Dicing With Death?

[Mintaka]

Curiosity killed the cat.

 

When I was a boy growing up in a small village in Derbyshire in the UK, there was an old lady called Miss Potts, a spinster aged 95.

 

I had a fascination for forbidden places, and we would go 'garden-hopping' through people's gardens, lying flat and dragging ourselves along like caterpillars.

 

She had an old shed, I scraped away the crumbling putty from around the window, removed it and climbed in.

 

On the shelves in the darkness were many strange jars and bottles. I removed one very big jar, it was MUCH heavier than something that size should have been.

 

I opened the lid and inside swirled this globulous magical silvery metal liquid, mercury.

 

I took the jar outside, removed handfuls with my bare hands, took it onto the park and shared my discovery with other curious cats.

 

Each day after school we took the jar onto the park, played with the mercury as if it was plasticine, then replaced the jar in the shed.

 

We ran it through our fingers, poked it with sticks on the concrete, hypnotised by it.

 

These days I wonder, what kind of damage did this do to me?

 

I don't know how many days or weeks we played with it, probably only a few..

 

I was about 9 or 10 years old. I read that children are much more resistant to this kind of poisoning than adults, and no lasting damage was done.

 

But I wonder. I have short-term memory problems, sometimes I forget things I've been told a dozen times in the past week.

 

I guess what goes around comes around. Let this be a warning to you curious kids. Stay out of old ladies' sheds.

 

Old ladies are not these soft harmless creatures you might think they are...in their sheds lurk fatal secrets and lethal dangers.

 

BE CAREFUL.

 

My other question: What in God's name was she doing with a kilo of mercury in her shed ?

[joekgamer]

For your last question, people used to be able (and allowed) to buy buckets of murcury for kids to play with.

 

As long as you didn't have any cuts while you were using it, then you should be fine (unless you coat your hands in it all day or something, of course).

 

And considering that we don't have an entire generation or two of MR patients, then you are probably okay after handeling it for a few hours a day for a few weeks.

 

Unless you boiled it. If so, I'd be surprised you're still alive and able to type that post.

[CraigD]

I don’t think you have cause for worry from you brief encounter with elemental mercury, Mintaka.

 

Elemental mercury isn’t very bio-available, so isn’t especially dangerous or toxic. The main danger posed by a large bead/blob/ball or more of it is exposing it to conditions where it can compound with other elements to produce something bio-available, such as by dropping it in non-sterile body of water, where various wee beasties can work their dangerous alchemy with it, ultimately winding up in something we might want to eat, such as tuna fish. The wikipedia article mercury poisoning has a pretty good summary of the great and slight health hazards of mercury in various forms.

 

One of my favorite childhood (ca. 1970, in southern West Virginia, USA) toys was a kg or two of mercury (I’m estimating, having long lost all record or recollection of any weighing of it) which about half filled the roughly 500 ml plastic drink container I kept it in (A thoughtful choice, as the container had molded-in graduation marks, so I could be sure I hadn’t lost any of its contents). My father, a physician, gifted it to me, after he got it from the cleanup of a broken mercury column sphygmomanometer, one of the big steel-bodied ones on wheels common in hospitals in those days. I was given a good talk about what I must not do with it – primarily lose it, especially anywhere that it could get into soil and ground water (about which I was meticulously careful, never, with a few well-controlled exception, letting it get off a lipped surface), and including eating it (which I did, one time, anyway – it’s a truly interesting experience I’d read too much about to resist), vaporize it (I was always careful to keep and handle it only in well-ventilated rooms), combining it with any sort of solvent chemical (you can make some terribly toxic stuff from mercury and household chemicals as common as methanol and iodine) , get it into anything porous, or, more an esthetic and practical concern than a safety one, get it too dirty, as skimming dust and other debris of liquid mercury is tricky. As a rule, I wore rubber dishwashing gloves to handle it, though I and various friends occasionally handled it bare-handed to experience the unique, weird feel of it.

 

The hazards of exposure to mercury are often exaggerated ridiculously – I recall a recent news story involving an old mercury thermometer being accidentally broken in an elementary school, prompting a multi-day evacuation of the entire multi-story building, a public outcry for medical treatment of all the students, faculty, and staff, and even some discussion of demolishing and replacing the building. Spectacles like this illustrate, I think, public ignorance of both chemistry and history. The case of this news story I found especially appalling, as one would think that an entire school might have at least one scientifically trained person capable of calming such hysteria, but apparently didn’t.

