Mercury has long been recognised as a neurotoxin element for many decades and with its compounds being extremely toxic, is ranked third in the ‘priority list of hazardous substance’ by the United States comprehensive environmental response, compensation, and liability act. In different samples, mercury can exist as either its inorganic or organic forms and this paper will review the methods for...

Mercury is a ubiquitous environmental toxicant that causes a wide range of adverse health effects in humans. Three forms of mercury exist: elemental, inorganic and organic. Each of them has its own profile of toxicity. The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of thimerosal, a topical antiseptic and preservative in vaccines routinely given to children, methyl mercury, and mercuri...

Mesocosm experiments in an optically transparent lake allow the manipulation of both dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and incident ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in order to study mercury reduction and emission processes. In the absence of UVR and the presence of visible light, mercury emission is very low (approximately0.3 ng/m2/h). When UVR is permitted in the mesocosm chambers, mercury emission i...

Evaluation of mercury exposure in an individual patient ideally includes the presenting history, physical examination, consideration of the differential diagnosis, and mercury analysis of blood and urine specimens. Analysis of mercury in hair specimens may supply useful supplemental information about exposure to organic compounds such as methylmercury, particularly to help reconstruct the patte...

The standard procedure for the determination of chlorine in organic compounds of mercury consists in decomposition of the material, separation of mercury and determination of chlorine as chloride. Decomposition of the sample could be achieved by wet mineralization [1,2], ignition in a stream of oxygen [3—7] or nitrogen [8], ignition in a flask with oxygen [9], etc. [10, 11]. Chlorine and mercur...

This study investigated the role of dissolved organic matter on mercury partitioning between a hydrophobic surface (polyethylene, PE) and a reduced sulfur-rich surface (polysulfide rubber, PSR). Comparative sorption studies employed polyethylene and polyethylene coated with PSR for reactions with DOM-bound mercuric ions. These studies revealed that PSR enhanced the Hg-DOM removal from water whe...

Mercury in the Arctic is an important environmental and human health issue. The reliance of Northern Peoples on traditional foods, such as marine mammals, for subsistence means that they are particularly at risk from mercury exposure. The cycling of mercury in Arctic marine systems is reviewed here, with emphasis placed on the key sources, pathways and processes which regulate mercury levels in...

Mercury contamination is a serious problem in Chinese cities. In the present study, mercury contamination was evaluated in topsoil and subsoil samples collected in an urban area of Beijing. The level of total mercury in topsoil ranged from 12.1 to 8,487 ng g(-1), and a significant correlation (R = 0.58145, p < 0.0001) with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons was observed. Higher levels were genera...

Conditions have been defined that enable the use of nitroprusside as a catalyst for the phenol-hypochiorite reaction when the latter is applied to measurement of nitrogen in Kjeldahl digests containing mercury. This is accomplished by lowering the concentration of mercury to a range where it remains effective in accelerating the destruction of organic matter during digestion but no longer react...

In the last century mercury levels in the global environment have tripled as a result of increased pollution from industrial, occupational, medicinal and domestic uses [1]. Glutathione is known to be the main agent responsible for the excretion of mercury (we refer to [41], [38] and [35]). It has also been shown that mercury inhibits glutathione synthetase (an enzyme acting in the synthesizatio...