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Comment on Dimethyl Mercury Exposure Incident at MIT

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Wow, I wonder if chelation therapy early enough can reduce the damage to the student's nervous system. I'm not aware of how quickly organic mercury crosses the BBB once it enters the bloodstream, but my guess is "faster than you'd like".

I hope it was worth working with such a notoriously unsafe compound against regulations and all sense.

If you look at the reddit thread, there is a horrific story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn#Accident_and_...

Yeah that was awful, but in her case she was unaware of the poisoning for months iirc. Then again I don't really buy that chelation therapy works that well for something as absurdly toxic as this even if you found a safe and workable ligand.

I guess the student just needs to hope their exposure was incredibly minute, otherwise they really have only a hard death to look forward to.

There are some new results for treatment with selenium and acetyl cysteine. MGH is probably the best place to get treatment for this. We’ll have to wait and see, and there is not any information out about the extent of exposure. Prior cases all seem to have only sought treatment upon getting symptoms, so I am cautiously optimistic about this case

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