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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."
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.
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
IAMNAC....A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood.
No they haven't.
Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede.
No they haven't.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
So far, no credible study has ever shown a link between the vaccinations and autism.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
I like in Almadén, a village which has been producing 3/4 of global mercury in last 2 millenia.
Well, do you know how many causes of autism we have? Only 2 in the last 10 years. In total, 2 persons in this village have autism.
But it does appear that all of that mercury has caused the population of Almaden to be unable to detect sarcasm.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Kill this comment with fire.
Those studies were refuted, the article in Lancet retracted, the author (Andrew Wakefield) thoroughly discredited, multiple stories in mainstream news were published to this effect, and yet the damage done by his "research" persists.
fferreres, go look up a couple articles on Andrew Wakefield. That is the guy whose kool-aid you are drinking. Here's a tidbit from Wikipedia:
"A 2004 investigation by Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer identified undisclosed financial conflicts of interest on Wakefield's part, and most of his coauthors then withdrew their support for the study's interpretations. The British General Medical Council (GMC) conducted an inquiry into allegations of misconduct against Wakefield and two former colleagues... a five-member statutory tribunal of the GMC found some three dozen charges proved, including four counts of dishonesty and 12 counts involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children. The panel ruled that Wakefield had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant", acted both against the interests of his patients, and "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his published research."
A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood.
No, they haven't; in fact not a single case has been. One crank researcher being paid by anti-vaccine lawyers made that assertion in a fraudulent study of 12 self selected children who were already exhibiting signs of autism before the study started. Since then, every major piece of research has shown no link between vaccines of any kind and autism.
Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede.
Nope, autism rates have remained steady or increased when mercury was removed from vaccines. Children who don't receive vaccines are no more or less likely to develop autism than children that do. Children in places where mercury has been removed or vaccines discontinued have the same rates of autism as before.
What makes you believe that mercury would[sic][I assume you mean 'should'?] be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation?
Because it makes delivery of vaccines to rural areas possible, reduces the risk of infections caused by spoiled vaccines, and has been demonstrated to be safe.
Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever.
As I said it makes preservation without refridgeration possible, making vaccines safer to ship and store, especially in rural areas (not as much of a problem in modern US granted). Atomic mercury does indeed cause brain damage and stays int he body long term, atomic mercury is not what is used in vaccines. The compound in vaccines is not retained by the way elemental mercury is, it has a halflife of 18 days (it's actually removed from the brain even faster than that) and it does not interact biologically the same way elemental mercury does. You may as well avoid salt since Sodium and Chlorine are both poisonous
It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
This is a global problem, caused by coal fired power plants and has little, if anything to do with the mercury in vaccines controversy beyond trying to establish the boogeyman. Actually, though, maybe this can help understanding. The amount of mercury in a typical vaccines, contains as much mercury as 50 grams of tuna. Even pregnant women and children can eat a can of tuna a couple times a week without being exposed to dangerous levels of mercury.
The point, which I thought was obvious, is that the chlorine is salt is not toxic. Similar to how the mercury in vaccines is not toxic. It is silly to try to extrapolate the chemical behavior of a molecule based on the behavior of the elements that make it up. Otherwise we could all breath water (plenty of oxygen in there right?) or use it to inflate a blimp (with all that hydrogen). Not to mention the fact that even if the mercury in vaccines were bioavailable and had a long half life, the amounts we are talking about are so tiny that you can easily ingest more mercury from a can of tuna than from a years worth of vaccines.
It is not "hard to find" mercury-free vaccines. Thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in Western nations in decades (with one or two rare exceptions) because better preservatives have been found. It is used in vaccines bought by developing and impoverished nations, because it's cheaper. And it has been proven repeatedly to be safe.
It's not nontoxic because you put it in a vaccines, it's nontoxic because it's part of the molecule C9H9HgNaO2S.
IAMNAC....A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood. Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede. What makes you believe that mercury would be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation? Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever. It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
There should be an alternative to Vaccines. We are getting vaccines every year, and the numbers is steadily going up. I don't like injecting Mercury in my blood to avoid a flu once every few years.
Mercury in vaccines and the relationship to autism has been one of the most studied medical items in the past two decades and the results, shown over and over again is that there is 0 link between the two. Better reporting of autism statistics is one of the reason. Another is the definition of autism has been expanded.
Linking autism to mercury in vaccines is just bad math (statistics). There is a very strong relationship to the increase in reported autism cases since the 1960s and the increased consumption of McDonalds french fries over the same period. Both grew at a large rate over the same time period, but nobody claims that french fries cause autism.
It is basic human nature to want to blame somebody else when your child is sick or diagnosed with something like autism. While understandable, blaming the vaccine only discourages others from getting immunized which has a much greater health risk for the population.
How's the New England Journal of Medicine for you? http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078187
Reference 4 is a review article that covers the (imaginary) link between autism and thiomersal.
The thiomersol-autism thing was entirely manufactured by a (former) physician in the UK who it was found violated ethical guidelines, falsified his results and had a vested interest in the outcome (he was involved with a company offering a vaccine alternative). The scientific evidence is clear - if you don't get your kids vaccinated you are needlessly endangering them. Along with everyone else.
As for your tobacco reference, scientific studies did NOT find that tobacco was safe. Tobacco companies insisted it was, for years, but they did not have scientific evidence backing them up. In fact, the reason they had to defend themselves was because scientific studies were showing that tobacco is in fact dangerous.
But hey, if you want to protect your kids from toxic elements you'd better check into the chlorine thing. We're CONSTANTLY ingesting chlorine! (Note: if you cut chlorine out of your kids' diet they'll die. Fairly quickly)
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.