[lula]

Oh for heaven's sake. We all survived amalgam fillings, glass thermometers. How did we manage when they broke and mercury scattered into tiny beads to be swept up. It's a good thing we now know it will poison us. Soon half of us will be dead anyway with or without the mercury. Besides how many light bulbs do you have to ingest to cause damage? Geesh!

[EBH]

It’s the vapor, not the beads that cause the problem. If it is immediately and properly cleaned up...most people will have no adverse reaction.

[ThePatrioticArtist]

I agree! (I guess I was typing when you were replying! :) )

[ontap]

Agreed...florescent lights have been around a long time. I’ve cleaned up after hundreds if not thousands!!!

[Flash Bazbeaux]

“How did we manage when they broke and mercury scattered into tiny beads to be swept up.(?).

We played with it. It made such cool little balls, and if you put in on a piece of paper it went skittering around all over the place. Kids today are deprived of the wholesome good fun of playing with things like liquid mercury, so they play with things like satanically-inspired video games, which is one of the reasons they grow up to be maladjusted homicidal maniacs.

[rellimpank]

--you understand--one of the small delights of my childhood was playing with mercury when a thermometer was broken-

-it happened at a one-room school in Wisconsin--we rolled the mercury around in our hands, then somebody lucky enough to have pennies made them look "silver" temporarily---

[Mjaye]

As kids, we loved broken thermometers, and would take the tiny beads and rub them into nickels to make them shiny. Who knows what evil lurks that my docs haven’t discovered as yet.

OTOH, I hate the flourescent bulbs I had to put in my kitchen when we remodeled, can’t dim them, don’t like the light, etc. And I can’t put anything else in that I know of since they have a slotted base, I think, rather than being interchangeable with a screw in bulb. Don’t like them at all.

[Vor Lady]

During the 1930s it was found that workers exposure to radium by handling luminescent paints caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia and bone cancer. This use of radium was stopped soon afterward. This is because radium is treated as calcium by the body, and deposited in the bones, where radioactivity degrades marrow, and can mutate bone cells. The litigation and ultimate deaths of five "Radium Girl" employees who had used radium-based luminous paints on the dials of watches and clocks had a significant impact on the formulation of occupational disease labor law.

What this article didn't mention is that these ladies thought painting their teeth and lips with the paint was cool and fun. There was a pictoral article with the photos they did, but I can't find it. Just because we played with mercury in school, doesn't mean it didn't/hasn't hurt us. We all die, but we can choose not to participate in things that will give us a painful death.