I know that it is probably highly unlikely
and i'm just worrying, but i'd rather be
called a hypochondriac than dead.
===
i picked up a fuse today and was messing
around with it. It's one of those
industrial type, with heavy silvery plated
bolt-on connectors and a rating of 350a at
300vac.
I was messing around with it and I tried
sniffing it a few times to see if I could
identify what the coating was made of.
It smelled kinda like fresh copper. I
came back to my computer to research it
and found that a lot of stuff like this is
in reality cadmium plated.
I read up on cadmium and found that
inhalation is the most dangerous way to be
exposed to cadmium, and small particles
being many times more dangerous than large
ones. Digestion seems to be of a small
importance (i ate a pizza afterward, but I
had washed my hands) and dermal exposure
is I guess almost unimportant entirely.
Since I inhaled it, that's obviously going
to consist of "small" particles.
It's been a few hours ago now and I don't
have any of the symptoms that I know of,
but I was wondering if perhaps I could
have been poisoned anyway. I guess
2mg/meter^3 of air for a couple hours is
almost always fatal. If you can't even
smell that, the concentration I must have
received from smelling it directly off of
the plated fuse was much, much higher,
though only for two full inhalations.
