Researchers Find Taiji Residents Have No Mercury-related Health Problems
The test results are in: the National Institute for Minamata Disease has found higher than average mercury levels in hair samples from Taiji residents, but not a single person tested was found to have any mercury-related health problems.
The Japan Times’s had an informative article on the subject:
TAIJI, Wakayama Pref. — Researchers have found extremely high methyl mercury concentrations in the hair of some residents of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, where people have a tradition of eating whale and dolphin, but none have developed any related illnesses.
The researchers said Sunday that of 1,137 residents tested, the methyl mercury density in 43 exceeded the level recognized by the World Health Organization as capable of causing neurological damage. The tests covered roughly a third of the town’s residents.
Of that tiny portion of residents who had mercury levels above the WHO warning level, none were found to have mercury-related health programs.
While there is no conclusive proof as to why those with high mercury levels had no health problems, the possibility that consuming naturally occurring mercury is different from consuming industrial waste mercury is mentioned as something that warrants further research:
“At this point, (eating whale and dolphin) has had no impact on residents’ health, but we will continue to ask the National Institute for Minamata Disease to research further,” Taiji Mayor Kazutaka Sangen said in a press release.
Okamoto couldn’t explain why some of the residents had high mercury levels but no symptoms.
“It may be because Taiji people accumulate methyl mercury by eating natural food, while other cases (in Minamata, Niigata and Iraq) were caused by chemical substances containing methyl mercury that were leaked into nature by human error,” he said. “That is my speculation without scientific evidence. We will continue to research that.”
So there you have it. Residents of the town that consumes large amounts of whale and dolphin meat do tend to have higher levels of mercury in their bodies than the average Japanese person, but only a tiny percentage of them have levels exceeding the WHO danger level. Of that tiny group, none have yet developed mercury-related health problems. Further research is needed on why there are no such health problems occurring among these people, who have supposedly been eating whale and dolphin meat for decades. The residents of Taiji seem to be breathing easy now, with some telling the media they are happy to continue eating whale and dolphin meat.
The Associated Press seems to have reported the story with a stronger emphasis on the dangerous nature of the mercury,
Residents of the dolphin-hunting village depicted in Oscar documentary “The Cove” have dangerously high mercury levels, likely because of their fondness for dolphin and whale meat, a government lab said Sunday.
It is not until several paragraphs later that the AP mentions that the study found no ill effects from mercury:
Despite the high mercury levels found in the Taiji tests, institute officials said neurological tests on the 182 citizens who wanted them found no problems. Follow-up tests are planned by March of next year, with outside experts possibly invited, and a separate study is under way to track mercury levels in the local catch.
At a presentation for the press on Sunday afternoon, many reporters questioned how there could be no health effects despite such high mercury levels, with some challenging the competency of the lab.
Joanna Tempowski, a scientist who works on chemical safety at the World Health Organization in Switzerland, said the Minamata institute was a respected institution that was trusted to provide technical assistance. Without seeing the Taiji results, she said that some damage from mercury might not appear immediately.
“At some point in the future they might start to show health effects,” she said.
The AP also included a quote from an animal rights activist who believed that the residents of Taiji were eating “poison.” The AP includes plenty of speculation about how the residents of Taiji may suffer health problems in the future, but Okamoto’s theory about natural vs. industrial pollution is omitted. The article gives one the impression that the research results or flawed, or worse – the Japanese researchers may be hiding something. After all, “some” reporters thought the researchers lacked competency.
From a Japanese perspective, this may be significant in disproving the claims of the animal rights activists behind the Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Cove,” who have repeatedly claimed that Japanese people who eat dolphin meat are in serious danger of developing Minamata disease. However, those who read the AP version of the story will likely walk away thinking that “The Cove” has been proven right.
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The article doesn’t mention it, but I wonder if they’ll look into researching the observed effect of selenium apparently neutralizing the toxic effects of mercury.
