How Poisonous is Mercury?

[Hunter]

How poisonous is mercury? I'm finding conflicting information online.

 

Mercury is the most poisonous element that is not radioactive? It's in our fillings, though, right?

 

According to a vintage science book it's tasteless and inodorous and the children are encouraged to taste it and smell it. That is obviously not a good idea, but how poisonous is it?

[hornblower]

oh those lovely vintage (& wrong LOL) books ;)

I played with it as a child.

I also broke mercury thermometers by accident and just cleaned it up with a cloth & threw it all out. OK, I admit, I played with the mercury a bit first.... (this was ~ 30 yrs ago)

Ingested elemental mercury won't usually poison you - it just passes through.

Inhaling mercury vapours is far far worse as I understand it because it can get into your blood stream.

Also this is one of those things that builds up. As with so many other things, the dose makes the poison.

 

[Rosie_0801]

My mother's childhood dentist used to drill holes in her teeth so he could charge for filling them. She certainly has all the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

[cintinative]

It's very poisonous in that once it hits the ambient air it starts to become a gas and you breathe it in. In terms of "dose makes the poison", a small dose does the job. Stay away from it.

 

Have you ever heard the expression, "mad as a hatter"?  It is because they used to use mercury in the manufacturing of felt used to line hats.

[creekland]

I'm of the generation who played with it as a child.  At school we loved when we got to play with it in science classes.  We were never encouraged to taste it however, nor did we think of doing that ourselves.

 

Now, if a mercury thermometer breaks it's a huge deal for cleanup - definitely no vacuum cleaner!  Fortunately, most of the thermometers at school no longer use mercury.

 

I'll admit I miss not being able to play with it once or twice per year.  It was rather fun seeing the liquid metal and how it worked.

 

I suspect one needs larger doses to get poisoned by it - akin to those hatters who used it regularly.

[Hunter]

I don't think the book was "wrong". It didn't say mercury wasn't poisonous or that it was harmless. It said it was tasteless and inodorous. Unfortunately it did include an object lesson that modern scientists think is unsafe on some level.

 

I know that not too long ago, I heard on the news that doctors were told to advise women to abstain from tuna fish, as their babies were more likely to be born with brain damage if they ate it. The study produced surprising results of more brain damaged babies, not less, for women who didn't eat tuna. The thinking was that poor women didn't have a nutritious enough substitute for the tuna, and that malnutrition is worse than mild exposure to mercury. But who knows.

 

Thank you everyone for sharing what you know about mercury. I appreciate the wide spectrum of responses. I can always count on the hive to provide both varied and knowledgeable responses, which really is rare elsewhere online. Thanks!

[Dicentra]

Fillings are a mercury amalgam - different properties than elemental mercury.

 

Elemental mercury is toxic because, as all heavy metals can do, it builds up in the body over time - the body doesn't excrete it.  Long-term exposure to mercury is what caused the hatters to be mad. :)

[Jean in Newcastle]

http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=246

[Reefgazer]

Mercury in its pure form is not going to hurt anyone; it's quite nonreactive.  In its oxidized/methylated form it's very bad news.  So the vintage books are both wrong and right.

[redsquirrel]

I have a friend who attended a prestigious and competitive school. One of her friends at college was almost killed by a classmate. He saw her friend as competition and he broke a couple mercury thermometers on the heat register in the study room. When the heat came on it turned the mercury to vapour. She ended up in the hospital and was very ill for a long time.

[Hunter]

Thank you all. This really helps!

 

It's all very interesting.

[Hunter]

I have a friend who attended a prestigious and competitive school. One of her friends at college was almost killed by a classmate. He saw her friend as competition and he broke a couple mercury thermometers on the heat register in the study room. When the heat came on it turned the mercury to vapour. She ended up in the hospital and was very ill for a long time.

 

This is really sad!

[MiMi 4under3]

Back in the day, my mom would leave me home alone at age 7 or 8. I'd purposely break a glass thermometer so I could play with the little, slippery, silver, balls. I could never pick them up! They'd just disappear. 

 

Then, when I got tired of the mercury, I'd light some matches and burn little pieces of paper...  :lol:

[SparklyUnicorn]

oh those lovely vintage (& wrong LOL) books ;)

 

I played with it as a child.

 

I also broke mercury thermometers by accident and just cleaned it up with a cloth & threw it all out. OK, I admit, I played with the mercury a bit first.... (this was ~ 30 yrs ago)

 

Ingested elemental mercury won't usually poison you - it just passes through.

