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Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D.
The Politics of
Mercury Poisoning
in Autism
Various statistics rate the incidence of autism spectrum disorders at between 1 in 150 and 1 in 200. Not long ago, autism was thought to be genetic, with symptoms surfacing soon after birth. However, in the past two decades, a more common form of the disease has occurred. It is called regressive autism: children appear to be developing normally, but then suddenly regress. Parents watch helplessly as their healthy bundle of energy and joy loses speech, social interaction, and develops repetitive behaviors. Many parents and doctors report that regressive autism happens around vaccine exposures.
“Autism: A Unique Type of Mercury Poisoning” sheds some light on the cause of autism. It is a profoundly important paper written by health professionals from the organization SAFE MINDS Who are
also concerned parents of autistic children. During an intense literature search, they uncovered an association between Pink Disease, which was an epidemic of mercury poisoning caused by rubbing a
mercury teething powder, called calomel, on the gums of innocent infants. This practice was followed
beginning in the 1850s and finally recognized as toxic and banned in the 1950s.
SAFE MINDS found that children with autism and children with Pink Disease are emotionally impaired, lack eye contact, are remote, anxious, exhibit incoherent speech, and experience violent mood swings. Structural damage to the brain and biological damage to neurons and mitochondria are identical in autism and mercury toxicity. Brain biopsies from autistic victims also show shortened dendrites, which are a known direct effect of mercury.
Children in modern times are not poisoned with mercury
teething powders but by injections of mercury contained in vaccinations
that are ironically designed to prevent disease. Since
1999, vaccine manufacturers have “voluntarily” stopped using
the mercury-containing thimerosal preservative, however, they
did not recall vaccine already made which continued to be distributed
for several years. Flu vaccines still contain mercury and
are being recommended for the general population, including
children.
Trying to fathom why a mercury preservative was chosen for
vaccines, originally in 1930, I discovered a 2001 FDA paper on
the history of thimerosal called, “Thimerosal in Vaccines.” It
states that, “Prior to its introduction in the 1930s, data on several
animal species and humans providing evidence for its
safety and effectiveness as a preservative was available.” But the
paper did not cite those pre-1930 studies. And it certainly did
not mention a highly questionable thimerosal study done in
1929 by Eli Lilly, the makers of thimerosal. However, Waters &
Kraus, in pursuing a lawsuit against Eli Lilly and Company,
received the 1929 study in 2002 as part of the discovery process.
It appears that the evidence for the safety of thimerosal has
been built on a falsehood.
To be able to say they had done a successful clinical trial with
thimerosal, Eli Lilly secretly sponsored an unethical “human
toxicity” study by researcher K. C. Smithburn on patients who
were dying of meningococcal meningitis. A flawed report condoning
thimerosal was produced. Senior partner of Waters &
Kraus, Andrew Waters, stated that, “Lilly then cited this study
repeatedly for decades as proof that thimerosal was of low toxicity
and harmless to humans. They never revealed to the scientific
community or the public the highly questionable nature of
the original research.”
In “Thimerosal in Vaccines,” the FDA quotes from this faulty
Smithburn study but calls it the Powell and Jamieson study of
1931. The facts reported in both papers are identical. The FDA
says that, “In this report, 22 individuals received 1 percent solution
of thimerosal intravenously for unspecified therapeutic reasons.
Subjects received up to 26 milligrams thimerosal/kg (1
milligram equals 1,000 micrograms) with no reported toxic
effects, although two subjects demonstrated phlebitis or
sloughing of skin after local infiltration.” The FDA makes sure
the reader realizes that, “Of note, this study was not specifically
designed to examine toxicity; seven of 22 subjects were
observed for only one day, the specific clinical assessments
were not described, and no laboratory studies were reported.”
Powell and Jamieson were paid Eli Lily researchers. Smithburn
was not an employee of Eli Lilly but signed over his 1929 report
to the company.
In 1972, the FDA finally began its initial questioning of
thimerosal’s safety and Eli Lilly gave them the Smithburn/
Powell study as evidence of safety. When Congressman Dan
Burton learned about the Smithburn study, he lashed out at FDA
officials in a 2001 congressional hearing. "You mean to tell me
that since 1929, we’ve been using thimerosal and the only test
that you know of is from 1929, and every one of those people
had meningitis, and they all died?" The FDA officials did not
respond.
