news-record.com: Mercury may lurk in your antiques
Filed under: Earth 911 - August 6, 2007
By Lex Alexander, Staff Writer
MONDAY, AUG. 6, 2007
GREENSBORO — Could your antiques poison you?
Possibly, if they contain mercury, a heavy metal that’s liquid at room temperature and linked to damage in several of the body’s organ systems. Some antique lamps and mirrors — and particularly barometers — contain the element.
The state will soon finish creating new guidelines on the handling of mercury, said state toxicologist Dr. Luanne Williams.
“We’ve learned a lot in the process, and we’ve seen that it takes very little mercury to have an elevated level in the home or school,” she said.
The acceptable level for homes or schools is 1 microgram per cubic meter of air, she said. Poisoning symptoms can appear at 23 micrograms per cubic meter of air. For that reason, a tablespoon is considered a large spill.
Mercury wasn’t always considered so dangerous. Its most common use in what are now considered antiques was in barometers. Those instruments, by measuring the weight of the atmosphere, could help sailors and fishermen forecast the weather and help geographers measure the height of mountains.
For that reason, barometers became highly sought-after. Researchers built and tried to perfect barometers for more than 200 years. Guilford County’s namesake, Francis North, Lord Guilford, helped make this research more common.
It is not clear how widespread the problem of mercury in antiques is, but the most durable or best-cared-for 19th-century barometers adorn mantlepieces even now.
And that can be a problem, said Anne Carlson of Greensboro’s Carlson Antiques. She said she used to import barometers from England but no longer does so.
She could recall one case years ago in which a mercury tube in a barometer broke. “We just buried (the mercury) somewhere,” she said. As knowledge has grown about the toxic effects of mercury, health officials have urged more caution in how mercury is handled, Williams said.
That’s because a small amount of mercury can split into many smaller droplets and can be cleaned up only with difficulty, Williams said. She cited one instance in a church in which parishioners walked through mercury in the church and tracked it into their cars, further spreading the mercury into car seats and carpets.
“Everything had to be removed — the carpet; the seats had to be taken out,” she said. “It was very expensive.”
Contact Lex Alexander at 373-7088 or lalexander@news-record.com
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WANT TO GET RID OF MERCURY?
If you want to dispose of an antique or other object that you suspect contains mercury, follow these steps:
- Double-bag the item.
- Place the bagged item in a box and seal the box.
- Call your local hazardous waste authority for additional instructions. In Guilford County, that number is 373-2196.
- Outside Guilford County, visit http://earth911.org and type “mercury” and your ZIP code into the search function for lists of facilities in your area that will accept household hazardous waste.
For additional information, call (919) 707-5900
Source: State toxicologist Dr. Luanne Williams
SYMPTOMS OF MERCURY POISONING
The acceptable level of mercury in homes and schools is 1 microgram per cubic liter of air. A leak of greater than a tablespoon is considered a large volume. At 23 micrograms per cubic liter, symptoms problems can develop within hours in someone’s nervous system, gastrointestinal tract or lungs.
In the digestive tract, those symptoms might include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
In the lungs, a person might develop shortness of breath, cough or chest tightness.
Nervous-system symptoms include headache, tremors, weakness and chills.
Longer-term exposure can lead to more severe effects in the nervous system that affect mood, such as irritability, shyness, aggressiveness and depression. Chronic exposure also can cause kidney failure. Hatmakers used mercury for more than 200 years in their work, from which comes the phrase “mad as a hatter.”
Source: State toxicologist Dr. Luanne Williams; http://www.seagrant.uconn.edu/HATTER.HTML