Cat with Minamata disease, University of California, Los Angeles
Minamata’s Fight for Justice:
How Japan’s Failed Debate and Response Sparked
Local and Global Change
Discovery of Minamata Disease
As an unknown illness afflicted residents in the early 1950s, strange activity was observed in cats that consumed fish from the bay. In April 1956, a girl was admitted to Chisso’s hospital for her inability to talk, walk, speak. On May 1, hospital director Hajime Hosokawa reported the disease to the Minamata Public Health Center.
"A girl aged 5 years and 11 months. She has had pyrexia for only a day in late March, 1956. Whenever she had meals thereafter, she was awkward at holding chopsticks and the foods dropped…She was admitted to the hospital on April 23. Difficulty of moving of extremities was being increased…On May 28, the patient became blind, the frequency of systemic convulsions gradually increased, she had no response to any stimuli, and she had flexion and remarkable deformity of the extremities.”
~Dr. Hajime Hosokawa's records, 1956, National Institute for Minamata Disease
Conclusions
Main symptoms: spastic motor paralysis, ataxia, disturbance of speech. Other serious symptoms: impairment of sight and hearing, difficulty in swallowing, tremors, insanity.
No sensory disturbance was found.
No general symptoms such as fever.
Concentration of patients in a given family or area.
After-effects in all cases.
Most cases were discovered in the coastal region.
~Dr. Hosokawa's First Report to the Kumamoto Prefecture Ministry of Health and Welfare, 1956, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease
By December, 54 patients were confirmed; 17 of them were dead.
“It was a nightmare. I hate being reminded of that time. Satsuki was unrecognizable when she died…They sent her to the Isolation Hospital in Shirahama…Satsuki went blind and deaf. She could neither speak, nor swallow the food they gave her…The whole village was in turmoil. Our well, garden and house, even the jars of miso and pickled radish, and the pots and pans in the kitchen had to be thoroughly disinfected by order of the Public Health Department.”
~Yamanaka Chio, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease
Minamata disease patient Tamano Murano has a seizure at Minamata City Hospital, 1960, Blind Magazine