Copyright 1971 by the Sierra Club. Library of Congress catalog card number: 71-158337 Designed and produced by Charles Curtis, New York, Foreword Early in 1969, before assuming the editorship of Environment magazine, I worked on the series of articles that would appear in its May issue. This was to be a special issue devoted entirely to the problem of mercury pollution, of which we had learned from Göran Löfroth, the biochemist whose efforts to alert Sweden to the problem are described in this book. No English-language publication had yet dealt with what seemed to be a serious hazard to public health, and I was anxious to bring the contents of the forthcoming issue to the attention of the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. I telephoned a number of officials in the Department of Agriculture, trying to find out to what extent mercury pollution was known and what measures were being taken to combat it. The Department of Agriculture seemed a reasonable place to begin, for I had little idea then of the extent of industrial pollution, and was most concerned about the agricultural use of mercury fungicides. Methyl mercury preparations were then-and are now-used to treat most of the wheat, corn and other grain planted in the United States to protect them from fungus attack. Research indicated very strongly that mer Foreword: Sheldon Novick 7 cury compounds used this way would migrate through growing plants and would be found in the harvested crops. Swedish investigators had uncovered a disturbing pattern of concentrations of methyl mercury, the most toxic form of mercury commonly found, which could be carried from treated seed to growing plants to harvested grain. And if this grain were used to feed chickens, the chickens would excrete the mercury in their eggs, resulting in increased exposure to fanciers of the sunnyside-up. We had quickly discovered that mercury compounds were considered so highly toxic that, despite their common use as insecticides, Department of Agriculture regulations prohibited the presence of any mercury residue on food crops. This is a so-called "zero tolerance," a blanket prohibition usually applied only to compounds suspected of causing cancer. Because research had shown that mercury fungicides, when applied to seeds before planting, appeared in low concentrations in the mature crop, and because mercury seed treatments of grain were almost universal, it seemed likely that essentially all of the grain being grown in the United States, and all of the animals being fed on this grain, and then used for food, were in technical violation of the USDA's regulations. Looking back over my notes from that time, I see that I spoke to Dr. Harry Hayes, then director of the Pesticides Regulation Division of the Department of Agriculture, and a number of officials in the Food and Drug Administration's Bureau of Compliance. None of these officials expressed undue concern about mercury, none told me he believed there was a problem of food contamination aside from occasional accidental spills of mercury compounds, and none seemed to think the |