Maternal feeding experiences

When extrapolating from animal experiments to the human situation one has to be very careful if the modes of application are different. Teratological experiments in which mercury had been given by the i.p. or i.v. route are, therefore, not comparable to mercury poisoning of the human fetus. Feeding experiments, however, are more suitable and I will only refer to such studies. Childs (1973) has fed tuna fish containing different amounts of methylmercury to pregnant mice and has determined the mercury concentrations in the embryos. He found a positive correlation between maternal uptake and embryonic content of this heavy metal. 

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