What is mercury poisoning?

CHEMICAL DANGER 

Too much mercury can make you sick,

but sometimes the symptoms are hard to distinguish from

other illnesses.

What's mercury?

There are three kinds of mercury. Depending on what the

exposure is, you could have different symptoms and

disease states.

Elemental, or metal mercury, is found in thermometers. The

problem with that is the inhalation of fumes that come off

that mercury. Playing with it and ingesting it is not as toxic.

That kind of mercury causes significant amounts of

neurological damage. As the exposure gets longer, there

may be additional changes in the bone marrow that affect

the ability to produce blood cells, infertility and problems

with heart rhythm.

Mercury salts, which are basically industrial, if you breathe

in or ingest them, gravitate more toward the kidney and not

so much the nervous system.

• The organic mercury is what gets into the food chain. It's

put into the water by chemical plants that are

manufacturing things and they get into shellfish and fish,

or elemental mercury that gets into the water is changed

into organic mercury by sea life; we eat fish or shellfish

and we get mercury exposure. That organic mercury acts

very similarly to the elemental form. It affects a lot of

nervous system damage. If a woman is pregnant, this

can also cause birth defects and loss of the fetus if the

levels get high enough.

Is mercury something we need in our diets, or is no amount

nutritionally safe or necessary?

No level is normal. Zero is normal. It doesn’t have a specific

reason to be in our body. As long as we live on this Earth,

because it's in Earth's crust and in the atmosphere, we're

going to be exposed. But there is no specific function for

that metal in our body.

The issue is one of looking at the total body burden: How

much mercury is in the body and what's known to be a

normal background? Theoretically, there's going to be a

baseline level, a general population average, but depending

on where you live, that level may be higher or lower. If you

live near a coast, you're more up to eating seafood. Or you

may be in an industrial area where mercury is put into the

water or the air.