Toxicity levels of coins

No one's "blaming" anyone.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

How many pennies were put into all of those fuse sockets?

 

You didn't look for them?

 

9% manganese. No metal is toxic unless it is present in the body in ionic form. I think you could drink a shot glass of mercury and just have a heavy dump because it is not absorbed, but just a little of mercury chloride would kill you.

 

Well concerning the OP's point, there is at least one "coin" I know of as dangerous to even hold too long. THe Aztecs made copper hoes as primitive money. How they purified the copper was with arsenic, and its still present in fairly high levels. I would caution anyone having these to be careful in handling these much without protection.

 

Liquid mercury was, in fact, used as a purgative -- it's not absorbed much at all. Mercury vapor, on the other hand, is bad news. And methylmercury and ethylmercury, while not ionic at all, are plenty, plenty toxic.

As a matter of fact, many organometallics are bad news, even though they're entirely covalent.

 

I knows a lotta toxic "hoes" ----real toxic mamas!!!!

 

Toxic hoes"

 

I have no idea since I was too short to reach the panel.



I'm still too short to reach the panel.

 

As a kid, we played with mercury all the time. Smacshing balls of it and watching them come back together. Rubbing it into a coins surface and playing with its silky smooth surface.

Simehow, I survived. I few ticks, twitches and general grumpiness, but all in all, nothing life threatening.

 

Lol, somehow I knew that one was coming when I wrote my post.

 

My wife's daughter, now 27, ate a penny at 1 1/2 years old, Dr told her she would
poo it out which she did. No problems. The wife also told me of an elderly lady who
had Dimentia and ate a box of paper clips while dining out. My older sister ate a can
of dog food when we were little kids back in the late 50's. I have no idea what all this
means execpt if I don't want someone breaking in and stealing my coins I now know an
excellent place to "hide" them.---John

 

If you check out yahoo's site questions on the dangers of ingesting coins, the best answer given is supposedly that it will do no real harm in small quantities. Oh really? Based on bio-chemistry, in many cases toxicity results. Why are nurses and doctors saying it will do no harm? Because they have no way to get it released from the system once absorbed? And then we have the naturopaths and their chelation therapy, where everyone needs what they have to offer especially their special methods of de-toxing the body.

Thanks for the feedback on this topic. I swallowed coins as a kid, now I don't know why. Also put them on railroad tracks to see what would happen.

 

This is exactly the problem. The doctor was wrong then and might still be wrong. If the penney was pretty new (as it probably was) then it might have been digested in the stomach. To make this much worse most humans who are most at risk (less than 18 lbs) can't talk and tell you they swallowed a penny.

Coroners also are often unaware that pennys are zinc.

 

Good points. They are in denial of all the health risks, they are mainly there to give comfort and assuage panic.

 

Playing with mercury from a broken thermometer or an old relay was lots of fun as a kid. One last trivia. The term "Mad as a Hatter" originated with the use of mercury in making hats - that is what I heard as a kid and it never made any sense. Top hats were made from felt which was composed of hair from different kinds of animals. Most prized was beaver hair, because it was waterproof mainly due to little hooks on the hairs which would cause the hairs to entangle and make a strong felt. However it was too expensive to hire Jim Bridger to go out and trap beavers all the time, so a cheaper alternative was used - rabbit fur. Now rabbit fur made a lousy low strength felt, so a treatment was found which caused the rabbit hair to split and thus entangle in making a felt. That treatment was to soak the hair in mercurious nitrate and other mercury compounds. Hatters would dip out armfulls of the soaking felt from the vats to spread out on the molds used to make the hats, thus they spent the days with a large portion of their bodies soaked in mercury compounds, to say nothing of the vapor they breathed.

 

Well, that just threw a wrench into my plan to eat this box of pennies. I guess I'll just search them for errors instead.

 

Probably the much longer die life striking the softer zinc.

But is arsenic absorbed through the skin?

 

Fixodent and polygrip denture cream( adhesive) contained zinc for decades until the "Zinc" lawyers started class actions.

 

And now we sell the people zinc lozenges to fight colds.