrying about what it would do to my look -- because the inch or so of hair necessary for the test has to come from the part of your coiffure closest to the scalp. That's so the hair tested will measure more recent mercury exposure, unlike the older hair at the tips of your locks.
A few weeks later I found out I was contaminated. And I'm not alone. In preliminary results, the study found that 21 percent of potentially child-bearing women exhibited mercury levels that exceed Environmental Protection Agency guidelines.
Scientists for the EPA estimate that some 600,000 kids born each year are at risk because of their mothers' mercury levels, since mercury levels in a newborn's umbilical cord were found to be 1.7 times the level in the mother's blood.
The largest manmade source of mercury pollution is the coal-fired power plant, which puts the toxin squarely in the middle of energy politics. Environmental groups tried to make mercury pollution in fish an issue in swing states during the presidential election. MoveOn.org ran an ad criticizing the Bush administration's lax approach to curbing mercury pollution. Meanwhile, the tuna industry seized on recent data from the Centers for Disease Control that suggest overall contamination levels of American women could be lower than previously measured, and proclaimed there is nothing to worry about.
But women in their reproductive years aren't likely to put much trust in the self-interested propaganda of the tuna industry. Mercury can put a developing fetus or nursing child at risk for brain damage. Children born with high levels of mercury can have learning disabilities, lower IQ scores, and behavioral problems like sluggishness. The expectant mom need not have any of symptoms whatsoever to exhibit levels that could harm a baby.
When I decided to throw myself into this highly politicized morass as a test subject, I had no special reason to believe that I had any more of this toxin in my body than the rest of you sushi-eating, ahi-tuna-steak-scarfing types. I am not a habitual angler, casting my fly into waters hot with the contaminant. I don't think I even eat enough fish to meet the American Heart Association's recommendation of eating fish twice a week to build a healthy heart. If the government announced there was mercury in peanut butter, I'd be willing to believe I'm aglow with the stuff. But tilefish and shark? I don't think that I've ever eaten either of those.
The Bush administration, flush with the glow of a new term, is poised to issue new guidelines for regulating mercury pollution in March 2005. Environmentalists are not sanguine about the prospect. If a track record is any prediction of future behavior, this administration, they believe, is far more likely to listen to its close friends in the coal industry, who are fighting any increased regulation, instead of the record-breaking 600,000 public comments that the government has received about the proposed rule.
