This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 75 Mercury: The cost of progress

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

When you think of mercury, what springs to mind? Is it the entrancing drop of shimmery liquid that flows from a broken thermometer, giving the metal the name quicksilver? Or is it the warnings of overconsumption of fish and bioaccumulation? Or perhaps it’s the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland? The story of mercury, in both its biology as well as its history, is vast and varied, and in this episode, we attempt to piece together a picture of this heavy metal. We first delve into the pathophysiological effects of the different forms of mercury exposure on the body, and then take a narrow tour of the metal’s history, focusing primarily on Minamata disease, before wrapping it all up with a look at just how widespread mercury contamination is today. Although the relationship between humans and mercury is as old as history itself, there are still so many lessons to be learned from it, especially “what is the true cost of progress?”. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I came here from Amakusa. Less than three years after we got married, I fell ill with this strange disease. Such bad luck. I can't even adjust my kimono. Look how I shake. No matter how often I tell my body to stop shaking, it won't obey me.

I can't control my own hands and legs. Whenever he comes here, my husband helps me adjust my kimono. muttering that I've become a helpless woman. Once he said I should wear underpants because my kimono kept falling in front. So he brought me long drawers and helped me into them. As he helped me into the pants, I said to him, I have really become a helpless creature, my dear. I want to get my own body back the way it was before.

I want to go back to the strong, healthy body with which I came into the world. I've never been sick. I've never had to stay in bed. I was brimming with energy. I could work harder than any man. It used to be so lovely out on the sea. I want nothing else, just to be like I was before I got the strange disease, to be able to row a boat and to land a net again.

I feel so miserable now, a helpless wretch with a body like a freak. I can't even wash my underwear when I have my period. If I don't work, my family won't be able to make ends meet. Minamata disease is hell. I feel like I was drifting away from this world. I have no grip. I cannot hold my husband's hand in mine. My arms shake so hard that I can't even draw my own dear son close to me. I might even bear this if I could go on living somehow, but I can't eat. I can't even bring the rice bowl to my mouth. I can't hold my chopsticks. When I walk,

it's not like putting one leg in front of the other on the ground, but like floating on air. I am afraid. I always get the feeling that someone is trying hard to pull me out of this world, roots and all. I feel so lonely. You healthy people have no idea what it's like to lie in bed, sick and forgotten by all. My husband is the only person I can still rely on. He is my only hope. I love him so much that I'd give my life for him. God, I wish I could use my hands and legs again. I wish I could work again like I used to. This is going to be a tough episode for so many reasons. Mm-hmm.

So that was excerpted from a book titled Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow by Ishimode Michiko. And that was a description, of course, of someone suffering from Minamata disease. Right. Also known as methyl mercury poisoning. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And I'm Aaron Almond Updink. And this is, this podcast will kill you. So today we're talking about Mercury. Mercury, yeah.

It's a very big and very challenging topic for a number of reasons. Yeah, this listeners, we have been just talking amongst ourselves about how much of a challenge this episode has been for us. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The biology has been a real struggle, trying to not only do. piece all of the complicated parts together, but be able to tell the story in a way that makes sense and is like easy for me to explain. And I think in both respects, both biology and history, the scope is enormous.

Enormous. And so I think figuring out what to concentrate on has been difficult. But also like as I did research for this, it was really emotionally difficult as well. Like it's a very heart-wrenching and horrifying, like, disease. Well, Minamata disease specifically, but just like the kinds of things that Mercury can cause, not all the time, as we will find out, I'm sure, Aaron. But, yeah, I do think, though, it'll be a very interesting one. This is our second heavy metal.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, this will be a very different episode, I think, though, than lead. Yeah. Yeah, for sure it will. Yeah. But one thing will be the same. And that is that it's quarantine time.

It is. What are we drinking this week? We're drinking Quicksilver. Quicksilver. It's the other name, common name for Mercury. Do you know that I did not know that until we researched this episode? Really? I had no idea that that's what quick.

A Quicksilver was a skate brand to me. and a surf brand. I was a band from the 70s for me. I had my parents' old albums. Yeah, I did not. That is hilarious. Yeah. Anyways, what's in a quicksilver? It is vodka, cucumber, lime, and a little bit of basil simple syrup and a little splash of soda water at the end. So refreshing. And we will post the full recipe for this quarantini as well as the non-alcoholic placebo rita on our website, This Podcast Will Kill You.com. Other business. We have a website. It's this podcast will kill you. com. Yep. We have so many things there from merch to bookshop.org to transcripts to all of the list of our sources. We now have a Patreon. We have so much available there. Check it out. Yeah. Do it.

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slash this podcast to get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash this podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash this podcast. Mercury is an element, H-G, also called Hydrargerum. Something like that. There are too many like ours in that in that word. It's it's no wonder that it was changed to mercury, to be honest. And like Aaron said already, also called Quicksilver. So this is a heavy metal that is naturally found in the earth's crust. However, the majority of the sort of bioavailable mercury that we are exposed to as humans

has been put into the mercury cycle, which we'll talk a lot more about very much later in this episode, from anthropogenic sources. Mostly the burning of coal, which releases mercury vapor, as well as gold mining, some various forms of gold mining, and a lot of other industrial products. Yep. So Mercury, I'm sure that everyone is at least vaguely familiar with Mercury because it is so fascinating to see because it's the only metallic element that is liquid at room temperature and looks like it's something out of a sci-fi film. Absolutely. Totally doesn't look real. But this liquid

form of mercury, as we'll find out, is certainly not the type of mercury that causes the most potential harm to humans or even other animals in wildlife. Yeah. So I want to just disclaimer, or even though we kind of did already, there's a lot to cover when it comes to this, like, nitty gritty of mercury. I hope that I do an adequate job. Let us try. So mercury comes in a number of different forms, and each of these different forms has a different level of potential toxicity to humans. The three overarching categories of mercury that you can be exposed to are elemental or metallic mercury. That's quicksilver. Inorganic mercury, which is mercury that is bound to like a chloride or a nitrite.

This is what used to be used not to step on your history toes, Aaron, but as vermilion, many, many moons ago. It's like a rock that is a color that was used for pigment. That's inorganic mercury. Don't worry. I'm not going to talk about it. Oh, good. And then there is organic mercury. Organic mercury is mercury bound to carbon and hydrogen.

So these all differ in terms of both exposure, like how we could expose to them, and also bioavailability, how much they can sort of disperse throughout our body and then cause damage. So let's go over the like broad strokes differences between these. and then we'll talk about how similar they actually are once they make it into your body. And then we'll go over the symptoms kind of organ by organ. Cool. Sounds good. All right. So elemental mercury, aka just plain HG, that is the liquid metal.

