Mercury on the Mind

March 15, 2005

Mercury on the Mind JoAnn Guest Mar 15, 2005 13:50 PST

http://www.thenhf.com/articles_60.htm

by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

December 2004

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 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 spend 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.

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