A Case of Mercury Poison From a Skin Lightening Cream

I saw a video on social media where a young lady went to the market requesting for a man to help her mix creams together so she can be fair. I mean what we refer to as skin lightening or bleaching cream. Well, I do not have a say on a person's choice of cream but I was shocked when I saw the man mixing over 7 different types of creams and tube creams just to form one. Well, a lot of people do not know the content of the creams they are purchasing not to talk of a combination of creams.

This is the case of a woman who presented to the emergency room with slurred speech and blurred vision after using a cream on her body. This was not the first time she was visiting the hospital with a complain of numbness after feeling needle-like tingling on her hand. Her first visit didn't pose any threat to her life so she thought but things are different now as she cannot see clearly and cannot talk properly.

Her situation didn't start that moment, it started about a few years ago, when she thought she had blemishes on her skin and needed skin treatment since she believed that the blemishes were as a result of sun burn and aging. She wanted to use a skin lightening cream to prevent blemishes. She ordered the cream at a large amount of the cream because she wanted her supposed problem to disappear immediately.

Just like magic, the blemishes started to disappear and she was glad but she over time she began to feel sick and at a point, she emptied her stomach by both vomiting and stooling at the same time. When she drank water, she started to feel a metallic taste in her mouth piercing through her teeth followed by a burning sensation on her tongue. This feeling would come and go, and it was followed by intense weakness in her hand which made sleep less.

She went to the hospital but doctors didn't see anything life threatening at first glance so she was asked to go back home but when she appeared the next time, she was unable to talk and was not seeing clearly again. At this point, it became serious because she could not walk as well and so medical staffs began work.

Seeing that her eyes, mouth, and legs weren't working properly, doctors began to suspect that it might be her nerves not functioning properly but an MRI didn't show any visible abnormalities as there was no swelling in the brain, and blood test shows that she is normal. Doctors also noticed that she had episodes where she would stare into the void and would remain there for a while only to mumble and scream out of it.

Another blood test was done on her but this time around it was a toxicology test where it was seen that the mercury level in her blood was 1400 times more than the upper normal limit. With this, doctors had a glimpse of what was wrong with her because it was certain that what was in a blood was less compared to what was in her organs and her body in total.

Mercury is a metal, and the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. At this point it is not absorbed into the body but in this liquid form, little amount of vapor can can be inhaled leading to mercury poisoning which is known as elemental mercury poisoning.
Upon examination of the cream, Methylmercury iodide was found which is an organic mercury compound which absorbs into the skin unlike elemental mercury and this was what led to an increased mercury in the body. The human body is made up of light elements Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Phosphorus, Sulfur, and Nitrogen which are stable in the body but mercury in the body is heavy since it is a heavy metal and is not stable in the body.

Mercury poisoning in the body can lead to this symptoms especially when it begin to reach the brain. Using Succimer (Dimercaptosuccinic acid) which is made of sulfur mercury can be removed from the body since it can bind with it instead of binding with protein in the body but the problem remains that it will not be able to remove the mercury in her organs and cannot reverse the damage done by mercury in the body. Clearing mercury from the blood can take a while about a year or more and so it is a very disturbing poison since it also takes a while to be noticed.

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_{Post Reference}

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_{https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6850a4.htm
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/mercury-poisoning-linked-skin-products
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8112557/
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1994-41898-001
https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/hs/minamata2002/ch3.html}

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_{Image Reference}

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_{Image 1 || Pexels || A Woman with a Bleaching Cream on Face
Image 2 || Pexels ||Patient Talking while Lying Down on a Hospital Bed
Image 3 || Picryl || methylmercury}