Don't Mess With Mercury: A Social Media Tool Kit for Environmental Health Practitioners, School Administrators, and Youth

Background:  Exposure to elemental mercury from spills, improper use, or clean-up can lead to central nervous system and other health effects. Clean-up and disposal can be very expensive. Many mercury spills occur because youth find mercury, think it is “cool,” play with it, share it with friends and contaminate their houses and schools when it is spilled.  Public health and emergency response personnel are frequently called upon to educate students, parents, teachers, and school administrators about spill prevention and mitigation measures.

Program background:  ATSDR has developed a suite of tools to reach these unique audiences including: a video game, a 30-second animated video public service announcement in English and Spanish, an interactive human body illustration, fact sheets for teachers and parents, and other resources. The tools, available on the redesigned ATSDR web site titled Don’t Mess With Mercury, can be used at schools, and at home. The poster presentation will introduce the tools, describe how examples from ATSDR’s responses to mercury spills were used to create targeted messages for youth in public service announcement, and share ways to incorporate them into health education activities in your community.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  The Don't Mess With Mercury tools have been well received by public health and response communities.  The challenges in measuring the success of these communication interventions, distribution issues, and options for the target audiences will be presented. 

Conclusions:  The redesigned Don't Mess With Mercury program has been initiated in 2013.  The tools have been provided to target audiences prior to general release and have received positive feedback.  The number of mercury spills will be tracked to see if this program has been effective in reducing the number of mercury spills in the United States.

Implications for research and/or practice:  The economic impact of reducing mercury spills could result in saving millions of dollars that are spent on mercury cleanups each year by local, state and federal agencies.  School classrooms would not have to be closed during spill cleanup, houses would not have to be evacuated, andother sites where spills occur would not have to be closed during cleanup activities.  The money saved could be spent on other environmental healt initiatives.