Mercury a risk to children?

Methylmercury from fish, as well as other sources of mercury exposure can be harmful to children's development.
The excerpt below is from the book "Silent Scourge: Children, pollution, and why scientists disagree" (2003). Click here to go to a website with reviews of the book, pdf files you can download, and some links to web pages about children and pollution.

The following is Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press, all rights reserved.

"The Road from Poisoning to Regulation
    Too often it takes a pollution disaster to show us the dangers of toxic substances in the environment. Current regulations on mercury uses and releases from factories only came about after the planet went through a series of dramatic poisoning incidents in the 20th century.
    One example of mercury poisoning was a mysterious condition called “Pink Disease” that sometimes afflicted infants in the U.S. and elsewhere (Table 2.2 lists the symptoms). But it was not until 1947 that the cause was identified in the U.S. as mercurous chloride (calomel) in teething powders (Weiss, 2000). And not all infants exposed to mercury in teething powders got pink disease. In the 1950’s reports of mercury poisoning started to appear in medical journals due to use of mercury to treat fungus infections on the skin, and also from ingestion of flour and wheat seed treated with mercury compounds as fungicides. Outbreaks of mercury poisoning from fungicide on grain occurred in Iraq in 1960, Guatemala in 1963-65, and Pakistan in 1969.
    But two mercury poisoning disasters were studied by researchers in order to pin down the cause and relate the dose of mercury to the symptoms in the poisoning victims—Minamata, Japan in the late 1950s, and Iraq in 1971-72 (Bakir et al., 1973).
Methylmercury Poisoning Disaster in Minamata, Japan
     According to a tourist website, “Minamata is a city with bright sunshine, clear blue skies and picturesque jagged coastline enveloped in greenery and with flowers bursting into bloom. Minamata's magnificent scenery unfolds before your very eyes with the Shiranui Sea in the ..."  (to read more, visit my page on children and pollution)
        The book also shows you a simple way to track your mercury exposure from fish -- you just chart it like you do for counting calories. How many tuna fish sandwiches per week are too many?


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