But the way that you're more likely to be exposed to it is not by that metal itself, but is by mercury vapor. So elemental mercury, if you ingest it, like you swallow it, it's really not absorbed very well through the GI tract. Something like 0.01% is one estimate I saw. Definitely less than 1% is absorbed. Do not drink mercury, though. But yeah, so elemental mercury vapor, it's vaporized very quickly and easily, even at room temperatures, but definitely when it's heated. and when it's inhaled, it's absorbed very rapidly across your respiratory membranes. Like 80 to 100% of it is absorbed across your respiratory membranes. And from there, it can very rapidly diffuse across other membranes in our body, including the blood brain barrier and the placenta.

Additionally, mercury vapor has a relatively long half-life in our body, about 60 days, and so it hangs around for quite some time and can kind of build. build up, especially in organs like your brain. Mm-hmm. Okay. So that's elemental mercury and how we get exposed. Then there's inorganic mercury, which I'm not going to talk a ton about, because it's probably the one that you're least likely to be exposed to.

But these can be absorbed through the skin or the GI tract if ingested, but only about 10% of ingested inorganic mercury is actually absorbed. So again, it doesn't actually absorb very easily. And the fact that it doesn't absorb very easily just has to do with like binding? Like what exactly? Listen, I asked for you to not ask me these difficult questions. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. But yes, it's essentially that our intestinal membrane doesn't allow it to easily pass.

And when we get into the next one, maybe that will make a little bit more sense. Let's get into it. Okay. Because then there is organic mercury. I'm going to spend a little bit more time on this. Organic mercury is formed when bacteria in the ocean or the soil or our waterways take inorganic mercury like metallic mercury or inorganic mercury ions. And what they do is they methylated, which means they add a carbon and some hydrogens. And when mercury is just floating around, as an ion or as a metal, it's not very bioavailable. It's not like attractive for plants or animals. Like they can't use it when it's just in that form. But now all of a sudden it's connected

to a carbon atom. Now it's very bioavailable. So this methylmercury can be used by plants, can be taken up by plants, and then those plants can be eaten by little fish that will hold on to that mercury and then larger fish will eat those fish and on and on up the food chain. And this process is called bioaccumulation, where that mercury stays within the system and by the time it makes its way up to predatory fish like tuna, sharks, swordfish, or other large-bodied ocean predators, especially, you can have very, very high levels of this methyl mercury in their muscle. Right, which is why there are all those warnings about how much canned tuna you're supposed to eat and so on the whole biomagnification. Exactly. Question. It's going to be a hard one?

I maybe. Okay. Why slash how do bacteria do this? Great question. Bacteria are phenomenal in general at making inorganic nutrients into organic nutrients and therefore available. That's what they do with nitrogen. That's what they do with phosphorus. That's what they do with all kinds of different ions. and that's the best answer I'm going to be able to give you. Oh, okay. Okay. But yeah, it's like what they do. That's like their point, not their point, but that's like a huge part of the contribution

of bacteria and fungi who do this in the soil as well to the sort of nutrient cycling in the environment. So that's how methylmercury exists. And then, of course, we eat a fish and now we're exposed to it. So methylmercury, this organic mercury, is by far the largest contributor to our general exposure to mercury as humans, not only because we're exposed to it through the consumption of things like fish, shellfish, etc. But also because it is almost 100% absorbed through the GI tract, in addition to potentially being absorbed through the skin or inhalation if you were to be exposed that way.

Mm-hmm. So it's of the forms of mercury. It's probably the most easily absorbed, especially through the GI tract. And once it's absorbed, it can very easily and readily distribute itself throughout the body. It can cross the blood brain barrier and placenta. And we'll talk a bit more about how it does that in just a minute. And even more concerningly than elemental mercury, the half-life of methyl mercury in the body is longer. It's 70 days or sometimes longer.

And the way that it's excreted is different. So it's excreted in our feces. It has to be conjugated in our liver and then we have to poop it out. Whereas other forms of mercury, like inorganic and elemental mercury, we actually excrete in our urine. Huh. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? That's very interesting.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So that's all the different sort of forms of mercury and how we get experienced. to them. And the difference is in how much of the mercury you're exposed to is going to actually make it into your body. I will also note there's a lot of other forms of organic mercury besides methylmercury, some of which are even more toxic, like diethyl or dye methyl mercury. Yeah. But in general, in fish, for example, by far the most common one that you're going to be exposed to is methylmercury. That's what is most common in the environment. The other forms

tend to be produced in industrial settings rather than by bacteria in the environment. Okay, gotcha. All right. So now that we know all of that, what does it actually look like when this mercury does get into our bodies? What happens and why does it make us so sick? So again, here there's a lot of complication. And what I'll say up front is that if anyone remembers our lead episode, a lot of the mechanisms of how mercury causes toxicity are not very dissimilar to lead. But the difference was that in lead, there's like kind of one very compact story. Like lead binds to a specific enzyme that then blocks heem synthesis and causes anemia. With mercury, because of what it does, it has a much broader effect, and therefore it's more

difficult to pinpoint the precise mechanism, if that makes sense, of toxicity. Yes. So I'm just going to kind of look at the broad strokes, and I think that we'll understand a lot of it. So in all of the various forms, once you're exposed to mercury, once it gets into our bodies, it generally exists as a positively charged ion, a cat ion. So either HG plus or HG2 plus or even methylmercury itself is a positively charged molecule. And because it's positively charged, like all positively charged ions, they have an affinity for negatively charged things.

In our body, that means proteins and some amino acids. Uh-oh. So, yeah, uh-oh is right. And so that's lead does the same thing. Lead exists as a positive ion and binds to certain proteins. In the case of Mercury, though, Mercury has a strong affinity for proteins and amino acids that contain two different types of residues. Sulfur groups, which are called thiols, and selenium groups, which are called selenols.

So there's two big. problems with this. Number one, there are some amino acids, like for example, Sistine, which is an amino acid with two sulfers, that when methylmercury binds to cysteine, it looks like another amino acid methionine that's a neutral amino acid, and is not just able to cross barriers, but can be actively transported across barriers like the placenta and the blood brain barrier. Okay. By amino acid transporters.

So not only can this ion itself potentially cross these barriers, once it connects with cysteine, it can be transported. Like, oh, hey, you look like methionine. Come on over. We need you. We're going to use you to build this fetus, or we're going to use you and, like, deposit you in the brain right now. Oh, my gosh.