The FDA continues in "Thimerosal in Vaccines": "Since then,
(the Powell and Jamieson study) thimerosal has been the subject
of several studies" [a bibliography cited eight studies mostly
from the 70s and 80s,] "and has a long record of safe and effective use preventing bacterial and fungal contamination of vaccines, with no ill effects established other than minor local reactions at the site of injection." Note that the FDA does not say that studies have been done to establish the safety of mercury as a component of thimerosal but to prove its effectiveness as an antibacterial and antifungal agent. The average reader might have assumed, when reading this FDA paper about thimerosal
in vaccines, that the FDA is addressing the toxic nature of mercury in thimerosal, but this is hardly the case. We know that mercury kills living creatures. What we really need to know is to what extent is it harming our children.
These eight studies not only do
not prove thimerosal's safety, they
also provide evidence that by at
least 1975, the FDA knew that mercury
builds up in tissues, crosses
the blood-brain barrier, and also
crosses the placenta to the fetus.
And yet, the FDA presents this
study as proof of the safety of
thimerosal, presumably because
the abstract says that there was no
"teratogenesis" or birth defects in
the rabbit fetuses.
From 1930 until the 1990s, the
number of vaccines increased to
an incredible 20 shots by age
three. In 1999, Dr. Neal Halsey of
the American Academy of
Pediatrics and Dr. William Egan of
the Biologics Division of the FDA,
in separate papers, reported on
the amount of mercury a child
received with standard vaccinations.
By six months, the average
child received 187.5 micrograms
of mercury; by two years 237.5
micrograms. Broken down into the designated vaccination
times the following amounts of mercury are given: at birth, 12.5
micrograms; at two months, 62.5 micrograms; at four months,
50 micrograms; at six months, 62.5 micrograms; at 15 months,
50 micrograms. Dr. Halsey has calculated the two month dose
to be "over 30 times the recommended daily maximum exposure,
with babies of the smallest weight category receiving
almost three months worth of daily exposures on a single day."
Dr. Halsey testified at a 2001 Institute of Medicine's (IOM)
hearing on vaccinations. Halsey is a member of the vaccine
advisory panel in charge of setting the safe limits for thimerosal
in vaccines. At the IOM hearings, he admitted that the advisory
panel had assumed the 0.01 percent amount of thimerosal in
vaccines was sufficiently low to be safe but failed to understand
that mercury is toxic at levels measured in nanograms and
micrograms. He said, "I feel badly that I didn't pick it up."
Halsey also admitted they knew little about the means of mercury
elimination from an infant's body. They did not realize that
most mercury from vaccines may not be excreted but instead
migrates to the brain. And they did not know whether an infant's
immature immune system could handle the insult of an injection
of 62.5 micrograms of mercury on a single day.
In setting standards, the experts admitted that allowable
doses of thimerosal were automatically averaged as if given in
small daily amounts over a six-month period, not all on any one
day. This makes the 12.5 micrograms of mercury, in a single shot
of most vaccines, far in excess of the EPA "safe limit" of 0.1
micrograms per kilogram, which in the average newborn is
approximately 0.4 micrograms. It is standard practice for children
to receive several shots in
one day.
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Structural damage to the brain
and biological damage to
neurons and mitochondria are
identical in autism and mercury
toxicity. Brain biopsies from
autistic victims also show
shortened dendrites, which
are a known direct effect of
mercury. |
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Since those revelations that
shocked the autism community,
the CDC has tried to stem the outrage
by declaring in November
2001 that they could find no link
between vaccines and autism.
The statement was false. The CDC
failed to tell the public that a
recently completed CDC-funded
study found a 2.48 times
increased risk of autism in children
exposed to more than 62.5
micrograms of mercury within
the first three months of life.
Later, this study was released with
the statistics altered to obscure
the initial findings.
In February of 2004, the
Institute of Medicine was criticized
by SAFE MINDS and other
autism groups for holding a
meeting about vaccine safety
before results of ongoing mercury
vaccine trials had been completed.
Because of the controversy
with the IOM, one of those
trials was rushed to online print
in February, 2004, two months
ahead of its publication date in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Dr. Richard Deth, a professor of pharmacology at
Northeastern University in Boston, along with researchers from
Johns Hopkins University, the University of Nebraska, and Tufts
University in Boston, said that their study is "the first to offer an
explanation for possible causes of two increasingly common
childhood neurological disorders."
The team found that two brain chemicals are key to one type
of brain metabolism called methylation. However, thimerosal,
ethanol and the metals lead and mercury all interfere with
methylation. The researchers were especially impressed with
the way thimerosal worked. It shut down methylation at doses
100 times lower than a child would receive after a single shot
with a vaccine containing thimerosal. "It was by far the most
potent," says Deth.
We have our body count. We have our smoking gun. What
now remains is to convince the health care system to test children
who are have autistic spectrum disorder for heavy metal
poisoning and begin detoxification therapies. This is a topic for
a future article.
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