Mercury on the Mind by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD
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Although
they afflict widely different age groups, autism and Alzheimer�s
disease share a common cause: mercury. Dr. Boyd Haley, professor
and chair of the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky,
and Dr. Bernard Rimland, founder of the Autism Research Institute,
presented evidence at this year�s Doctors for Disaster Preparedness
meeting that connects mercury with these diseases.
This
heavy metal is highly poisonous. A Dartmouth professor studying
the chemical characteristics of an organic form of mercury – dimethyl
mercury – spilled two drops of it on her gloved hand. The first sign
of mercury poisoning occurred four months later when her speech
began to be slurred. This was followed by difficulty walking and
loss of vision. She then fell into a coma and died. Another person,
attempting to smelt the silver in dental amalgams he obtained (they
are 35 percent silver, 50 percent mercury, and 15 percent tin, zinc,
and other metals), heated them in a frying pan. The mercury vapor
thus generated killed him quickly. The two other family members
in the house at the time also died.
Mercury
is one proton (neutron and electron) heavier than gold – the atomic
number of gold is 79; mercury, 80. It is distributed throughout
the earth�s crust. Unlike other metals, mercury, in its elemental
state, is liquid (molten) at room temperature. And it releases a
steady stream of gaseous mercury atoms that linger in the atmosphere
for months (eventually falling back to earth and its oceans in an
inorganic form in rain drops). Even when in a solid state, combined
with other metals as an alloy, mercury atoms continually escape
into the atmosphere. Once added to latex paint, put in teething
powder, used in making hats, as a fungicide on seeds, as an antiseptic
(Merthiolate), and as a treatment for syphilis (the cure was worse
than the disease), human exposure to mercury today comes principally
from three sources: dental amalgams, vaccines, and fish.
Elemental
mercury when released by a dental amalgam is inhaled and (80 percent
of it) absorbed by the lungs and retained in the body. Vaccine makers
add thimerosal (which is half ethyl mercury) to vaccines to prevent
bacterial contamination. This injected organic form of mercury is
readily taken up by brain and heart muscle cells. Fish harbor another
organic form of mercury – methyl mercury, which is obtained from plankton
that synthesize it from inorganic mercury extracted from the sea.
Currently
the two most important sources of mercury exposure for Americans
are dental amalgams and vaccinations. The Federal government�s Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), for reasons not explained, have chosen to ignore this fact.
These agencies and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) focus
exclusively on mercury in seafood, to the extent that the NIH will
not fund studies that address mercury in amalgams and vaccines.
In
lockstep with the government, the American Dental Association (ADA)
claims that amalgams are safe, and the mercury in them poses no
problem. The (government-funded) Institute of Medicine (IOM) and
various specialty societies, notably the American Academy of Pediatrics
(AAP), American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), and the American
Medical Association (AMA), say the same thing about mercury in vaccines.
There is growing evidence, however, that mercury in vaccines and
amalgams cause both autism and Alzheimer�s disease. The CDC and
the FDA and the medical establishment, led by its specialty societies,
discount or ignore this evidence – evidence that includes privately
funded epidemiological studies; research on how mercury damages
brain cells grown in culture; animal studies in rodents, sheep,
and primates; and clinical studies in children and adults.
Autism
was discovered in 1943, in American children, twelve years after
ethyl mercury (thimerosal) was added to the pertussis vaccine. (The
disease was not seen in Europe until the 1950s, after thimerosal
was added to vaccines used there.) In a typical case, shortly before
his 2nd birthday a normally developing, healthy boy stops
communicating with others and withdraws into himself. He avoids
eye contact and becomes strange and aloof. His vision becomes blurred;
and he develops various motor disturbances, such as involuntary
jerking of the arms and legs and walking on his toes. In addition
to these manifestations, Dr. Sallie Bernard and her colleagues,
in a study titled, "Autism:
A Unique Type of Mercury Poisoning," describe the speech
difficulties, unusual behavior (such as unprovoked crying spells
and head banging), various degrees of cognitive impairment, gastrointestinal
difficulties, and immune difficulties that these autistic children
can have. Mercury is most likely a causative factor in other developmental
disorders as well, such as delayed speech and attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder.
Investigators
have shown that there is a direct relationship between increasing
doses of mercury in vaccines and autism. In the 1950s, with an immunization
schedule limited to four vaccines (against diphtheria, tetanus,
pertussis, and smallpox), 1 in 10,000 children developed this disease.
