Decoded Korea

Lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury are the four heavy metals that regulators worry about most — in food, in water, in cosmetics, and in industrial chemicals. They get grouped together in headlines as "toxic heavy metals," as if they were interchangeable. In the regulatory data, they are not. Each is dangerous in its own specific way, and the way a chemical database classifies them shows the difference clearly. We queried the K-REACH database, which holds 47,517 chemical substances registered in Korea, each carrying nine regulatory flags. Searching for the compounds of these four metals returns hundreds of entries, and the pattern of flags tells you something the "toxic heavy metal" label hides: three of the four are dominated by cancer risk, and one is not. The four metals by the numbers Counting the registered compounds of each metal and their flags: Metal Compounds Toxic CMR CMR share Lead 180 159 113 63% Cadmium 107 105 65 61% Arsenic 22 22 17...