So that's bad. The other thing, because that kind of tells us that's how it gets into these structures. What does it do once it's there? Like why is that so bad to have mercury instead of actually methionine? Right. By binding to not just cysteine, but a number, a whole suite of proteins, amino acids, and enzymes, what mercury does is it causes a cascade of downstream effects. It basically blocks, interrupts the actions of these various enzymes or proteins.

And like I said, it's not just one. It's not just cysteine. There's a whole bunch of enzymes that have either sulfur or selenium groups on them. So one of the principal effects seems to be that an increase in mercury leads to a decrease in the antioxidant ability of our body. So a lot of the damage that occurs in mercury toxicity is due to reactive oxygen species. So basically, mercury is blocking enzymes that normally help fix oxidative damage. And it blocks their ability to do so. It's like, boop, you can't fix this.

And so now there's just this free-floating reactive oxygen that can cause a lot of damage. And when you combine that with its ability to cross these important membranes, like the blood brain barrier and the placenta, you get oxidative damage in structures that can't easily be repaired. That makes a lot of sense. I'm glad because it took me a long time to understand it. I mean, it's really complicated. And these are things I haven't thought about, like, oxidative stress and so on is like that's nitty gritty. It's very nitty. And so this is just by, this is just because the mercury ion once it's in you is attracted to, it's binding to these negatively charged things and sort of replacing their function or preventing them from

functioning the way they should. Okay. Precisely. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it can do that on so many different sort of proteins and enzymes. Yeah, so it's very bad. And so this is why systemic symptoms.

And why so many of the symptoms, like we'll see, are neurologic. Right. Because once it gets into the brain, it can kind of just stay there for quite some time. Bound to these proteins and enzymes. So the symptoms in some ways do depend on the form of mercury that somebody is exposed to. But what they really depend on is where that mercury goes and potentially accumulates. And so that also depends on whether the. exposure is a whole bunch of mercury all at once, like acute toxicity, or a smaller amount of

mercury over a longer period of time or chronic toxicity. So I'll kind of go through very briefly system, like organ system by organ system, because since we're exposed to these different forms of mercury in different ways, they tend to have most effects on certain organs, if that makes sense. But the truth is that any of these forms of mercury can potentially cause any of these types of symptoms, right? Because once it's in your body, it all acts relatively similarly. Right, that makes sense. There are still some subtle differences. But all right.

So let's talk about our lungs first. You're most likely to be exposed to mercury in your lungs through mercury vapor, which is mostly elemental mercury. This happens most often in industrial or occupational settings. And inhalation of mercury vapor, especially a large amount, like more than a thousand micrograms per cubic meter of air, can cause massive interstitial pneumonitis. So this means inflammation in the lining surrounding, like the spaces in between your cells of your lungs. because this mercury, you can kind of think of it as just ripping through the lining of your lungs. So you'll have all this inflammation, which will lead to a pretty severe cough because of all this fluid. A lot of chest pain because that fluid is going to irritate the whole lining of your chest.

Difficulty breathing. This mercury does distribute throughout your body, so it's common to have a rash that appears on the skin. people often have a metallic taste in their mouth and might feel nauseous or might vomit. They might start bleeding from the gums, which is a pretty common symptom of a lot of different forms of mercury poisoning is sort of gingivitis. And then elemental mercury is removed from the body mostly through the kidneys so we can see kidney failure. Okay, yeah. But often with large enough exposures, this is fatal. This is a very fatal form of exposure.

And the death tends to be due to respiratory failure, especially in the case of children who are exposed to large quantities of elemental mercury vapor. What is a large quantity? So in general, these acute symptoms would happen at pretty high concentrations, like above 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter. I tried to get a sense of like how many grams of like liquid. would mercury, it would cause to get that. But I couldn't get that number, I think, in part because it depends on, like, are you heating it or is it just at room temperature and all of that? But even at

chronic, like, lower levels of exposure between like 25 to 100 micrograms per cubic meter of air, even those levels have been shown to be enough to cause chronic symptoms, which tend to be more neurologic, and we'll talk about the neurologic symptoms in just a bit. It's hard to picture those amounts, but... I know. It's so... That was for a lot of this. Even in fish, it's like, I have no idea how much mercury that is.

One number that I saw really commonly was that... So in a mercury thermometer, there's anywhere from like 0.5 to 3 grams of mercury. So often average is used as one gram of mercury in a thermometer. And you'll see the stat that one gram of mercury can cause contaminants. contamination of a 20-acre lake. That's a big lake. That's a big lake. It's not a huge lake, but it's a lake.

And that stat is true, but with the caveat that that number comes from the annual deposition of mercury in a lake in Minnesota, I believe it was Minnesota, where about a gram of mercury was deposited over the course of a year, and those fish then had high level of mercury, like unacceptably high levels. So it's true, but it's not like if you just took a thermometer and broke it and dumped it in a lake, then you would contaminate all those fish, because it's a process that takes time. And if you just dumped a bunch of mercury, most of it wouldn't actually find its way into the fish. Right. But over time, that amount of mercury would in fact work its way up the food chain. Does that make sense? Okay. That makes sense.

Yeah. So then let's move on to the GI tract. Inorganic mercury is probably, one of the most, maybe not the most common, but it's associated with pretty strong GI symptoms if you are exposed. But again, any form of mercury can cause symptoms like this. So GI symptoms are things like very severe abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, bloody diarrhea. I did find that in the case of inorganic mercury, ingestion of one gram or more can be lethal, either due to kidney failure or cardiovascular collapse. Because again, even though only about 10% of it is absorbed, if that then makes it into your heart,

it can cause damage there as well. Okay. The other thing, too, is that inorganic mercury is something that can be present. In most places, this is not legal, but it can be present in skin care or makeup products, especially skin lightning products. So that is very dangerous because inorganic mercury can be readily absorbed through the skin much better than the GI tract.

And then, of course, there is the nervous system symptoms, which we most strongly associate with methylmercury poisoning, or what we heard about in our firsthand account, Minamata disease. But again, especially in terms of like long-term chronic exposure to low levels of mercury vapor or other forms of mercury can certainly cause these same neurologic effects. And just like with the other forms, exposure to a very large dose, an acute poisoning, is often fatal. But what's much more common is that people are exposed to low-level or moderate-level doses over longer periods of time. And then this methylmercure is able to build up in the nervous system and cause these effects.

So in adults or children who are exposed to methylmercury, these symptoms can take months to manifest. And what tends to happen is that the peripheral nervous system is largely involved. But then the central nervous system, so like the brain also then can become involved. So early it might be things like sensory impairments, not being able to feel things the way that you could before. Or paresthesias, which are those feelings of like a burning sensation or a tingling, maybe a numbness or like a pinprick sensation. any of those. Tremors, like we heard in our first hand account, are very common. And those are all mostly peripheral nervous system effects.

