Mercury Brazil

Porvari P. 1995. Mercury levels of fish in Tucumi hydroelectric reservoir and in River Mojn in Amazonia, in the state of Para, Brazil. Sci Total Environ 175 109-117. 

Roulet M, Lucotte M, Saint-Aubin A, Tran S, Rheault I, Farella N, de Jesus da Silva E, Dezencourt J, Sousa Passes CJ, Santos Soares G, Guimaraes JR, Mergler D, Amorim M. 1998. The geochemistry of mercury in central Amazonian soils developed on the Alter-do-Chao formation of the lower Tapajos River valley, Para state, Brazil. Sci Total Environ 223 1-24. 

IAEA efforts related to both CRMs and others, such as hair for total mercury and methyl mercury (prepared in India), and lichen for multi-element certification (prepared in Portugal) to assist biomonitoring programs in Brazil, Chile, China, Czech Republic, India, Italy, Malaysia, Slovenia, and Vietnam,... 

Guimaraes, J.R.D., Meili, M., Hylander, L.D., Castro e Silva, E., Roulet, M., Mauro, J.B.N., and Lemos, R.M.A., Mercury net methylation in five tropical flood plain regions of Brazil High in the root zone of floating macrophyte mats but low in surface sediments and flooded soils, Science of the Total Environment, 261 (1-3), 99-107, 2000. 

Malm, O., W.C. Pfeiffer, C.M.M. Souza, and R. Reuther. 1990. Mercury pollution due to gold mining in the Madeira River Basin, Brazil. Ambio 19 11-15. 

Palheta, D. and A. Taylor. 1995. Mercury in environmental and biological samples from a gold mining area in the Amazon region of Brazil. Sci. Total Environ. 168 63-69. 

Bisinoti MC, Jardim WF. 2003. Production of organic mercury from Hg° experiments using microcosms. J Brazil Chem Soc 14 244—248. 

Metallic mercury is mostly a problem in confined spaces or where it is handled in industrial processes or in laboratories. It is not generally an environmental problem, more likely an industrial hazard. However, metallic mercury does occur naturally (it was mined in Spain and Slovenia, for example) and the use of mercury for metal reclamation is a potential environmental hazard in countries such as Brazil where miners use it to extract gold from river sediments. Inorganic and organic mercury may be produced from the metallic mercury during its use and subsequent release into the environment. 

Caldas ED, Machado LL. Cadmium, mercury and lead in medicinal herbs in Brazil. Food Chem Toxicol 2004 42(4) 599-603. 

Byrne L Brazil s mercury poisoning disaster. Brit Med J 1992 304 1397. 

Akagi H, Malm 0, Branches F JP, et al. 1995. Human exposure to mercury due to gold mining in the Tapajos river basin, Amazon, Brazil Speciation of mercury in human hair, blood and urine. Water Air and Soil Pollution 80(l-4) 85-94. 

Malm O, Branches FJ, Akagi H, et al. 1995. Mercury and methylmercury in fish and human hair from the Tapajos River Basin, Brazil. Sci Total Environ 175(2) 141-150. 

M.H.D. Pestana and M.L.L. Formoso, Mercury Contamination in Lavras do Sul, South Brazil a Legacy from Past and Recent Gold Mining, Set. Total Environ. 307(1-3), 125-140, May 20 (2003). 

Boisehio, A.A.P., and E. Cemichiari. 1998. Longitudinal hair mercury concentration in riverside mothers along the Upper Madeira river (Brazil). Environ. Res. 77(2) 79-83. 

Zimbabwe (UNEP 2002). In the Amazon region (Brazil) alone, more than 450 metric tons of mercury per year were released into the environment due to this activity in the 1980s and 1990s. This represents about 10% of anthropogemc emissions in the world. Although the sale and use of mercury is officially banned in Brazil, it is difficult to enforce such a law in remote areas of the Amazon. Due to a low start-up price for the amalgamation... 

Examples of applications of X-ray spectrometric analytical techniques to elemental determinations in a variety of materials are presented in Table 2.12. Some recent applications papers may be mentioned. Total reflection XRF has been applied by Xie et al. (1998) to the multielement analysis of Chinese tea (Camellia sinensis), and by Pet-tersson and Olsson (1998) to the trace element analysis of milligram amounts of plankton and periphyton. The review by Morita etal. (1998) on the determination of mercury species in environmental and biological samples includes XRF methods. Alvarez et al. (2000) determined heavy metals in rainwaters by APDC precipitation and energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence. Other papers report on the trace element content of colostrum milk in Brazil by XRF (da Costa etal. 2002) and on the micro-heterogeneity study of trace elements in uses, MPI-DING and NIST glass reference materials by means of synchrotron micro-XRF (Kempenaers etal. 2003). 

Natives in Indonesia, New Guinea and the Brazil still use the age-old metallic mercury (Hg) method. It recovers about two-thirds of the gold present. They wash to rock face with high-pressure water and break the ore in a hammer crusher alloy the gold sediment with metallic mercury (called amalgamation) in a sluice-box filter and vaporize the mercury from the gold with heat. The mercury vapor that results can be... 

Data sets for mercury are now available for locations in the Adriatic Sea, Alaska, Antarctica, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Florida, Greenland, India, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, Spain, Taiwan, Tennessee, Thailand, and Viemam. 

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