I believe it’s been observed that top-level marine predators — like whales — tend to have an high accumulation of selenium as well as mercury in their systems, apparently with no ill effects. As methyl mercury is one of the naturally occurring form of mercury and was present in the environment long before humans started dumping more if it, it makes sense that there ought to be a natural system in animals for coping with the accumulation of it, at least for nominal levels.
If they ran a spectral analysis on the hair samples of the Taiji residents, I’m very interested if the results showed selenium levels found as well as the mercury levels. It may be that the Director General Koji Okamoto being “unable to explain” was him being careful not to make any statements without the research to back up any speculation. Him hinting that ingesting methyl mercury from natural sources is different from artificial chemicals makes sense, if one takes into consideration that selenium would be simultaneously ingested from natural sources, while pollution will introduce just methyl mercury only.
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So many people worry about mercury from fish! It’s madness.
I ask them; do you have fillings from the old days? Not the new, ceramic crap, but the old fillings that are silver colored? What in the heck do they think that filling is made from? Aluminium? No! It’s Mercury. It’s in your teeth, people! And you’ve been living with it for, what, 40 years? And you’re still alive.
There are also natural diet factors. Drinking lots of green tea, and eating a balanced diet of legumes and fruits and meats that are cooked from scratch (which these Japanese people tend to do more often than not), and having a good life without too much stress. Many of us in America don’t realize that these local Japanese people don’t eat fast food or TV dinners, AT ALL. In fact, they probably hardly drink Soda! They literally drink green tea or other teas ALL DAY LONG. They have good, natural foods from the local areas that they cook by hand on a daily basis. Magnesium, Selenium, Niacin, and !!!! OMEGA 3 !!!! are known to naturally flush Mercury out of the system. Eating eggs regularly without overdoing the cholesterol, is also known to be an essential ingredient in staying healthy and strong, also flushing out mercury. The Japanese are known to eat the most amount of eggs per person per week than anywhere else in the world = FACT.
We have much to learn.
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The mercury in fillings is part of dental Amalgam, not methyl mercury. The amount of mercury exposure from a filling is negligible compared to mercury consumption from eating mercury rich meat over a long period of time.
What exactly is your source on local Japanese people drinking green tea ALL DAY LONG and having no sources of stress in their lives? You know, I’d think having a foreign film crew sneaking around trying to catch you on camera would be a pretty big source of stress.
Contrary to popular belief, rural people are not privy to some magical secret of good health just by the virtue of living in the middle of nowhere. People who are “closer to the Earth” can have just as bad health problems as everyone else. There’s no reason to go making claims about how they’re amazingly healthy because of drinking nothing but tea without having any factual evidence to back it up. I might as well say that it’s because they breath sea air so much, and sea air naturally contains trace elements of selenium which cancels out the mercury poisoning.
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http://www.holisticmed.com/dental/amalgam/
Foreign film crew running around sure would be a MAJOR cause of stress, you’re right, LOL, so discount everything I said about their diets that have been there for 500 years LOL them damned foreign film crews helped do away with that myth in a hurry LOL
This site here says more than 4 cups a day was at 81%, and if you’re looking at the chart, the top 2 bars are “prepared (Japanese) tea” and then “tea”
http://www.jmar.biz/hot/html/dai17_2.html
http://www.avanti-web.com/pastdata/20061118.html
Cool site
http://ocha.tv/
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http://www.fishscam.com/mercuryMyths.cfm
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Nice site – You do realize it was created by the Center for Consumer Freedom, an NPO front supported by the tobacco, fast food and gambling industries.
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Actually, I think PLASTIC is more the problem than anything else:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8639769.stm
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how does that affect the info on there though?
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It’s sponsored research. You can find examples of this in a variety of food and product industries where they simply won’t report negative results or they cherry-pick their dataset to find favorable outcomes.
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It’s pretty easy to conceal any contrary data when you only test about a third of the population, and then generalize to the entire group.