As vaccines for other diseases were added, health care providers
began injecting increasingly larger doses of mercury into children.
Those born in 1981 were given 135 micrograms of mercury (on average),
and one case of autism occurred in every 2,600 children born that
year. With the addition of hepatitis B vaccine (injected on the
day of birth) and one for Haemophilus influenzae Type b,
providers injected 246 micrograms of mercury into children born
in 1996. Autism occurred in one out of every 350 of these children.
Today, providers follow an immunization
schedule, prepared by the CDC and approved by the AAP and AAFP,
that includes 13 vaccines given, with variable numbers of booster
shots, 33 times before a child reaches the age of 2 (when the development
of the brain is completed). Autism now afflicts 1 in 100 boys and
1 in 400 girls, and physicians diagnose 100,000 new cases of this
disease every year in the U.S (using diagnostic criteria, in the
DSM-IV, that is more restrictive than the previous DSM-IIIR). Over
the last 30 years more than one million children have come down
with this disease, and currently one in every 68 families in America
has an autistic child.
Mainstream
medical journals, like Pediatrics and The New England
Journal of Medicine, only publish studies that claim thimerosal
is safe. And it turns out that these articles are written in large
part by researchers in the pay of vaccine makers, as the Coalition
for Safe Minds (Sensible Action For Ending Mercury-Induced Neurological
Disorders), a private nonprofit organization, has
shown. Editors of these journals will not publish studies that
show a link between thimerosal and autism like "Thimerosal
in Childhood Vaccines, Neurodevelopment Disorders, and Heart Disease
in the United States" by Mark and David Geier, which documents
a strong association between the amounts of mercury injected in
vaccines and autism. Such articles can only find acceptance in alternative
(i.e., "politically incorrect") journals like the Journal
of American Physicians and Surgeons, where this one was
published.
The
amount of damage a given dose of mercury can do to the brain (and
also the heart) depends on one�s age, sex, and genetically determined
ability to excrete mercury. Young children with still developing
brains are more susceptible, and males are more vulnerable to a
given dose of mercury because testosterone enhances its neurotoxicity.
Most important, however, is one�s genetically programmed ability
to rid the body of mercury. The brain has a house-cleaning protein
that removes dangerous waste products, which comes in three varieties:
APO-E2, APO-E3, and APO-E4. The APO-E2 protein can carry 2 atoms
of mercury out of the brain; APO-3, one; and AOP-E4, none. The genes
we acquire from each parent determine which two we have. People
with two APO-E4 proteins (and thus no APO-E2 or -E3) have an 80
percent chance of acquiring Alzheimer�s disease. And according to
one study, autistic children have a huge preponderance of APO-E4
protein in their brains.
Alzheimer�s
disease was discovered in 1906, again in America, where dentists
used mercury-laden amalgams to fill cavities (dentists in Europe
largely avoided them). Today, more than 4 million Americans now
have Alzheimer�s disease. It afflicts half of people over the age
of 85 and 20 percent aged 75 to 84.
The
first symptoms of this disease are difficulty concentrating and
variable degrees of memory loss, leading ultimately to devastating
mental deterioration. The brains of people with Alzheimer�s disease
shrink by 25 percent and have distinct pathologic hallmarks (neurofibillary
tangles, amyloid plaques, and phosphorylation of tau protein). Brain
cells grown in the laboratory develop the same three pathologic
findings when exposed to nanomolar (3.6 × 10-10
molar) doses of mercury, an amount approximating that found in the
brains of people who have a lot of amalgam fillings.
Dental
amalgams are the main source of mercury in an adult�s brain. An
average-sized amalgam filling contains 750,000 micrograms of mercury
and releases around 10 micrograms a day. Researchers put radiolabelled
mercury amalgams in the teeth of sheep and determined where escaped
mercury went with a scanner. They showed that mercury atoms exhaled
through the nose travel up filaments of the olfactory nerve to the
hippocampus, which controls memory, and to other critical areas
in the brain. In another study,
rats given the same concentration of mercury that people inhale
from their amalgams develop the pathologic markers of Alzheimer�s
disease. People with Alzheimer�s disease have mercury levels in
their brains that are 2 to 3 times higher than that seen in normal
people.