 

Inhaling mercury vapours is far far worse as I understand it because it can get into your blood stream.

 

Also this is one of those things that builds up. As with so many other things, the dose makes the poison.

 

 

 

I've heard other people say this. 

 

In my area the huge problem is lead (lot of old houses).  I just wonder how people back then managed not to drop dead early (not suggesting the stuff is harmless though). 

 

I keep wondering, what will be the thing I'm using now that in the future people will warn it kills a person quickly. 

[tammyw]

I won't even allow CFL bulbs in my house because cleaning up a broken one sounds horrifying (and who hasn't ever broken a light bulb). http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl

 

Mercury just plain scares me.

[SparklyUnicorn]

I won't even allow CFL bulbs in my house because cleaning up a broken one sounds horrifying (and who hasn't ever broken a light bulb). http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl

 

Mercury just plain scares me.

 

Ugh..had to clean up one of those.  I did and tried not to think too hard about it.

 

I hate those bulbs for so many reasons.  That's another thread though.

[Catherine]

My son and I are reading an interesting book called The Elements of Murder and it has a long section about mercury, its salts, and their use throughout history as poisons. Mercury chloride gas is highly toxic, but elemental mercury is not harmless, because it sublimates over time into the air and can be ingested or inhaled that way, and it is poisonous, but gram for gram much less so that mercury chloride.

[Melissa in Australia]

My FIL tells me that a good way to knock someone off is to put a dish of mercury under their bed, and the vapors will slowly kill them. :ohmy:

[creekland]

http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=246

 

That was a very interesting article - thanks for linking it!  I'll admit that if we were back in our homeschooling days, I'd get a mercury thermometer to let my kids experience mercury.  It was quite fun at the time - and memorable - and not life threatening.  I'll admit we eat tuna on occasion too plus I have some of those old style fillings - and a fairly recent blood test showed my mercury levels are well below a bad range.

 

Now I'll know to be super careful if we ever break a CFL bulb though...

 

 

 

Back in the day, my mom would leave me home alone at age 7 or 8. I'd purposely break a glass thermometer so I could play with the little, slippery, silver, balls. I could never pick them up! They'd just disappear. 

 

Then, when I got tired of the mercury, I'd light some matches and burn little pieces of paper...  :lol:

 

When I was in kindergarten I always got home about an hour before my mom did.  They ended up making the rule that I HAD to go outside to play once I changed my clothes (unless it was raining).  I kinda got into a little bit of mischief more than once.  I never thought about breaking a thermometer though - you beat me on that one.  I might have tried burning things more than once... ;)  I always thought I had cleaned stuff up well.  It never occurred to me at the time that they could smell it when they walked in!

[kiana]

When I was in kindergarten I always got home about an hour before my mom did.  They ended up making the rule that I HAD to go outside to play once I changed my clothes (unless it was raining).  I kinda got into a little bit of mischief more than once.  I never thought about breaking a thermometer though - you beat me on that one.  I might have tried burning things more than once... ;)  I always thought I had cleaned stuff up well.  It never occurred to me at the time that they could smell it when they walked in!

 

We used to read books in the attic by candlelight. My mother tried and tried but we kept stealing candles to play with them.

 

She finally resorted to posting a picture of a burn victim on the refrigerator to remind us to be careful.

[Hunter]

I knew nothing about the lightbulbs. Management replaces our lightbulbs, so most of the time I don't touch them, but I do have a lamp and have no idea whether I have broken a bulb, or just thrown a bulb in the trash and let it break in the trash. I have no idea. Good to know I need to be more careful and aware.

 

Microwaving plastic and styrofoam is going to be talked about in the future I think.

[Jean in Newcastle]

"Normal" light bulbs are ok.  It's the curly CFL ones that are the problem.  We had a fluorescent light bulb explode once and the shrapnel went two rooms beyond the initial "bomb site"!  Fortunately no one was hurt.  I didn't realize that the time about mercury and vacuumed it all up.  When someone told me that was wrong, I did some retroactive research and found that just one light bulb wasn't so dangerous.  But I will still take care of any breakage using a wet mop method in the future.  Or better yet, hopefully won't have any more breakage!

 

Doctors did a mercury detox on me once in an effort to try and get to the bottom of some of my chronic problems.  I had i.v. medicine that binds to metals in the body then you are able to pee it out.  They did a test to show levels of mercury in my pee before the procedure (almost none) and then a test to show levels of mercury after the medicine (a lot of mercury in there).  It is a procedure that is very hard on your body though and not one I will pursue in the future.  (And it didn't really make any difference in my health.)

