'Integrating Knowledge to Inform Mercury Policy'

BBC News 28 August 2010 Environmental and animal-welfare groups are urging the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to persuade the World Health Organization (WHO) to act over fears about eating whale meat.  The coalition of organisations wants the WHO to issue guidelines amid fears about the safety of the meat.  The groups say whale meat is highly contaminated with mercury and should not be eaten.  But whaling nations say they already have health guidelines in place.

CEH measures many atmospheric chemicals at its EMEP superersite Auchencorth Moss, 15 miles south of Edinburgh in the Scottish Borders. Of interest with respect to the volcano is the measurement of hourly mercury concentrations and fluoride.  Volcanoes are a major natural source for mercury and it can be found in the gas phase and associated with volcanic ash. This link (CEH website) shows the most recent 5 days of mercury measurements.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is issuing final rules that will cut emissions of mercury from Portland cement manufacturing, the third-largest source of mercury air emissions in the United States (Link to EPA press release).

• High Mercury Levels Found in Burmese Pythons living in the Everglades
• Large fires may contribute to mercury in fish in southwest Colorado
• US Fish Mercury Concentrations Decrease in the 1970s and 80s; Recent Trends Show Variation
• Mercury levels increasing in popular species of game fish in Lake Erie
• Mercury found in fish from San Francisco water supply
• Mercury poisoning, the dark side of Colombia’s gold boom

On the final day of the first negotiating meeting of the UNEP INC, 11 June 2010, it has been announced that the new instrument currently under construction with the explicit aim and reducing or eliminating global use of mercury has been named the Minamata Convention.

Dr John Holmes presented IKIMP’s ‘Decision Making Framework’ for redundant elemental mercury at the UNEP International Negotiating Committee 1 meeting in Stockholm recently. Currently the member states are meeting in Stockholm to begin the negotiation of a legally binding instrument to limit the global use of mercury.

Scientists at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology have found that the acceptable critical upper limit for mercury in soils is just 0.13 parts per million.  The critical limit was defined at five per cent, which means that 95 per cent of the organisms will be unaffected by 0.13 microgrammes of mercury per gram of soil.

New studies on mercury in US fish

Gold mining without mercury

Canadian residents demand action on mercury in water

Effects of very low levels of methylmercury on Arctic mamals

Following the 9th International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant (ICMGP) in China in June 2009, a special issue of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics is being released on Atmospheric mercury.  Discussion papers are available to view here. Special issues of Applied Geochemistry  (on Mercury in contaminated sites) and Water Air and Soil Pollution (Focus on biogeochemistry of mercury in the environment) are also planned.

All in one mercury removal (25 March 2010, link to Highlights in Chemical Technology)

Finding and removing mercury from environmental waters could soon be accomplished with an ‘all-in-one’ magnetic microsphere developed by Chinese scientists.   Shengyang Tao, from the Dalian University of Technology, and colleagues have created a nanocomposite microsphere that can detect, adsorb and remove mercury from water. Wang et al (2010)

The little blue pills that sent Abraham Lincoln into a rage (22 March 2010, link to Royal Society of Chemistry press release)

The Blue Mass pills taken as antidepressants by Abraham Lincoln contained dangerously high levels of mercury likely to have caused his notoriously wild temper, scientists have found.  Researchers who analysed a recently unearthed sample of the medicine discovered it contained up to 120 times the acceptable daily intake of mercury .