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medpundit |
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Monday, September 15, 2003I wrote (or quoted): "...Three months before presentation, our patient had dismantled the sphygmomanometer in his bedroom spilling mercury on his bed and carpet and had played with it for a day or two before informing his mother. Attempts had been made to dispose of the mercury by vacuuming, and then by flushing it down the toilet." To which came this response: The child received the (agreeably tragic) overexposure not from a small amount in the carpet, but from PLAYING with the mercury and spilling it on his bed. This is typical of the knee-jerk overreaction that I find idiotic. I don't think a mercury sphygmomnometer belongs in a child's bedroom, but this doesn't mean that we should abolish them from doctors' offices, yet the fear freaks want to abolish them entirely. Just because a child got a high exposure from days of playing with mercury, does not mean that small amounts embedded in a school carpet are bad, (unless the students are allowed to crawl around and sleep on the carpets. We've gone from being able to detect parts per million to parts per billion in contamination. People who can't comprehend "the dose makes the poison" want us to now "clean things up" by that increased factor of 1000 just because we can now measure it. My own law is Frank's law of 10-squared: Removing the next decade of contamination, (going from 99% pure to 99.9% pure for example,) typically costs 10 times more, but only achieves 1/10th the reduction in dose, so the cost per unit effect goes up by a factor of 100. This very quickly renders any extreme cleanup actions financially and socially irresponsible. And on tourist fatigue: I was in the tourist business (I owned a "trinket shop") for 17 years. It wasn't as though I was working in Disneyland, but once I counted the number of people entering my shop on a relatively unbusy day, and darned if there weren't some 1,000 people came through that! But here is the really interesting thing: by the end of the season (and ours only runs for some 5 months), I suffered from an exhaustion that is really difficult to describe, but definitely exists. I think of it as a kind of blankness in the middle of my frontal lobe. Anyway, my theory is thus: we human beings, for most of our history, have lived our lives among a small unchanging number of people. We are not built to meet - and be welcoming and friendly with - huge numbers of strangers. Thus, in any place with lots of tourists, the locals may start out welcoming these "visitors", but there always comes a time when they resent and even hate the tourists. (I remember here a worried observation by an Israeli, on a 'why do they hate us' riff, talking about how Israeli tourists are disliked even in Nepal.) Now, because I am betting that this reaction (and it is universal) to tourists is physiological, I would really like to see a study looking into this. Such a study could be financed by tourism associations, and even governments whose countries depend upon tourism. UPDATE: Yet another opinion on mercury molecules and carpet: I don't want to belabor the mercury discussion, but I'd like to point out why the hazards are not exaggerated. I do appreciate that "the dose makes the poison", however with mercury the absorbed dose depends on the surface area, which is HIGHLY variable. That means you can't check a contamination problem by measuring vapor concentration. If you get a low reading, it could be a few milligrams of microscopic droplets that will harmlessly evaporate in the next few weeks. Or it could be a big blob, waiting to be turned into micro-droplets with several square meters of surface area. That unpredictability is why industrial hygienists get all twitchy when they hear "mercury" and "carpet" in the same sentence. One aspect of this variability is that financial risk is almost unlimited. Consider an ignorant janitor who drops a box of mercury sphygmomanometers in storage, "cleans up" the mercury with a vacuum cleaner, then proceeds to use that vacuum cleaner all over the building for weeks. At least several people will get sick; the entire building will have to be shut down for an extended period, the flooring gutted, and furniture replaced; and employee and visitor homes, vehicles, clothing, and furniture checked and decontaminated. Direct cleanup costs for disasters of this type start at $50,000, and the sky's the limit for non-economic damages. That scenario is neither exaggerated nor theoretical: things like that happen all the time at sites where mercury is used. The following document lists some typical mercury scenarios that actually happened. You can find many more in the industrial hygiene literature. The stuff is truly insidious. posted by Sydney on 9/15/2003 06:41:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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