Mercury compounds, organic, research

In one tragic incident, an entire community on Minamata Bay in Japan was poisoned, with extremely serious birth defects, very painful reactions, mental disorders, and many deaths. Only after lengthy research was the cause determined to be mercury compounds discarded into a river by a plastics factory. Whether it was inorganic salts or methylmercury compounds seems uncertain, but the contamination was immense and methylmercury compounds were found in the silt and in animals and humans. The methylmercury was readily taken up by the organisms living in the bay and, because the people of the community depended on fish and other seafood from the bay for much of their diet, the entire community was poisoned. 

The symptoms of Minamata disease were successfully reproduced in laboratory animals fed on diets containing organic mercury and the original source of the mercury was traced to the effluent from the Chisso factory in the area, which employed inorganic mercury compounds as catalysts in the production of acetaldehyde and vinyl chloride. It has been stated by D ltri [60] that by 1964, Japanese research workers had concluded that the source of the methyl mercury... 

Dimethyl mercury is an organic compound that poses a serious environmental threat to all living things. Research how this compound affects living things. Include information on whether dimethyl mercury poses a threat to your local environment. If so, determine what is being done to eliminate this problem. 

Urban wastewater is most likely the best experimental field for the application of UV spectrophotometry. The first reason is that organic pollution is composed of unsaturated compounds, which enables finding, for any sample, simple relations between its UV spectrum and the value of aggregate parameters such as COD, BOD, etc. (see Chapter 4). As a consequence, many researches have been conducted on this topic for more than 30 years [1-3], All these authors have proposed the measurement of the absorbance at 254 nm. Even if this wavelength seems to correspond to a shoulder in the spectrum, the reason for the choice of this wavelength was more practical (254 nm being the main radiation below 300 nm of low-pressure mercury lamp), than scientific, because of possible interferences from industrial discharges. 

A number of imaging systems (so-called PD-D systems) based on the formation of an image in physically developable mercury nuclei have been reported by PhiUps Research Laboratories. A common feature of these systems is that the photosensitive element contains an organic or inorganic compound that releases a ligand for Hg (CN , RS, NH3) upon being struck... 

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