I am what I ate--a toxic waste dump, loaded with mercury

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Wed, 9 Feb 2005 11:17:30 -0500

 

 

 

I am what I ate--a toxic waste dump,

loaded with mercury -- and I don't eat very much fish.

 

 

 

 

 

I am what I ate

I'm a toxic waste dump, loaded with mercury -- and I don't even eat

very much fish.

 

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By Katharine Mieszkowski

 

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Nov. 17, 2004 | Too bad Superfund is bankrupt, because I recently

discovered that I'm a toxic waste dump. Yes, I'm a walking, talking

contamination site, liable at any moment to freak out my friends,

colleagues and acquaintances by announcing that my mercury pollution

level exceeds federal health guidelines for women my age.

 

In fact, trace amounts of the neurotoxin are in the very fingernails

that I'm using to type these words. And you too, may be swimming with

mercury, depending on how much tuna or other big carnivorous fish you

like to gobble.

 

Curious? You can find out your own mercury levels by sending a few

strands of your hair to a testing lab. A few weeks before the

presidential election, environmental advocates at Greenpeace offered

to test me as part of a study on mercury contamination conducted by

the Environmental Quality Institute at the University of North

Carolina-Asheville.

 

I agreed, and shortly thereafter my own mercury test kit arrived in

the mail. I enlisted a colleague to play the role of medical

assistant/hair stylist. She donned the enclosed plastic gloves to cut

a sample from the back of my head close to the scalp. I managed to

cough up an adequate sample under her scissors, despite worrying about

what it would do to my look -- because the inch or so of hair

necessary for the test has to come from the part of your coiffure

closest to the scalp. That's so the hair tested will measure more

recent mercury exposure, unlike the older hair at the tips of your locks.

 

A few weeks later I found out I was contaminated. And I'm not alone.

In preliminary results, the study found that 21 percent of potentially

child-bearing women exhibited mercury levels that exceed Environmental

Protection Agency guidelines.

 

Scientists for the EPA estimate that some 600,000 kids born each year

are at risk because of their mothers' mercury levels, since mercury

levels in a newborn's umbilical cord were found to be 1.7 times the

level in the mother's blood.

 

The largest manmade source of mercury pollution is the coal-fired

power plant, which puts the toxin squarely in the middle of energy

politics. Environmental groups tried to make mercury pollution in fish

an issue in swing states during the presidential election. MoveOn.org

ran an ad criticizing the Bush administration's lax approach to

curbing mercury pollution. Meanwhile, the tuna industry seized on

recent data from the Centers for Disease Control that suggest overall

contamination levels of American women could be lower than previously

measured, and proclaimed there is nothing to worry about.

 

But women in their reproductive years aren't likely to put much trust

in the self-interested propaganda of the tuna industry. Mercury can

put a developing fetus or nursing child at risk for brain damage.

Children born with high levels of mercury can have learning

disabilities, lower IQ scores, and behavioral problems like

sluggishness. The expectant mom need not have any of symptoms

whatsoever to exhibit levels that could harm a baby.

 

When I decided to throw myself into this highly politicized morass as

a test subject, I had no special reason to believe that I had any more

of this toxin in my body than the rest of you sushi-eating,

ahi-tuna-steak-scarfing types. I am not a habitual angler, casting my

fly into waters hot with the contaminant. I don't think I even eat

enough fish to meet the American Heart Association's recommendation of

eating fish twice a week to build a healthy heart. If the government

announced there was mercury in peanut butter, I'd be willing to

believe I'm aglow with the stuff. But tilefish and shark? I don't

think that I've ever eaten either of those.

 

The Bush administration, flush with the glow of a new term, is poised

to issue new guidelines for regulating mercury pollution in March

2005. Environmentalists are not sanguine about the prospect. If a

track record is any prediction of future behavior, this

administration, they believe, is far more likely to listen to its

close friends in the coal industry, who are fighting any increased

regulation, instead of the record-breaking 600,000 public comments

that the government has received about the proposed rule.

 

In August, the EPA announced that 48 out of 50 states have issued

advisories about eating fish caught in their rivers and lakes because

of pollution from mercury and other toxins. Over 75 percent of those

fish advisories are due to mercury. According to the EPA, most mercury

in American adults comes from eating contaminated fish, whether it's

caught locally or bought in the supermarket.

 

We're not talking anchovies and sardines here. It's the big

carnivorous fish, like tuna, high on the food chain, that

" bioaccumulate " a substance known as methyl mercury in the course of

eating loads of smaller fish.

 

Mercury pollution thus has a dual-pronged effect. Poor people who fish

for their own food in mercury-laden waters are at risk, but so are the

wealthy who aren't price sensitive when it comes to what they perceive

as a healthy diet rich in sushi, halibut, ahi tuna, swordfish and

seabass. This leads to a paradox: The better off you are, the worse

off you are.

