By Dr. S. Allen Counter, Globe Correspondent, 12/16/2003

Earlier this year, I was asked by the editor of an international biomedical journal to write a review article on the effects of mercury exposure on children, an area in which I have conducted scientific studies for the past seven years. I was surprised by the results.

Mexico and Nigeria and the border states of California, Texas and Arizona all show extremely high rates of mercury poisoning.

In clinics in Arizona, for example, doctors had observed more than 300 patients who had toxic levels of mercury in their urine. I found medical reports of similarly high levels of mercury poisoning among patients in Saudi Arabia, Senegal, West Africa, and in Tanzania in East Africa. Even among newly arrived Bosnian and Albanian refugees in Germany, doctors have found patients with toxic levels of this same type of mercury.

One of my first clues to unraveling this mystery turned out to be basic geography: Most of the reported mercury-poisoning cases were found in nations in the lower latitudes.

The second clue: In Mexico, as in other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, most of the patients with clinical evidence of mercury poisoning were women. Even in the Southwestern Unites States, 96 percent of the more than 300 patients found to have abnormal mercury levels were female.

In every case, clinical questioning revealed that the women had used skin-whitening creams — many for years. In other words, these women had tried so desperately to whiten their skin color that they had poisoned their bodies by applying mercury-based “beauty creams.”

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