Dude, back in the day Dentists used to roll mercury around in their hands when making the gold/mercury amalgam used in dental fillings. Sure, some of it gets absorbed through the skin, but not much. Example, when I was in college I worked for an environmental chemistry professor doing elemental analysis with various instruments, including an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICPMS) (basically a quadrupole mass spec with an extremely hot heat source, enabling it to detect part per billion levels of elements). The professors best friend was a dentist who had been in the business for a long time and was concerned about the level of mercury in his blood. We drew blood, I filtered and diluted it, and ran it through the ICPMS. He had ~13 ppb of mercury in his blood as I recall. Granted that is a relatively high amount of mercury to have in your system, but given that he said he handled compounds containing mercury on a regular basis for the better part of 15 years, I was surprised it was not higher.
So take a chill pill, you ain't gonna die because a light bulb popped in your face. I'd be more concerned if you inhaled a ton of mercury vapor, but the amount of mercury in those bulbs is relatively small.
So take a chill pill, you ain't gonna die because a light bulb popped in your face. I'd be more concerned if you inhaled a ton of mercury vapor, but the amount of mercury in those bulbs is relatively small.