 

" Higher economic status and education level appear to be risk

factors, " Dr. Jane M. Hightower and biostatistician Dan Moore of

California Pacific Medical Center wrote in a study of affluent people

in the San Francisco Bay Area, some of whom complained of symptoms

like fatigue, inability to concentrate and memory loss.

 

Personally, I don't eat all that much fish. When I sent off for the

mercury test, I just thought it would be intriguing to see what was

there. I also thought it amusing that all that was necessary for the

test was a lock of my hair.

 

But hair apparently is a trusty barometer: " With your hair growing,

it's basically tracking the chemicals in your body continuously, "

explains Michael W. Murray, a scientist with the National Wildlife

Federation. " Once you eat a fish meal, a little bit of it is going to

be removed with time, and some of it is going to come out in your

hair. Hair analysis seems to work pretty well for mercury. "

 

" Technically, what you're measuring is the amount of mercury that your

body has been able to get rid of in the last three or four months, "

explains Richard Maas, the director of the Environmental Quality

Institute, which did the testing on my hair sample. " When that came in

there's no way to say. "

 

" You may not think of your hair as being dead cells, but it really

is, " adds Kathryn Mahaffey at the EPA, who has conducted analysis of

methyl mercury transfer from mother to child. " These are simply

excretion products in the body, if you're speaking metabolically,

although it may not make the stylists happy. It's just a natural

phenomenon. For example, birds get rid of mercury by putting it in

their feathers, bears in their fur. "

 

Although I was sure I was going to end up with an ugly bald patch on

the back of my skull, which I planned to blame on the coal industry or

environmental hysteria, depending on my test results, cutting my hair

for the sample didn't noticeably change my look, and after I mailed it

to the lab just before the election, I promptly forgot about it. I

really wasn't worried.

 

But a week after President George W. Bush had been ushered back into

office with larger Republican majorities in both the House and Senate,

all but assuring the continuation of his laissez-faire pollution

policies, I received a letter at home informing me that I am in fact

over the limit that the EPA and National Academy of Sciences

recommend. My results came back as 1.08 micrograms of mercury per gram

of hair, just over the threshold of 1 part per million that's

considered safe.

 

" If your laboratory results are between 1 and 11 [micrograms of

mercury per gram of hair] your mercury hair level is above the

recommended limit, " the enclosed Interpreting Mercury Hair Results

sheet informed me. " You could be at elevated risk if you are pregnant,

planning to become pregnant or nursing a baby. We recommend that you

avoid fish that may contain elevated levels of mercury and also reduce

consumption of fish with low to moderate levels of mercury (please see

attached list). "

 

Rationalizing that I was just .08 over the limit, so it wasn't really

that big a deal, I called Maas, of the Environmental Quality

Institute, which did the testing. But he told me: " If you have a level

above 1, it's definitely a cause for concern. "

 

He explained that it's statistically probable that my contamination

came from fish, although there are other possible, if less likely,

sources, such as the silver amalgam filling I have in one tooth, or

the traces of mercury used as a preservative in some medical shots,

such as flu shots. But the most probable source is fish, and therefore

the easiest way to try to lower my level is to change the fish I eat.

 

Here's how the toxin gets into fish: When coal burns, it releases

mercury that gets turned into gas, Maas says. As it cools, the mercury

turns into aerosol droplets, which can travel hundreds of miles before

settling onto the ground or water. In water, it settles into the

sediment at the bottom of rivers and lakes.

 

" The bacteria in the sediment methylate this mercury and turn it into

methyl mercury to make it less toxic to themselves, " Maas says.

" That's a problem, because methyl mercury is fat soluble. " That makes

it harder for creatures that consume it to excrete it, according to

Maas, since the mercury gets stored in lipid and muscle tissue.

 

What happens next is the process that makes methyl mercury more

concentrated in a shark than, say, a worm. " When burrowing worms or

insect larvae consume sediments, they get that methyl mercury in them,

and then it gets biomagnified up the food chain. Then, maybe a

crawfish eats that insect larva, and a small fish eats that crawfish,

and a larger fish eats the small fish, " Maas says. " Each time all the

methyl mercury is passed up the food chain. Each trophic level will

then have a methyl mercury level 10 times higher than the one below

it. That's why by the time you get to the sports fish and large fish

that we actually consume, those levels are quite high. "

 

The state of California requires grocery stores to post warnings about

mercury contamination in the fish they sell, although they don't

always comply.

