Most people with mercury in their bodies get it from eating contaminated seafood, and, even in small amounts, it can harm the brains of unborn children.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the horrors of mercury poisoning in Japan and elsewhere shocked the world into curbing releases of the toxic metal. Since then, mercury pollution from human activities, like burning coal and mining, has declined in many parts of the world. But when a team of French researchers analyzed thousands of tuna samples from 1971 to 2022, they found that mercury levels in the fish remained virtually unchanged. That’s most likely because “legacy” mercury that has accumulated deep i