Wampum

Julia points us to a Washington Post report about mercury levels:

One-fifth of women of childbearing age have mercury levels in their hair that exceed federal health standards, according to interim results of a nationwide survey being conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Asheville...

"There is no other pollutant out there that has anywhere near this high a percentage of the U.S. population with exposure levels above the government's health advisory levels," said Maas, co-director of the Environmental Quality Institute. "Not lead, not arsenic, nothing."

The last major national study of Americans' mercury exposure, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1999 and 2000, concluded that about 12 percent of women of childbearing age had mercury levels that exceeded EPA's safety standard.

The new study found excess mercury levels in 21 percent of the 597 women of childbearing age who were tested.

The UNC researchers said they could not explain why their subjects had higher mercury levels, as 80 percent of study participants said they had no reason to think they had high concentrations of mercury in their blood. Men and women in the study had similar mercury levels.

Where does all of that mercury come from? At least here in the Atlanta area, it might be coming from your local supermarket. Tha AJC reports:

The Sierra Club released a report Tuesday that showed that one of six fish bought at three big grocery chain stores in Atlanta was contaminated with mercury.

Scott Goldstein, a conservation organizer for the Sierra Club in Atlanta, bought a half-pound each of salmon, catfish, tuna and bass from area groceries and brought them to Advanced Chemistry Labs in Atlanta for testing.

Lab results showed that the tuna contained mercury levels that exceeded federal guidelines. When ingested over many years, low levels of mercury can cause neurological and developmental problems in young children and fetuses.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one in every six women of childbearing age has enough mercury in her system to put her future children at risk.

While federal and state environmental regulators have long warned anglers against eating too many of the fish they catch in lakes and rivers, Goldstein said his random sample showed that even commercial fish sold in grocery stores can contain unsafe levels of mercury.

Julia knows how we got to this sad state of affairs:

As you may recall, Mr. Clinton had a plan in place to reduce mercury levels, but Our Fearless Leader is fighting to replace it with a plan where mercury-emitting plants can, basically, pay off and keep polluting. The government-recommended guidelines for eating mercury-tainted fish are pretty much screwed too.

She also notes that "a child with mercury poisoning takes a lot of quantity time to raise."

And that, my friends, is God's honest truth.