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E-book Mercury Pollution in Minamata

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Penilaian

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In July 2012, I was employed as a program-specific professor to implement the “Connectivity of Hills, Humans and Oceans Educational Program” which was opened to all graduate students of Kyoto University. In 2010 when I worked at the National Research Institute of Aquaculture, I visited the Minamata Disease Municipal Museum in south Kyushu. There, I learned details and personal accounts of a disease that is commonly called “Minamata disease.” This disease is defined as methylmercury poisoning which occurred among people living along Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea (Yatsushiro Sea) in southwestern Kyushu (hereafter called “MPM” as an acronym), Japan, who ate local fish and shellfish contaminated with methylmercury discharged from a private company (Minamata Disease Study Group 1966). At that time, I was terribly shocked by the misery caused by the dis-ease that made many residents suffer. I also knew that many doctors and researchers worked hard to care for the patients as well as to clarify the cause of this disease; however, some people involved with this incident hindered rather than helped to resolve this human and ecological tragedy. This experience moved me to add the lecture regarding this disease among seven lectures in my class “Environmental Conservation of Coastal Waters” in the educational program in Kyoto University from 2013. I considered that this incident was an inevitable consequence of Japan’s rapid economic growth after World War II and that similar phenomena are a likely consequence of rapid economic development. This class was conducted in English in order to ensure ease of information and communication about this unfortunate incident for international students, mainly from developing countries. The class was concluded in January 2017 due to my retirement.I met Dr. Hajime Nishimura who is an author of a book (Nishimura and Okamoto 2001) to which I had referred to in my lecture to explain the mechanism about how MPM occurred, at an academic meeting which was held on December 18, 2016. We agreed that it is important to ensure that young people all over the world need to have accurate information of this disease, considering that the disease occurred again in Niigata, Japan (Masano 2013), as well as in Ontario, Canada (Takaoka et al. 2014), and in China (Harada 1985). He strongly recommended to me to pub-lish a book about MPM in English. There are many books and papers which describe this disease; however, most of such publications have been written in Japanese (e.g., Ui 1968; Harada 1972, 1985; Miyazawa 1996; Takamine 2016). Therefore, I wrote this book in English in the form of a lecture to notify young people throughout the world about the outline of the disease as well as the reasons why this disease occurred so that this tragedy is not repeated again.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

546.6 YOK m

Penerbit

Switzerland : Springer Nature., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

74 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789811073922

Klasifikasi

546.6

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Groups 8, 1B, 2B, 3A, 4A, 12

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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