 

But all the estimates, recommendations and warnings are based on

averages and approximation. You never know exactly what level is in

the sample on the end of your fork. I may not think that I eat a lot

of fish, but the fish that I happened to eat during the months

represented by the hair sample could have been especially

contaminated, leading to my high reading:

 

" There's a bit of a Russian-roulette element here. You may go to a

sushi bar, and get a fairly decent slab of tuna, and you may get a hot

mercury-rich piece, " says Kert Davies, a spokesperson for Greenpeace.

 

Mercury pollution from power plants is not regulated at the federal

level, although some states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and

Wisconsin have imposed their own measures. But federal regulations are

now being formed. The National Wildlife Federation and the Public

Interest Research Group argue that under the Clean Air Act, 90 percent

of the mercury pollution from those plants should be cleaned up by

2008. Under the same law, the government is already successfully

implementing cuts on mercury pollution from waste incinerators.

Environmentalists say only corporate self-interest is preventing the

same thing from happening with power plants

 

Under the legislation the Bush administration calls Clear Skies, only

70 percent of that mercury would be cleaned up, and it might take as

long as until 2025.

 

" We're expecting them to reintroduce Clear Skies as soon as the new

Congress comes in, in January, because of the election results, " says

Olivia Campbell, national campaign coordinator for the National

Wildlife Federation. Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., known for calling

" manmade global warming " " the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the

American people " on the floor of the Senate, plans to reintroduce the

bill. With a friendlier Senate, it has a better chance of passing, and

the EPA is expected to release its mercury regulations by March.

Although mercury does occur naturally from geological formations, like

volcanos, some 70 percent of the emissions in the United States,

according to the Ocean Conservancy, come from burning coal.

 

To be fair, the methyl mercury that apparently was speared by my fork

or chopsticks can't all be pinned on Bush, given the global nature of

the fish supply. We might have to clean up the whole world to make it

safe for future mothers to eat swordfish and shark again. But the Bush

administration has opposed attempts by European delegates to the

United Nations to create a global protocol to control mercury.

 

So, instead of trying to regulate methyl mercury out of the food

supply, we're stuck with trying to avoid the pollution at an

individual level. The Environmental Protection Agency offers these

guidelines for what women of reproductive age should and shouldn't

eat. (They offer no guidelines for men, the traditional logic being

that if you protect the hypothetical unborn fetus, which can tolerate

only the lowest levels, it's likely that everyone else in a given

family is getting safe levels, too.)

 

The EPA guidelines suggest that if you're concerned about mercury, you

leave big predatory fish, like shark, swordfish and tilefish, out of

your diet completely. You're also supposed to limit your intake of

other fish and shellfish to those that eat lower on the food chain and

are therefore lower in mercury, such as salmon and shrimp, to about 12

ounces -- about two average meals -- a week.

 

Albacore tuna is typically higher in mercury than light canned tuna,

so limiting albacore to once a week is also advised. But environmental

watchdog groups challenge those guidelines as not aggressive enough,

suggesting that they subject women and their fetuses and young

children to too much risk, while pandering to the tuna industry.

Environmental groups offer their own, more conservative, recommendations.

 

The gross irony of all this wrangling over which fish has more or less

mercury is that government scientists are fearful that consumers,

grossed out by mercury pollution, may just shun fish in general. Why

are they alarmed? Because, when fish is not subtly poisoning you, it's

very good for you.

 

" If your level is higher than you consider desirable, reduce the

amount of mercury you're taking in your diet by changing the types of

fish that you're eating, " Mahaffey from the EPA told me,

diplomatically. " We do think that fish is good for you overall, so we

really recommend that people select fish that are lower in mercury. "

But she admits that it's a hard message for consumers to understand:

" It's a complicated risk message because for years we've been telling

people that fish are good for you. They're recommended to help in the

prevention of coronary heart diseases, and also a lot of

weight-reduction diets have recommended these. Yet, as we learn more

about the levels of contamination it's pretty clear that we have to be

selective in the types of fish you eat. "

 

Some studies even suggest that the well-known heart-health benefits of

the omega-3 fatty acids in fish can be canceled out by mercury. " If

you're eating fish every day, you're not really getting much benefit

from the fatty acids, " says the National Wildlife Federation's Murray.

" The effects of the contaminants seem to really overtake the benefits

that you're getting at those higher levels. "

 

Mahaffey recommends salmon, anchovies and shrimp, which all have

" decent amounts " of omega-3 fatty acids and relatively low mercury

levels. And she tells consumers to eat less " steaklike " fish. In other

words, eating fish that themselves eat lower on the food chain is your

best bet.

 

The good news, from my perspective, is that subjects who cut their

fish intake in some studies, like Hightower's, have seen drops in

their measurable mercury levels in just a few months. I'll get back to

you with my next set of test results. Let's hope I can report I'm out

of the toxic zone and still have some hair left by the end of this.

 

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About the writer

Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon Technology.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/17/waste_dump/print.html