A new study has revealed that mercury pollution is more widespread across the world than previously thought, even among high-level ministers and delegates, as a new UN treaty struggles to get to grips with what experts call “an immediate threat to everyone.”
New Study Reveals Dangerous Mercury Levels among Delegates at Minamata Mercury Convention COP1, with the Highest Levels in Delegates from Small Island Developing States.
Evidence that the neurotoxic metal mercury poses a global health threat to all was underscored today in a new study analyzing the mercury body burdens among delegates of a global conference of the world’s first mercury treaty. The study detected mercury levels above health alert thresholds in over half of the global policy decision-makers tested at the first Conference of the Parties to the Minamata Convention.
Researchers concluded that even global policy-makers who are educated about mercury risks are not protected from mercury contamination. The findings revealed mercury in all participants and elevated mercury levels exceeding theUS EPA health advisory level of 1 ppm. Levels many times higher were identified in delegates from a number of regions. Mercury, while harmful to adults, causes the greatest damage to the developing nervous systems of fetuses in utero.
Millions of people are risking their lives using mercury to separate gold from ore in the gold mining industry.
United Nations launched a campaign to stop the use of mercury in unofficial gold mining, but alternative machines are still too expensive for miners to obtain.
This is one of the issues to be discussed at the UN Environment Assembly being held in Kenya.
Joseph Muema has been showing up for his spray painting job for the past three years with the knowledge that his lifetime on earth shortens with each passing day, something he insists is for the sake of his family.
Amongst other articles in the magazine, IPEN Co-Chair Olga Speranskaya writes about women leading the fight against the largest mining plant in Russia, the Tominsky MPP plant, owned by a Russian copper company. The company is currently destroying protected forests to clear land and build the mine. Activist scientists at the forefront of this movement describe a domino effect of environmental impacts that threaten to make the populated region uninhabitable.
A new video has been released by UN Environment at the 3rd Meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly featuring Minamata Disease survivor, Ms. Shinobu Sakamoto.
Shinobu calls for an end to pollution: "The fetal Minamata disease patients including myself are getting worse, year by year. Many people are still suffering and struggling from pollution. Today, I must repeat my message--Minamata disease is not over. Pollution must end."
In continuation of his mercury-free dentistry campaign in Africa that started a week ago, President of the World Alliance for Mercury-Free Dentistry, Charlie Brown, an American, on Saturday October 28, 2017 left Yaounde, Cameroon for Lagos, Nigeria.
