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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.
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Once this ban passes, then all new diagnoses of autism should stop, right?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
To summarize: A draft treaty (with only 2 of 5 planned meetings to draft the treaty having been completed) and not expected to become final for 2 years, is not complete. Is there any reason to believe that the exception for vaccine preservatives won't be present in the final treaty?
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.
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I think you mean Thiomersal...
T-H-I-M-E-R-O-S-A-L is the way it is spelled on the vaccination form where it asks "Are you allergic to Thimerosal (used as a preservative in vaccines)?"
No it doesn't. Scientific study after scientific study has proven it doesn't.
Even the first doctor who said there was a link has admitted he faked his data for monetary gain from a lawsuit.
Unfortunately some people still hold onto this old belief- just like people still believe sugar makes kids get hyper... which has been proven not to be true (blood sugar is regulated unless you have diabetes or other such disease).
It's an old wives tale nothing more. Vaccines do not cause autism.
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Some vaccines contain thiomersal, a compound of mercury. And in such miniscule amounts it doesn't harm anyone beyond some localized redness. Many vaccines are phasing it out, not because it causes harm but because it's talking point for antivaxxer loons. Of course when thiomersal goes these loons will be screeching about the miniscule traces of formaldehyde or detergents that vaccines also contain.
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.
I say don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
A baby with enough Thimerosal sinks right to the bottom of the bathwater. It's pretty easy to pour the bathwater right off and find the baby still in there.
Your general point is true, but your information about tuna and thimerosal is false. The mercury in tuna is methyl mercury, which is one of the less-pleasant organic mercuries. Organic mercury is quite bad compared to elemental mercury. The mercury exposure limits I'm referring to are actually for methyl mercury, since it's the common and dangerous organic mercury. Thimerosal breaks down in the body to ethyl mercury. There are not sufficient studies on ethyl mercury to determine its impact, but the rule of thumb is that ethyl mercury should be no worse than methyl mercury, so it's reasonable to apply the methyl mercury limits.
It could actually be that thimerosal is much less bad for you than an "equivalent" amount of tuna, but it's a reasonable upper limit. (Particularly since those limits are for chronic exposure and thus are extremely low.)
There are non-mercury, liquid metal thermometers available. http://periodictable.com/Items/031.6/index.html It's gallium, indium, and tin.
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Would he have gone nuts anyway because it was a party? Did he go nuts because he has been conditioned (even unconsciously) by adults that candy == go nuts? Did you control by giving artificially sweetened candy to other children at the party? (Even better would be a third group with no candy.)
I think you have failed to eliminate a vast array of confounding factors in your experiment. Not worthy of publication. :)
Thimerosal has already been phased out or banned outright in most of the world. In Russia, they found direct links to increased rates of serious mental health issues and instituted a strict ban on the stuff.
If that were true, one would suspect that we would see a similar problem in the US since Thiomersal has been used for decades. We should see increasing amounts of mental illness, stupidity and general batshit craziness.
Oh, wait ....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you go to your doctor, you will get a thimerosal free shot. If you go to a clinic for flu shots, you won't unless you are pregnant. Without thimerosal, each vial can only be used once, just like other vaccines. Thimerosal enables multi-use vials, where 10 shots can be given from one vial. Obviously, like many products, packaging costs come into play. The single shot vial and the 10 shot vial are the same size and contain the same amount of vaccine. The difference is one can be used 10 times the other can't.
Thimerosal is not bad, to date, nothing else has been proven as safe or effective in producing multi-use vials. Testing on thimerosal also has shown it is safe in the amounts received in a vaccination. The only thing banning it does, is drive up the cost of vaccines, by causing all vaccines to be single use vials.
While I am not trying to dismiss the dangers of mercury, you will receive more mercury in your lifetime from breathing the air near a coal powered electrical plant than you will in a lifetime of vaccinations (each one being about the same amount of mercury as a can of tuna fish).
It might not be used in children, but it is used. They were offering free flu shots where I work, and I asked them if it contained Thimerosal. They said yes, I passed, I got the flu (H1N1 season) and now it turns out I may be better off (see articles about H1N1 possibly triggering broad flu immunity). But my point is that it is still used here in the US.
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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.