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Yes, that is what we do here in the USA, but people get all amped about discrimination and racial profiling, when all we’re doing is simply presenting the facts as they are found, such as population statistics and the likelihood that a black person is more likely to develop diabetes than a caucasian person, etc.
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That is the basic premise of all statistical studies: taking a statistically significant sample of a population and inferring information about the population from that sample. In Taiji’s population of about 3,500, a sample size of 1,337 provides about a 2 percent margin of error. This is widely accepted as an accurate way to determine information about a population.
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In Taiji’s population of about 3,500, a sample size of 1,337 provides about a 2 percent margin of error. This is widely accepted as an accurate way to determine information about a population.
…as long as the question being asked about the population is narrow to the point of being almost meaningless. If you they actually want to determine dolphin meat-mercury-health linkage that would be considered clinically relevant, there should be some data collection about which testees actually ate dolphin meat, how much, for how long, age, weight, sex, lifestyle, other health issues, etc. Moreover, there does not seem much significance to the question about any linkage to neurological effects, as the inclusion criteria for this particular cohort seems to be merely:
neurological tests on the 182 citizens who wanted them
From the article, there is not nearly enough analysis yet to have determined what most here seem to assume has been determined.
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While this is true, I don’t think the Minamata Institute would try to cover things up. They were founded in reaction to some really, really horrible cases of mercury poisoning in Japan’s past, and I imagine that there are still a lot of staff whose family have been affected by mercury poison. I could be totally wrong here, but I just can’t see a group like that covering up a case of mercury poisoning just because it makes a village look bad.
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Heading is somehow misleading. They have found 10 times more mercury in most Taiji residents. Mercury related helath problems are rare, but can show up anytime in the future. Bottom line is, mercury is a poison and taiji residents tested to have 10 times the average mercury found in their bodies. But who am I to be worried about their heath, eat up all you can.
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So, why is the title misleading? It’s not misleading at all! It says exactly what is in the reports. These residents, who have consumed mercury to this level really do not have any mercury-related health problems. So I don’t see anything wrong with the heading here.
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Today is the future of Taiji, where people begun to eat dolphin hundreds years ago.
Ironically, Taiji is facing not a health problem but an aging problem.
There are getting less young people, and the old live too long.
I mean, longevity is good, but may oppress their finance.
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According to the JT article:
“The Taiji tests found that 43 people [out of 1,137 tested] had [mercury] levels in excess of 50 ppm, with the highest having 139 ppm.”
While 3.7% of those tested did exceed the 50 parts per million minimum mercury level recognized by the WHO as the level someone is likely to experience nerve damage, the article goes on to explain:
“The average amount of methyl mercury found in the hair of Taiji residents was 11.0 parts per million for men and 6.63 ppm for women”
This shows that the average mercury levels in Taiji are only a bit higher than the averages found around Japan (2.47 ppm for men and 1.64 ppm for women) and still nowhere near the WHO danger zone.
Even so, the levels found in those poisoned in the infamous Minamata industrial incident (often used as a comparison) were MUCH higher than even the highest level found in Taiji. According to the wiki article:
“In [Minamita] patients the maximum mercury level recorded was 705 ppm (parts per million), indicating very heavy exposure and in non-symptomatic Minamata residents the level was 191 ppm.”
The fact remains, that even the maximum mercury ppm found in the recent Taiji study (139 ppm)is still much lower than the levels found in the industrial Minamata disaster. Considering the different sources of mercury and disproportionate mercury levels found in the two groups, Minamata and Taiji are barely comparable. We can use the horrors of Minamata as an extreme lesson about the dangers of mercury ingestion, but they are certainly not relative to the current conditions in Taiji or Japan as a whole.
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The really weird thing about the AP article, to me, is the idea that “they might just not have gotten sick yet“. Considering just how long they’ve been eating whale/dolphin meat in Taiji, surely if symptoms were going to develop, they’d have developed by now. It has been going on for generations. I expect it was going on before even the oldest current inhabitants were born.
