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.