 

As long as you didn't have any cuts while you were using it, then you should be fine (unless you coat your hands in it all day or something, of course).

Interestingly, elemental mercury isn’t terribly toxic even when injected.

 

Due, I imagine, to the popular misconception that it’s a deadly poison, there are occasional attempted suicides by intravenous injection of elemental mercury. Except in cases where the amounts are so great that they result in cardiac or pulmonary embolism, or complications due to the the big hole or even severed vein you have to make to pass a needle large enough to inject mercury, many of these suicides fail, their victim surviving without long term disability. Though most of these cases are written up in medical journals available by subscription only, I found this excerpt from the 2000 Jun 15 New England Journal of Medicine via a quick web search:

A 21-year-old dental assistant attempted suicide by injecting 10 ml (135 g) of elemental mercury (quicksilver) intravenously. She presented to the emergency room with tachypnea, a dry cough, and bloody sputum. While breathing room air, she had a partial pressure of oxygen of 86 mm Hg. A chest radiograph showed that the mercury was distributed in the lungs in a vascular pattern that was more pronounced at the bases. The patient was discharged after one week, with improvement in her pulmonary symptoms. Oral chelation therapy with dimercaprol was given for nine months, until the patient stopped the treatment; the urinary mercury level did not change during this period. At follow-up at 10 months, she was healthy, with none of the renal, gastrointestinal, or neurologic effects that can result from the oxidation of mercury in the blood and consequent exposure of these organ systems. The abnormalities on the chest radiograph were still apparent. Although these abnormalities are striking, the absence of clinical toxicity in this patient illustrates the differences in the acute and chronic effects of exposure to elemental mercury, inorganic mercury (e.g., mercuric chloride), and organic mercury (e.g., dimethylmercury). Inorganic and organic mercury are much more toxic than elemental mercury; for example, a dose of 400 mg of mercury in the form of dimethylmercury is usually lethal.

(from http://brneurosci.org/info/mercury.html, which also has some good practical protocols for cleaning up spilled mercury)

 

135 grams is a lot of any dense liquid to get in your circulatory system and survive! Notice also that the patient was not suffereing from life-threatening poisoning by mercury, but was essentially drowning in it, as it left her blood stream and puddle in her lungs.

 

Unless you boiled it. If so, I'd be surprised you're still alive and able to type that post.

Polymath’s correct that vaporizing mercury greatly increases its ingestion: from the wikipedia article linked above, eating elemental mercury results in ingestion of less than 0.01%, while inhaling its vapor results in about 80% ingestion.

 

However, I think he exaggerates its lethality. While inhaling mercury vapor in any quantity is to be avoided, ultimately doing so results in it entering your blood, where its effect is similar to the attempted suicide case described above. You’d have to do a lot of intentional inhaling to ingest tens of grams of mercury vapor!

 

Still, I’m sticking with my dad’s admonition, and never vaporizing mercury! :)

[Mintaka]

haha Craig your post has cheered me up a lot, thank you. I can't believe that parents were actually giving this stuff to children by the kilogram to play with, it makes me feel so much better that I wasn't the only one. I'm just glad that I didn't heat it like you say, and that it was elemental mercury not organic! ;) Great, now all I have to do is try and find the actual cause of my dementia..:rolleyes:

 

 

 

I don’t think you have cause for worry from you brief encounter with elemental mercury, Mintaka.

 

Elemental mercury isn’t very bio-available, so isn’t especially dangerous or toxic. The main danger posed by a large bead/blob/ball or more of it is exposing it to conditions where it can compound with other elements to produce something bio-available, such as by dropping it in non-sterile body of water, where various wee beasties can work their dangerous alchemy with it, ultimately winding up in something we might want to eat, such as tuna fish. The wikipedia article mercury poisoning has a pretty good summary of the great and slight health hazards of mercury in various forms.