[redsquirrel]

And the danger of a CFL lightbulb is pretty small. We have a box in the basement where we put spent lightbulbs and batteries and every couple of years we run it to the dump. The dump has a special collections area and takes stuff like that, along with old paint, used computers, motor oil and other hazardous waste.

 

http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl

 

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-compact-fluorescent-lightbulbs-dangerous/

[dirty ethel rackham]

 

In my area the huge problem is lead (lot of old houses).  I just wonder how people back then managed not to drop dead early (not suggesting the stuff is harmless though). 

 

 

Lead from lead-based paint (and leaded gasoline) doesn't necessarily kill you, but that doesn't mean it is harmless.  Lead causes brain damage.  As houses get older, the lead-based paint starts to flake and crumble, which is where the exposure comes from.  We live in an older house.  The told us that the worst thing we could do was to scrape old paint.  Keeping it encapsulated in another paint layer keeps it locked away.  Now remodeling is where you can get more exposure. 

 

[Hunter]

Lead from lead-based paint (and leaded gasoline) doesn't necessarily kill you, but that doesn't mean it is harmless.  Lead causes brain damage.  As houses get older, the lead-based paint starts to flake and crumble, which is where the exposure comes from.  We live in an older house.  The told us that the worst thing we could do was to scrape old paint.  Keeping it encapsulated in another paint layer keeps it locked away.  Now remodeling is where you can get more exposure. 

 

 

And in the windows, if powder deposits on the sills, when the windows are opened and closed. We think that is where my son got poisoned way back in the late 80's. He used to rest his chin on the sills to look outside. And even would drop his pacifier on the sill and put it back in his mouth.

 

The landlord removed lead paint for a living. He was a friend, and I believed him when the said the apartment was lead free. It turns out the paint was so high in lead, they think the painter had added lead to it.

[Space station]

My dh loves to tell the story of when he was hired as a teen one summer by the town he grew up in.  Their job one day was to put up signs near the creek bed that read, "Mercury contaminated soil - No digging."  After digging holes all day long for the posts, his friend looked at him and said, "Wait, do they mean THIS soil?"  Yep, no protective gear, nada.  The national lab had "LOST", literally (and I mean this) TONS of Mercury which were later found in the creek beds.  Of course, this was Oak Ridge, TN where cars were routinely scanned to see if the tires were radioactive from running over frogs from the nuclear waste ponds, so no one even blinked at a little Mercury exposure.   :eek:

[MistyMountain]

There is much less mercury in a light bulb then was in the old thermometers. I don't really worry about it plus it is hard to break the part where the mercury is. More mercury is released from the manufacturing of incandescent bulbs.

 

Lead actually was in the environment a lot in the past when we had unleaded gasoline. Clair Patterson found out that we were adding lead to the environment through our actions and proved it but it took 20 years for people to listen because the gas industry didn't want to admit it and did everything to discredit his work. I heard of people who were killed from lead poisoning.

[tammyw]

We've just switched completely to LED lights and very happy with them (they are expensive initially but you'll really never have to replace them).

[Jean in Newcastle]

We do not have local recycling and I have never seen a dump day advertised. Well, I don't know the term but one of those collection dates where they will take things like paint, batteries, lightbulbs, etc. So for me I'm less inclined nowadays to get the mercury bulbs due to proper disposal. I hadn't given too much thought about them breaking in the home. Yikes!!

Home Depot takes some CFL bulbs for recycling.  

[Space station]

Anyplace that sells CFLs is required to accept them for recycling, at least in my state.

[Hunter]

I ate dinner with a friend that nuked the hades out of a cheap plastic container to heat up some leftover vegetables. Ugh! I was thinking I might have been better off tasting mercury than eating those vegetables. I ate them anyways. Life in dangerous, and that is just the way it is.

[tammyw]

I ate dinner with a friend that nuked the hades out of a cheap plastic container to heat up some leftover vegetables. Ugh! I was thinking I might have been better off tasting mercury than eating those vegetables. I ate them anyways. Life in dangerous, and that is just the way it is.

I felt that way a few years back when a friend was giving microwave popcorn to my kids, lol. I found a way to get her to start using the Whirley pop :)

[Stellalarella]

I believe that as Lewis and Clark traveled west, they ingested a mercury medicine.  Their route can be traced by their mercury...deposits.  

 

http://lewis-clark.org/content/content-article.asp?ArticleID=2564

 

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-07-03/news/0507030260_1_lewis-and-clark-meriwether-lewis-campsite

 

bizarre factoid for the day...