Many of the sites Akagi has visited in South America, Africa and Asia are small gold mines, as cavalier with mercury today as Akagi's hometown was in the 1940s. Right now, this is the world's largest source of mercury pollution. If you mix mercury with gold-rich sediment, the two metals form an amalgam, and you can then cook off the mercury as vapour. It's all very convenient for miners ignorant of the risks or resigned to living with hazards. Some 10 to 15 million people are involved in this enterprise, about a third of them women and children, spread over 70 countries. But that mercury then gets into soil and rivers, is converted to methylmercury, and builds up in fish and fish eaters.
read more... https://phys.org/news/2017-09-waterlife-mercury-poisoning.html
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