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Why Methylmercury Remains a Conundrum 50 Years after Minamata
Department of Environmental Medicine, Environmental Health Sciences Center, and Center for Reproductive Epidemiology, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York 14642
1 For correspondence via fax: (585) 256-2591. E-mail: bernard_weiss@urmc.rochester.edu.
Received March 6, 2007; accepted March 7, 2007
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Not too long ago, a common vision of economic vitality painted a landscape of factory chimneys pumping smoke plumes into the sky. We are now painfully aware of how flawed was our vision and of how the price for that vitality would come due only later. It stalked us in the form of widespread environmental contamination, with consequences for public health and welfare whose scope we still have not fully grasped. The Japanese coastal city of Minamata became a tragic model of how heedless industrialization could taint the lives of unwitting victims. These victims, largely fishermen and their families, began to experience a mysterious neurological affliction in the 1950's that eluded any known etiology. It eventually was traced to the consumption of seafood contaminated by methylmercury; its source the effluent inadvertently discharged by an acetaldehyde-manufacturing plant that used mercury as a catalyst in its production. Methylmercury had been known as