Minamata disease comes from the ingestion of fish or shellfish contaminated with mercury. Minamata was a small fishing village in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. It is considered a city today, but it has been the scene of some of the most inhumane and environmental destruction in history. It started in the 1930s with a company that had been there since 1907, the Chisso Corporation began manufacturing acetaldehyde, which is used in some plastics. Acetaldehyde (C2H4O or CH3CHO) or ethyl aldehyde is sometimes called MeCHO. Waste from the company's products flowed into the village's fishing bay, whose bacteria transformed the heavy mental into methylmercury and later into the organic form of methylmercury chloride (CH3HgCl). The small village relied heavily on income from fishing, but they did not know that they were being poisoned by mercury in the fishing bay. Meanwhile, the animals began to behave as if they were disorderly drunk, stumbling, then falling into the river and dying. No one really paid attention to it until after the acetaldehyde production boom in the 1950s, when Chisso began to increase production and become the world's largest producer. People noticed that others were starting to lose coordination and were tripping. Others lost their hearing and began shaking uncontrollably. Some symptoms of mercury poison were so severe that people's bodies were contorted and paralyzed in half of their bodies. The situation had become so serious that people started classifying it as an epidemic, but no one still knows the cause of the symptoms. A local fisherman, Sohachi Hamamoto's symptoms included tripping, falling off his boat, and then turning into uncontrolled shaking. When his family took him to ...... middle of paper ...... l Journal of Japanese Sociology. Volume 15 Number 1 p. 7-25. Tsuda, T., Yorifuji, T., Takao, S., Miyai, M., Babazono, A. (2009). Minamata disease: catastrophic poisoning due to failed public health response. Journal of Public Health Policy Vol. 30, 1, 54-67. Hryhorczuk, D., Persky, V., Piorkowski, J., Davis, J., Moomey, C., Krantz, A., Runkle, K., Saxer, T., Baughman, T., McCann, K. ( 2006). Residential mercury spills from gas regulators. Perspectives on Environmental Health, Vol. 114, p. 848-852, No. 6. Stable article URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650987Rennie, AC, McGregor-Schuerman, M., Dale, IM, Robinson, C., McWilliam, R . (1999). Lesson of the week: Mercury poisoning after a spill at home from a sphygmomanometer loaned by the hospital. BMJ: British Medical Journal. Flight. 319, pages 366-367. Stable article URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25185466