On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 7:49 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
At 01:39 PM 11/18/2017, Eugene Salamin wrote:
While metallic mercury is a fairly benign poison, the organometallic dimethylmercury is extremely nasty.
Lack of awareness that it can penetrate latex gloves has led to a very tragic, slow death, well documented on the internet.
Slow death indeed!
When we were kids 65 years ago, we played with metallic mercury all the time. We used it to coat pennies (which used to be real copper or sometimes steel), and generally enjoy its weird properties. In addition to thermometers, you could also obtain mercury from *mercury* light switches, which were extremely *quiet*, and also *extremely reliable*. My mercury poisoning doesn't seem to have progressed very far in the last six decades...
Eugene was talking about dimethyl mercury poisoning, not metallic mercury poisoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com