Mercury risk rising in US

David Zink

I'd like you to meet a young family: Angela, Jerry, and their 
little girl Becky. Angela cares about her family's health and 
tries to provide them with a healthy diet, including fresh fish a 
couple times a week. Jerry loves the outdoors and fishing. Becky 
was born and developed normally, and was a happy baby.

Things seemed to be on the right track until about Becky's 16th 
month, when things mysteriously started to go wrong. By 18 
months, she had entirely lost the six or seven spoken words she 
had started using earlier. She started avoiding eye contact with 
her mother, and became uncoordinated, inattentive, irritable, and 
withdrawn. Angela and Jerry would often find Becky staring 
vacantly into space and biting her hands.

Nobody knew what to make of this. Becky's doctor was perplexed, 
and ran Becky through some tests. The results confirmed autism 
and revealed the likely culprit: mercury.

Becky's not alone. The number of children with mercury-caused 
problems is growing. According to new estimates from the 
Environmental Protection Agency, 16 percent of women of 
childbearing age have dangerous levels of mercury in their 
bodies, putting more than 600,000 children at risk each year.

Where is this stuff coming from? Coal-burning power plants are 
the single largest source of mercury pollution. They release over 
100,000 pounds (50 tons) of mercury into the environment annually 
in the US.

Once released into the atmosphere, it soon gets into streams, 
lakes, and the sea, where it forms methyl mercury — a potent 
neurotoxin. It targets the developing fetal brain and nervous 
system. Even tiny amounts can cause serious developmental 
problems, reflected in humans as difficulties in walking, 
talking, hearing, and writing. Fish are often found with high 
levels of mercury in their tissue.

President Bush's "Clear Skies Initiative" will allow power plants 
to increase mercury emissions by 520 percent by 2010. In 
December, Mike Leavitt, Bush's new EPA administrator, said that 
it is "not feasible" to determine how much mercury the chemical 
and power plants are emitting, nor to enforce tougher standards. 
(Power corporations' generous contributions to Bush and lobbying 
efforts to avoid installing improved emission control equipment 
have apparently succeeded.)

The EPA proposed allowing power plants to spew more mercury into 
the air longer. Leavitt's favoured "free market" approach 
includes "emissions trading" that will likely create toxic "hot 
spots." Environmentalists fear this will delay substantial 
mercury reductions by a decade.

At the same time, the EPA is planning on exempting coal 
combustion waste from regulation as hazardous waste, ensuring 
that more than 100 million tons of mercury-laden waste will be 
dumped into the environment each year.

The federal Food and Drug Administration currently recommends 
that all women of childbearing age, especially pregnant and 
nursing women, avoid eating swordfish, pollock, mackerel, 
tilefish, or shark. Four ounces of white canned tuna maxes out 
EPA guidelines for a 120-pound person.

Forty-three states have issued warnings against eating fish 
species that tend to have high mercury concentrations, including 
bass, trout, and other fish caught in over a thousand lakes and 
streams across the country. And any vaccines containing 
thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury, should be avoided 
by pregnant and nursing women and young children.

Persistent toxic bio-accumulative chemicals (PBTs) like mercury 
are a serious problem in many parts of the country. To address 
this threat to our health and the environment, the Washington 
State Department of Ecology developed a plan to phase out PBTs, 
which build up in the food chain and are known even in trace 
amounts to cause birth defects, cancer, and mental retardation.

Faced with a budgetary shortfall created by tax exemptions and 
cuts for the corporations and wealthy, the Washington State 
Legislature eliminated funding for vital public health programs 
like the PBT phase-out plan.

Environmental and public health, our food supply — is nothing 
safe from capitalism?

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People's Weekly World, paper of Communist Party, 
USA