What about our cats?
My Mom feeds her cats tuna
every day I think . . .
Posted on 08/01/2005 6:15:46 AM PDT by topher
[10 year old boy who eats 3 to 6 ounces of tuna a day has neurological and brain effects. Blood tests show that his mercury level was 12 times what the EPA considered safe for a 60 pound boy. Article states that solid white albacore tuna has more mercury than chunk light tuna... U.S. source of Mercury in water is coal fired power plants... Vanity introduction since this is an excerpt]
...
Ms. Davis noticed something else: Her son's fingers were starting to curl, as if he were gripping a melon. And he could no longer catch a football.
A neurologist ordered tests. They showed Mathhew's blood level was laced with mercury in the amounts nearly double what the Environment Protoection Agency says is the safe level of exposure to the metal. Matthew had mercury poisoning, his doctors said.
The Davises had pinpointed the suspected source: tuna fish. For a year or so, starting late 2002, Matthew had gobbled three to six ounces a day of white albacore tuna. ... based on FDA data for canned albacore, he was consuming a daily does mercury at least 12 times what the EPA considered a safe level for a 60-pound child. ...
[Vanity: the article states that one microgram a day for each 22 pounds of body weight. It appears that the tuna industry may have squashed news about this even under the Clinton Administration. Apparently, there is some controversy on the Federal level about what safe levels are, and how much tuna should be consumed.
A joint Federal Safety Advisory board allows much more tuna to be consumed than is safe.]
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
From the table:
Chuck light tuna -- 0.12 parts per million
Albacore tuna -- 0.35 parts per million
Shrimp -- 0.05 parts per million
Cod -- 0.11 parts per million
Swordfish -- 0.97 parts per million
Salmon -- 0.01 parts per million
Catfish -- 0.05 parts per million
American Lobster -- 0.31 parts per million.
Source of this is Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management; Food and Drug Administration
[They apparently list two sources for this table on Page A5]
See what happens when you take out the sea turtles and dolphins!
This kid had trouble because (1) low body weight (60 lbs), and (2) he ate a lot of tuna each day.
It was the tradition for many centuries for Christians to eat fish once a week.
Your liver and other organs can probably flush out this amount of mercury in your body -- if it is once a week.
There were huge nuclear blasts by Russia and other nations in the 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's. It was only in the 1970's and 1980's that they started to underground nuclear testing.
People have been exposed to a lot worse -- lead was in gasoline for a number of years before they pulled that.
Maybe Chinese coal should be banned...
The US mines something like 100 million tons of coal/year.
Not because it is too light, but because it is being sent "up the flue" as metallic mercury vapor, which is not highly reactive with current scrubbing chemistries. Maybe if they added sodium hydrogen sulfide to the scrubbing spray, but that would probably cost a fortune.
"Option 2" [...becoming more aware of it...] is correct.
As to Chinese coal, we spent a couple months in China, mainly in Guangzhou (husband was there on a work assignment.)
The pollution in the city was just awful, and we were told it was from coal burning. If that's where the mercury is coming from, we got a nice dose while there, LOL.
I have MS, and for years folks have been trying to make a connection between MS and mercury, but I've never seen any conclusive study that proves mercury "causes" MS. No more than studies that can link Hep B vaccine to increase in incidence of MS.
But I'm still intrigued by the autism link to vaccinations (which was mercury linked, and they did, for the most part, remove the mercury source from the vaccines), or possibly the linking of the increase of autism to the period where they started giving infants the Hep B vaccine.
I really don't think you can put a hard "blame" on all illnesses to certain substances (even folks who have never smoked get lung cancer), but I do believe that certain substances might "trigger" a condition in a person who was predisposed to it.
Basically, just put a couple of "L"s into the smoke stack. Then the real cost is building such a smoke stack, and draining the water into a waste water tank.
Such a system would have up front capital costs, but the only additional cost in operation would be processing the waste water.
I do think it is a worthwhile use of tax dollars to try to make industry competitive but the environment clean. Tax credits for cleaning contaminates would relive energy sticker shocks.
There is a new control system being developed by a guy in Minnesota. I think its called Enviroscrub and uses another heavy metal to trap mercury, sulfur and other bad actors.
But one's computer has all sorts of nasty things in it -- especially the newer ones. Microchips now rely, in some case, arsenic, as well as other toxic chemicals.
I worked in a wafer fab (Texas Instruments), and pregnant women were advised not to work there.
What about our cats?
My Mom feeds her cats tuna
every day I think . . .
Thanks for the info. I don't like fish all that much, but shrimp! Good thing I can't afford it often! Whoda thought being poor would be a blessing? :)
susie
What about Pacific Wahoo?
What about Pacific Wahoo?
Don't know what they're called exactly, and haven't worked in a dental office in a few years, but they were similar to the badges that check for x-ray exposure, but they were mercury sensors that I assumed checked mercury vapor in the air.
Did a quick google check and this page mentions 3M lapel badges to monitor different hazardous fumes, mercury vapors being one of them.
http://www.hoslink.com/Ellis/ALARM.htm
They're a near-top predator that eats fish so I'd guess Wahoo would be somewhere in the vicinity of Albacore Tuna and Yellowfin (Chunk Light) tuna.
I'd like to try Wahoo, hear it's great, but I only eat what I catch and Wahoo are few and far between and mostly caught accidently off the Mid-Atlantic. I've never actually seen one.
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