Mercury danger in new hospital buildings

By Paul Jones BRISBANE — Queensland health minister Peter Beattie plans to continue uncontrolled mercury use in thermometers and blood-pressure recording machines (sphygmomanometers) in new buildings planned for Royal Brisbane Hospital (RBH). In response to complaints from registered nurses, Beattie has merely restated false claims made by the secretary of the ALP-affiliated Queensland Nurses Union, Gay Hawksworth, that mercury-based thermometers would be "replaced by electronic equipment". In fact the opposite is happening. In RBH's Ward F, where electronic thermometers were being used, mercurial thermometers have been reintroduced. Mercury-based thermometers are responsible for tens of kilos of unaccounted for mercury spillage every decade. Nurses in Ward 7F South at RBH, where the issue began in July 1994, say five times as many thermometers are broken compared to last year — the equivalent of half a kilo of mercury per year unaccounted for in one ward. While Beattie says that controls are "strict", nurses say that no paperwork is involved in replacing a broken thermometer, or disposing of an old one. Patients say that broken thermometers are often left lying on their bedside tables. Attempting to come to terms with the hazard, some nurses have paid for electronic equipment themselves. The RBH mercury spill policy has no author, no references, and is written at the level of first year health science. It allows mercury air levels of 50 micrograms/cubic metre (the legal upper limit) which is higher than that known to produce psychiatric symptoms (30 micrograms/cubic metre) according to Material Safety Data Sheets obtained from the suppliers of the mercury, Bethlehem Apparatus Co. The Division of Workplace Health and Safety have formally advised RBH that, under Section 28 of the Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) Act, sphygmomanometers should have a prominent warning label reading: "Warning. Liquid mercury. Handle with care. Toxic by inhalation. Cumulative effects". Product literature of W.A. Baum Co., the leading manufacturer of sphygmomanometers, openly states that their machines leak mercury. Yet the newly-formed Queensland Nursing Council allows nurses who are training at university to use unlabelled sphygmomanometers without requiring any input from occupational hygienists or biomedical engineers regarding the causes of leakage in the apparatus. Nurses at university should refuse to use sphygmomanometers not carrying prominent hazard warning labels. They should quote Australian Standard 3655 (1989) — 13.1(e) and the relevant sections of the WHS Act and regulations in their state. They should also reject representation by student bodies who don't support the issue and remind tutors that it has been a long-standing protocol that when a poison is transferred to another container, the second container must also be labelled.