Occupational Mercury Exposure at a Fluorescent Lamp Recycling Facility —

Overview

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Key numbers

The worker extracted the full PDF text with layout preservation twice and compared extraction hashes before commit. The following lines are copied from numeric/table-bearing regions of the PDF and retain the source units and wording where legible:

• ratory protection for mercury vapor, nitrile or other suitable June 19 to evaluate potential contamination from the facility.
• take-home exposures. as drivers. Workers’ mean age was 35 years (range = 23–50 years),
• On May 12, 2017, the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, six of seven workers were male, and mean duration of employ-
• Public Health Madison & Dane County, and the Occupational ment at the facility was 2 years (range = 0–5 years). Five workers
• average urine mercury/creatinine ratio was 49.6 µg/g creatinine reported, compared with breathing height (Table 2). Inside the
• (range: >23.8–71.2 µg/g creatinine). Follow-up during June– processing area, mercury levels were 9.0 µg/m3 at the entrance
• reported muscle twitches. have reported that 33% of mercury is released from bulbs in the
• TABLE 1. Urine and blood mercury test results and personal protective equipment usage for workers at a fluorescent lamp recycling facility —
• ¶ American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists biologic exposure index = 15 µg/L.
• normal range is <10 µg/L.
• TABLE 2. Mercury vapor air sampling results at a fluorescent lamp

Methods (brief)

• protective equipment (PPE). Mercury levels in indoor air var- 4-feet high. All areas of the facility were sampled, including the
• of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)-approved respi- sampled water and fish from two nearby ponds on May 25 and
• was defined as a urine spot mercury level above the ACGIH Spot urine samples were obtained from four of the seven
• biologic exposure index of 20.0 µg/g creatinine in a facility workers; a fifth worker’s spot urine sample was obtained
• worker. Twenty-four–hour urine samples were not obtained 1 week later. Two workers declined testing. All five tested
• Repeat testing showed a decrease in mercury levels in urine, Wipe samples from the cars of two workers determined the
• one worker. One worker continued to have elevated blood and Samples of water and fish from two nearby ponds found mer-

Implications

This page makes the source discoverable for category-level evidence routing. Values remain source-native and should be used only with the stated matrix, species, basis, geography, and censoring context from the paper. The page does not convert total mercury to methylmercury or use total arsenic as inorganic arsenic.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Shellfish (shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, oysters, mussels)
• Mercury

Verification notes

• Identity check: DOI, raw handle, candidate cite-key, and SHA-256 were compared against existing wiki/sources/ pages before creation.
• Full-PDF read: pdftotext -layout was run on the full PDF twice; extracted text hashes matched before the page was written.
• Numeric verification: numeric/table-bearing lines were selected mechanically from the verified extraction and preserved without unit conversion or rounding.
• Brand firewall: the worker skips PDFs when extracted numeric lines appear brand/manufacturer-sensitive; this page contains category-level or species-level evidence only.
• HMTc firewall: no threshold, percentile, pass/fail, clean/dirty, or certification math is stated.

Update history

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