Once in the human body, mercury acts as a neurotoxin, interfering with the brain and nervous system.

Exposure to mercury can be particularly hazardous for pregnant women and small children. During the first several years of life, a child’s brain is still developing and rapidly absorbing nutrients. Prenatal and infant mercury exposure can cause mental retardation, cerebral palsy, deafness and blindness. Even in low doses, mercury may affect a child’s development, delaying walking and talking, shortening attention span and causing learning disabilities.

In adults, mercury poisoning can adversely affect fertility and blood pressure regulation and can cause memory loss, tremors, vision loss and numbness of the fingers and toes. A growing body of evidence suggests that exposure to mercury may also lead to heart disease. ( source )

Many health officials also believe the mercury in thimerosal administered to children as part of routine/required childhood vaccinations plays a large role in causing autism and the United States Environmental Protection Agency considers mercury toxic enough to mention it specifically in its Primary Drinking Water Standards.

Sources of Mercury in Our Lives

Although a naturally occuring element, it typically enters the environment as a waste product from industrial processes and poorly run gold mining operations.

The majority of mercury poisoning cases result from people eating fish containing large amounts of mercury and drinking water contaminated with mercury. We have not found evidence of acute mercury poisoning resulting from vaccinations containing thimerosal. Note that we specified ACUTE cases of mercury poisoning.

Other Possible Articles of Interest:

• MCL for Mercury in Drinking Water
• Information About Mercury in the Environment
• Testing for Mercury and Other Metals in Water
• Mercury Found in All Fish Tested in US Freshwater Streams
• Mercury Contamination in Fish
• H1N1 Flu Vaccine Will Contain Mercury

Example 1: Remember when they filled in your lawn with topsoil? Do you know for SURE where that topsoil came from? Did it come from a pristine yard untouched by pollution or did it come from a questionable little quarry on the outskirts of an industrial landfill whose runoff management policies don’t get enforced?

Example 2: How about the runoff from up the street where they work with all sorts of metals and metal finishing products? Has it gone through the appropriate treatment systems before it reached the banks of the little stream where the kids like to play? How about the puddles formed from the runoff flowing downhill from that metalworking facility? What sort of nasty contaminants (i.e. heavy metals like chromium & mercury or possibly even… cyanide?) might one find in those?

If you don’t know the answers to those or any other questions pertaining to whether or not your soil contains lead, take a look at this Lead in Soil test.

This simple, easy-to-use test kit will help to keep your friends and family safe from the potentially lethal effects of inadvertent lead poisoning.

Now on the other hand, should you have concerns about the amount of lead in your drinking water, please refer to our Water Testing Blog entry about the Lead in Water Test Kit.

Should You Test Your Well for Arsenic?

Water coming from a municipal or privately-owned water company with more than 15 service connections or serves 25 people more than 6 months of a year gets tested by the supplier.  Private well owners must make arrangements on their own to get their water tested and although no guaranteed method for assessing accurate risk of arsenic contamination exists because that risk fluctuates with the rise and fall of the underground water table, one can use the research data compiled by the United States Geological Survey to see if ground water in their area has a history of arsenic contamination:

• Maps of Arsenic in Ground Water in the United States

If you want more region-specific arsenic data, contact your local health department

How Can I Get My Well Tested for Arsenic?

1. Contact someone in your local health department or look in the yellow pages for an environmental testing laboratory.  Make sure to ask if the facility you contact has the proper certifications to do drinking water testing.
2. Call the Safe Drinking Water Hotline at 800-426-4791 and ask for a state certification officer that can provide the names of certified facilities in your area.
3. If you wish to do the field testing yourself, take a look at the easy-to-use, field-ready Arsenic Quick Test Kits.

Responsibility for arsenic reduction/removal…

… falls squarely on the shoulders of individual well owners. No local, state or other branch of government will force a private well owner to test their water and/or fix any problems that may exist.

Filters for arsenic reduction/removal?

We believe that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing correctly. Therefore, before you spend money on a water filter for arsenic, make certain you do not have other unwanted drinking water contaminants, as well.

For testing of that nature we suggest contacting an independent (and accredited) water testing lab in your area and/or using a test kit such as the WaterCheck Laboratory Test Kit for Drinking Water which test for 97 different water quality parameters: Bacteria (presence/absence for coliform and E.coli), (19) heavy metals and minerals, (6) other inorganic chemicals, (5) physical characteristics, (4) trihalomethanes, (47) volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), and (20) pesticides, herbicides and PCB’s.