But then as it affects your central nervous system, you can have ataxia, which is difficulty walking because you can't coordinate your limbs. This numbness and weakness, you can have also rigidity in your muscles because the nerves are not firing correctly. You can have dysarthria, which is difficulty speaking, because you can't coordinate the muscles of your mouth. You can also have things like memory loss, dementia, blurry vision or loss of vision, loss of hearing. So this can affect any part of the nervous system. And so especially in the case of large exposure or continued chronic exposure, this can lead to death in kind of any number of ways from respiratory collapse.

because you've impaired the nerves that are involved in breathing or in the brain, like your respiratory drive, it can lead to cardiovascular collapse. Even though methylmercury is primarily not excreted by the kidneys, it still does have major effects on the kidneys so it can lead to renal failure. It's a pretty devastating disease. It is, yeah, absolutely devastating. is yeah yeah and then of course methylmercury also affects the developing nervous system of a fetus and so it can cause abnormal development in a number of different ways it can lead to congenital blindness or deafness it can lead to an inadequately developed brain or an incompletely developed brain so microcephaly it can lead to difficulties with walking or speaking it can lead to a syndrome that looks a lot

like cerebral palsy, which is like exaggerated reflexes, involuntary movements of the limbs, limbs are often rigid, things that look kind of very similar to what exposure to methylmercury would look like in an adult, but that happen congenitally, essentially. And that's, of course, if the baby survives, because large quantities of methylmercury exposure can also cause fetal demise as well and pregnancy loss. So it's pretty horrific. Yes. That's all I have for the biology, Erin.

It's the downer of an ending. I mean, it's a reality, though. It is, yeah. In the thing that's, I think, just so much worse, I don't know if that's even the right word, but there's not really anything that we can do, especially in the case of methyl mercury poisoning. If exposure is from metallic mercury vapor,

you can use keyletters, which are essentially a way to help bind that mercury and help us excrete it faster. But keylators don't really work to treat inorganic or especially organic mercury poisoning. So there's not much that you can do, and especially in the case of this neurologic damage, it's permanent. Right. You've destroyed those neurons. So. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, Erin, how in the heck did we get here to this point? I mean, I probably won't be able to answer that question, but I will at least touch on some, I think, pretty important things in the history of Mercury. Okay. Let's take a quick break first. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is

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We're offering our listeners 15% off their first order of O'Keefs. Just visit O'Keefscompan.com slash this podcast and code this podcast at checkout. Texting privacy policy and terms and conditions posted at textingterms.com. Texting enrolls you for occurring automated text marketing messages. Message and data rates may apply or apply. Apply stopped, opt out. Visit ISSA online for details. Excuse me. What do you do for a living? Weight tables.

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against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by public investing. Brokrid services by open to the public investing, Inc. Member Finraa and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC registered advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. So like you, Aaron, I also got overwhelmed when I first started researching this

because this is a huge topic, not just in the biology, but also in the history. And I say this for like so many episodes. I know. I would know. We're so broken records. I know. But I mean, I will say that like for mercury, there are many different ways that you can tell this story. There's so many different things you could focus on. Like you could focus on the role of mercury in mining, the impact that mercury has had on trade, mercury in chemistry, in alchemy, in religion, occult practices. And then there's, of course, the role that Mercury has played in the history of medicine. So like the development of the mercury thermometer and how crucial that was, mercury used to treat syphilis, and gonorrhea and other conditions.

We've talked about that. We've talked about that. And mercury used in dentistry. I mean, it just like goes on and on. And then there's the darker side of mercury and its toxicity, especially in occupational exposure or industrial exposure. So miners experiencing symptoms due to chronic exposure, hatters exposed to mercury vapors giving rise maybe to the Alice in Wonderland Madhatter character.

And then, of course, there's these many accidental and intentional cases of mercury poisoning through ingestion. And the story of mercury is not just super broad, it's also quite deep, right? Because humans have been working with mercury since the early days of civilization, using it for all of these things I've already mentioned. It got its name, after all, from the Roman god, Mercury. who was the Greek god Hermes, couldn't resist throwing a little bit of ancient Greek or ancient Roman trivia in here. We've got to have at least a touch. At least a touch. But instead of trying to tackle the entirety of Mercury and its role in human culture and society, I decided to focus specifically on one particular area. And that is minimata disease and the horrible circumstances

surrounding it. And if you want to know more about these other areas of Mercury that I mentioned, there is a book that I'll mention again in the sources section called Mercury, A History of Quicksilver by Leonard Goldwater, and it's full of anecdotes about its chemical and industrial and cultural history. Okay, but Minamata. So I decided to focus on this incident in particular because it's a hugely important topic not only in the history of Japan, but also in the general history, the global history of industrial contamination and putting the interest of corporations above the health and well-being of individuals. And it's also still extremely relevant for today in its lessons on the human costs of industrialization and pollution, but also on the power of

grassroots movements in raising awareness and achieving maybe not justice, but accountability, at least in some measure. And I'm really worried that I'm not going to do this story the justice it deserves, but at the very least, what I hope will happen is that you will become interested enough that you'll want to check out more of these wonderful sources that I will list at the end of the episode, because they are really, like, there's so much more. to the story and I really want people to read more about it. Okay. Minamata is a small coastal city in the very southwestern tip of Japan. And today, if you do a Google image search of Minamata, you won't find many pictures of the beautiful Minamata Bay and the shimmering Shiranui Sea

and the lush green mountains surrounding the city. Instead, you'll find images from one of the worst environmental disasters the world has ever seen. And this is the legacy left behind by the Chiso Corporation, still in operation today. The company first set up shop in Minamata in 1908, producing fertilizer, but then in 1932, it expanded its operations when it began to produce acid aldehyde, which, importantly, uses mercury sulfate as a catalyst. Over the next, next few decades, chiso ramped up production of acetaldehyde producing thousands or tens of thousands of tons each year. And all of these tons of acetaldehyde meant also the production of thousands of tons of waste. And that waste, which was not great to begin with, became incredibly deadlier

when in 1951 the Chiso Corporation changed the co-catalyst in this reaction to ferric sulfide, which led to the production of mercury waste, which was much more readily transformed into methylmercury when it was dumped into the sea next to minimata, where there were lots of bacteria to take up that mercury and turn it into methylmercury. And so like you talked about, Aaron, methylmercury is an organic compound, so it can be readily absorbed by plants and animals. And so all of this mercury waste that was being unloaded into the water, wasn't sitting harmlessly on the seafloor, it was being immediately turned into methylmercury and then taken up by plants, and then the plants were eaten by fish, and then bigger

fish. And it's the classic story of bioaccumulation, right? If you were living in Minamata in the 1940s and the 1950s, if you weren't working at Shiso, there was a pretty good chance that you either fished or farmed for a living. And no matter where you worked, there was an even better chance that locally caught fish and shellfish and seaweed constituted a pretty substantial portion of your diet. And so as this toxic mercury continued to be dumped into the sea outside minimata and then be transformed into methylmercury and accumulate in the plants and fish living in it, it of course found its way into the diet of the residence of minimata. The first signs that anything was wrong came pretty early on right around 1951.

