Still Want To Be
At The Top Of The Food Chain?
One of the online medical letters I get recently stated the following:
At The Top Of The Food Chain?
One of the online medical letters I get recently stated the following:In an analysis of 732 Nunavik Inuit men and women--the indigenous people of northern Quebec--Dr Beatriz Valera (Centre de Recherche du CHUQ, Quebec, QC) and colleagues found mercury levels to be more than 50 nmol/L. That's more than 10 times higher than levels in the general US population in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) study of 4 nmol/L, an American Heart Association (AHA) press release notes [2]. These higher levels stem largely from the preponderance of fish and marine mammals in the traditional Inuit diet
It would seem that it is a small world after all and that the consequences of our lifestyle are reaching all corners of the world. Bless us all.
Paddle safe...
DS
2 comments:
Interesting post today. In the late 1960's I collected seal blubber samples for a mercury study in Nunavut for two years and it was high even back then, so these results don't surprise me. The real question is what can be done at this point...
As I recall from basic science - not much at this point! Mercury is one of those things that doesn't work its way out of the food chain in any kind of a hurry, so we'll be stuck with it for a long, long time. "Sins of the fathers" and all that...
Susan
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