20 Students Tested in Poisoning Scare

Twenty Long Beach seventh-graders were sent to hospitals for testing Thursday after they came into contact with a drop of mercury a classmate had taken to school.

A spokesman for the Long Beach Unified School District, Richard Van Der Laan, said all the students appeared to be unharmed.

He said the child who took the mercury to school would be disciplined. In the meantime, he said, notes were sent home with the 1,670 students enrolled at Alexander Hamilton Middle School, where the incident occurred, reminding parents not to allow their children to take hazardous substances to school.

“One difficulty with this is that we don’t know exactly where the mercury came from, whether it came from a broken thermometer, a dentistry filling or an electric light switch,” he said. “That complicates the diagnosis of the hazard.”

Van Der Laan said that by the time school authorities became aware of the situation, about 9:30 a.m., some children may have gotten some mercury on their hands.

Medical authorities said Thursday that mercury is most dangerous in a vaporous form that can be inhaled. There was no sign that happened in this case, and only protracted contact with the liquid form would be alarming.

Van Der Laan said the school later used a mercury-sniffing electronic detector to determine where any mercury might still be present, and a vacuum cleaning device to collect it where found. Both firefighters and schools’ hazardous materials personnel were summoned to the school for help.