Posted on 09/10/2002 9:56:27 AM PDT by Korth
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate voted to ban the sale of mercury fever thermometers in order to curb a source of environmental contamination.
On a voice vote and without dissent, the Senate sent The Mercury Reduction and Disposal Act to the U.S. House of Representatives for concurrence.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates medical mercury thermometers contribute about 17 tons of mercury to solid waste per year, said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and chief sponsor of the measure.
The bill calls for a nationwide ban on the sale of such thermometers as well as a grant program to help consumers exchange them for digital ones or other alternatives.
"Mercury fever thermometers are very easily broken. When this happens, the improper disposal of the mercury can have severe environmental and physical consequences," Collins said.
"One mercury thermometer contains about one gram of mercury," said Collins, "enough mercury to contaminate all the fish in a 20-acre (8 hectare) lake."
Her bill would also create an interagency task force, headed by the EPA, to address the problem of the global circulation of mercury and ways to reduce the mercury threat.
Wow! That's using the WayBack machine. It was a cause of great joy and celebration whenever a thermometer broke during my childhood. We'd take a two sided razor blade (Yikes, at 8 years old to boot!) and chop up the mercury on a hardwood floor and see how many little balls we could make. When we got bored with that we'd scrape them all together and make a big puddle again.
Good thing Mom never noticed the scratches on the wood floor.
I earned my engineering degree in the year 1 B.C. (Before Calculators)
and can only approximate so many decimal places on my slide-rule.
And these dang bifocals even make that difficult anymore. :-(
(Actually, they did come out with handheld calculators my senior year.
But $200 was a heckuva lot of money for most students,
and use was taboo in class or for exams.
The little marvels only did basic arithmetic and trig functions,
but they sure were an improvement over wading through
conversion/trig/logarithm tables in a reference book!)
What I am saying is that if mercury is allowed to seep into water or whatnot and be atomized, it will spread and will find its way into the human blood system.
I have yet to detect Hg in any of the surface or groundwaters I've tested in California, and that includes bodies in gold mining areas. Even methylated, the stuff sequesters in sediments...
Ain't the internet great.
Yep!
Try this one: Allmeasures.com.
Mercury is, of course, a natural element. It is too bad that neither party is Congress seems able to cope with reality, nature or the restraints on arbitrary power that were second nature to those who gave us America.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Sure, the teachers in all the physical science classes let the students play it with to get a feel for the weight and texture. We were just cautioned not to drink it. Darned stuff used to roll off the table onto the floor and was about impossible to pick back up.
Is that why there was zero dissent in the Senate on this vote?
You're not really naive enough to think Senate votes are indicators of the accuracy of "scientific" claims are you?
Don't be silly. Different drops spread over different backyards will have no effect whatever.
Do you also oppose peeing in the woods on environmental grounds? Have you ever BEEN in the woods?
They may not have to, though - most of the major battery manufacturers have stopped adding mercury (along with cadmium and lead) to their alkaline batteries, so there's really only trace amounts in batteries these days.
It's pretty certain the Roman aristocracy went downhill mentally from the combination of inbreeding and the use of lead plumbing and dinnerware.
Maybe. I'm not entirely sure I buy it, since the water carried through Roman pipes was all cold water, and might not have actually absorbed much lead. But maybe it had some effect ;) It's pretty certain the Roman aristocracy went downhill mentally from the combination of inbreeding and the use of lead plumbing and dinnerware.
The only emotionalism I've seen in this thread has been coming from your side of the debate.
Here is more support for your position. It's an interesting discussion of the whole mercury issue. One of its conclusions:
only the ionized fraction of atmospheric mercury, and NOT the elemental form that is contained in thermometers, is capable of entering the a lake's food chain, and that only a fraction of the ionized mercury that disperses into a lake ("perhaps between one and ten percent") would actually end up being converted to the organic form of mercury (e.g., methylmercury) that is further bioaccumulated and ultimately contained in fish.
So do they even sell mercury thermometers anymore?
Yes, but you went to the wrong place to find one. Walgreens is one of several large drug store chains tht has already voluntarily stopped selling them.
Out of curiosity, why do you want to hoard mercury thermometers? They are no more accurate than digital ones, and are less convenient to use.
"Well if i had money Tell you what I'd do I'd go downtown and buy a Mercury or two Crazy bout a Mercury Lord I'm crazy bout a Mercury I'm gonna buy me a Mercury And cruise it up and down the road"
-- Mercury Blues (Robert L Geddins/KC Douglas)
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