Some fish seemed to be just floating in the bay and could be easily caught by hand. Barnacles stopped appearing on boats near the factory dumping grounds and seaweed began to float to the surface. Its color appeared to be fading and its roots became more brittle. Birds, especially crows, began to fall. fall from the sky, crashing into the sea or the ground dead, and you could snatch a sea bird easily, just like with your bare hands. That's not good. No.

And by 1953, things had gotten worse. More fish began acting strange, swimming in a bizarre way in the thick, greasy, stinking patches of water outside the factory that people compared to, like, turning the sea into a swamp. It was so thick. And people were finding their nets emptier and emptier. Seweed began to disappear, and you couldn't find shellfish anywhere close to the shore. But the most noticeable change, the thing that would really kind of sound the warning bells was the cats of Minamata. People had started noticing that their cats had trouble moving.

They seemed super uncoordinated. They would suffer convulsions. They salivated profusely. and they would bring their noses close to the ground, almost looking like they were trying to do a headstand by kicking their back legs up. They ran round and round, running into rocks or trees, with many just jumping into the sea and drowning.

Soon, there were nearly no more cats left in the area. Like, for example, in 1954, in one hamlet, 100 of the 120 cats died within two months. What? Yeah. The loss of cats was devastating, obviously not just because they were pets, but because cats also performed an invaluable service by killing mice and rats who would damage fishing nets by chewing through them. And so when all the cats started to die, the mice and rat populations exploded, making it impossible to keep a fishing net intact. But did it even matter because there were almost no fish to even. fill these nets with. Between 1953 and 1955, fish catches went from 490,000 kilograms a year to about a third of that, 183 kilograms a year. But it wasn't just the fish and the birds and the seaweed and the cats that had started showing worrying changes. It was also the residence of Minamata. Several people began developing problems walking or talking or getting numbness or in their fingertips or shaking in their limbs, tunnel vision, and they went to the hospital to receive a diagnosis of anything ranging from Japanese encephalitis to alcoholism, anything other than mercury poisoning before many of them died.

But it took a few years of this before anyone recognized that what they had on their hands was, not some Japanese encephalitis or whatever, it was an outbreak of an unknown, debilitating, and often deadly disease. In 1956, two young girls, sisters, were brought to the hospital by their mother after they began showing trouble walking and talking. And the mother of the girls told the doctors that their neighbor, who is another young girl, had also been showing the same symptoms. And so the doctors went to investigate, and they found that they actually had at least eight people with these same symptoms, with the same disease, which was enough for them to declare to the public health office that, quote, this is an epidemic of an unknown disease of the central nervous system. And not long after this declaration, more cases started appearing, with some families entirely affected. But there was such a stigma surrounding it that people stayed behind doors as their neighbors shunned them. For some people, the disease came on rapidly. A strong, healthy fisherman yesterday woke up today, unable to stand on the boat and cast his net.

Soon he would be in the hospital, suffering from convulsions and bloody fingertips as he rips off his nails by scratching at the walls. Horrifying and terrifying, don't even be. begin to cover it. And you can imagine how neighbors and friends and family nervously watched for signs of the disease in themselves, probably. May 1, 1956, marks the date when the mysterious disease affecting the residents of Minamata was officially discovered. But the doctors didn't yet know what the disease was or what was causing it, which meant that they could do nothing to prevent it. city authorities went to the homes of people who had come down with this disease and they ordered them out, forcing some into isolation so that they could disinfect, like spray the entire house, which only furthered the fear and stigma associated with it. After interviewing the patients, many of which were from fishing families, the people in charge of the investigation came to the conclusion that it was likely something from the seawater.

but they weren't sure exactly what it was, although immediately several heavy metals were proposed. But these surveys tended to be super focused, which kind of led to this picture of minimata disease as just one thing, like the most extreme cases. And it overlooked the people who had less severe symptoms, which ultimately meant that they weren't recognizing the extent of the exposure, both in terms. of like the number of people impacted and like the scope of disease symptoms, but also how widespread it could be geographically. Right. But it's also not as though narrowing down the cause was like super duper easy. The Chiso Corporation was dumping a lot of chemical waste into Minamata Bay.

And so trying to figure out which of the possible, I think at the beginning of the investigation, there were like 64 possible poisons proposed. And so figuring out which one of those was causing the symptoms wasn't necessarily this easy thing to do. And the factory certainly didn't help narrow down things. In one of the books I read for this, the author describes a four-stage model for all pollution events. First, people become aware of the problem. In Minmata, this happened in May, 1956. Second, they begin to search for the cause, which does take some time, usually.

usually. Third, the polluter proposes or supports alternative theories to draw attention and responsibility away from themselves. And so then the public becomes confused as to who to believe. Okay. Fourth, all of these theories or hypotheses compete with and then neutralize each other. So that still no one knows what to believe. Oh, gosh. And so whenever Mercury was proposed, the Chiso Corporation was there to say, no, we actually think it's red tide. Or no, we don't dump any mercury at all. It's impossible. Or no, it's actually mercury from the agriculture, whatever.

