Precautions and Biological Effects
Rubidium reacts violently with water and can cause fires. To ensure safety and purity, this metal is usually kept under a dry mineral oil or sealed in glass ampoules in an inert atmosphere. Rubidium forms peroxides on exposure even to small amount of air diffusing into oil, and is thus subject to similar peroxide precautions as storage of metallic potassium.
Rubidium, like sodium and potassium, almost always has +1 oxidation state when dissolved in water, including its presence in all biological systems. The human body tends to treat Rb+ ions as if they were potassium ions, and therefore concentrates rubidium in the body's intracellular fluid (i.e., inside cells). The ions are not particularly toxic; a 70 kg person contains on average 0.36 g of rubidium, and an increase in this value by 50 to 100 times did not show negative effects in test persons. The biological half-life of rubidium in humans was measured as 31–46 days. Although a partial substitution of potassium by rubidium is possible, rats with more than 50% of their potassium substituted in the muscle tissue died.
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