Dec 23, 2019 12:00:00

A woman whose blood mercury concentration has exceeded 500 times the normal due to the effect of whitening cream is in a coma

by

NomadSoul1

According to history, it is said that 'the ancient Egyptians made harmful minerals into powder and made them into cosmetics, ' and the pursuit of beauty often involved risks. In the United States in the 21st century, it was reported that women who used whitening cream in search of white and beautiful skin had a serious health hazard, as they became comatose due to extreme mercury poisoning.

Notes from the Field: Methylmercury Toxicity from a Skin Lightening Cream Obtained from Mexico — California, 2019 | MMWR
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6850a4.htm

Skin Cream Altered With Mercury Puts Woman In Coma – CBS Sacramento
https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/09/10/altered-skin-cream-mercury-woman-coma/

Woman had 524x the normal level of mercury in her blood from skin cream use | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/12/the-horrifying-case-of-organic-mercury-poisoning-from-tainted-skin-cream/

A 47-year-old woman living in Sacramento, California first reported an abnormality in July 2019. At the hospital, a woman talked to her doctor about dysphoria and weakness in her arms. Two weeks later, when she visited the hospital, her symptoms worsened, including her dysphonia, poor visibility, and difficulty walking. During treatment at the hospital, her condition continued to worsen, eventually leading to delirium with confusion and strange, threatening thoughts and hallucinations.

When a doctor performs a blood test to determine the cause of a woman's symptoms, she finds that mercury levels in women's blood are above the upper limit of measurable values, making it impossible to measure. Regardless of the results, the hospital was found to be extremely mercury poisoning, so the hospital listened to the female family while giving orally the drug used to treat mercury poisoning in a feeding tube to determine the cause of the mercury poisoning. I searched. As a result, it was found that the cause was mercury contained in a Mexican whitening cream that women had been using for years.

According to a WHO (PDF file) report, whitening creams containing inorganic mercury are often used among women living in Africa and Asia and those with dark skin living in the West. Inorganic mercury is a harmful component to the human body, but is known to have a strong whitening effect because it inhibits the production of melanin pigment , which darkens the skin.

by Prostock-studio

A whitening cream containing inorganic mercury may contain as much as 200,000 ppm of mercury, but mercury in a whitening cream used by women was 12,000 ppm. Even though the content of mercury is relatively small, a woman fell to the extreme of mercury poisoning, mercury contained in the whitening cream is a kind of organic mercury rather than inorganic mercury methyl mercury because it was. Methylmercury is also a substance that caused Minamata disease , and has the characteristic of being extremely toxic to the nervous system.

A woman who had to be hospitalized for mercury poisoning had applied a whitening cream containing methylmercury to her face twice a day for seven years. As a result, the California State Poisonous Control Agency (CPCS) re-tested a woman's blood sample and found that she had a blood mercury level of 2620 micrograms per liter. Since it is usually assumed that the total amount of mercury in the blood does not exceed 5 micrograms per liter at most, the woman's blood mercury concentration is calculated to be 524 times higher than usual.

'I knew that the cream contained mercury, but it worked so well that it seemed that my mother continued to use it,' she told a local television station CBS Sacramento . I didn't even think that this would be the case with just whitening cream. ' According to CBS Sacramento, women remain in a coma despite prolonged chelation therapy , with no prospects for recovery. Also, the exact manufacturer and distribution of the whitening cream in question is still unclear, and the California Public Health Service (CDPH) is now looking into sources and screening products on the market. It is thought that we push forward.