And they also directly tried to prevent research linking the disease to the waste that they dumped into the sea. Like in one instance, they bought up all the fish in the markets so that a researcher from the NIH in the U.S. couldn't take any back to conduct research on. Oh, geez. Yeah. And in 1958, they changed the dump site from Minamata Bay, from the sea, to the river, to try to mislead the investigations that were going on at the sea dump site, which actually led to only more widespread exposure because people started showing up with Minamata disease

like farther away. Yeah. If anything that's just going to, like, show more support, like, if you move your dump site, then you're going to move where people get sick. Yeah. People are going to get sick in your new dump site. I mean, good forethought on their part. But, like, if there were forethought, then maybe there would have been no methylmercury poisoning

in the first place. What a concept, Aaron. What a concept. But one of the most egregious things they did was they hid the results of experiments that the Chiso hospital doctor had done, which conclusively. showed that they were responsible for the waste. So he was feeding cats like different waste. And then there was this like infamous cat number 400 who developed symptoms of minimata disease after being fed waste from the acid aldehyde process. And but when he brought these results to the company,

the company ordered the results to be destroyed or hidden. And they stopped and they said no more experiments, you will not have access to any more of this acid aldehyde waste. Yeah. But despite Chiso Corporation's best efforts, starting in 1959, methylmercury produced as a result of this acetaldehyde production was finally pinpointed as the cause. Mercury was found in the waste that they produced. It was found in the seafood in Minamata. That seafood was found to cause symptoms in cats and experiments, and it was found in the people suffering from the disease. The researchers who tested water or hair for mercury made measurement after measurement. They were like, there's no way that these numbers can be right because they're off the charts. The amount of mercury near the

factory waste outlet was found to be 2,000, over 2,000 parts per million. Oh. Yeah, that's 2 kilograms grams per ton, which is twice the amount needed for a mercury mine. Like where you specifically mine for mercury. And so the thing is, because of bioaccumulation, even very low levels of mercury in the environment can lead to very high levels in fish. So having that high of levels in the environment is terrifying. It is, yep. Yeah. And there was so much mercury that they actually.

actually ended up establishing like a subsidiary to reclaim the mercury in the waste because it was valuable. Oh, dear. Hundreds of people are found to have greater than 50 parts per million in their hair, which is the level at which, like, neurological symptoms can develop. And one woman was found to have 920 parts per million. Oh, dear. Yep.

And you might think, or at least hope that given these solid links between acid aldehyde waste and minimata disease, there would be some sort of acknowledgement or attempt to write the wrongs by the Chiso Corporation. But also, if you're a listener of this podcast, you know that history is full of disappointing to say the least people and corporations and this is one of them. It really just feels like these... It's really hard to wrap your brain around because when I was doing this, I was reminded of, well, many of the things that we've talked about. But I think in particular, thalidomide. Yeah, philitomide. The knowing, like the solid links, the knowing and then the refusal, denial, denial.

Like, to what end? To what end? I just... I do not. comprehend. I know. I don't know how you can have a conscience, a soul, and make these decisions. Ever again? Yeah, I don't. Yeah. Yeah. But the Chiso Corporation took great issue with these findings, and they continued to try to undermine them. They produced pamphlets to discredit the findings and the university researchers who had compiled them saying they were like, oh, well, you know,

they're not qualified for their jobs. And the same thing, and the same thing, sad thing is, Chiso had a lot of the residents of Minamata on their side, along with the local and regional government. The factory had been seen by many as the town's economic savior, especially in like the years following World War II during like the economic recovery period. And about 25% of the jobs in the town were somehow linked to Chiso or to Chiso and like their different subsidiaries. And in the face of these, like, links between minimata disease and the factory waste, the corporation kept making these subtle threats to, like, oh, we're going to shut down and move

somewhere else if people don't drop their complaints. Like, this is proving to be very problematic for us. But it wasn't just the people affected by methylmercury poisoning that had issues with Chiso. It was also the fishing co-ops who had all but lost their source of income. as fish populations declined something like 90% over the 1950s. Yeah. And also the sale, but not the catching of fish from Minamata was banned. So, like, you could still catch fish, but like to what end?

Because if they, well, because what would happen is that if they banned the actual fishing itself, then Shisa would have to pay more because it would be have to show that they, you know, took the livelihoods. Anyway. And so these fishing co-ops also demanded recognition and compensation from Chiso, but the public kind of turned against them after there were some riots or some like sit-ins that turned violent. And this had the effect of also stigmatizing the people with this methylmercury poisoning who were either ignored or harassed for fighting Chiso. Finally, though, at the end of 1959, the fishing cooperatives and the people with Minamata disease won small victories as Chiso finally made some payments. They did not, however, take responsibility for the poisoning. They just said, oh, no, these payments are like a charitable gift from a caring neighbor.

Yeah. Oh, gosh. And these gifts showed how much the company believed a lot. life was worth. Oh, no. They agreed to pay adults 100,000 yen, which was $278 per year, and children, $30,000 per year, $83, and $20,000, or $56 in funeral expenses. But they required a certification committee to decide who would be eligible for the money. And the company asked to conclude a clause where, quote, even if in the future it is determined that the cause of minimata disease is the factory's wastewater, the patients will make absolutely no further demands

for compensation money. What? Mm-hmm. Beyond the pale. I mean, I don't, yeah. And they also made small payments to these fishing co-ops. And they, importantly, they're like big, you know, public image thing was they built this pollution control center, which was supposed to remove the mercury from the waste that they produced. It did not. Like, not at all. It was just for show. What? Yeah. What's the point, Erin? This was the cost of progress in their eyes, I think. I don't know. At this point in time, so 1959, the number of people with confirmed minimata disease was in the dozens, but the next 10 years would show just how tiny the tip of the iceberg that was. After the so-called sympathy payments in 1959, I think that the Chiso Corporation thought or at least hoped

that the people affected by the mercury poisoning would just shut up, take that tiny bit of money and just go. But they didn't. This decade from 1959 to 1968 is sometimes called the decade of silence or the decade of isolation in the history of Minamata disease. But that's kind of a mischaracterization. If there was silence, it wasn't from the people who were suffering from the disease. It was from the government or the Chiso Corporation and also from many of the non-affected citizens willfully ignoring the government. this massive environmental disaster. But no matter how much they close their eyes or plugged their ears, the problem wouldn't just go away. Even though the payments had been made and the ridiculous waste cleanup program had been constructed and no one was eating fish anymore, the disease itself didn't go away. It appeared to be spreading.

And part of this was when doctors began to recognize congenital cases of Minamata disease in the early 1960s. Since the early 1950s and into the 1960s, rates of miscarriages of stillbirths, diagnoses of cerebral palsy, and other congenital defects had soared through the roof. For example, the normal background rate of cerebral palsy was estimated to be about 0.2 to 0.6%.

But in affected areas, that had gone up to 7.46%. what? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Doctors began to suspect that these children had been poisoned by mercury in utero, and hair samples, breast milk, samples, and umbilical cord samples all supported this. Another fight then happened to get these congenital cases of Minamata disease to be recognized, and eventually they were, but again, only for those tiny payments. But throughout the 1960s, other things were happening on a national scale that would help turn the tide for the people with Minamata disease. So like I said, in the 1950s, especially once Chesa Corporation's role in the poisoning was made clear, the victims of the mercury poisoning didn't receive a whole lot of public sympathy. But in the 1960s, three other major pollution cases had come to light. air pollution in Yokaiichi City, leading to a lot of asthma, cadmium poisoning in Toyama Prefecture, and the second Minamata disease in Nigata Prefecture, north of Tokyo.