The
mercury in flu vaccines also plays a role in this disease. One investigator
has
found that people who received the flu vaccine each year for
3 to 5 years had a ten-fold greater chance of developing
Alzheimer�s disease than people who had zero, 1, or 2 shots.
Another
important factor with regard to mercury on the mind, which officials
at the CDC, FDA and the professors in the IOM do not consider, is
synergistic
toxicity – mercury�s enhanced effect when other poisons are present.
A small dose of mercury that kills 1 in 100 rats and a dose of aluminum
that will kill 1 in 100 rats, when combined have a striking effect:
all the rats die. Doses of mercury that have a 1 percent
mortality will have a 100 percent mortality rate if some aluminum
is there. Vaccines contain aluminum.
Why
do officials at the CDC, FDA, and leaders of the medical and dental
establishment discount or ignore all these important facts? Some
of them being in the pay of vaccine makers is one reason. The specter
of litigation for having sanctioned thimerosal and amalgams and,
in the case of the FDA, not doing appropriate safety studies on
them is another. But it is more complicated than that. The hypothesis
that mercury causes autism and Alzheimer�s disease is a new truth.
And as Schopenhauer points out (see my article
on him), each new truth passes through three stages: First, it is
ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. And third, it is accepted
as self-evident. The mercury truth is now in the second stage.
In
the 1790s Edward Jenner observed that milk maids did not have pock
marks on their faces, like people did who had contracted and survived
smallpox. Milking cows with cowpox rendered them immune to smallpox.
He took fluid from the pustules of infected cows, injected it into
children, and found that it protected them, when exposed, from contracting
smallpox. The medical establishment of the day dismissed the idea
of vaccinating people with cow pus as nonsense; and Sir Joseph Banks,
president of the British Royal Society (the IOM of the day), told
Jenner that he would ruin his reputation if he tried to publish
these findings, which were so much at variance with established
knowledge. When other doctors and informed individuals like Thomas
Jefferson recognized that "vaccination" did indeed work,
its value was, in time, accepted as self-evident. Jenner�s vaccine
saved millions of lives and eradicated a disfiguring disease that
has a 30 percent mortality rate. (But laboratories in the U.S. and
U.S.S.R. preserved the virus that causes smallpox, and we now know
that Soviet microbiologists grew vast quantities of it in chicken
eggs for use as a biological weapon
of mass destruction.)
Today
the medical establishment, led by the AAP, AAFP, AMA, CDC, and IOM,
has gone to the other extreme. The accepted wisdom now is that vaccines
are a panacea. Health care providers start injecting them in infants
on the day of birth, and government officials seek to have them
made mandatory for all Americans. But some little-discussed facts
belie their value. Deaths from diphtheria, for example, declined
90 percent from 1900 to 1930, due to better sanitation and nutrition,
before there was a vaccine for this disease. Likewise, the death
rate for measles declined 95 percent (13.3 to 0.03 deaths per 100,000
population) between 1915 and 1958, before the vaccine for measles
vaccine was introduced in 1963. Viewed from a risk/benefit perspective,
providers and government officials downplay the deleterious effects
that vaccines can have on one�s health and inflate their benefits.
The top medical textbook on the subject is Vaccines,
edited by Drs. Plotkin and Orenstein. In the 1999 3rd
Edition that I reviewed (a slightly longer 4th Edition
was published last year), its authors confine their discussion of
mercury in vaccines to two short paragraphs in this 1,230-page book.
They do not address concerns that have been raised about its neurotoxicity.
Vaccine
manufacturers have started removing thimerosal from vaccines. And
for the first time since the state began keeping records on this
disease, California has had a decrease, of 6 percent,
in the annual number of children over the age of 3 who have been
diagnosed with autism. This occurred in children born in 2000, when
the phase-out of thimerosal in vaccines began. Iowa has passed a
law banning thimerosal in that state, and California has done the
same thing for pregnant women and children under 3 (the bill awaits
the governor�s signature). But pharmaceutical companies still add
thimerosal in their Flu vaccines; and pediatricians are vaccinating
children with their remaining supply of thimerosal-containing vaccines,
which the FDA has chosen not to recall.
Taking
mercury out of vaccines would substantially reduce the incidence
of autism, but this alone will not eliminate the disease. Giving
too many vaccines over too short a time to infants whose nervous
system is not yet fully developed can also trigger autism and its
spectrum of disorders. As Dr. Blaylock has shown (see Recommended
Reading below), multiple vaccines given close together over-stimulate
the brain�s immune system and, via the mechanism of "bystander
injury," destroy brain cells.
