Mercury in Human Tissue

Mercury has been known to be highly toxic for a very long time. To-day, though industrial exposure is relatively controlled, there are still many reports of poisoning by mercury. In general these are due to thoughtlessness or carelessness rather than mismanagement or ignorance. Most trained personnel have been told repeatedly that mercury has a significant vapour pressure at room temperature (0.001 mm at 18°C) and much higher when exposed to slightly higher temperatures (0.27 mm at 100°C) and is, therefore, a health hazard. The following work describes a few incidents caused by the misuse of mercury and illustrates just how insidious a health hazard it can be. In dealing with problems of forensic science or public health where the level of trace elements in tissue is important, one of the basic requirements is a set of normal concentrations. These are often not available or expressed as less than the limit of detection or varying widely from source to source. Using the technique of activation analysis it is possible easily to analyse a range of normal tissue samples as required. This was done for the mercury investigations, and the results are given below for over twenty tissues.