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9/11 Update: New York State Attorney General's office
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by Rodger Herbst
Book Notice: Claiming the Mantle: How
Presidential Nominations Are Won and Lost Before the Votes Are Cast
by R. Lawrence Butler
"Modern Poll Tax" is Challenged in WA: Ex-felons
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Next Steps after the 2004 Elections
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Justice Department Manipulates Truth About
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After the Riot
anonymous account of prison conditions
WORKPLACE
Bon Macy's Fails Employees' Health-Care
Needs
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San Francisco hotel workers locked out
photos and story by David Bacon
Small Business Administration Fails
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IMMIGRATION AND MEXICAN LABOR
HOW U.S. CORPORATIONS WON THE DEBATE OVER
IMMIGRATION
by David Bacon
Illegal Immigration: Another Way to Outsource
Jobs?
opinion by Domenico Maceri
Salsa and Apple Pie
A U.S.-Mexican Union in the making
by Steven Hill
ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH
Existing Systems Do Not Protect Us
by Sarah Westervelt
Mercury on the mind: Want to avoid both autism
and Alzheimers? Then forget the flu vaccine and avoid dental amalgams
by Donald W. Miller, Jr, MD
What Water to Drink? Tap water may be your healthiest
option
by Seth Gordon
MEDIA
MEDIA BEAT by Normal Solomon
The Presidential pageant: "There he is, Mr. America..."
People Like This Paper! So why is it so
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A New Yorker Trapped in Los Angeles
excerpt from Willaim Blum's book: "Freeing the World to Death"
Poetry by Robert Hosheit
Beatnik Books
poetic reviews by Robert Pavik
GOOD IDEAS FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES by Doug Collins
Polish Jokes
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Mercury on the Mind
by Donald W.
Miller, Jr., MD
Want to avoid both autism and Alzheimers? Then forget
the flu
vaccine and avoid dental amalgams
Health information in the
WA Free Press should not be construed as
medical advice. Always make your own
choice regarding medical treatment
by seeking multiple sources of information
and consulting with your
personal physician.
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 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. It was 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), but 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
second 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,"
(
www
.vaccinationnews.com/DailyNews/July2001/AutismUniqueMercPoison.htm)
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 the four vaccines against
diphtheria,
tetanus, pertussis, and smallpox, one 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,
which
is typically 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. (See research by Geier & Geier, Medical Science Monitor,
2004,
10(3), p133-39 or
www.medscimonit.com/pub/
vol_10/no_3/3986.pdf)
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 two (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 (even using
diagnostic criteria
that are more restrictive than previously). 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, a private
nonprofit organization, has shown (see "Something is
Rotten in Denmark"
www.safeminds.org/pressroom/press_releases/
20040518_AutismAuthorsNetwork.pdf). 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 Geier & Geier
(www.jpands.org/vol8no1/geier.pdf), 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 it 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
such as
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 x 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 by Boyd Haley, PhD
(
www.holistic-dentistry.
com/artalzeimer.asp),
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. Dr. Hugh
Fudenberg,
MD, one of the most frequently published biologists of modern
times, found that
people who received the flu vaccine for three to five
consecutive years had a
ten-fold greater chance of developing
Alzheimer's disease than people who had
zero, one, or two shots (see
www.doctorbob.com/vd--
flu-shot-season.html).
Another important factor with regard to
mercury and 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 one in 100 rats
and a dose
of aluminum that will kill one in 100 rats, when combined have
a
striking effect: all the rats die. Doses of mercury that have a one
percent
mortality will have a 100 percent mortality rate if some
aluminum is there.
Vaccines also contain aluminum. (The article "Report
on Mercury Toxicity from
Dental Amalgams and Thimerosal" by Boyd E.
Haley, Ph.D., includes a summary of
the research evidence for
synergistic effects of mercury with aluminum and other
metals: see
www.talkinternational.com/health/
report_on_mercury_toxicity_bh_050803.
htm .)
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, 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. (See my article on
Schopenhauer at
www.lewrockwell.com/miller
/miller8.html
.)
In the 1790s Edward Jenner observed that milk
maids did not have pock
marks on their faces, unlike people 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 US and USSR 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. See my history of smallpox
and bioterrorism at
www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/
miller6.html
.)
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
(
www.
newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/9/13/112130.shtml).
Finding one
cow in
the US 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. (See the protocol at
www.holisticmed.com/
dental/amalgam/iaomt.txt
.)
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 citations 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 or
www.aapsonline.org/
vaccines/mercinmed.pdf .
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,
www.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"
(the three faces being fish,
vaccines, and dental amalgams) by Thomas Clarkson
in Environmental
Health Perspectives Volume 110, Supplement 1, February 2002,
pages
11-23
or
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2002/suppl-1/11-23clarkson/
EHP110s1p11PDF.pdf . This study provides a 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 at
www.whale.to/m/haley.html
.
"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.
(His book can be
ordered at www.russellblaylockmd.com .)
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. (Book can be ordered at
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1881217302/lewrockwell/
102-6092241-8696148 .)
Donald Miller is Director of Cardiac
Surgery at the VA Medical Center
in Seattle, and Professor of Surgery at the
University of Washington. He
is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness
and writes articles on
a variety of subjects, including bioterrorism. His web
site is
www.donaldmiller.com.
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