She and her husband stopped eating dinner out.
And for lunch, she almost invariably had a plain tuna sandwich.
“It was a cheap meal,” she remembers.
“And I thought it would be nutritious.”
Curtis’s second son, Ryker, was born in June 2005, three weeks early.
The doctors helicoptered him to a bigger hospital, where he was put in an incubator.
Curtis was able to hold him for only a few hours a day.
“That poor kid.”
It was a month before Curtis was able to take him home.
There were new problems, though.
At 8 months, Ryker wasn’t responding to his name or looking.
And he didn’t look at Curtis when she talked to him.
It turned out that Ryker was nearly deaf.
What the heck was going on with her child?
She sat down with her ob/gyn, who ticked off some possible explanations.
They could be seeing the health effects of Ryker’s prematurity.
Or perhaps it was genetic.
But Curtis had heard something on the news that troubled her.
Might mercury be a cause?
“It’s unlikely, and we’ll never know for sure,” the doctor told Curtis.
“But that might be it.”
Another preliminary study this year found that mothers who delivered prematurely were more likely to have high mercury levels.
“I felt like everything my son was going through was my fault,” she says.
“This was something that should never have happened,” Curtis says.
“I worry that it could have been prevented.”
Every day in this country, coal-fired power plants in all 50 states spew out particles laced with mercury.
Incinerators and chlorine plants burn off still more.
The bacteria are absorbed by plankton, which fish dine on.
Little fish are light eaters, so they don’t consume enough mercury through plankton to become dangerous.
And then there’s tuna.
As a large predator fish, tuna contains mercurysometimes lots of it.
The task of protecting Americans from mercury in commercially sold fish falls to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
It also says these women should not eat more than 6 ounces of albacore tuna per week.
Eating fish can lower the risk for stroke, depression and mental decline.
The tuna industry takes the same position.
But has women’s health truly come first in the government’s handling of the mercury issue?
The debate started in 1995.
In 1997, another group of scientists reported that mercury in fish was likely nothing to worry about.
They took hair samples from American women and tested for traces of mercury.
But at a year and a half, the women’s babies showed no ill effects.
(Officials with the EPRI did not return calls for comment.)
There is no evidence that the scientists involved in these studies did anything improper.
Their work appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals and no one has suggested it’s invalid.
“There’s been no industry influence on any of the work we’ve done.
“Over an entire population, it can be significant,” Dr. Grandjean says.
Tuna, which commercial haulers gather on the open sea, falls under the purview of the FDA.
And that agency had set a standardfive timesas high as the one the NRC experts were recommending.
Nowhere did it mention tuna, which accounted for one-third of the seafood market.
A draft advisory reportedly did recommend pregnant women eat less tuna.
But this time he went with her; she pointed him toward what he was looking for.
The public was understandably confused by there being one mercury standard from the EPA and another from the FDA.
The FDA asked its Food Advisory Committee to study the issue further.
The committee met in July 2002.
Other members agreed and urged the FDA to include tuna in its mercury advisory.
That state told women to eat no more than one 6-ounce can of light tuna per week.
Almost two years passed before the FDA updated its advisory.
She adds that the process of crafting the FDA advisory was fully transparent.
“The FDA had meetings with industry people, environmental organizations and consumer advocates.
The Seychelles researchers also joined the debate.
In his talk, Davidson stressed how little was known about mercury’s health effects.
In fact, they were much more lenient.
It’s to protect public health,” he says.
As for Aposhian, he resigned from the committee in protest the day the FDA issued its rule.
“I was shocked the FDA did not follow the Wisconsin advisory,” he says.
“It has put the normal development of American children in jeopardy.”
The news about mercury keeps coming, with each contradictory finding seeming to further cloud the picture.
Meanwhile, the tuna industry launched an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at countering the Faroe Islands research.
MercuryFacts.org and FishScam.com deliver the same message; restaurants and food companies fund both websites.
Dr. Grandjean says that “mercury is mercury is mercury.
It doesn’t matter if it comes from whale or tuna.”
They found it does not.
Morel’s research had been aided bysurprisethe U.S. Tuna Foundation.
The power industry has funded almost all of the research into the chemistry of mercury, he adds.
“I’ve yet to see any problems.
People are honest and EPRI realizes it would damage itself by trying to skew the results.”
“In an ideal world?”
“Money tends to add to the confusion when it comes to regulation,” she says.
“The public health message is one of compromise for all parties.
The message she gives patients: Use common sense.
“Poison is not a good thing to eat.”
Photo Credit: Jonathan Kantor
