Ferrocyanide compounds enter the environment as anti-caking additives to road salts. In illuminated aquatic environments, the salts dissociate and form toxic free cyanide, which can then be lost through volatilization. The most common techniques for analysis of cyanide in environmental samples measure total and free (generally weak-acid dissociable, WAD) cyanide species. Cyanide has been detect...

There are thousands of areas in the U.S.A. and Europe contaminated with cyanide-containing wastes as a consequence of a large number of industrial activities such as gold mining, steel and aluminium manufacturing, electroplating and nitrile pesticides used in agriculture. Chemical treatments to remove cyanide are expensive and generate other toxic products. By contrast, cyanide biodegradation c...

Web publication: 23 March 2006 Abstract The contribution of smoke inhalation to cyanide-attributed morbidity and mortality arguably surpasses all other sources· of acute cyanide poisoning. Research establishes that cyanide exposure is: (1) to be expected in those exposed to smoke in closed-space fires; (2) cyanide poisoning is an important cause of incapacitation and death in smoke-inhalation v...

In patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) and non-CF bronchiectasis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most important respiratory pathogen. It is able to synthesise hydrogen cyanide, a potent inhibitor of cellular respiration. The present study investigated whether cyanide is present in the sputum of CF and non-CF bronchiectasis patients infected with P. aeruginosa, and whether the detection of cyanide...

Concentrations of free cyanide and total cyanide in water samples in Bogoso and its surrounding areas in Ghana have been measured in this study. Concentrations of free cyanide and total cyanide were found to be above the maximum permissible discharge limit of effluent from mining companies into natural waters set by Environmental Protection Agency, Ghana (GEPA). A comparison of the results obta...

Although sodium nitroprusside (SNP) is often used in pediatric intensive care units, cyanide toxicity can occur after SNP treatment. To treat SNP-induced cyanide poisoning, antidotes such as amyl nitrite, sodium nitrite, sodium thiosulfate, and hydroxycobalamin should be administered immediately after diagnosis. Here, we report the first case of a very young infant whose SNP-induced cyanide poi...

Increasingly, there are severe environmental controls in the mining industry. Because of lack of technological advances, waste management practices are severely limited. Most of the wastes in the milling industrial effluents are known to contain cyanides and it is recognized that after extraction and recovery of precious metals, substantial amounts of cyanide are delivered to tailings ponds. Th...

A new sensitive spectrophotometric method has recently been developed for the trace determination of cyanide with ninhydrin. Cyanide ion was supposed to act as a specific base catalyst. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates that the reported assay is based on a novel reaction of cyanide with 2,2-dihydroxy-1,3-indanedione, which affords purple or blue colored salts of 2-cyano-1,2,3-trihydroxy-2H...

The toxicity, physiologic effects, and antidotes are the points emphasized in the existing literature on the cyanides; Giacosa and Baumann alone have been interested in their fate in the body. Reports are unanimous that the aliphatic cyanides split off hydrocyanic acid, and that toxicity is directly proportional to the rate at which this splitting occurs, while an increase in the excretion of t...

A microdiffusion technique has been used to separate and concentrate the nanomole amounts of cyanide in whole blood, and to permit its simplified colorimetric estimation (1). With this technique cyanide was measured in whole blood from normal smokers, normal nonsmokers, and patients suffering from tobacco amblyopia. Cyanide was also measured in whole blood from vitamin B12-deficient and normall...