Mercury Rising (brain damage up to 24 IQ points)

[Shallah Kali]

Millions of fetuses whose mothers eat fish are being exposed to brain-damaging mercury. But critics charge the Bush administration's regulations are like bailing the ocean with a thimble.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/18/mercury/index.html

"Children who suffer the consequences of methylmercury toxicity often appear like other children who may have been affected for a genetic reason," explains Leo Trasande, the assistant director of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Center for Children's Health and the Environment in New York. "A child with mental retardation may have had a significant environmental exposure in the perinatal period. But there are no hallmarks." One study found that an affected child could score lower on IQ tests by as little as .20 of a point to as much as 24 points.

The mercury studies are behind the EPA's advisory to moms and would-be moms to avoid eating the most mercury-laden fish, such as swordfish and shark. And to go easy on the tuna. But even with those warnings in place, the agency estimated that as many as 600,000 newborns are being exposed each year. That's 15 percent of the 4 million babies born in the United States each year.

While the Bush administration cajoles women to follow its fish warnings, it's proved unwilling to take on the root of the problem. Fish, after all, are only the pathway of mercury to our bloodstreams. Coal-fired power plants, in the United States and abroad, are the largest source of man-made mercury pollution. But Bush and company stand in the way of international efforts to prevent mercury pollution and are doing little the stop it at home.

{SNIP}

The cost of not cleaning up mercury pollution in our environment is not just lost sales for the tuna industry, which has been grumbling that sales are down because of concerns about the toxin. A new study from Mount Sinai, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, of which Trasande is the lead researcher, states that the economic fallout of mercury pollution is nearly $9 billion a year. The study calculates the economic cost of the hundreds of thousands of kids likely to be brain damaged by mercury.


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And the RW believes the bush administration and republican politicans when they say they love fetuses....

[firefox]

1. You aren't suggesting they quit testing for pot are you?

Sure it is a world of limited resources, but we should never quit spending the billions we do to test for laughing grass to test for mercury just because of permanent brain damage to children and adults. Besides, something this huge must be kept quiet or people might panic when they discover that the government does not give a damn. Poisoning is better than panic.

[tavalon]

3. Yep

and the only reason we are hearing anything about the environmental mercury causing brain damage is because our government wants to deflect away from the actual cause of the mercury poisoning epidemic that happened between 1988-2002, otherwise they wouldn't let this one out of the bag. It's a diversionary tactic, one I've become very familiar with. It goes like this: Yeah, kids are getting poisoned by mercury but it's not because of the mercury we injected into them, it's because of the environment. Don't look at that other thing, it's not important, the environment is where you must look. Look at the environment, look at the environment, damnit stop looking over there at the thimerosal, look at the environment! Ad nauseum.

And it's working because all of the best lies have a kernal of truth to them.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Shrub's relaxation of the pollution standards are waging a sort of

terrorism on peoples' neurological well being. Turn him and his GD environmental policies over to Home Land Insecurity.