http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1787/How Mercury-Tainted Tuna Damages Fetal Brains
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The book I eventually wrote on environmental threats to pregnancy devotes two chapters to mercury. It was this book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, that prompted Alice Berman, editor of Childbirth Forum, to solicit my article.
I said yes. Sponsored by Pampers diapers, the magazine has a print run of 20,000, and most of its readers are nurses who work as childbirth educators, an audience I had long wished to reach. So, with my own childbirth instructor in mind, I traced the flow of mercury through the human food chain, starting with its introduction into the atmosphere and ending with its presence in tuna fish sandwiches. I finished my story before the deadline. The editor liked it. It went out for external review. The reviewers liked it. The story was accepted for publication.
At about the time I started checking my mailbox for copies, I found out my article would not be published after all. In an apologetic e-mail, Berman forwarded me the following message, which she said she had received from the group that handles the publication’s production: “Although the feature is relevant, well-researched, and well-written, it cannot be used for Childbirth Forum at this time based on a directive from the newsletter’s sponsor, Procter & Gamble. … The information about mercury and fish must be written about in a larger context of diet during pregnancy, and is too ‘controversial’ to feature as it is.”
But eating fish is also the leading route of exposure to methylmercury. Women who eat fish more than twice a week have blood mercury levels that are seven times higher than women who eat no fish. And mercury, like lead, is a terrible saboteur of fetal brain growth. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently estimated that as many as 630,000 infants, or roughly one in every six U.S. babies, are born each year with unsafe levels of methylmercury in their blood. These revelations have ignited a fiery debate both about fish consumption during pregnancy and about how best to get mercury out of the environment in the first place.
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The biggest known contributors to atmospheric mercury are coal-burning power plants, which put 50 tons of mercury into the air each year. Incinerators and some chlor-alkali facilities are also significant mercury polluters. Emissions from chlor-alkali facilities are a disputed number that is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.
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it's ok to lie to us women - we don't mind - we like having disabled children.
these men of Proctor & Gamble need to be punished.
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