DHEC’s most recent list of Top Mercury Polluters here in SC takes Santee Cooper’s ‘big polluter of the year’ award: their Winyah plant in Georgetown!

According to the EPA and the CDC, 1 in 6 – around 630,000 – American children are born with potentially unsafe levels of mercury in their blood every year.

Through Greenpeace, you can get tested for mercury today for only $25 – it may be a big eye-opener!

_{DHEC provided these figures in response to a request under the SC Freedom of Information Act from the Post & Courier. Emissions levels are estimates. Some locations were measured several years ago and may no long emit mercury emissions.}

Hopefully you or your mother aren’t eating tuna everyday like a former co-worker of mine – John – did for breakfast. Sure, he lost lots of weight, and his high protein diet was helping that, but a high canned tuna diet has other side effects too. Symptoms of mercurial poisoning include, but are not limited to:

• loss of hair,
• heart fluttering,
• heart, nervous system, and kidney damage,
• and more.

I haven’t ran into John in a couple of years, but hopefully everything is going good for him.

I’ve reported on seafood mercury levels in this blog before. As a matter of fact, my earlier post Seafood Mercury Levels Make Headlines quotes the same High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi article that MotherJones just mentioned, so it’s certainly nothing new on the health front, but it is one that people need to be aware of.

The problem is, with canned tuna providing the highest source of mercury in the American diet, people need to wake up and smell the tuna – without the mercury in it! Oh, and say thanks to the FDA for looking out for us.

It’s almost expected nowadays to hear that Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Tri-Union (parent company of Chicken of the Sea) are doing all they can to quiet their unhealthy ways, but when the FDA, the very agency of the U.S. government put in place to protect us, is out there reputedly taking payoffs from company executives, then we have a serious health issue here in America.