Mercury Metal

Environmentalists and industry representatives pleaded their case with federal regulators Tuesday over rules that would slash toxic emissions from cement kilns, the top source of mercury emissions in California. The Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed regulations for Portland cement kilns earlier this year, after more than a decade of pressure from environmental groups.

The prevalence of autism in California children continued to rise after most vaccine manufacturers started to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in 1999, suggesting that the chemical was not a primary cause of the disorder, according to a study released Monday. The analysis found that from 2004 to 2007, when exposure to thimerosal dropped significantly for 3 to 5 year olds, the autism rate continued to increase in that group from 3.0 to 4.1 per 1,000 children.

New studies in infants show that the mercury used as a preservative in vaccines is cleared from the body at least 10 times faster than researchers had previously believed, a finding that casts further doubt on the theory that the preservative causes autism. Researchers had believed that the ethyl mercury in the preservative thimerosal is metabolized in much the same way as the methyl mercury found in fish and other sources.

Who is the young man in the sports coat shown on a grainy videotape spilling mercury on a platform of the Red Line subway station at Pershing Square? When it happened on Dec. 22, officials quickly labeled it a harmless accident. But Thursday, officials acknowledged that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority botched its response, waiting eight hours after being told mercury was on the platform before clearing the station and cleaning up the spill.

At least four subway passengers either touched or stepped on six ounces of mercury that a man dropped onto a downtown L.A. subway platform, with one commuter finally alerting authorities about the spill eight hours after it occurred. Among those exposed to the mercury was a woman who lives in downtown Los Angeles. She got the mercury on her red house slippers minutes after the man dropped it, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Det. Danny Regalado.

Federal and local authorities on Tuesday arrested a 27-year-old man they believe spilled mercury on a downtown L.A. subway platform, ending a weeklong dragnet that raised more questions about the handling of the incident. Armando Bustamante Miranda was being questioned by FBI agents and Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators, who are trying to determine why the hazardous chemical was dropped in the station on Dec. 22 by a man who then called an MTA operator to say what he had done.

A day after two boys were discovered playing with mercury at a Riverside County elementary school, the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday told county officials to evacuate more than 950 students and called in teams to determine whether the hazardous material had been properly cleaned up. County officials said they had learned that after school Tuesday, the boys, ages 6 and 9, allegedly climbed through a fence into the yard of a welding shop in Romoland and stole vials of mercury.

A study of 1,047 children who received mercury-containing vaccines as infants has concluded that the mercury does not cause learning difficulties or developmental delays. The research released Wednesday said mercury exposure was associated with very small changes on some measures of attention, speech and motor control. But the changes varied by gender and were mostly beneficial, leading scientists to conclude they were the result of chance. Dr.

Rick Allnutt has closed all but one section of his funeral home on the north end of town. The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash. Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there.

Californians who volunteered for a nationwide study of mercury contamination had among the worst levels, with nearly one-third of those tested having concentrations in their tissues that exceeded safe levels. The study, organized by two national environmental groups, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, does not provide information about Californians in general because the volunteers were not a random sample.