Cats went mad, birds fell from the sky, and a disease caused by poisoned seafood devastated an entire Japanese coastal community

Image(s): Left/Taner Yildirim/Right/Aileen M. Smith/European Environment Agency For decades, the quiet fishing city of Minamata on Japan's southern coast appeared to be thriving. Families depended on the sea for food and livelihoods, unaware that an invisible poison was steadily moving through the marine ecosystem. The first signs did not appear in people but in animals. Cats began behaving erratically before collapsing into the sea, birds fell from the sky, and fish floated lifelessly in the bay. Soon afterwards, residents developed mysterious neurological illnesses that doctors struggled to explain. The condition, later named Minamata disease, was eventually traced to methylmercury poisoning caused by industrial wastewater. It would claim lives, permanently disable thousands of people and become one of the defining environmental health disasters of the twentieth century, fundamentally changing pollution control laws around the world.Decades of industrial mercury pollution transformed Minamata Bay into a deadly source of food contaminationThe origins of Minamata disease can be traced to 1932, when the Chisso Corporation began releasing industrial wastewater containing mercury comp...