The article “Our Preferred Poison” in the March 2005 issue of Discover magazine brings up the issue dealing with mercury poisoning. The author, Karen Wright, writes, “Mercury is unimaginably toxic and dangerous. A single drop on a human hand can be irreversibly fatal. A single drop in a large lake can make all the fish in it unsafe to eat.” This was the opening statement in the article which first grabbed my attention, because I had not thought mercury to be such a deadly substance. After all, it is used in thermometers, so I hadn’t thought it to be as fatally toxic as Wright claims it to be. The people with the most risk of damage by mercury are unborn fetuses and children.
Studies seem to show that the metal has the most negative effect on the developing brain, opposed to the mature adult brain. Some scientists speculate mercury could be the cause of autism, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and Parkinson’s disease, amongst others. I don’t know how accurate or credible these studies are though. Throughout the article Wright states that no one is sure how little mercury can be ingested before the human body shows signs of poisoning. What scientists do know is the amount of mercury the human body cannot ingest. They found this out due to accidental ingestion’s of various people throughout the world.
The article mainly focuses on two types of mercury: methylmercury, which is found in most of the fish, and other seafood’s we eat, and alloys, called amalgams, which are commonly used with silver to fill in the holes in our teeth. Methylmercury seems to be the main source of the amount of mercury in our blood. The article describes briefly how the mercury ends up in the fish we eat, how the rain grabs the mercury from the atmosphere and deposits it into the lakes and oceans. Because of the food chain, the largest of the aquatic animals will have the highest amount of mercury, whales and sharks for example.
The Essay on Influence of Amount of Phytoplankton to Gizzard Shad’s Body Weight
Oceans and rivers are man’s primary sources of food. Every time fish is served as part of a meal, one wonders what biosynthesis and pre-predator food chains make possible the growth of fishes. The implications of prey-predator food chains to the survival of big fishes become relevant when one thinks of the necessary biological settings so that marine environment can sustain a balanced ecosystem. ...
So, communities high in whale and shark consumption will show the greatest risk of mercury poisoning. Wright does not discuss the consumption of mercury through the silver / mercury filling vapors very much. She only points out that people with more fillings have shown to have more mercury content in their urine, with the dentists having performed the fillings having two to fives times as much. Mercury can also be found in the compound called thimerosal, which is used as a preservative for vaccines. Not long ago, when this information was introduced to the public, there was a scare which caused a decline in the amount of vaccines given to young children. To me, not vaccinating a child seems more dangerous than exposing the child to a trace amount of mercury.
The article states how the FDA has been trying to ban the use of thimerosal, which they have been successful in doing in most drugs, besides the flu vaccine. The article brings up many concerns dealing with mercury poisoning, a lot of things I had do idea existed. It almost scared me a little, maybe that’s what the author had intended when writing it. Maybe she wrote it in hopes it would cause her readers to lower their intake of fish and other mercury containing substances. I don’t think I will be one of those readers until some more proof is established though..
