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Re: Mercury scam?



Maybe this is off-topic sice it's not about radiation.



Following Jerry's post about mercury: looking at world averages gives a slightly fallacious cast to the process (now mind youi am not condoning any horror stories about mercury).  I lived for many years in a community (Bellingham. WA) with a chlor-alkali plant and the plant dumped mercury into the waters of Bellingham Bay.  before EPA set standards for mercury, the emission was essentially controlled only by the cost of recovering the mercury. Mercury is very dense and tends to settle in aquatic sediments.  Marine fauna DO take up mercury and methylate it to form dimethylmercury, which was identified as the cause of Minamata disease in Japan..  Minamata disease is a severe irreversible neurological disorder.  The amount of mercury found in shellfish and other seafood is a function of the amount in the water they inhabit, and we didn't eat the seafood from Bellingham Bay even after the EPA standard was in place.



once again "the dose makes the poison."





-- 

Ruth F. Weiner

ruthweiner@aol.com

505-856-5011

(o)505-284-8406

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