Isn’t one major problem with mercury the risk of hideous birth defects if an embryo is exposed within the first few weeks after conception? Since women typically don’t know that they are pregnant that early on–including very young women in high school chemistry classes–I thought the precautions around mercury were as severe as they are because while it might be unlikely that anyone exposed is pregnant, it certainly is not impossible, and the consequenses are potentially so very dire. If this is incorrect, I’d love to know!
Ya’ll know that there’s a lot of room between “One drop will kill you instantly” and “Completely harmless and probably good for you”, don’t you?
Mercury, like most toxic things, falls in between those two.
There’s also a difference between ‘naturally occurring’ and ‘no reason to control’ (Fires are naturally occuring, but fire departments and fuses are still a good idea, right?)
Elemental mercury is not hugely toxic for healthy adults. It takes fairly large doses to have effects in adults (though it will eventually. Hatmakers in the 18th and 19th century who used mercury in the felting process were known for their occupational disease of tremors and other neurological symptoms. There’s some evidence that’s where the phrase "mad as a hatter’ came from).
However mercury is particularly dangerous to developing brains – fetuses and babies. Even very small amounts can cause damage, from mild retardation to serious problems. In fact, a lot of freshwater and saltwater fish have enough mercury in them to be of concern for pregnant women and babies.
Like most people said, skin contact with liquid mercury is not a big deal, but vapors are a much better route of exposure, as is environmental mercury in fish.
As has been pointed out, mercury is an element and cannot be destroyed, so it sticks around. That means even small amounts are a concern, cause they’re not going away.
So mercury spills should be cleaned up because a) we don’t want to breathe it and b) we don’t want the spill going down the storm drain and winding up in fish.
So if you break a mercury thermometer should you immediately write out a will and bid farewell to your loved ones? No.
Should you clean it up and dispose of it properly as hazardous waste? Yes. That means if you’re in a hospital or other facility, call whatever hazmat team you have. If you’re at home, sweep it all into a plastic bag (then double bag it), open windows to get good ventilation for a while, and then get rid of it at your town’s next hazardous waste collection day.
Or of course, you could insist on being macho and drinking it to show how tough you are. :rolleyes:
After smoking a couple packs and saying ‘Ahh… I been smoking my whole life and it ain’t killed me yet’, that is.
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- Pure liquid mercury is not very toxic, even to children, even when ingested as long as it is fairly small amounts and doesn’t happen regularly. Poison control centers will tell you that it will simply pass through the digestive tract, with very little absorption. A hospital will not, for example, operate to remove it–they’ll simply tell you to make sure your kid doesn’t eat mercury any more.
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- What is dangerous is some particular mercury compounds, because these break down in the digestive tract and release large amounts of mercury that is in forms that are readily absorbed into the body. Eating a few paint chips with a small percentage of mercury can give you FAR more dosage than eating several times that amount of pure liquid mercury, because the pure liquid mercury is fairly innert in that form, in the digestive tract. It’s rare, but breathing mercury-paint dust while sanding can have the same result. So feel free to play with wild abandon–just keep your mercury clean, and in your hand or the jar.
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Supposedly, the mercury compond cinnibar was a common red pigment in Newton’s day…his bedroom was painted with it. Could he have gotten lethal dose from cinnibar?
Newton was also an avid alchemist, and mercury has always been a favourite element in that crowd.
(Supposedly his hair was analysed recently, and did indeed contain abnormal quantities of Hg.)
It would be very heavy.
The person was Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor at Dartmouth. She died about ten months after the exposure. See Denison University | A top liberal arts college located in Ohio for some press clippings on the incident.
That stuff is incredibly dangerous. It goes right through latex gloves and your skin.
Mercury exposure over LONG periods of time at HIGH concentration causes mental deterioration. The mad hatter in “Alice in Wonderland” was reported (not by me) to be an example of such clinical presentation.
MAD AS A HATTER
[Q] From A Hansen: “Can you enlighten me about the origins of mad as a hatter?”
[A] These days we associate mad as a hatter with a bit of whimsy in Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book Alice in Wonderland of 1865. Carroll didn’t invent the phrase, though. By the time he wrote the book it was already well known; the first example I can find is from a work by Thomas Chandler Haliburton (Judge Haliburton), of Nova Scotia, who was well-known in the 1830s for his comic writings about the character Sam Slick; in The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville of 1836, he wrote: “Father he larfed out like any thing; I thought he would never stop—and sister Sall got right up and walked out of the room, as mad as a hatter”. As the author felt no need to explain it, by then it was clearly well known in his part of North America. Whether it was invented there, I don’t know, but it seems likely. An early British reference is in Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray, serialised between 1848-50: “We were talking about it at mess, yesterday, and chaffing Derby Oaks—until he was as mad as a hatter”.
Note, by the way, that mad is being used in both these cases in the sense of being angry rather than insane, so these examples better fit the sense of phrases like mad as a wet hen, mad as a hornet, mad as a cut snake, mad as a meat axe, and other wonderful similes, of which the first two are American and the last two from Australia or New Zealand. But Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, used it in the same way that Lewis Carroll was later to do: “He’s a very good fellow, but as mad as a hatter”.
Few people who use the phrase today realise that there’s a story of human suffering behind it; the term actually derives from an early industrial occupational disease. Felt hats were once very popular in North America and Europe; an example is the top hat. The best sorts were made from beaver fur, but cheaper ones used furs such as rabbit instead.
A complicated set of processes was needed to turn the fur into a finished hat. With the cheaper sorts of fur, an early step was to brush a solution of a mercury compound—usually mercurous nitrate—on to the fur to roughen the fibres and make them mat more easily, a process called carroting because it made the fur turn orange. Beaver fur had natural serrated edges that made this unnecessary, one reason why it was preferred, but the cost and scarcity of beaver meant that other furs had to be used.
Whatever the source of the fur, the fibres were then shaved off the skin and turned into felt; this was later immersed in a boiling acid solution to thicken and harden it. Finishing processes included steaming the hat to shape and ironing it. In all these steps, hatters working in poorly ventilated workshops would breathe in the mercury compounds and accumulate the metal in their bodies.
We now know that mercury is a cumulative poison that causes kidney and brain damage. Physical symptoms include trembling (known at the time as hatter’s shakes), loosening of teeth, loss of co-ordination, and slurred speech; mental ones include irritability, loss of memory, depression, anxiety, and other personality changes. This was called mad hatter syndrome.
It’s been a very long time since mercury was used in making hats, and now all that remains is a relic phrase that links to a nasty period in manufacturing history. But mad hatter syndrome remains common as a description of the symptoms of mercury poisoning.
Courtesy of World Wide Words © Michael Quinion