Minamata disease
a severe neurological disease caused by mercury poisoning, first discovered in the Japanese city of Minamata.
Minamata disease (Japanese: 水俣病, Hepburn: Minamata-byō) is a neurological disease caused by severe mercury poisoning. Symptoms include ataxia, numbness in the hands and feet, general muscle weakness, loss of peripheral vision, and damage to hearing and speech. In extreme cases, insanity, paralysis, coma, and death follow within weeks of the onset of symptoms. A form of the disease in babies, with microcephaly, extensive cerebral damage, and symptoms similar to those seen in cerebral palsy also occurred.
Minamata disease was first discovered in the city of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, in 1956. It was caused by the release of methylmercury in the industrial wastewater from a chemical factory owned by the Chisso Corporation, which continued from 1932 to 1968. It has also been suggested that some of the mercury sulfate in the wastewater was also metabolized to methylmercury by bacteria in the sediment. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated and biomagnified in shellfish and fish in Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea, which, when eaten by the local population, resulted in mercury poisoning. The poisoning and resulting deaths of both humans and animals continued for 36 years, while Chisso and the Kumamoto prefectural government did little to prevent the epidemic. The animal effects were severe enough in cats that they came to be named as having "dancing cat fever."
As of March 2001, 2,265 people had been officially recognized as having Minamata disease and over 10,000 had received financial compensation from Chisso.
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This entry incorporates text from “Minamata disease” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.