Quote: Originally posted by woelen | Why so upset about thallium? I read about people experimenting comfortably with mercury or lead and their salts and these are of similar toxicity as
thallium. Others play around with phosgene and derivates (di- and triphosgene), or with white P. All of them equally toxic and dangerous
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Upset? No, excited is a much better word. It's interesting, I actually have an Exam in 20 hours where I'll have to compare the toxicity of thallium,
Mercury and lead (environmental chemistry). There really isn't much day to day exposure to background levels of thallium, unlike Mercury and lead
(depending on how much fish you eat) and it's mainly known for killing people, much in the same way arsenic sort of developed a reputation as a murder
weapon. So you're right, comparable toxicity but definitely screams death to many a chemist.
Give me a few years and this hopefully will be my career path, heavy metals in the environment.
Also, I believe pre 1970 there was no cure for thallium poisoning, now Prussian Blue is used. Took quite a while to find an effective treatment.
Any oxidation states with colour though? You've always presented such wonderful colour changes of metal chemistry in your website, think you will be
able to that with thallium?
[Edited on 26-6-2015 by Tdep] |