How poisoness is mercury?

[Correa Neto]

The Discovery Channel's gold show a while back followed gold prospectors in the Amazon. They'd find a likely spot on the river bank, spend a couple of days shoveling dirt into a sluice, and end up with about 30 gallons of gold-rich sludge. Then, they put this into a 55 gallon drum with some additional water and about a 1/2 cup of mercury. They mixed it by climbing in and stomping for a couple of hours. Then, they carefully poured out the sludge until they found the mercury - now heavy with whatever gold had been in the sludge. Now came the scary part: one guy took the mercury, put in on a metal dinner plate and heated it with a propane torch to evaporate the mercury and leave the gold behind. His unmasked face just a few inches from the plate as he carefully heated it.

He said something like "I've heard this can make you sick, but I feel fine".

Ugh.

That's too familiar to me... Saw this lots of times. Pan downriver and you'll grab some Hg bloblets - very nasty for the environment. Those guys inhale Hg while "burning" the Au/Hg sludge and while eating the fishes from the river.

They don't think its actually harmfull for a simple reason- they will die sooner due to something else (yellow fever, malaria, gunshot, knife wounds, AIDS, etc.). Sad but true.