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The process of risk management for environmental contaminants
involves the integration of environmental and biomedical data with social,
economic, and political information to decide how to reduce or eliminate
potential human health risks. It would be valuable to develop a set of
links and partnerships between organisations and individuals across Europe
to promote the exchange of ideas, information and technology on complex
environmental problems, to better understand them and to inform environmental
operators, politicians and individual citizens.
The EMECAP project joins this vision and, taking into account technical,
environmental and biomedical issues, provides individuals and regulatory
bodies with a new tool to face the problem of mercury pollution.
The problem of mercury
The toxicity of mercury on humans is well known and
widely recognized because of its effects on the central nervous system
and on organs like kidney and liver. In particular, the effects of high
doses of elemental mercury and methilmercury are well known, since many
scientific studies have been carried out on mercury mine workers and on
regular consumers of contaminated fishes. Anyway less known are the effects
that mercury causes on humans for long exposures to low concentrations.
Mercury Cell Chlor-Alkali plant
The Mercury Cell Chlor-Alkali (MCCA) sector constitutes
one of most important anthropogenic metallic mercury source (about 15%
of the global). At present MCCA plants are all over the world with 100
operating units in Asia, 63 in Europe, 45 in America, and 17 in Africa.
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