I really need to watch the Cove some time. I keep hearing about it from one side or the other, but I haven’t seen the actual thing myself.
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“neurological tests on the 182 citizens who wanted them found no problems.”
So, this is not a randomly selected population sample?
Whatever side of the issue you are on, if that’s how the neurological testing group was selected – “citizens who wanted them” – then the study is not random, and thus probably not useful as a representative sample, unless a parallel sociological study is done on mercury consumption or symptoms vs. willingness to volunteer for mercury poisoning tests.
One could assume that the people who eat the most whale/dolphin meat might be the
fishermen themselves, since the meat is “free” to them.
One might also assume they would be less likely to volunteer for a study that could hurt their livelihood, especially if they themselves are noticing any symptoms.
Letting the test subjects themselves control who gets tested or not does not make for very useful results.
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Can’t belive 2 retar– ahem, PEOPLE, gave me thumbs down, how can you disagree with what I wrote? Is it wrong?
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Mercury sounds tasty.
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Japan agrees the world has changed!
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NEWS – THE JAPAN TIMES
MERCURY DANGER IN DOLPHIN MEAT
==============================
SAPPORO — The annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, as documented in the film “The Cove” has sparked an emotional international debate, with animal rights activists decrying the capture and slaughter as unnecessary and cruel, and those in Japan who defend the slaughter as both legally permissible under international treaties and an ancient tradition.
But for Tetsuya Endo, a professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, there is a far more important issue related to the hunt that the public and the government must address.
Dolphin and whale meat is high in mercury, and Endo, one of the world’s foremost authorities on mercury levels in dolphins and whales caught off Japan’s coastal waters, has discovered Taiji residents who eat the meat sold in local stores have extremely high concentrations in their bodies.
“Between December 2007 and July 2008, myself and a team of scientists and researchers took hair samples from 30 male and 20 female residents of the Taiji area. In three cases, the levels of mercury present were more than 50 parts per million, high enough that it was possible nerve damage, like that seen in victims of Minamata disease, could occur,” Endo told The Japan Times in an interview last week.
Endo’s tests revealed that one Taiji man in his 50s had a mercury level of 67.2 parts per million. The average mercury level of all 50 subjects was 21.6 ppm for the men and 11.9 ppm for the women.
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I personally do not care if humans kill dolphins or whales. We kill pigs for meat too, and they are also highly intelligent and sometimes even cute (-> see the movie Babe). I DO mind if we hunt a species to extinction, as is now happening with many popular fish species such as Tuna and Haddock, some whale families.
Meat of large fish suffers from bio-magnification of lead and other heavy metals, and should therefore be only consumed in limited amounts, and absolutely avoided by pregnant women, infants and children as the metal can disturb their growth and development and cause other irreversible damage to their bodies.
Even Japanese scientists argue that whale meat is highly dangerous and should essentially not be sold or consumed. Why then does the Japanese government keep this industry on life support from tax money? I remember reading an article (maybe Asahi) a few years back which explained that there is no demand for whale meat(in Japan), and thats why the government gave it to schools for free!! The worst possible thing to do.
Considering their size, dolphins should contain the same level of heavy metals than Tuna. The golden rule therefore would be that eating it occasionally probably would do little harm, but if it becomes a large part of your regular diet you – and particularly your children – will suffer serious health problems.
If the health effects on Taijin residents are really neglible despite high concentrations of the poison in their bodies, it could maybe be because it is a seasonal food, and mostly consumed by elderly people where it causes less damage.
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As a biologist I’m curious if there have been any studies into potential epigenetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics) effects of mercury. You can’t just look at the health of the current population since environment influences future generations as well.
Considering the aged population of Taiji, I imagine a significant portion isn’t having kids anymore but it would be interesting to see how their kids stack up against the rest of the country health-wise. Obviously, that’d require tracking a lot of people who have left town which is probably prohibitively expensive.
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