http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/10AUTISM.html
The paragraph that got my attention was:
The F.D.A. team’s conclusions were frightening. Vaccines added under Halsey’s watch had tripled the dose of mercury that infants got in their first few months of life. As many as 30 million American children may have been exposed to mercury in excess of Environmental Protection Agency guidelines — levels of mercury that, in theory, could have killed enough brain cells to scramble thinking or hex behavior.
I do not believe that thimerosal alone is responsible for the meteoric ris ein autism. Whether it is the key element in some or all autism remains to be seen.
A few things jumped out at me from this article…
“…And then suddenly in June 1999, during a visit to the Food and Drug
Administration, a squall appeared on the horizon of Halsey’s confidence. Halsey attended a meeting to discuss thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that at the time was being used in several vaccines… ”It was the first strong evidence of a causal association with neurological impairment…”
How is it that we have 65 years+ of administering mandatory vaccines containing a known neurotoxin (mercury is one of the single most toxic substances we have dound to date in any form, and organic forms like methyl and ethyl are exponentially more toxic than the elemental form) and we have never before run any testing on the safety of its use???
{A brief aside… thimerosal was removed from veterinary vaccines almost 5 years prior to it’s removal from new production of pediatric vaccines because vets reported that vaccines with mercury in themcaused problems including behavior regression and death in dogs and horses, as well as occasional spontaneous miscarrages. )
(One more brief aside… thimerosal is also known as merthiolate, that liquid grandma used to swab our cuts with that stained the skin red and burned like fire on the wound. It was removed from the over-the-counter market in the mid 80’s after tests run by Eli-Lilly determined that merthiolate was 60 times (that is 6000%) more toxic to the flesh than the staff germs it sought to protect the flesh from.)
“…’In most vaccine containers, thimerosal is listed as a mercury derivative, a hundredth of a percent. And what I believed, and what everybody else believed, was that it was truly a trace, a biologically insignificant amount. My
honest belief is that if the labels had had the mercury content in micrograms, this would have been uncovered years ago. But the fact is, no one did the calculation….”
!!!!! These people are supposed to be overseeing what the pharmaceutical companies do, to monitor the testing process, to ensure that the drugs and medical procedures used on us have the risk/benefit ratio properly defined. What have they been doing for the last 65 years on the thimerosal issue?
“…The more Halsey learned about these mercury studies, the more he worried. ”My first concern was that it would harm the credibility of the
immunization program,” he says. ”But gradually it came home to me that maybe there was some real risk to the children.” Mercury was turning out to be like lead, which had been studied extensively in the homes of the Baltimore poor during Halsey’s tenure at Hopkins. ”As they got more sophisticated at testing for lead, the safe level marched down and down, and they continued to find subtle neurological impairment,” Halsey says. ”And that’s almost exactly what happened with mercury…”
Is this what the price of herd immunity is? That the first thought to cross a dr.’s mind is not “have we harmed a patient unwittingly” but instead “what will happen to our credibility”?
“…Paul Offit, a vaccinologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,
takes it a step further. ”In some instances I think full disclosure can be harmful…”
In light of the fact that babies are incapable of deciding whether they should or should not receive a vaccine, considering that no medicine or procedure is without adverse-event risk, including vaccines, and taking into account that medical exemptions where risk outweighs benefit exist in all 50 states, how can we make informed consent decisions for our most precious commodity, our children WITHOUT full disclosure.
You know, any time a representative of the govt. tells us “do not worry, you don’t need to know, trust us…” the warning bells go off in my mind. How ‘bout y’all?
“…(An early University of Rochester study was reassuring: it
indicated that children eliminate thimerosal much more quickly than
expected.)…”
We-e-e-e-e-llllll, this is not entirely true… First of all, mercury exposure in typical metabolism is measured in half-lifes, the amount of time it takes for your body (using bile) to clean half of the mercury out. In the blood the half-life is about 60 days, in the internal organs (kidneys, pancreas, intestines) it is 6 months. For the central nervous system it is 2 years. Remember that is half the mercury, so any mercury in the brain takes 2 years to go down by half, then 2 more years for half again, etc.
Now we get to te sticky part. Infants do not produce bile, so they cannot eliminate any mercury in them. And the blood barrier of the brain which normally shields us from mercury settling there is not fully formed until they are toddlers, meaning that any mercury introduced has free access.
And there is one more unsettling piece to the puzzle… The mechanism which allows the body to self-chelate is the MT protein process (Metallothionein) has been shown to be mal-functioning in many autistic kids. This means that without the assistance of medical treatment (chelation using DMSA, EDTA or DMPS) their bodies never shed te mercury they ingest, inhale or receive through injections. They have no half-life, it all stays in. And mercury, unlike lead, nickel, cadmium and other toxic metals does not stay free int he blood at a point of balance for the total body load. If you do not clean it out, it all goes into storage, so blodd testing will not show it is present. This is why so many drs. disbelieve that children who present clear signs of mercury poisoning have it inside them.
I have know doubt that my boy’s autism was greatly aggravated if not caused by the mercury he received, first in utero from my wife’s amalgam fillings, then from the 17 shots he received prior top age 2 which contained thimerosal. I don’t give a flying fig what the drs. who wish to protect their public image, their positions of prestigue and their precious herd immunity program try to tell me.
My boy did not begin using expressive language until after we began treating him specifically for mercury poisoning.
I find it very interesting that the people who poo-poo the loudest about thimerosal do not live with an autistic child. And when one of “them” gets touched directly by autism, and begins to look at what is known, they suddenly change their tunes.