A new federal study by the U.S. Geologic Survey confirmed that the rate of mercury contamination in tuna and other Pacific fish has increased 30 percent since about 1990. It also said that this toxic mercury is expected to increase another 50 percent if China continues to build more coal-fired power plants to fuel its industrial revolution.
It is told that nearly 40 percent of all U.S. exposure to mercury comes from eating contaminated tuna from the Pacific, and roughly 75 percent of all human exposure to mercury comes from eating fish, say U.S. officials. It is fact that mercury exposure can lead to permanent development affects and that is why the Environmental Protection Agency has been fighting to retain those strong public cautions against efforts by the fishing industry and the Food and Drug Administration to weaken or confuse them.
The study states that mercury becomes toxic when it is converted by bacteria into a form called methylmercury. It is also said that many steps up the food chain later, predators like tuna receive methylmercury from the fish they consume. The study also mentioned that Asia is an important source of mercury in the Pacific not only because prevailing winds carry air pollution over the ocean, where it rains down, but also because ocean currents carry the pollution throughout the basin.
The EPA has recently announced plans to regulate mercury emissions from another major source: cement plants. It is true that Chinese coal-fired power plants have been a growing concern not because of mercury, but because of carbon dioxide emissions, which have helped China catapult ahead of the U.S. as the world’s top emitter of the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming.
The Obama Administration has also strongly supported an international treaty on mercury — but the bottom line is that China will need technological help to achieve a low-mercury/low-carbon industrialization.
