Mercury Rising

Mercury is in the news these days, with word is getting around about the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) study (reported by the EPA) characterizing exposure to organic mercury. It suggests that more than 300,000 newborns in the United States each year may have been exposed to unacceptable levels of mercury from their mothers’ consumption of fish. For those who see this finding as credible, this has led to some painful consideration of the risk comparisons – heart-healthy diet versus your baby’s brain.

For the moment, we’ll glide by the rant, I mean the analysis, of how print and broadcast media fail abjectly to inform people so that they can form their own opinions about this issue. Instead, over the next several weeks, we’ll focus on a series of questions that may be of near-term interest to anyone:

What’s the risk that my child could have been affected? (How uniformly is the risk distributed?)

What are the consequences of being overexposed to mercury? (What kinds of adverse effects are associated with exposure over the safe level?)

How much can I trust the “safe” level of exposure (What kinds of information have been used to evaluate no-effect thresholds)?

Are all kinds of fish equally risky? Under what conditions can we eat fish for a heart-healthy diet?

And, the longer-term questions such as: where is the mercury coming from? What do we have to change or stop doing to reduce the risks? Is this anyone’s fault, and should there be remediation or compensation?