Research
There has never been, to our knowledge, any state or federal funding for research on Mercritis. It would be wrong to cast aspersions on the sensitivity of Capital Hill, however, as less than 1 in 500,000,000 observable deaths have been attributed to Mercritis. Still, a disease that results in great suffering should be studied. Even without funding, the cause has been advanced somewhat by articles, thesis papers and the occasional documentary.

Over the last 200 years the Mercritis community has narrowed the cause of Mercritis Condition (MC) down to environmental factors, in particular toxins from certain types of paint. Oral exposure to vast quantities of oil based and lead rich paint is at least one known MC culprit.

Each case study has yielded, definitively, a victim who either worked in the paint trade or who was observed eating or drinking paint. Paints that could possibly result in MC were outlawed for myriad health and environmental issues in the mid-70s in America. However, they remain on the shelf in parts of South America, Africa, the Philippines and China where restrictions have yet to be created and pushes by environmental groups have not been felt.

Modern Day Cases Modern cases in America seem to revolve around painted structures that have weathered 30 to 70 years and have not been repainted or cleaned to fit modern codes. Areas of the Southwest United States and Southern states, particularly Arkansas, remain hotspots. Shed structures are arguably the least cared for structure on rural properties. The "shed boom" in the 90's in which low cost Chinese vinyl and processed tin structures flooded the market has had no appreciable impact on MC as most properties still contain the caved in and collapsed structures of the original MC sheds.

Tri Quimby of the State of Arkansas Civil Codes Division cited a defiant rural attitude about properly hauling away the debris. "You can't tell country folks what to take off their land," Quimby said, "it ain't a country club or a gated community. It's real folks and they'll do as they do."

In a private 1984 survey by Carmichael McVetty of the Houston Institute of Internal Medicine he took his graduate class on a box car ride from North Texas through Oklahoma and Arkansas counting possible structures in homes and trailer parks along 400 miles of track.

It is alarming that the amount of structures in 1984 was that high. Sheila Dohicky's graduate paper deduced what many in the MC community had been thinking, "that the incident of Mercritis compared to innumerable potential MC sites is so low that it would be a failure of logic to assume that the amount of ingested paint required to induce MC could be low or even moderate."

The amount of paint MC victims ingest has to be high if not self-destructively high. Leslie North of the Centers for Disease America (CDA) added, "that if you want Mercritis you have to work at it, I mean compulsively work at it. It isn't a skin contact health issue, it is an ingestion issue and the quantities, we think, have to be up there. Compound this with the fact that nearly 100% of the potential MC candidates die from a vast array of serious health issues associated with eating paint and you have a condition that can rarely manifest itself." Concurrent with Ms North's view, most Mercritis victims have been found through autopsy to be right on the razor's edge of dieing from a multitude of organ failures. "

If they even get to MIR (Mercritis Induced Rage), they are way past lucky," Ms. North said. "Paint kills, it is intensely dangerous to ingest paint and even the odd anomaly of Mercritis doesn't change the fact that, one way or another, paint will bring you down like a comet."

Mercritis sufferers, it is suggested, under-report the amount of paint they have ingested. The compulsion to self-destruct, present in the pre-MC patient is rapidly replaced with the gut survival instinct as a result of being physically attacked and/or harmed by others. Mart9045SkyriderX@earthlink posted to the Mercritis Boards, "I felt like a fool so, I clammed up with the doctor. Shoot, I mean, what do you say, when you eat that much. I'm in seclusion, I have real bad health problems, I feel alienated and you know, it's like one of those things in life, you just plain wanna take it back, dial back the hours, remove your self from the situation. And now I'm dieing of a broken heart." A net friend emailed us in 1997 to say he had died of renal failure.

Nearly all cases observed have been observed post mortem. "As a result it has been no less than a challenge to determine the actual number." Says Dr. Penny Wall of Pensacola State Medical School. In her doctoral thesis Dr. Wall states, "That Mercritis is essentially compounded by murder, suicide or fatality due to injury caused by accidents during the flight of the victim (i.e. stumbling into a fast moving river to avoid capture, SEE Legends of the Colorado River, BBC, 1982 volume XXXVIII), the number of Mercritis victims is believed to be vastly under-reported and unobserved by medical professionals."