Product Description
One morning in 2000, Dr. Jane Hightower walked into her exam room to find a patient with disturbing symptoms she couldn’t explain. The woman was nauseated, tired, and had difficulty concentrating, but a litany of tests revealed no apparent cause. She was not alone. Dr. Hightower saw numerous patients with similar, inexplicable ailments, and eventually learned that there were many more around the nation and the world. They had little in common—except a healthy appetite for certain fish. Dr. Hightower’s quest for answers led her to mercury, a poison that has been plaguing victims for centuries and is now showing up in seafood. But this “explanation” opened a Pandora’s Box of thornier questions. Why did some fish from supermarkets and restaurants contain such high levels of a powerful poison? Why did the FDA base its recommendations for “safe” mercury consumption on data supplied by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist extremists? And why wasn’t the government warning its citizens? In Diagnosis: Mercury, Dr. Hightower retraces her investigation into the modern prevalence of mercury poisoning, revealing how political calculations, dubious studies, and industry lobbyists endanger our health. While mercury is a naturally occurring element, she learns there’s much that is unnatural about this poison’s prevalence in our seafood. Mercury is pumped into the air by coal-fired power plants and settles in our rivers and oceans, and has been dumped into our waterways by industry. It accumulates in the fish we eat, and ultimately in our own bodies. Yet government agencies and lawmakers have been slow to regulate pollution or even alert consumers. Why? The trail of evidence leads to Canada, Japan, Iraq, and various U.S. institutions, and as Dr. Hightower puts the pieces together, she discovers questionable connections between ostensibly objective researchers and industries that fear regulation and bad press. Her tenacious inquiry sheds light on a system in which, too often, money trumps good science and responsible government. Exposing a threat that few recognize but that touches many, Diagnosis: Mercury should be required reading for everyone who cares about their health.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 3 reviews)

Leadership is thrust upon her. by R. Diaz (Westford, Massachusetts United States)

4 Stars
August 16, 2009
I am a heavy metal poisoning researcher and I found this book a must read! Everybody won't feel like I do but that's only because the status of your health is good. When you start to have minor, unexplained signs, signals and symptoms, this should be the first book that you pickup. Basically, this is an unplanned, unexpected and surprisingly fruitful adventure that Dr. Hightower was forced onto. This book is the story of Dr. Hightower bumping into life and life lead the way for her since she stumbled upon mercury and an influence on any affliction, condition and illness. Dr. Hightower runs into some very interesting and intriguing sources of information that add, substantially, to her education. Her adventure takes her from the Spanish arrival onto this continent, to the international politics of Iraq and Japan. These are very strange places for an M.D. to be looking into . . . but that's life as she found it. What she has learned in the past 10 years will effect the rest of her career. There is essentially no happy ending to this book because there is no end to money, politics or poison. The final paragraph sums up the frustrations of seeking the truth in a world that doesn't want to give up accurate information when it interferes with the accumulation of money, power and hegemony. I suspect that when Dr. Jane Hightower's history is written, she will be mentioned in the same footnote as Dr. Alice Hamilton. Dr. Hightower is to mercury as Dr. Hamilton was to lead.

Hightower's bombshell by ATG (East Coast)

5 Stars
October 15, 2008
How would most people feel knowing that (spoiler alert): -the most influential studies of two of the most horrendous mass mercury poisonings in history-- the Minimata fish poisoning and the Iraqi grain poisoning-- were funded by the fishing industry and EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute. And that EPRI is the world's largest lobbying organization for coal-fired power, itself the greatest source of mercury pollution? -Canada had its own "Minimata" mercury poisoning epidemic that killed and maimed countless Ojibway Indians in the 1970's and that the Dow chemical corporation and the fishing industry controlled the outcome of human studies and censored independent researcher's access to effected individuals? -Saddam Hussein may have, in a direct way, controlled the data which formed the basis of the FDA's "NOEL" (No Observable Effect Level) standards for "safe" blood levels of mercury in humans in the wake of the Iraqi grain incident? All this while Hussein may have deliberately arranged for the bulk of tainted grain to be sent to areas of the country populated by perceived opponents of the Ba'athist regime. -most of the industry-hired researchers from the above tragedies were also the authors of the Seychelle Child Development study which initially reported no evidence of harm from extremely high blood levels of mercury in children and which has influenced FDA standards for allowable levels of mercury for human exposure? And that the Seychelle Island study was industry's answer to the previous Faroe Island study which, conversely, found considerable evidence of mercury's harm to infants and children from high fish consumption? -most of the aforementioned industry-hired researchers hailed from the University of Rochester, which took its funding from EPRI, the fishing industry and other financially concerned entities and which itself produced two of the studies upon which the pharmaceutical companies, CDC, FDA and Congress forged a judicially influential "majority science" conception of the effects in mercury exposure in infants via vaccines? Most Americans should read this book. Except those who like tremors, premature cardiac death, seizures and brain damage.

Disappointing by Ian

1 Stars
October 09, 2008
I've heard all about mercury on the news -- mercury in dental fillings, mercury in fish, mercury in light bulbs, mercury in high school chemistry labs. So I bought this book thinking it would be an intriguing read that might help me put it all into context. But what I got was a self-absorbed fairy tale of one person's gripes against Big Industry. Frankly, that isn't exactly a new genre. There's not much intrigue in this book. (The author writes as much about herself as anything else.) Most of what you'll find is paranoia about what we eat and a lot of complicated science. Entire sections were unreadable. I was hoping, at least, to hear about the FDA conspiring with Saddam Hussein to promote some faulty data about mercury in fish, mercury in lightbulbs, or mercury in lightbulbs shaped like fish. But frankly that seemed more like something tacked on to help sell the book. Overall, it felt about twice as long as it actually is and by the end I was just hoping to get it over with and move on to something better.

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