A few brain cells here, a few brain cells there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real . . .

Mercury is a neurotoxin. Neurotoxins are bad for developing nervous systems. Therefore . . .

Five "hotspots" of mercury contamination posing a risk to human health have been found in the eastern states of the US and eastern provinces of Canada.

Average mercury concentrations in many of the region's freshwater fish exceeded the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recommended level for safe consumption by up to 20 times.

[snip]

The EPA safety limit for the consumption of mercury is 0.3 parts per million, yet perch in some locations contained a concentration of about 5 parts per million. The researchers found the average mercury concentration in fish across the region was between 10% and 88% above the limit, depending on the species. (New Scientist)

David Evers and his colleagues at the Biodiversity Research Institute in Maine have been looking at mercury in edible fish and also in wildlife like otters and mink in the US northeast and parts of eastern Canada. In a paper in Bioscience (January 2007) they detailed the locations of mercury hotspots: parts of the Adirondack Mountains in New York, the Merrimack river in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the Kennebec river in Maine and Kejimkujik National Park in Nova Scotia, Canada. The main source is the right wing savior of the peak oil predicament, coal-fired power plants.

While the atmospheric mercury emitted from these stations poses no public health risk, some environments - typically forested areas with wetland - encourage greater deposition of the mercury on the ground.

Once deposited, the mercury is concentrated further via the aquatic food chain, sometimes by 10 million times. "It magnifies," says Evers.

In 2005 the EPA put in place a new Clean Air Mercury Rule, it is based on the premise that mercury contamination of the environment is a regional phenomenon, not a local one. Thus it allows trading of emissions between sources, with a reduced overall cap. But the existence of local hot spots undermines the rationale and calls for some local caps, not just area-wide ones.

On the other hand, it's just a handful of brain cells.

In my grandchild's brain.

More like this

I'm from the Merrimack River area. The reason for the high mercury here isn't so much the coal plants farther west (like Ohio), it is the local clustering of commercial municipal trash incinerators. They were supposed to be the saviour when they were built as far as the double benefit of energy production and solid waste disposal. However, they have a constant demand for new supplies (unlike landfills which could close any particular day or two). So, before the state would allow them to be built, they had to create 20-year contracts with area towns. Exceedingly bad contracts were written. In the group that includes my town, only 1 other town was able to get out of the contract. The rest of us are stuck with some of the highest trash disposal fees in the country.

Meanwhile, in order to cut down on mercury emissions, the state and utilities have instituted various programs to get people to trade in their mercury thermometers for non-mercury types, and similar measures. (In other words, more than emission caps are in place.) There has been a guidance in place for many years recommending very limited local consumption of fish.

On a lighter note, is heavy metal a neurotoxin?

Warning signs should be along the water, and sent home with school children,

in as many languages as are spoken in a region; some newcomers may be used to fishing for food and not understand the consequences.

Stupid local program (funded by a mercury recycler?) had eveyone in town turning in their old glass/mercury thermometers, and being given "free" battery thermometers -whose batteries contained mercury and have to be brought back to the health dept for safe recycling (by the mercury recycler)...so, becoming reliant on battery-operated thermometers, that needed new mercury-containing batteries. I finally found glass/non-mercury thermometers instead: Geratherm. (Hey I see they even make a "solar"-powered one! that won't shatter like the glass, not that one can't be careful with a glass thermometer...which were the only Geratherm ones I found locally.)

By crfullmoon (not verified) on 04 Jan 2007 #permalink

Just out of curiosity...has there ever been any documented neurotoxic effects to the local wildlife which consume these fish? Do the otters have behavioral problems? I wonder how their IQ's stack up to otters which consume lower concentrations of mercury.

os: Don't know the wildlife literatue. Anyone else? I'll also inquire.

http://www.nwf.org/mercury/ "Mercury runs many processes in our lives - from automatically switching off an iron to keeping a vaccine fresh for use" (oops; maybe they want to edit their site? not considered a "feature" by certain crowds.)

..."Small mammals such as river otter and mink are more sensitive to mercury than larger mammals.

They suffer from involuntary muscle action, movement problems, impaired vision and hearing, reduce reproductive success, impaired growth and death.

Larger mammals such as the Florida panther suffer from damaged nervous systems and reproductive health.

Birds such as the bald eagle suffer from weight loss, weak wings and legs leading to difficulty flying, walking and perching.

It also affects them when they go to lay their eggs. The egg shells are thinner, they tend to lay their eggs outside of their nests and they lay fewer eggs.
Chicks suffer from impaired hearing"
See also http://www.nwf.org/mercury/bioaccumulation.cfm

By crfullmoon (not verified) on 05 Jan 2007 #permalink

Awhile back I asked an economist who works on cap-and-trade schemes if there were any good answers to the hot spot problem. It turns out there is an ingenious solution: you can set up exchange rates that vary according to local mercury concentrations. So if you are a mercury emitter near a hot spot, it will cost you a lot more to buy additional mercury emission credits than someone far away from a hot spot. I don't know the details of the pricing mechanism, but I would imagine it would not be that difficult to come up with something workable. It's more of a hassle, because you have to keep track of local concentrations, but still pretty cool.