When Your Favorite Cup Sends You to the Hospital

Do you have a McDonald's Ogre printed Glassware or that with other characters on it? People who have these cups cherish them a lot, and it is not this alone a lot of people have numerous favorite cups and I guess you have one as well. When DreamWorks and McDonald's teamed up to promote Shrek 3, they got a total revenue of $813 million and among the lines of things created were lines of Shrek 3 glasses. They also did the same for the Shrek 4 glasses where the characters were printed on.

A lot of people bought these cups and among them is Jennifer Taggart who bought some of the glasses for her son. Since she was an environmental lawyer, and former environmental engineer, she decided to do some environmental investigations in her home and the glass cup was one of the things to inspect. She used a thermofisher scientific niton xrf analyzer to test its chemical composition. She found Cadmium present in the glass and cadmium is a soft silver white heavy metal which is extremely toxic like other heavy metals like Lead and Mercury.

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The inhalation or ingestion of Cadmium can lead to a lot of problems including lung damage, kidney damage, and can also lead to fragile bones and it has a terrible effect on children than adults because they are more susceptible to its effects and it is regarded as a a group 1 carcinogen.

In 1989, a woman had series of symptoms including bloody diarrhea, kidney inflammation, difficulty breathing, bone pain, pus infected gum and constant fatigue. After going for tests and scans, nothing was found until was taken for a toxicology test at the forensic department that a supposed gold teeth with over 2% cadmium was found in her mouth. The Gold teeth were removed and her symptoms subsided and she became well.

Cadmium is used for hardening and lowering melting point in metal alloys so it explains why in might be in your gold tooth but asides from this, it can also be found in battery, plastic stabilizers, as well as color pigments including plated gold tooth in a some cases, as well as the painting on the McDonald's cup.

With the mother saw that, she sent the cups to be tested in the lab and the samples were checked for their level of toxicity when consuming food and water with the cup to see if it was at a safe level. You will wonder why use the word safe? Well, it is because heavy metals like lead and cadmium are from the ground and make their way to the body in extremely low doses which is why the word "the dose makes the poison" speaks the truth.

When these metals get into the body, the kidney and liver produces Metallothionine protein which absorbs cadmium thereby preventing them from interacting with the cells and storing them till they leave the body. As you would expect, when there is too much Cadmium, it will overwork the protein causing the toxin to remain in the cells and the body for years.

The acceptable safe intake of cadmium is 0.1microgram per kilogram of body mass. People who do not have enough nutrient or iron in the body suffer Cadmium poison. In all, the cadmium level in the cup painting was said to not be dangerous even when they had the cadmium. The consumption level was said to be low and not dangerous.

^{Post Reference}

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Image Reference

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^{Image 1 staticflickr ||
Image 2 || wikimedia || Cadmium
Image 3 || flickr || PNNL}