Women of childbearing age from around the world have been found to have high levels of mercury, a potent neurotoxin which can seriously harm unborn children.
The new study, the largest to date, covered 25 of the countries with the highest risk and found excessive levels of the toxic metal in women from Alaska to Chile and Indonesia to Kenya.
Women in the Pacific islands were the most pervasively contaminated. This resulted from their reliance on eating fish, which concentrate the mercury pollution found across the world’s oceans and much of which originates from coal burning.
The most extreme levels were found in women from sites in Indonesia where mercury was heavily used in small-scale goldmining and where fish was also commonly eaten. Such goldmining led to serious mercury pollution and was also a source of harm to women in Kenya, Paraguay and Myanmar.
Industrial pollution was another source of mercury, and the research found this affected women in Nepal, Nigeria and Ukraine.
“Millions of women and children in communities mining gold with mercury are condemned to a future where mercury impairs the health of adults and damages the developing brains of their offspring,” said Yuyun Ismawati, an Indonesian woman from Ipen, the coalition of NGOs that produced the scientific report.
“As long as the mercury trade continues, so too will the mercury tragedy.”
Cook Islands resident Imogen Ingram, from the Island Sustainability Alliance, learned that her own mercury levels were two-and-half times higher than the US Environmental Protection Agency’s safety threshold.
“It is really alarming to learn that you have, without knowing, passed on mercury to your child,” she said.
“Mercury contamination across the Pacific Islands is high because we eat fish.
“But I do not want to be told not to eat fish. Coal-fired power, one of the primary sources of mercury pollution in the oceans, is the real offender. It is time to phase it out. Mercury contamination is ubiquitous in marine and freshwater systems around the world,” said David Evers, executive director at the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI), which conducted the scientific tests. “This study underscores the importance of global cooperation to address mercury pollution.”
A global agreement to tackle mercury pollution, the Minamata convention, came into force in August and its first major meeting starts on 24 September in Geneva, Switzerland.
It will limit the use of mercury in many products from 2020, but does not ban the international trade in the toxic metal, most of which ends up in small-scale gold mining. Primary production of mercury can continue in some countries until 2032, as the convention stands.