So it was like basically Minamata Take 2 from another factory also leading to methylmercury poisoning. Oh. These three, along with the mercury poisoning in Minamata, are called the big four pollution cases. And several lawsuits had already begun for the other three in the 1960s, which then gave hope to the people affected by Minamata disease that maybe they could finally get some small piece of justice. And in 1968, the government announced their official findings that the Chiso Corporation was responsible for producing the waste that led to widespread methylmercury poisoning in and around Minamata. and it was only in this same year, in 1968, 12 years after the disease was first recognized that the Chiso Corporation finally stopped dumping mercury into the sea outside Minamata. They did it for 12 years.

They continued to pay people but said, oh, we put this pollution, cleaner, upper and so if and so there there could not possibly be a case after 1960 once we built this thing. Erin. Uh-huh. That's 12 years of knowingly poisoning human beings. Mm-hmm. Like that was the price of progress. I, I, it's very hard.

Yeah. these sympathy payments were not seen as like accountability or responsibility. They were just damage control. Like how much money do we need to throw at this? What's the least amount of money we can throw at this to make the problem go away? Right. That's I feel like what it always is. And the people impacted by the disease were not going to accept that anymore.

With these other pollution events and the incredible grassroots work done by people such as Ishimere Michiko, who's the person who wrote the book, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, which is, by the way, one of the best books I've ever read, I think. Like it was absolutely, her writings are so beautiful and so impactful, and it is, I just want everyone to read it. It was unbelievable. And also the work of several photographers, like Kuwabara, Shisei, Shiota, Takeshi, Miyamoto, Shigami, and also Eugene and Eileen Smith, who helped to bring

Minamata disease to wider attention and the struggle for recognition by the company as to what they did. And I also want to especially shout out, because I learned this in the research for this episode, that Eugene and Eileen Smith, so who brought this international recognition to Minamata disease, there's actually a new movie called Minamata that can. came out in 2020, but I couldn't find it streaming anywhere yet about Eugene Smith, who was a photographer for life, who basically invented the editorial photo essay. And his and Eileen's book is titled Minamata is beautiful and incredible and it's like groundbreaking. Wow. Anyway,

all this is to say is that by the time that 112 patients and family members had filed a against the company in 1969, they had a lot more public support than they previously had. And it took a few years, but eventually they did see success in court. It wasn't perfect, but it did force the Chiso Corporation to pay more, and it also held them responsible legally for the poisoning. It legally said that they had shown negligence in dumping between 224 to 600 tons of mercury estimated. That is not only massive amounts, but a massive range that is terrifying. Right.

So 224 is definitely like, those are not the Chiso Corporation's estimations, by the way. But it is thought to be at least 224. That's... And so when you said that thing about the one drop of mercury from, or like that little bit of mercury from a thermometer... Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

But there would still be a certification committee, and this committee excluded a lot of people who had less severe symptoms, like who didn't display the classic methylmercury poisoning symptoms. But still, it was a big step forward. It gave the people who had minimata disease and their families some relief and a sense of dignity. It allowed them to not fight constantly to get the Chesot Corporation to acknowledge that what they did was wrong, but to actually then have the power to say, okay, yes, what you did was wrong? Now, what can we do? What can you do to make it at least a little bit better? You'll never make it right, but to make it a little bit better.

And I'm going to wind down the history here, maybe rather abruptly. but I do want to be clear that the story of minimata disease is not over. The Minamata Bay was declared cleaned of mercury by, I think, 1994, but today many of those with congenital minimata disease are at an age where they need increasing amounts of support and care, and their parents who have typically provided that care are also aging and less physically able to do that. Many people are still unregistered. They haven't been able to get certified by these committees,

and so they don't have any payments from the Chesot Corporation to help them with their medical issues. And also many people are still unsatisfied with the inaction and lack of accountability from the government and have continued to fight for recognition. In total, 2,265 people have been officially, certified, of whom 1,784 have died, and 10,000 have received financial compensation from Chiso. More recently, it has been suggested that calling Minamata disease a disease rather than a criminal poisoning hides the truth. It doesn't place the responsibility at the feet necessarily at the Chiso Corporation.

The history of this criminal mercury poisoning by the Chiso Corporation in and around Minamata has led to the creation of an entire field of study. It has inspired plays, poems, and songs. It was impactful in the democratization of Japan. It helped turn the tide for corporate accountability. And it revealed this power of grassroots movements. And we cannot afford to ignore or forget what happened in Minamata because it's going to keep happening. Maybe it won't be methylmercury poisoning, although it probably will also be that.

And there definitely have been instances of mercury pollution since Minamata. But there's also a good chance it could be something similar. Like, what about climate change and the large-scale destruction of our planet? What is the true cost of progress? There's a great quote from the book Minamata by Eugene and Eileen Smith. The morality that pollution is criminal only after legal conviction is the morality that causes pollution. This is as relevant today as when it was first published back in 1975. I can't emphasize enough how so many corporations are just are not being held accountable for what they're doing to the planet.

And so I really, really encourage everyone to learn more about this, about Minamata. Read Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow by Ishimur de Michiko or Minimata by Timothy George or the photo essay book by Eugene and Eileen Smith. or watch the documentary minimata, the victims in their world, because there is so, so much more to the story than what I've gone through here. But anyway, I think, Erin, that I'm ready for you to tell me what's going on with mercury and mercury poisoning today. I would love to after a break. So I try always in these sections to talk about numbers, right? Like, in this case it would be, do people still get mercury poisoning? How many? I couldn't find numbers on this, Aaron.

I mean, the only number I could find, I found a couple. We'll still talk numbers. Don't worry. The World Health Organization estimates that in subsistence fishing communities, between one and a half to 17, which is a huge range, of every 1,000 children, have some kind of cognitive impact because of the consumption of mercury contaminated fish. Wow. Yeah. I don't know. That number is from the World Health Organization like Mercury fact sheet website. I don't know exactly where that number came from.

But that's the number that they cite. If we look at the potential for occupational exposure, which we know is great in certain industries, especially in artisanal and small-scale gold mining. I found a paper from environmental health perspectives from 2014 that was a review on the health effects of mercury in these artisanal and small-scale gold mining communities. They cited that globally 15 million people participate in this type of gold mining across 70 different countries, which is a way bigger industry than I realized. Yeah.

