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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] I'm a toxic waste dump, loaded with mercury -- and I don't even eat very much fish.
  • Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 07:33:08 -0700


I'm a toxic waste dump, loaded with mercury -- and I don't even eat very
much fish.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon Technology.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/17/waste_dump/print.html

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.

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)."

Rationalizing that I was just .08 over the limit, so it wasn't really that
big a deal, I called Maas, of the Environmental Quality Institute, which
did the testing. But he told me: "If you have a level above 1, it's
definitely a cause for concern."

He explained that it's statistically probable that my contamination came
from fish, although there are other possible, if less likely, sources, such
as the silver amalgam filling I have in one tooth, or the traces of mercury
used as a preservative in some medical shots, such as flu shots. But the
most probable source is fish, and therefore the easiest way to try to lower
my level is to change the fish I eat.

Here's how the toxin gets into fish: When coal burns, it releases mercury
that gets turned into gas, Maas says. As it cools, the mercury turns into
aerosol droplets, which can travel hundreds of miles before settling onto
the ground or water. In water, it settles into the sediment at the bottom
of rivers and lakes.

"The bacteria in the sediment methylate this mercury and turn it into
methyl mercury to make it less toxic to themselves," Maas says. "That's a
problem, because methyl mercury is fat soluble." That makes it harder for
creatures that consume it to excrete it, according to Maas, since the
mercury gets stored in lipid and muscle tissue.

What happens next is the process that makes methyl mercury more
concentrated in a shark than, say, a worm. "When burrowing worms or insect
larvae consume sediments, they get that methyl mercury in them, and then it
gets biomagnified up the food chain. Then, maybe a crawfish eats that
insect larva, and a small fish eats that crawfish, and a larger fish eats
the small fish," Maas says. "Each time all the methyl mercury is passed up
the food chain. Each trophic level will then have a methyl mercury level 10
times higher than the one below it. That's why by the time you get to the
sports fish and large fish that we actually consume, those levels are quite
high."

The state of California requires grocery stores to post warnings about
mercury contamination in the fish they sell, although they don't always
comply.

But all the estimates, recommendations and warnings are based on averages
and approximation. You never know exactly what level is in the sample on
the end of your fork. I may not think that I eat a lot of fish, but the
fish that I happened to eat during the months represented by the hair
sample could have been especially contaminated, leading to my high reading:


"There's a bit of a Russian-roulette element here. You may go to a sushi
bar, and get a fairly decent slab of tuna, and you may get a hot
mercury-rich piece," says Kert Davies, a spokesperson for Greenpeace.

Mercury pollution from power plants is not regulated at the federal level,
although some states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and Wisconsin have
imposed their own measures. But federal regulations are now being formed.
The National Wildlife Federation and the Public Interest Research Group
argue that under the Clean Air Act, 90 percent of the mercury pollution
from those plants should be cleaned up by 2008. Under the same law, the
government is already successfully implementing cuts on mercury pollution
from waste incinerators. Environmentalists say only corporate self-interest
is preventing the same thing from happening with power plants

Under the legislation the Bush administration calls Clear Skies, only 70
percent of that mercury would be cleaned up, and it might take as long as
until 2025.

"We're expecting them to reintroduce Clear Skies as soon as the new
Congress comes in, in January, because of the election results," says
Olivia Campbell, national campaign coordinator for the National Wildlife
Federation. Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., known for calling "manmade
global warming" "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people"
on the floor of the Senate, plans to reintroduce the bill. With a
friendlier Senate, it has a better chance of passing, and the EPA is
expected to release its mercury regulations by March. Although mercury does
occur naturally from geological formations, like volcanos, some 70 percent
of the emissions in the United States, according to the Ocean Conservancy,
come from burning coal.

To be fair, the methyl mercury that apparently was speared by my fork or
chopsticks can't all be pinned on Bush, given the global nature of the fish
supply. We might have to clean up the whole world to make it safe for
future mothers to eat swordfish and shark again. But the Bush
administration has opposed attempts by European delegates to the United
Nations to create a global protocol to control mercury.

So, instead of trying to regulate methyl mercury out of the food supply,
we're stuck with trying to avoid the pollution at an individual level. The
Environmental Protection Agency offers these guidelines for what women of
reproductive age should and shouldn't eat. (They offer no guidelines for
men, the traditional logic being that if you protect the hypothetical
unborn fetus, which can tolerate only the lowest levels, it's likely that
everyone else in a given family is getting safe levels, too.)

The EPA guidelines suggest that if you're concerned about mercury, you
leave big predatory fish, like shark, swordfish and tilefish, out of your
diet completely. You're also supposed to limit your intake of other fish
and shellfish to those that eat lower on the food chain and are therefore
lower in mercury, such as salmon and shrimp, to about 12 ounces -- about
two average meals -- a week.

Albacore tuna is typically higher in mercury than light canned tuna, so
limiting albacore to once a week is also advised. But environmental
watchdog groups challenge those guidelines as not aggressive enough,
suggesting that they subject women and their fetuses and young children to
too much risk, while pandering to the tuna industry. Environmental groups
offer their own, more conservative, recommendations.

The gross irony of all this wrangling over which fish has more or less
mercury is that government scientists are fearful that consumers, grossed
out by mercury pollution, may just shun fish in general. Why are they
alarmed? Because, when fish is not subtly poisoning you, it's very good for
you.

"If your level is higher than you consider desirable, reduce the amount of
mercury you're taking in your diet by changing the types of fish that
you're eating," Mahaffey from the EPA told me, diplomatically. "We do think
that fish is good for you overall, so we really recommend that people
select fish that are lower in mercury." But she admits that it's a hard
message for consumers to understand: "It's a complicated risk message
because for years we've been telling people that fish are good for you.
They're recommended to help in the prevention of coronary heart diseases,
and also a lot of weight-reduction diets have recommended these. Yet, as we
learn more about the levels of contamination it's pretty clear that we have
to be selective in the types of fish you eat."

Some studies even suggest that the well-known heart-health benefits of the
omega-3 fatty acids in fish can be canceled out by mercury. "If you're
eating fish every day, you're not really getting much benefit from the
fatty acids," says the National Wildlife Federation's Murray. "The effects
of the contaminants seem to really overtake the benefits that you're
getting at those higher levels."

Mahaffey recommends salmon, anchovies and shrimp, which all have "decent
amounts" of omega-3 fatty acids and relatively low mercury levels. And she
tells consumers to eat less "steaklike" fish. In other words, eating fish
that themselves eat lower on the food chain is your best bet.

The good news, from my perspective, is that subjects who cut their fish
intake in some studies, like Hightower's, have seen drops in their
measurable mercury levels in just a few months. I'll get back to you with
my next set of test results. Let's hope I can report I'm out of the toxic
zone and still have some hair left by the end of this.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon Technology.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/17/waste_dump/print.html





  • [Livingontheland] I'm a toxic waste dump, loaded with mercury -- and I don't even eat very much fish., Tradingpost, 02/10/2005

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