Poisons can hide in plain sight, play the long game, doing their work just below your skin, dancing atop your neurons and causing a quiet riot in your brain that, by the time you realize anything is askew, it’s too late.
Speaking of which, I’m late for a tea party.
Today’s Moment of Science… A disease with three names: Mad Hatter’s Disease, the Danbury Shakes, and Minamata Disease.
Mercury has some chemically delightful properties. It’s heavy, at more than thirteen times denser than water, and it’s the only metallic element that’s liquid at room temperature. Loading up old rectal thermometers or a plastic tilt-a-maze alike, it’s fun for the whole family. For today though, we’re focusing on stories about those times mercury fucked up everything.
And hooboy, this element has gone all “I will not be ignored” on our asses a few times.
Hat making was highly in vogue in the 1700s but came at great peril to the hat maker. Also coming at great peril to the hat maker? Sexy times. This was before penicillin and Trojans, and after a particularly unlucky night of getting lucky you could find yourself chugging one of few reliable methods of STD control at the time: motherfucking mercury.
It’s tough to say how much medicinal benefit one could get from mercury even in the most desperate of times for treating syphilis. But, it was the 1700s, your junk was leaking, it was mercury or nothing.
So… what in a badger’s ass does this have to do with hats?
Processing fur off an animal’s hide in modern times involves soaking it in more refined chemicals. But a few hundred years ago, a reliable source of ammonia to soak the material in for this part of the process was 100% all natural piss. It seems the way they figured out that mercury helped make an improved felt?
Mercurial urine from syphilitic hat makers.
(I saw them perform in Brooklyn in ‘98)
The effects of inhaling mercury fumes over the years drove hatters to a well known set of symptoms, including twitching, drooling, verbal difficulties, an introverted personality, difficulties thinking clearly, and loss of some motor control. From hushed beginnings in France in the 1700s to becoming commonplace in England in the early 1800s, mercury was identified as the culprit for all these shenanigans in the 1860s. It slowly fell out of favor in Europe over the next several decades.
Meanwhile, in America…
In Connecticut, mercury poisoning morphed into the Danbury Shakes. In large hat making factories, not only would an individual hat maker be exposed, but the mercury vapors wafted through the factories. City hall’s response was more or less, “it’s only hurting the workers, so what’s the big deal?” To duck scrutiny they tried to blame the workers’ health woes on drugs and alcohol.
It took until the 1940s for the use of mercury to come to an end in Danbury’s hat industry. So now Danbury, Connecticut is known for a sewage treatment plant named after John Oliver and widespread mercury poisoning. Anyway. On this tour de neurotoxin, we really gotta talk about Minamata Disease.
You’re likely aware of the potential for mercury poisoning associated with diets high in certain kinds of fish. Your weekly tuna for lunch is fine as long as you don’t dare put it in the office microwave, you monster. But in Minamata, Japan, people started falling ill. The illness came on suddenly and included a familiar spate of neurological symptoms.
The cats. The goddamn cats in town were going crazy too. Dancing cat fever, it was called.
It seemed possible that this could have been a contagious disease. But patients’ high levels of mercury in their systems provided a clue about an environmental cause. Since fish sourced from the Minamata Bay was a mainstay of the local diet, this was a potential common link. In hair testing in symptomatic locals, levels of mercury were found to be as high as 700 parts per million of mercury.
For comparison, you and I probably have mercury levels of around five ppm.
Levels of mercury in the Minamata bay were at their highest near the Chisso Corporation. Though they’d been using mercury in their production process since 1932, in the early 1950s they added a catalyst that produced a byproduct of highly toxic methylmercury. Six hundred tons of mercury containing waste had been dumped into the water. Minamata Disease and dancing cat fever coincided with the change to the new catalyst, which was then discontinued in 1968.
Over 1,700 people died, reportedly over 10,000 have had toxic health effects, and financial settlements are still being paid out to this day to patients receiving medical care for Minamata Disease.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, wondering what we’re doing catastrophically wrong right now that will be reduced to a fairy tale in hundreds of years. But for now, that tea.
True, that last. Consider the story of professor Karen Wetterhahn, which resulted in major safety changes with dimethylmercury.
At the time of her accident, she was following the gold standard safety practices. Her peers, once her mercury poisoning was diagnosed, tested every safety glove that they could lay their hands on and found that dimethylmercury swiftly passed through latex gloves.
Boy, weren’t the safety regulators faces red after that discovery!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn