IMVA - It Matters Where You Live - June 20, 2006

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berardscar

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 23:24:09 EDT

[MedicalConspiracies] IMVA - It Matters Where You Live - June

20, 2006

 

 

 

 

 

 

It Matters Where You Live

 

 

 

 

 

States that are reporting the highest levels of mercury

emissions

also have the highest rates of developmental disorders

including autism.

 

Dr. John Palmer

 

A two-year study of mercury accumulation in the town

of Steubenville, Ohio, by federal EPA researcher Matt Landis and the

University of Michigan disputes the basic EPA policy on mercury;

showing emissions to be much more concentrated in local areas around

power plants than thought before. The EPA contends only about 8% of

the mercury from coal-burning plants, incinerators and boilers settles

to the ground locally. The Steubenville study contends nearly 70% of

the mercury found in the Steubenville area came from local sources.

What this means is that it is dangerous to live

anywhere near coal-burning plants, incinerators and boilers. If

mercury spreads widely, as presumed by the model commonly used by the

EPA, communities near coal-fired plants face no greater risk than

those elsewhere. If large amounts of mercury from those plants settle

within 60 to 120 miles of a plant, then local communities face much

larger risks.

This is terrible news for many people for large

populations in certain areas of the United States are exposed to

multiple sources of mercury. Every year these plants spill out

millions of tons of pollution into the air and this alone is provoking

a health crisis. Different institutions have measured the impact of

this pollution in terms of increased premature death, heart attacks

and other negative health impacts. You can see exactly the increased

risks to you and your family, depending on where you live, at the

following site: http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower/map.html It

allows you to zero in on your state and will show you all the points

of exposure for air pollution in general.

The news offered by Dr. Palmer from the University of

Texas and a Harvard Research team is that the mercury in the air is

having its direct effect on our children, playing its part in the

devastating epidemic of neurological disorders including autism. It is

not just the fish, the vaccines or the dental amalgam that are

saturating our bodies with mercury. Americans and people around the

world are going to have to wake up to the fact that mercury is in the

air they breathe, in the soil they plant in, and in the water they drink.

The world is facing massive poisoning, similar to

that which India and Bangladesh are already facing with heavy

concentrations of arsenic in their ground water. Yet people are

skeptical because the poisoning is slow in coming on. Arsenic is not

something you drink and you instantly fall ill, this is something that

affects your body over years. It’s the same with mercury poisoning

and most of the principle chemicals that are now firmly implanted in

our environment. One does not have to be bitten by a snake or spider

and fall over dead immediately to consider one poisoned.

Recently researchers from the Northeastern Ecosystem

Research Cooperative[ii] have, for the first time, documented elevated

mercury levels in non-aquatic and non-fish-eating animals, including

songbirds that live in mountaintop forests of the northeastern part of

the United States. " Mercury's reach in our environment is much greater

than we ever imagined, " said Felice Stadler of the National Wildlife

Federation. The most troubling discovery to researchers was the

mercury found in the blood of songbirds. The songbird data show that

methylmercury is also forming in drier, forested areas, raising new

questions about the extent of environmental damage. The birds

exhibited the following problems from non-aquatic environmental

exposure to mercury:

Fewer eggs produced, lower reproductive success, offspring

less responsive to maternal calls, reduced chick survival, and

decreased egg volume, compromised embryonic development, less likely

to hunt, seek shade, less time flying, walking or pecking. Exaggerated

response to fright stimulus. Brain lesions, spinal cord degeneration,

central nervous system dysfunction, tremors, difficulty flying,

walking and standing. Inability to coordinate muscle movement, reduced

feeding, weight loss and progressive weakness in wings and legs.

It takes no stretch of the imagination to understand

that what is happening to these songbirds is happening to our

children. Mercury is getting into everything and even birds and land

animals like us are being blanketed with this nerve poison. The same

study found similar problems in Mink and Otters, showing us what is on

the way for human beings and their offspring.

Mercury is not an ordinary air pollutant nor is it

classified as such. Because it is a neurotoxin that causes

neurological problems, it is considered a hazardous air pollutant,

which gives it a different legal status. This is a very polite way of

saying that mercury is a nerve poison, which even at the lowest

concentrations imaginable causes problems for the young. We are only

in the beginning phases of becoming aware of the tremendous problem

with thousands of tons of mercury being poured into the air each year.

If one gram of mercury can pollute a 20-acre lake or kill a child,

imagine what 8 to ten billion grams of it would do.[iii]

A fraction of a teaspoon can render all

the fish in a 20-acre lake unsafe to eat.

The United States government’s estimate of the

health benefits of reducing mercury emissions vastly understates the

total problem because it does not take into account the direct effect

of having thousands of tons of nerve poison in the atmosphere that

people breathe.

The Harvard study that was stripped from public documents

by EPA officials estimated health benefits from mercury reductions at

100 times the level used by the EPA.(iv) The government is not paying

attention to the presence of mercury in the water people drink or that

it is getting into the soil and thus into our dry foods. If one takes

even a curious glance at the bottom of the above graph we see visually

that mercury is a quickly rising tide having in a few short years

polluting the majority of our waterways. What doctors and scientists

have not seen is that this same process is being repeated on land.

Part of the airborne mercury deposited in the United

States originates from abroad and this highlights the entire question

about mercury. It’s everywhere, coming from everywhere. Nothing

demonstrates our current state of globalization better than the

international nature of mercury air pollution. From 1990 to 1999, even

as total airborne emissions of mercury in the United States supposedly

dropped, worldwide emissions have soared into the stratosphere.

Ice core studies have shown that we have already

increased

environmental mercury levels by a factor of 20 over the

last 270 years.[v]

Mercury is making its presence felt more in the soil

and is entering the food chain via our crops. Recent evidence suggests

that mercury is responsible for a reduction of micro-biological

activity vital to the terrestrial food chain in soils over large parts

of Europe †" and potentially in many other places in the world with

similar soil characteristics. Critical limits to prevent ecological

damage due to mercury in organic soils have been set at 0.07-0.3 mg/kg

for the total mercury content in soil.[vi] The Swedish Chemicals

Inspectorate is reporting that the “mercury levels are increasing by

about 0.5% per annum in the topmost layer of its forest soils and

southern Sweden is already above the levels which have been shown to

affect biological process and organisms in the soil.â€[vii]

University of Nevada researchers in December of 2004

let be known that we have a similar unlooked for problem on land.

“Based on previous studies, what we originally thought was that

mercury in soil would be absorbed through a tree’s roots, then

released through the tree’s leaves into the air,†said Jody

Ericksen, a Nevada graduate student who studied the contaminant for

her master’s degree in Environmental Science and Health. “We were

wrong. What happened is that the plants absorbed the mercury from

the air.†According to Nevada researchers, once a tree’s leaves

contain mercury, those leaves eventually fall off, decay and mercury

goes back into the soil, air and, ultimately, water.[viii] This has

huge implications, darkening the mercury story considerably. As we

learn more we see the huge error humanity has made. Understanding is

dawning that mercury is not going away. It is just being recycled and

fortified as it goes organic. Even the mercury we all excrete everyday

from our bodies is going into the environment.

According to the National Institute of Environmental

Health Sciences between the late 1970s and late 1980s, the average

level of mercury in biosolids (inevitable by-product of the sewage

treatment plants) that are used as fertilizers for farm lands

increased from 2.8 mg/kg to 5.2 mg/kg, and arsenic levels from 6.7

mg/kg to 9.9 mg/kg while levels of lead, nickel, cadmium

decreased.[ix] And as early as 1999 reports found mercury levels in

rain over Chicago Illinois that are as high as 42 times EPA safe

levels; Detroit, Michigan rain with 65 times safe levels; and rain

along the Illinois/Wisconsin border as high as 56 times safe levels.[x]

Of our nearly 1,900 lakes and rivers officially classified as

" impaired " under standards set by the U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency, mercury is responsible in two cases out

of three.

State of Minnesota[xi]

Power plants in the US put 48 tons of mercury a year

into the atmosphere through burning coal.[xii] China spews 600 tons of

mercury into the air each year, accounting for a great part of the

world's non-natural emissions. And the volume is rising quickly with

more coal fired energy plants now under construction in China than

exists in the entire country of England. China all by itself is

bringing on a mercury crisis. By 2020, China will have nearly 1,000

gigawatts of total electricity-generating capacity, more than twice

the current amount, according to the State Power Economic Research Center.

China uses more coal than the United States, the

European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal

consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest

industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired

power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all

the households in Dallas or San Diego. To make matters worse, India is

right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power

plants

China will this year burn about 1.9 billion tons of

coal, a 12% increase from last year, and consumption is expected to

keep rising. In fifteen years we can expect China to be pumping 1,400

tons of mercury into the air or approximately 60 additional tons a

year as new capacity comes online.[xiii] This is a huge number and

will join the already enormous amount of mercury bellowing up from

China's more than 2,000 coal-fired power plants. This mercury soars

high into the atmosphere and then around the globe on what has become

a transcontinental conveyor belt of mercury polluted air. And as we

can see from the chart below China has over the last fifteen years has

tripled its power making capacity thus its mercury polluting capacity.

In the U.S. hospitals that burn their wastes put 20

tons a year into the air and potentially upwards of 200 tons are lost

into the environment because that is how much Hg is ordered into

hospitals to repair sphygmomanometers.[xiv] Every plastic manufacture

pours it out and every new car is laden with its fumes. Much attention

though is being focused on the nation's heavy reliance on coal.

Emissions from electric utility plants represent the single largest

unregulated industrial source of mercury emissions in the US,

according to the EPA. Some 500 power plants pump out 60 percent of the

75 tons of mercury released into the air by all industries in 2001,

according to the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory.

A medical waste incinerator near Baltimore's industrial

waterfront

has violated limits for mercury, soot and other air

pollutants more than

400 times over the past two years, prompting three state

legislators

and a city councilman to demand that the state shut it down.

Baltimore Sun 12/2004

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,

medical waste incinerators are the fourth-largest source of mercury

re-entering the environment. In addition, the EPA estimates that

mercury fever thermometers contribute about 17 tons of mercury

disposed of in solid waste landfills annually.

Actually there is no real way to estimate how many

tons are actually being put into the environment and how much really

has entered the environment in the last fifteen years. Between 1990

and 2000, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions grew by 69 percent

in India, 57 percent in Brazil and 33 percent in China indicating a

pace of development that includes increased mercury emissions. “If

India, China and Brazil replicate our pattern of fossil-intensive

development, the game is over,†said Alden Meyer, director of the

U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists. Scientists seem more

concerned with the warming effect of all this growth and not as

concerned with the poisoning effect. India is estimated to be now

dumping 77.91 tonnes of mercury per year into the atmosphere, 59 tons

of which are from its coal fired plants. India’s coal carries

concentrations of mercury in the area of about 0.272 ppm, which is

conciderably higher than American grade coal. When other industrial

uses are factored in, like the production of chlorine, India raises

high in the rankings of mercury polluters.

Mercury has spread out into the atmosphere and into

the oceans where it gains strength and toxicity through the process of

methylation. Radioactivity tends, with the passing of many years, to

lower in toxicity but mercury runs up the hill to more toxic levels

with the help of fish, mammals and bacteria. Mercury bio-accumulates

and under goes bio-magnification. The term bioaccumulation refers to

the net accumulation over time of metals within an organism from both

biotic (other organisms) and abiotic (soil, air, and water) sources.

The term bio-magnification refers to the progressive build up of some

heavy metals (and some other persistent substances) by successive

trophic levels †" meaning that it relates to the concentration ratio

in a tissue of a predator organism as compared to that in its prey.

According to biologist Dr. Sandra Steingrabera, “top predatory fish,

like a tuna, can easily have sequestered in its flesh methylmercury

levels that are a million times higher than the water it swam in.â€

The huge tonnage of mercury put into the environment

each day is adding to an already critical situation. Considering that

mercury is an accumulative poison with delayed effects or a lag time

measured in years, we can see that humanity has created a time bomb

that is ticking while even more mercury is added. Tomorrow we will all

wake up to a world with about twenty tons more mercury in the

environment. In a world rapidly approaching some saturation point with

mercury these twenty tons are significant. The longer medical and

governmental authorities deny the full mercury story the higher the

tide will rise as concentrations increase on land, sea and air.

Mercury is a basic fact; it’s a reality that has to be taken into

account by doctors. Though mercury is accompanied by tens of thousands

of other chemicals in the environment none are as toxic or as

prevalent. Human destiny is on a collision course with mercury. It is

already poisoned huge numbers of people who are suffering from its

chronic effects.

Mark Sircus Ac., OMD

Director International Medical Veritas Association

http://www.imva.info

http://www.magnesimforlife.com

+55-83-3252-2195

www.skype.com ID: marksircus

International Medical Veritas Association

Copyright 2006 All rights reserved.

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