If you like coal, you'll LOVE mercury!

How My Mercury Level Hit Double the Safety Limit

By Bryan Walsh, Tuesday, Apr. 12, 2011
TIME

A couple of weeks ago I took a pair of scissors and clipped a thatch of hair from the back of my head. I did not do this lightly — much like petroleum, my hair is an increasingly scarce resource, and I'm doing my best to conserve it. But I was taking part in a Sierra Club-sponsored test for mercury contamination in people, and levels of the toxic metal can be detected through the hair. So I taped the small sample I could spare inside an envelope and sent it off to the University of Georgia, which was doing the actual testing. And then I pretty much forgot about it.

So I was more than a bit surprised when an express letter arrived at my home from the University of Georgia a few days later, with a message from Lisa Liguori, the scientist who runs the testing lab there. It turned out that my mercury levels were more than twice the government-recommended safety limit. I wasn't exactly a walking thermometer, but I had a surprising amount of the stuff in my blood and body. (See the World's Top 10 Environmental Disasters)

Fortunately, for a man, mercury contamination isn't considered a significant health risk — and my levels are still well below the point at which harm would likely occur in any case. But women who are pregnant or want to get pregnant, as well as very young children are a different story; those groups are more vulnerable to mercury contamination. The reason is that mercury is a neurotoxin that impairs brain development in young children, either directly, or through a pregnant or nursing mother. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as many as 1 in 12 American women have enough mercury in their bodies to put a baby at risk, which means as many as 300,000 infants a year may be at increased danger of learning disabilities associated with in utero exposure to mercury. "For kids that young, their brains are developing and vulnerable to this," Liguori told me.

(More here.)

You have read this article with the title If you like coal, you'll LOVE mercury!. You can bookmark this page URL https://ogbcommunity.blogspot.com/2011/04/if-you-like-coal-you-love-mercury.html. Thanks!