If We Had A Nickel For Every Time We Were Asked About Nickel Poisoning…

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

No question/request too big or small 😎

❝I was just reading something about nickel poisoning. It’s not anything I had come across before. Is it very common and is it something people should be wary of?❞

If we had a nickel for every time we were asked about nickel poisoning, then we’d have one nickel, but it’s a good question and worthy of exploring.

So…

In most cases, nickel’s health risk is more about its allergenic properties, than its toxicity per se.

Nickel allergy is a form of contact dermatitis in which your immune system reacts to nickel after skin contact, most commonly causing an itchy rash at the point of exposure, though it can get worse. For example, symptoms usually appear within 1–3 days after contact and may include a rash, bumps, severe itching, skin discoloration, dry cracked skin, blisters, and/or fluid drainage.

This is mostly about piercings, jewelry, and accessories such as belts or wristwatches, though there are plenty of other possible sources (including, yes, the US coin of the same name, which usually contains 25% nickel). Inconveniently, other sources include various pieces of medical/dental kit, so do watch out for those.

However, sometimes it really is about poisoning, and nickel’s toxicity.

Nick poisoning is usually about nickel carbonyl, whose ingestion or inhalation can cause all manner of woes, for example, as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) details:

❝An industrial accident is described in which 100 oil refinery workers were exposed to nickel-carbonyl, 31 were hospitalized, and 3 died.

Mild initial symptoms are listed, including headache, vertigo, nausea, and local pains. Delayed reactions are described, including constrictive chest pain, cough, pneumonia like symptoms, stomach pains, nausea, and weakness.

Death between 4 and 11 days after exposure is noted. The presence of nickel in tobacco, and the formation of nickel-carbonyl during smoking are discussed.❞

You can find the JAMA article’s entry here: Nickel May Be Potentially Hazardous to Health

And you can find a lot more information on the UK’s “Health & Security Agency” website, here:

• Sources and Route of Human Exposure ← food and cigarette smoke are the main sources of nickel exposure in the general public!
• Health effects of acute or single exposure ← spoiler: it’s not good
• Health effects following chronic or repeated exposure ← what doesn’t kill you, gives you cancer, which then gets a second chance to kill you

So all this to say, it’s definitely something that it’s well worth knowing about and avoiding!

You can also learn more about its other also-dangerous forms, here: Nickel; a metal with threats to human health, focusing on its intoxication mechanisms

Want to learn more?

For a much deeper dive into the broader topic of avoiding the toxins the industrial world is keen to throw our way, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:

Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer

Take care!