Is this water toxic?!

MERCURY IN RETROGRADE

- Liane Weintraub, Editor-in-Chief

One of the oddball things I remember doing as a child in school is playing with mercury.  I can’t recall whether we broke open thermometers or not, but somehow we had those funny little silver balls rolling around in dishes.  The teachers probably told us not to touch them, but I’m sure we poked at them with our fingers, dropped them on our skin and generally contaminated our young selves with the stuff.

Mercury, as we all now know, is about as toxic a substance as you’re likely to come across in daily life.  The problem is that even in today’s “enlightened age,” we’re all still coming into way too much contact with it.

Power and chemical factories continue to release tons of mercury into the environment.  It is a by-product of coal-fired power plants, and chlorine (“chlor-alkali”) plants use huge quantities of mercury to extract chlorine from salt.  Mercury pollution also occurs when used cars are scrapped and melted down for recycling, it is used in small-scale gold-mining, in batteries and, in a fairly insignificant quantity, in making light bulbs.  These processes literally “lose” mercury into the environment, and it finds its way into our lives in the fish we eat. 

Mercury collects in large quantities in all the waterways of the world, where it is converted into a form to which humans are particularly susceptible.  Needless to say, children are especially vulnerable.  As mercury works its way up the ocean’s food chain, it intensifies, so predatory fish (big ones that live a long time and eat lots of smaller, mercury-infested fish) carry the highest doses.  In today’s toxic age, we can no longer have a cavalier attitude to the part fish plays in our diets.

Mercury is a neurotoxin, which means it interferes with the functions of the brain and nervous system.  Although severe mercury poisoning can have lasting effects in adults, it is generally reversible once contamination is ended.  In infants and children, the effects of mercury poisoning are almost always irreversible, so exposure is highly hazardous for pregnant women and small children. 

The good news is that the European Union and the United States are finally coming around to the hazards of mercury.  The bad news is that the rest of the world is not yet on board.  The worst news is that mercury is a highly unpredictable and transient element, and it has a habit of depositing itself far away from where it originated.  That means that mercury generated in a chemical facility in India or a coal-fired power plant in China is just as likely to wind up in California’s waters.  Get it?  This is a truly global problem.  Like so many of those pesky environmental issues we confront, it’s just impossible to get away from the over-arching message: like it or not, we share our planet with a lot of other folks, and its health is everyone’s responsibility.

Find out whether your own mercury levels are in the safe zone:

Click here: NRDC Mercury Calculator

 Find out more about mercury contamination in fish:

Click here: NRDC: Mercury Contamination in Fish - A Guide to Staying Healthy and Fighting Back

Malibu Seafood: Our favorite fish market sells the freshest wild-caught fish around!