Letter to editor
ByTo the editor;
I’ve been researching the environmental issue of high levels of mercury in fish, this has been caused by industries burning coal in their production, which allows mercury to escape. In most cases there is mercury suspended in steam and smoke, getting into the clouds, raining down and overall ending up in water ways. in more extreme cases there has been industries that simply dump large amounts of waste containing inorganic mercury into the waterways. This inorganic mercury is then transformed by microorganisms into methylmercury, where it binds with the Phosphoryl and Carboxyl in fish bodies, therefor there is no way of removing it from fish currently known, fish are also often unaffected by mercury poisoning, all in all giving people mercury poisoning from eating certain fish.
Many think mercury should be removed from industrial process entirely, however I don’t think that is necessarily safe as quite a bit of medical equipment is produced in industries relying on contaminants with mercury by-product, to run. I think we should prioritize work on a neutralizing process to prevent the inorganic mercury from entering the atmosphere, while we find safer alternatives. There are multiple filtering processes already known for purifying an area of mercury, a neutralizing process would be safest and most effective given the current technology. I do agree that these industries should distance from waterways however that won’t do much as it’s still entering the atmosphere, still getting in clouds and therefor still getting water. it’d be a temporary relief if any.
Of course filtering isn’t a permanent solution but it’d be effective as alternatives will take a long time, most likely too long to get implemented safely into medical device manufacturing, while a filter would have next to no effect on the production while studies are done on alternatives.