Slashdot Mirror
Proposed Mercury Ban Threatens Vaccines
T Murphy writes "Although in the draft stages, a treaty being pushed by the United Nations Environment Programme has a blanket ban on mercury. While the ban would stop the use of mercury in paints or pesticides, it currently has no exemptions to allow for other small uses, such as in thermisol, which is used as a preservative in vaccines. The next meeting to discuss this treaty will be at the end of October."
Does anyone really believe that the final draft would include a total ban, even for vaccines? I didn't think so. Sounds like more hype than fact, and an article for the sake of having an article on the part of the Chicago Tribune.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Last I read it was being phased out in favor of other preservatives that lacked mercury.
Mercury has been phased out of most vaccines. This was done in the late 1990s in response to concerns that the mercury was somehow causing autism in children. Note that this had no impact on autism rates so the anti-vaxxers then switched to talking about ambiguous toxins. Thiomersol is still used in some vaccines but it is only a small fraction of vaccines, such as some versions of the flu vaccine. If necessary that can be easily replaced. It would be stupid because the mercury levels are tiny but it wouldn't have much of an impact. I'm more concerned that this sort of blanket ban would inadvertently impact smaller uses where mercury is really necessary for specialized uses in other areas. The ban also doesn't seem to address the differences between organic and inorganic mercury which have wildly different chemical properties in practice.
I've worked at a vaccines manufacturing site for a dozen years now and have helped produce hundreds of millions of doses of pediatric vaccines - I've never seen a milligram of thimerosal at our plant or any other in our supply chain. Most current technology manufacturing plants stopped using it decades ago and this really is only an issue for old facilities making old vaccines that they can't relicense using new technology.
Technologies like single dose syringes and barrier/isolator filling lines have made preservatives largely unnecessary and even for those that still use them, there are better choices like EDTA.
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
There is no safe amount of mercury exposure. It is a potent neurotoxin. This is a great treaty and I hope it succeeds. We're smart enough to find other ways of accomplishing what we need. Under pressure from autism-related claims, it was replaced by something safer in vaccines. Digital thermometers take temperature without using mercury. Fluorescent lights will soon be replaced with LEDs.
There's a lot of crazy people in the world. Every little thing we can do to remove neurotoxins from the environment is a good step.
Next: do the same thing with lead. I'm sick of seeing it in all my christmas light plastics.
Yes, in older kids. The pertussis (whooping cough) component of childhood vaccines wears off after a while (and was never 100% to begin with). This, combined with increasing numbers of non immunized children and the fact that the CDC gets wound up about pertussis* makes outbreaks fairly common.
Fun fact: the newer tetanus vaccines have pertussis vaccine in them so adults might quit being the reservoir of the disease. It tends to cause a much milder illness in adults so they don't get treated and it can be contagious for weeks.
*Because it's treatable and highly contagious and fairly dangerous to infants.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I do research in organic chemistry for living and a fellow organic chemist one time accidentally dropped a drop of Dimethyl mercury on her hand. It went through the gloves that she was wearing and onto her skin. Within several hours she was dead from what the doctors described in layman terms as "her brain melted".
*sigh* If that's what you know about it, she wasn't a "fellow" organic chemist except that she once worked in the same field. Her name was Karen Wetterhahn, and she worked at Dartmouth College. She died almost a full year after the accident, and she didn't even recognize the symptoms for months. If she had reported the spill and gotten treatment earlier, she might not have died. It wasn't as if mercury poisoning was something nobody knew about.
Her case was important because before her accident, latex gloves were considered sufficient protective gear (which is why she didn't think to report it and get tested). After she died, safety standards were changed to recommend much heavier-duty protective gear when possible, and she started showing up in cautionary lectures about safety (apparently with the facts being watered down into legend by the time they got to you).
I don't know where you got the bit about "her brain melted", which it wouldn't have, though there was certainly a lot of neurological damage, and history notes that her coma was a particularly ugly one.