Minamata disease results from the ingestion of fish or shellfish contaminated with mercury. Minamata was a small fishing village in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. It is now considered a city, but it has been the scene of the most inhumane and environmental destruction in history. It all started in the 1930s with a company that had been there since 1907, Chisso Corporation, began producing acetaldehyde, which is used in some plastics. Acetaldehyde (C2H4O or CH3CHO) or ethyl aldehyde is sometimes referred to as MeCHO. Waste from the company's products flows into the village's fishing bay, bacteria transform the heavy mental material into methylmercury and then into the organic form of methylmercury chloride (CH3HgCl). The small village relied heavily on income from fishing, but they did not know that they would be poisoned by mercury in the fishing bay. During that time the animals began to behave as if they were drunk and uncoordinated, stumbling and then falling into the river and dying. Nobody really paid attention to this, until after the acetaldehyde production boom in the 1950s, when Chisso began to increase production, eventually becoming the world's largest producer. People noticed that others had started to lose coordination and were stumbling. Others lost their hearing and began having uncontrollable tremors. Some symptoms of mercury poison were so severe that people had twisted bodies and were paralyzed in half of their bodies. The situation had become so serious that people began to classify it as an epidemic, but still no one knows the cause of the symptoms. The symptoms of Sohachi Hamamoto, a local fisherman, appeared as if he stumbled, fell from the boat, and then progressed to uncontrolled tremors. When his family took him to… half of the paper… the Journal of Japanese Sociology. Volume15 Number 1 page. 7-25.Tsuda, T., Yorifuji, T., Takao, S., Miyai, M., Babazono, A. (2009). Minamata Disease: Catastrophic poisoning due to a lack of 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 leaks from gas regulators. Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 114, page 848-852, n. 6. Stable Article URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650987Rennie, A.C., McGregor-Schuerman, M., Dale, I.M., Robinson, C., McWilliam, R (1999). Lesson of the week: Mercury poisoning after a blood pressure monitor borrowed from the hospital leaked into the house. BMJ: British medical journal. vol. 319, pp.366-367. Stable article URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25185466