If you use a mercury thermometer, you're putting yourself and your family in contact with one of the most toxic substances around. Claire O'Connellreports
Would you keep a glass vial of neurotoxin in your bathroom cabinet? Look closer because there may be one lurking - in the form of a mercury thermometer.
Glass thermometers remain a hot spot for mercury exposure in the home and should be banned from sale in pharmacies, according to Michael McKeon of the Irish Doctors' Environmental Association.
He has also found that many healthcare professionals are not trained to deal appropriately with a mercury spill.
Exposure to mercury can result in a range of symptoms, including fatigue, neurological problems and, in acute cases, death.
"Mercury is one of the most toxic substances you can find," says McKeon, who lectures at Dublin City University's school of nursing. "And the trend in relation to mercury dosage and the level we can live within is downwards."
In 2006, the National Poisons Information Centre ranked thermometers among the top non-pharmaceutical poison agents in Ireland. A household mercury thermometer is easily broken and contains around one gram of the heavy metal, says McKeon.
"It's a vial of neurotoxin that you have to shake downwards in a hand that might be a bit nervous because the child is sick."
Such thermometers are sold cheaply in pharmacies all over the country and come with no instruction on what to do if the thermometer breaks and mercury escapes, according to McKeon.
Many people would automatically reach for a brush or vacuum cleaner to gather spilled mercury, but this will make the situation worse by dispersing the toxin, he explains. "If you hoover it up you are actually blowing it around the place and you'll contaminate your hoover."
Instead, his advice is to collect and contain the spilled metal: "Mercury is easy to manipulate, like a little ball of silver, and you can use a piece of paper to push it up into an envelope. Then you should put it into a sealed container and give it in to a hazardous waste specialty to deal with it."
However, McKeon believes that many people will not take the necessary steps to clean up mercury safely. "That's why you need to withdraw mercury thermometers from sale in chemists," he says, noting that digital thermometers or plastic "fever strips" are good and cost-effective alternatives.
But while mercury continues to hide in homes, it is being phased out of many clinical settings, according to McKeon.
Ireland is naturally falling into line with a European drive to reduce mercury usage, according to his recent online survey of 60 healthcare professionals, which suggests that about half of healthcare settings here now shun mercury. "Since around 2000, a lot of public hospitals haven't bought mercury equipment. That grew organically, there's no legislation to tell them to do that," says McKeon. It's an indication that people are moving away from using mercury in the healthcare sector.
However, he believes many smaller healthcare sites with a slower turnover of equipment are still using mercury in thermometers, or in sphygmomanometers to measure blood pressure. And where the equipment is mobile, he feels the risk of breakage and mercury exposure is unacceptably high.
He is also concerned that over 80 per cent of respondents in the survey had no training in how to deal with a mercury spill.
"The majority of healthcare professionals have no training or education in what happens when you break a thermometer," says McKeon, whose survey also found that almost a third of respondents would dispose of mercury inappropriately in medical or general waste rather than treating it as a hazardous substance.
In addition to withdrawing mercury thermometers from sale in chemists, McKeon would like to see staff in healthcare settings trained in how to deal with a spill and to have access to mercury clean-up kits.
"Mercury awareness should be a fundamental part of healthcare training," according to McKeon.