Much
more research needs to be done on the neurotoxicity of mercury and
excessive vaccination. Dr. Haley terms autism Mad
Child Disease. Finding one cow in the U.S. with Mad Cow Disease,
from Canada, prompted the Federal government to spent millions of
dollars examining other cows to see if they had contracted it. With
regard to Mad Child Disease, however, the government spends $59.00
in research for every case of autism diagnosed in this country.
Avoiding
flu shots that contain thimerosal, and having dentists stop implanting
mercury amalgams in people�s mouths would lower the incidence of
Alzheimer�s disease. If you have amalgam fillings, particularly
if there is a family history of Alzheimer�s disease, you might consider
having them removed. Be sure to have a dentist do it who follows
the protocol
established by The International Academy of Oral Medicine &
Toxicology for safely removing them.
For
the third source of mercury, follow the CDC�s advice and don�t eat
mercury-contaminated fish, especially if you are pregnant because
mercury in your bloodstream crosses the placenta and is concentrated
in the fetus� brain.
Recommended
Reading – in addition to the online links provided above
An
excellent review of thimerosal and autism, titled "Mercury
in Medicine – Taking Unnecessary Risks," is to be found,
of all places, in the Congressional Record. Prepared by its
Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness, this report was presented
to the Committee on Government Reform, chaired by Congressman Dan
Burton (who has an autistic grandson). Congressional Record,
May 21,
2003, E1011–E1030.
SafeMinds
president, Lyn Redwood, presented testimony at a Congressional hearing
held on September 8, 2004 that exposes malfeasance by the CDC and
FDA related to thimerosal. It is titled "Truth
Revealed: New Scientific Discoveries Regarding Mercury in Medicine
and Autism" and is posted on their website, safeminds.org.
See also this organization�s 84-page Report
to Congress titled, "A Brief Analysis of Recent Efforts
in Medical Mercury Induced Neurological and Autism Spectrum Disorders"
(September 8, 2004).
"The
Three Modern Faces of Mercury" – in fish, vaccines, and
dental amalgams – by Thomas Clarkson in Environmental Health
Perspectives Volume
110 | Supplement 1 | February 2002 | pages
11–23. This study provides an current-day perspective on
mercury exposure, post Calomel, Merthiolate, and Mad Hatters.
If
your dentist parrots the American Dental Association stance on this
subject and says that "silver" – i.e., mercury –
amalgams are perfectly safe, insist that he or she read Dr. Boyd
Haley�s response to the president of the ADA on his defense of dental
amalgams. It is posted on this
website. I sent it to my dentist who I had been going to for
a number of years. When he chose to ignore it, I changed dentists
– to a mercury-free one and had him remove all my amalgam fillings.
"Mercury:
the Silent Killer," Chapter 3 in Health
and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life by
Russell L. Blaylock, M.D. As a board-certified neurosurgeon, Dr.
Blaylock, like me, is a member of the medical establishment. He
now, however, studies and writes about wellness and complementary/alternative
medicine on a full-time basis.
Are
Vaccines Safe and Effective? by Neil Z. Miller (2002).
This 78-page (paperback) book is well worth reading, especially
if you have children or if you are being pressured to get a flu
shot.
For
a comprehensive review, with 167 scientific references, on how vaccines
damage infants� and soldiers� brains (Gulf War Syndrome) when given
too close together, see Dr. Blaylock�s "Interaction of Cytokines,
Excitotoxins, Reactive Nitrogen and Oxygen Species in Autism Spectrum
Disorders" in the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association
(JANA 2003;6[4]:21–35). See also his study, "Chronic
Microglial Activation and Excitotoxicity Secondary to Excessive
Immune Stimulation: Possible Factors in GulfWar Syndrome and Autism"
in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPS
2004;9[2]:46–52). Dr. Blaylock has written a simplified version
of these studies for the general public titled "Vaccines: the
Hidden Dangers," in his Blaylock
Wellness Report (Vol. 1, No. 1), which is published monthly
and can be purchased online.
September
29, 2004
Donald
Miller (send him mail)
is
a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of
Washington in Seattle and a member of
Doctors for Disaster Preparedness
and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com,
including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.
Copyright
� 2004 LewRockwell.com
Donald
Miller Archives
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