Another Reason To Ban Mercury

Microbiomes and Environmental Health

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Microbiomes_and_Environmental_Health?topic=49473
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Many people worldwide are already regularly exposed to inorganic mercury during gold-mining operations.20
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Summers says bacterial exposure to metals such as mercury can contribute to antimicrobial resistance because many transferrable plasmids carry genes for multiple types resistance. In other words, in the process of developing metal resistance, a bacterium may also become resistant to an antibiotic it hasn’t even encountered. This is important because the result of our collective microbiomes’ gene transfers may not always be as good for us as they are for our microbiomes, says Les Dethlefsen, a staff scientist at Stanford University. As Silbergeld puts it: “We may exist at the pleasure of the microbes.”
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David Skurnik, who is affiliated with the Université Paris-Diderot and Harvard Medical School.31 The study involved two groups: French subjects consisting of pig farmers and bank insurance workers, and French Guyanan subjects consisting of city-dwelling French expatriates and members of the indigenous Wayampi tribe living in an isolated area. The Wayampi were heavily exposed to mercury used in artisanal gold mining, whereas all the other subjects lived in environments with low levels of mercury.

The researchers reported finding mercury-resistant Escherichia coli significantly more frequently in the pig farmers than in the bank insurance workers; the farmers also had higher carriage rates of antibiotic-resistant E. coli. In parallel, the scientists found the Wayampi participants had greater numbers of antibiotic-resistant E. coli than the expatriates, even though the tribe members used fewer antibiotics.31
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From a regulatory perspective, Rita Schoeny, senior science advisor for the EPA Office of Water, says revelations at the April NAS conference about the potential role of the microbiomes in disease risk raise many questions. For instance, EPA regulations for arsenic, and to some extent for mercury, are based on what scientists understand to be “a lovely progression of reduction and methylation with more reduction and methylation”—none of which, she says, considers microbial metabolism. Schoeny says the EPA Office of Water regulates microbes as something to be avoided, particularly in drinking water, under the assumption that the “only good bug is a nonexistent bug”; the microbiome is currently not on the agency’s radar in terms of policy making.
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http://www.eoearth.org/article/Microbiomes_and_Environmental_Health?topic=49473</