Posted on 08/10/2005 5:26:23 AM PDT by dennisw
What did you replace them with? Some super holistic dentists try to vacuum up that vapor and put you on supplements to purge the mercury from your bloodstream that inevitability enters from the removal of amalgams
That has been established already. To say that a single drop of MERCURY on the hand can be fatal is wrong. She didn't say a single drop of DIMETHYL MERCURY in the opening paragraphs. They certainly are not the same. Not many of us played with dimethyl mercury as kids. If we had, we wouldn't be here.
The author simply declined to mention the FORM of mercury. Yes, anyone can handle little balls of metallic mercury without harm (at least in the short term -- too many of them in a room will present a volatilization hazard, especially if they are small and thus have a high surface area-to-volume ratio). But I think what the author was referring to was dimethyl mecury which was spilled on a professor's laboratory gloves, as was reported in a news release (below) from the late 1990's. It took 10 months to kill the victim,
A news release that was circulated:
Exposure to Mercury Kills Dartmouth Professor
ANOVER, N.H. -- A Dartmouth College chemistry professor has died from exposure to a rare form of mercury, first synthesized more than 130 years ago.
Karen E. Wetterhahn, 48, who also had served as an associate dean and a dean at the college, died on Sunday, about 10 months after accidentally spilling a few drops of dimethylmercury on her disposable latex gloves while
performing a laboratory experiment. The substance, which has no practical application, is used in research on heavy metals.
Professor John S. Winn, chairman of the college's chemistry department, said Professor Wetterhahn was an internationally recognized leader in the study of how heavy metals can initiate cancer at the molecular level.
Dimethylmercury is so rare that it is only in use in perhaps 100 laboratories worldwide at any given time, he said.
Through a search of medical literature, the college determined that exposure to the substance killed two laboratory assistants in 1865, shortly after it was first synthesized, and a 28-year-old chemist in 1971.
"Karen Wetterhahn's death is a tragedy for her family and for the Dartmouth community-- the students, colleagues and friends who have come to love her generosity of spirit, to rely on her talents and to respect her ground-breaking work, "said Dartmouth's president, James O. Freedman.
After years of studying chromium metal toxicity, Professor Wetterhahn had turned to the study of mercury in a sabbatical at Harvard University in September 1995, Winn said.
In the experiment at Dartmouth last August, she had used dimethylmercury to set up a standard against which to measure other mercury involved in her research.
The drops apparently spilled onto her gloves, passed quickly through the latex and were absorbed through her skin. After her illness was diagnosed in late January, the college had the latex gloves independently tested, and
it was determined that the mercury could pass through in 15 seconds or much less.
Although she washed her hands after the accident, Professor Winn said, "I just don't think she had any idea of the peril she was in when the spill occurred."
Other types of gloves offer more protection, but she probably used latex to increase dexterity during the delicate procedure, he said.
In a letter to Chemical and Engineering News about the accident, Winn and two other college officials recommended that heavier gloves be used during such experiments, and that "medical surveillance measuring mercury
concentrations in whole blood or urine" should be considered during extended use of these compounds.
Wetterhahn's symptoms, which initially included difficulty with balance, speech, vision and hearing, progressed rapidly and she was in a coma from late February until her death. Although treatments were administered to
eliminate the mercury in her system, they began too late to prevent irreversible damage to the nervous system, Winn said.
Well, if fillings are fatal I'm doomed. My mouth is silver from the fangs back. I have Irish teeth.
["A single drop on a human hand can be irreversibly fatal."
Bull... I use to play with it all the time when I was a kid, never even got sick let alone died...obviously...]
I plaide wit it to as a kid, an it dint effect me one bit.
I could not find a doctor in my insurance network who knew how to treat this but was fortunate enough to find an M.D. with additional certification in alternative medicine who was able to treat me, albeit at my expense
Seriously, I have an old Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic camera (35m) which still works like a charm BUT can only use a Mercury Battery (for the light meter). I have 'heck' of a time find them. Fortunately, I found one little mom and pop camera shop that has them - and they're 'hidden' under the counter.
Buying Heroin or an UZI is easier than finding a Mercury camera battery.
When I was a kid, several times I put mercury in a pan on the stove and heated it until it boiled away. I probably absorbed a good amount of vapor.
I am pushing 60 and have no unusual health issues.
It is not the vapor alone that is deadly, again, it is the amount.
This proves beyond the shadow of a doubt, that ignorance truly is bliss.
As a child, my class mates and I often held palms full of mercury and played with it for days, coating coins and making them appear mint contition and just rolling the shiny little droplets around in our hands.
We all owe our lives to being blissfully ignorant.
Or just another "publish or perish" piece of work……or someone looking for 'grant money'.
Also remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? Mercury was once used to treat felt. Hatters (hat makers) would chew the felt to help reshape it, thus exposing themselves to the mercury...
usually plastic
Would you explain the difference for us and tell us how to avoid contact with the lethal Mercury?
So the cat is right! She won't eat the albacore, only chunk light tuna....if it's packed in water with salt.
Metallic mercury is the silver liquid found in older thermometers.
Here's info on methyl mercury:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury
You would have a hard time getting exposed to a fatal amount of it unless you worked in a lab that used it. Don't worry about it.
Not any more. But they used to.
The kind of mercury that can kill with a single drop of exposure is dimethylmercury...it is a man made mercury used in labs, not the kind used in thermometers.
Here's a link to a story about a scientist who died after exposure to dimethylmercury...she was exposed even though she had on latex gloves, and she died some time later from the exposure.
http://www.mercuryexposure.org/index.php?article_id=17
Po' folks screwed agin I reckon, they jus' can't afford that chunk lite tuna.
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