In August, the EPA announced that 48 out of 50 states have issued advisories about eating fish caught in their rivers and lakes because of pollution from mercury and other toxins. Over 75 percent of those fish advisories are due to mercury. According to the EPA, most mercury in American adults comes from eating contaminated fish, whether it's caught locally or bought in the supermarket.

We're not talking anchovies and sardines here. It's the big carnivorous fish, like tuna, high on the food chain, that "bioaccumulate" a substance known as methyl mercury in the course of eating loads of smaller fish.

Mercury pollution thus has a dual-pronged effect. Poor people who fish for their own food in mercury-laden waters are at risk, but so are the wealthy who aren't price sensitive when it comes to what they perceive as a healthy diet rich in sushi, halibut, ahi tuna, swordfish and seabass. This leads to a paradox: The better off you are, the worse off you are.

"Higher economic status and education level appear to be risk factors," Dr. Jane M. Hightower and biostatistician Dan Moore of California Pacific Medical Center wrote in a study of affluent people in the San Francisco Bay Area, some of whom complained of symptoms like fatigue, inability to concentrate and memory loss.

Personally, I don't eat all that much fish. When I sent off for the mercury test, I just thought it would be intriguing to see what was there. I also thought it amusing that all that was necessary for the test was a lock of my hair.

But hair apparently is a trusty barometer: "With your hair growing, it's basically tracking the chemicals in your body continuously," explains Michael W. Murray, a scientist with the National Wildlife Federation. "Once you eat a fish meal, a little bit of it is going to be removed with time, and some of it is going to come out in your hair. Hair analysis seems to work pretty well for mercury."

"Technically, what you're measuring is the amount of mercury that your body has been able to get rid of in the last three or four months," explains Richard Maas, the director of the Environmental Quality Institute, which did the testing on my hair sample. "When that came in there's no way to say."

"You may not think of your hair as being dead cells, but it really is," adds Kathryn Mahaffey at the EPA, who has conducted analysis of methyl mercury transfer from mother to child. "These are simply excretion products in the body, if you're speaking metabolically, although it may not make the stylists happy. It's just a natural phenomenon. For example, birds get rid of mercury by putting it in their feathers, bears in their fur."

Although I was sure I was going to end up with an ugly bald patch on the back of my skull, which I planned to blame on the coal industry or environmental hysteria, depending on my test results, cutting my hair for the sample didn't noticeably change my look, and after I mailed it to the lab just before the election, I promptly forgot about it. I really wasn't worried.

But a week after President George W. Bush had been ushered back into office with larger Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, all but assuring the continuation of his laissez-faire pollution policies, I received a letter at home informing me that I am in fact over the limit that the EPA and National Academy of Sciences recommend. My results came back as 1.08 micrograms of mercury per gram of hair, just over the threshold of 1 part per million that's considered safe.

"If your laboratory results are between 1 and 11 [micrograms of mercury per gram of hair] your mercury hair level is above the recommended limit," the enclosed Interpreting Mercury Hair Results sheet informed me. "You could be at elevated risk if you are pregnant, planning to become pregnant or nursing a baby. We recommend that you avoid fish that may contain elevated levels of mercury and also reduce consumption of fish with low to moderate levels of mercury (please see attached list)."

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