And they didn't have numbers, like what percentage, you know, of people have signs of mercury poisoning or anything like that. But they did say that in the, this paper was kind of a review of papers that have looked into it. And mercury exposure at very high levels is found and causing potential health problems. So it's still not numbers, but at least you get a sense of the. potential scale. But the thing is that it's not just occupational exposure, right?

And it's not just subsistence farming communities. Everyone is exposed to mercury. If you've ever eaten a fish or a shellfish, if you've ever eaten grain, you've probably been exposed. It's everywhere. So what I want to focus on instead is how much mercury are we talking about in the environment and where is this mercury coming from? So I mentioned at the very, very top, like three hours ago in this episode, that mercury is found

naturally in the earth's crust. And there is a natural mercury cycle where mercury is released from things like geothermal vents, from volcanic activity, from biomass that's burned during fires. This happens normally. And then this mercury is released into the atmosphere. It's deposited in the soils or the oceans or the waterways, where it of course can become methylated and it can become part of the biomass or become part of the soil deposits and eventual fossil fuels, etc. Right? That's a natural cycle like the water cycle, the carbon dioxide cycle, all of our cycles. But just like the carbon dioxide cycle, the amounts of mercury currently in our atmosphere and being released into our atmosphere to become a part of this active cycle rather than trapped beneath

the earth's crust are vastly higher than they have been ever because of humans. Unsurprisingly, the sources of increased mercury concentrations in the atmosphere are anthropogenic, so let's put some numbers on it. If you check out the EPA website, which reports data from the U.S. and all of the industries that report mercury emissions and all other emissions to the U.S. The EPA has reported a 73% decrease in airborne emissions of mercury from 2007 to 2019, which if you look at that on a national level, you're like, that's awesome. That's a huge decrease. But the thing about something like mercury or carbon dioxide is that we can't look at things like environmental pollution on a country or a national level.

level. This is a global phenomenon with global consequences because mercury released into the atmosphere can travel thousands of miles before being deposited via rainfall into our soils and waters where it can continue to travel throughout the water cycle across the globe, be methylated by bacteria uptaken by plants, enter our food chain. Those fish can then travel across the globe and then once a fish is caught for consumption, it can be shipped anywhere around the world. Yep. Yep. So this is a global issue. So how are we doing globally? A UN report from 2018 estimated about 2,200 tons, that's 2,200 tons of global emissions of mercury in 2015. This is an increase of 20% from 2010.

Okay. When we look at what the contributors are, coal burning and other fossil fuel burning accounts for about 24% of all of the total global emissions. The largest overall percentage, 37.7% is contributed by artisanal and small-scale gold mining. So this presents issues not only for the people who are being exposed to this mercury vapor during that small-scale gold mining, but also on a large scale as well. And overall, human activities have increased the total atmospheric mercury concentrations by 450% from like pre-industrial levels. It's very difficult to wrap your brain around. It really is. just like with climate change and carbon dioxide, the amount of mercury that we've already put into the environment, the atmosphere, the soils, the waters, it hasn't made it all into the food chain yet.

So decreasing our emissions now will still take years to actually show like a beneficial effect or a decrease in total mercury. Yeah. So it's a lot. It's such a bigger issue than I realized, Aaron. I had no idea that there was so much mercury being released by things. I didn't know that. I mean, I didn't either. And I like, you could do an entire podcast multiple seasons on Mercury. Yes. Speaking of too much to cover, a whole topic I didn't even get into, which I'll just very briefly mention, is something we actually touched on what feels like a million years ago in our vaccines episode in season two, and that's thimerosol. So thimerosol is a mercury compound that is an additive that's been used in various multi-dose vaccine vials as a preservative.

Mercury has been used as so many things, antiseptic, antimicrobial, and so thimerosol is used as a preservative to prevent contamination when somebody has to introduce multiple needles into vials, multiple times to draw up vaccine doses. So thimerosol is ethyl mercury, or at least it's broken down into ethyl mercury in our bodies. So it's an organic mercury compound, but it is not methyl mercury, which is what we find in fish, for example.

Methyl mercury is one carbon atom and three hydrogens bound to mercury. Ethel mercury is two carbon. atoms five hydrogens. So back in like 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in the US reducing or eliminating the use of thimerosol in vaccines in kids because of data about the accumulation of methylmercury in tissues. And they thought that for some kids of certain sizes, the dosages would exceed methylmercury, like recommended safe dosages. So in the U.S., the U.K., the EU, in a lot of places, thimerosol isn't really used in childhood vaccines at all.

It's been eliminated since about 2004. But it is still an important preservative in vaccines in other parts of the world. It's still used in some vaccines in the U.S. but this data, importantly, was not from ethelmercury. It was from methylmercury. And it turns out that ethylmercury, once we studied it, is eliminated from the body a lot more readily than methylmery is. So it doesn't actually accumulate the same way. And so since then, because of all this controversy surrounding thimerosol, there have been a lot of large-scale epidemiological studies, none of which have shown major or long-term.

neurodevelopmental effects of thimerosol in vaccines. There's a lot more to that story, but that's all I wanted to just mention that it exists, and it's a different form of mercury than what we find in fish and than what causes minimata disease, for example. So that's mercury, or at least some small slices of it. I was going to say, we covered, I mean, I feel like we covered a lot of ground, but there's still a lot out there. There's a, we, we broke the thermometer and just spilled a few drops out and there's a lot left

in there. There we go. Okay. Anyways. Clean that, clean that up, though. Clean it up and don't vacuum it. Sources? Sources.

I pretty much have already mentioned mine, but I will briefly just go through again the titles. So, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, Minimata, Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy and Postalienerner, in post-war Japan, toxic archipelago, a history of industrial disease in Japan, and then Minamata, and then again, that Mercury, a History of QuickSilver book. I had a number of different sources, a lot of which go into way more detail than I did on the specific mechanisms of the toxicity of Mercury. So if you'd like to read a lot more, we'll list all of our sources on our website, this podcast would kill you.com under the episodes tab.

We sure will. I wanted to give a huge thank you and shout out to Emily who helped me with these sources for Minamata disease. They were so helpful. I appreciate it so much. It was so great to email back and forth with you. Thank you also to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. And thank you to the exactly right network of whom we are a proud member. And thank you to you, listeners. We hope that you found this very long episode, enjoyable. Yeah, and also a shout out to our patrons. Yeah. We really, really appreciate you.

We love you so much. Yeah. Okay, well, until next time, wash your hands. You filthy animals. Virgin Voyages presents with love from Alaska. Alaska isn't complicated. It just needs to be done right. waking up to glaciers, spotting wildlife from the deck, spending the day hiking, kayaking, or exploring,

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