The time for easy hunting is coming to an end. The German Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection has commissioned the Federal Institute of Risk Evaluation to research a possible connection between ammunition containing lead, the meat of wild game and human health. This was reported on April 15, 2009 in the newspaper Tagesspiegel (Daily Mirror).
Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb for plumbum in Latin nomenclature and has the atomic number 82. It is easily shaped and has a relatively low melting point – and is therefore ideal for producing ammunition. The snag is that this heavy metal is poisonous.
Above all, this element has very serious effects on children. For example, it impairs their mental development. And it has also been demonstrated that lead can cause cancer in mammals.
That’s why lead is hardly used anymore as a metal; we fill our cars with lead-free gasoline and have replaced the water pipes in old buildings. Even car wheels can no longer be balanced with lead weights.
But in hunting, lead is still allowed. When an animal is hit, the ammunition breaks up and the lead particles can spread throughout the whole animal. When it is then eaten as wild game, the lead ends up in the body and follows its fateful course there.
But that’s not the only danger. Every year, 120,000 kilograms of lead are spread across the landscape by hunters in Germany alone. The poison seeps into the ground, finally reaching the groundwater.
Just as leaded gasoline was eliminated, so could hunting also be abolished, to limit the amount of poison entering nature, human bodies and the animals.
For more information, call 1 800 846-2691 or go to www.DoNotEatUs.org
Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/diseases-and-conditions-articles/hunting-lead-poisoninga-major-risk-factor-958282.html
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