 

One of my favorite childhood (ca. 1970, in southern West Virginia, USA) toys was a kg or two of mercury (I’m estimating, having long lost all record or recollection of any weighing of it) which about half filled the roughly 500 ml plastic drink container I kept it in (A thoughtful choice, as the container had molded-in graduation marks, so I could be sure I hadn’t lost any of its contents). My father, a physician, gifted it to me, after he got it from the cleanup of a broken mercury column sphygmomanometer, one of the big steel-bodied ones on wheels common in hospitals in those days. I was given a good talk about what I must not do with it – primarily lose it, especially anywhere that it could get into soil and ground water (about which I was meticulously careful, never, with a few well-controlled exception, letting it get off a lipped surface), and including eating it (which I did, one time, anyway – it’s a truly interesting experience I’d read too much about to resist), vaporize it (I was always careful to keep and handle it only in well-ventilated rooms), combining it with any sort of solvent chemical (you can make some terribly toxic stuff from mercury and household chemicals as common as methanol and iodine) , get it into anything porous, or, more an esthetic and practical concern than a safety one, get it too dirty, as skimming dust and other debris of liquid mercury is tricky. As a rule, I wore rubber dishwashing gloves to handle it, though I and various friends occasionally handled it bare-handed to experience the unique, weird feel of it.

 

The hazards of exposure to mercury are often exaggerated ridiculously – I recall a recent news story involving an old mercury thermometer being accidentally broken in an elementary school, prompting a multi-day evacuation of the entire multi-story building, a public outcry for medical treatment of all the students, faculty, and staff, and even some discussion of demolishing and replacing the building. Spectacles like this illustrate, I think, public ignorance of both chemistry and history. The case of this news story I found especially appalling, as one would think that an entire school might have at least one scientifically trained person capable of calming such hysteria, but apparently didn’t.

 

 

Interestingly, elemental mercury isn’t terribly toxic even when injected.

 

Due, I imagine, to the popular misconception that it’s a deadly poison, there are occasional attempted suicides by intravenous injection of elemental mercury. Except in cases where the amounts are so great that they result in cardiac or pulmonary embolism, or complications due to the the big hole or even severed vein you have to make to pass a needle large enough to inject mercury, many of these suicides fail, their victim surviving without long term disability. Though most of these cases are written up in medical journals available by subscription only, I found this excerpt from the 2000 Jun 15 New England Journal of Medicine via a quick web search:

A 21-year-old dental assistant attempted suicide by injecting 10 ml (135 g) of elemental mercury (quicksilver) intravenously. She presented to the emergency room with tachypnea, a dry cough, and bloody sputum. While breathing room air, she had a partial pressure of oxygen of 86 mm Hg. A chest radiograph showed that the mercury was distributed in the lungs in a vascular pattern that was more pronounced at the bases. The patient was discharged after one week, with improvement in her pulmonary symptoms. Oral chelation therapy with dimercaprol was given for nine months, until the patient stopped the treatment; the urinary mercury level did not change during this period. At follow-up at 10 months, she was healthy, with none of the renal, gastrointestinal, or neurologic effects that can result from the oxidation of mercury in the blood and consequent exposure of these organ systems. The abnormalities on the chest radiograph were still apparent. Although these abnormalities are striking, the absence of clinical toxicity in this patient illustrates the differences in the acute and chronic effects of exposure to elemental mercury, inorganic mercury (e.g., mercuric chloride), and organic mercury (e.g., dimethylmercury). Inorganic and organic mercury are much more toxic than elemental mercury; for example, a dose of 400 mg of mercury in the form of dimethylmercury is usually lethal.

(from http://brneurosci.or...fo/mercury.html, which also has some good practical protocols for cleaning up spilled mercury)

 

135 grams is a lot of any dense liquid to get in your circulatory system and survive! Notice also that the patient was not suffereing from life-threatening poisoning by mercury, but was essentially drowning in it, as it left her blood stream and puddle in her lungs.

 

 

Polymath’s correct that vaporizing mercury greatly increases its ingestion: from the wikipedia article linked above, eating elemental mercury results in ingestion of less than 0.01%, while inhaling its vapor results in about 80% ingestion.

 

However, I think he exaggerates its lethality. While inhaling mercury vapor in any quantity is to be avoided, ultimately doing so results in it entering your blood, where its effect is similar to the attempted suicide case described above. You’d have to do a lot of intentional inhaling to ingest tens of grams of mercury vapor!

 

Still, I’m sticking with my dad’s admonition, and never vaporizing mercury! :)

[Moontanman]

CraigD, i am from Southern WV too, we also played with mercury, a man i knew had at a gallon of it in one of those old square glass milk jugs, the thing was so heavy it was like it was glued to the floor. he would dump out hands full of it to play with. I am not quite mad as a hatter today so i assume all the time we spent playing with it, years of playing with the stuff, wasn't all that harmful...