more about why the dose no longer solely makes the poison:
INTRO:
"The science of toxicology has been fundamentally altered by the discovery, 20 years ago, that industrial chemicals released into the environment can disrupt the hormone systems of plants and animals, including humans.
For more than 450 years, toxicologists have relied on an idea expressed by Paracelsus in the fifteenth century: "The dose makes the poison."[1] By this, Paracelsus meant that everything is poisonous in a high enough dose and, "Even strong poisons are harmless if the dose is low enough." Implicit in these two ideas is a third, "The higher the dose, the stronger the poison." Together, these ideas have been used to justify dumping billions of tons of biologically-active chemicals into the environment each year: even the most active were considered OK to dump because they would be diluted by air and water down to doses that were considered safe."
~snip~
"Because we are all exposed to mixtures of chemicals every day, the toxicity of mixtures is an important public health matter. If insignificant doses of several chemicals add up to a significant dose then "the dose makes the poison" misrepresents reality and may put us in harm's way. Two studies published recently in ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES examined this question.
"The first study tested a mixture of four organochlorine chemicals (the pesticide Lindane, plus two forms of the pesticide DDT and a breakdown product of DDT called DDE). Each of these chemicals by itself is known to behave like the female sex hormone, estrogen, when tested on human breast cells. The researchers conducting this study wondered whether low concentrations of these four chemicals (too low to cause estrogenic effects by themselves) mixed together would cause an estrogenic effect on human breast cells -- in other words, could low doses of four separate chemicals add up to an effective dose?
"This study showed unmistakably that these four estrogenic chemicals at low levels DO add up to an effective dose. This is a very important finding because it means that chemicals present in food and water at "harmless" levels may combine with other "harmless" chemicals in the environment and, together, cause harm. [EHP Vol. 109, No. 4 (April, 2001), pgs. 391-397.]"
~snip~
"But the newly-discovered difficulties for the old "dose makes the poison" school of toxicology don't stop there. Many hormones are only active during a brief period in the life of an organism. To test whether a chemical disrupts a hormone, it must be tested during the particular time when that hormone is active. This was illustrated by a study of Bisphenol A published recently in ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES.
"Bisphenol A is a chemical used extensively in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics, including soft drink containers. Bisphenol A can also be found in some modern plastics used as "dental sealants" and in the lacquer lining of tin cans. From these sources, hundreds of millions of people are being exposed to low levels of Bisphenol A, without their knowledge or consent. Bisphenol A is known to be "weakly estrogenic" -- meaning that it behaves like the female sex hormone, estrogen, but with a potency about 10,000 times less than pure estrogen. Because it is only "weakly estrogenic" many toxicologists have assumed that it is safe to expose hundreds of millions of humans to Bisphenol A and ethically acceptable to expose people without their informed consent.
"The new study in ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES reveals that Bisphenol A is particularly potent in mice exposed near the time of birth. Pregnant female mice exposed to low levels of Bisphenol A near the time of birth produce offspring that gain excessive weight early in life and maintain excessive weight thereafter. This effect does not occur in mice fed Bisphenol A as adults. (The study also found that low doses of Bisphenol A produced a greater effect than higher doses, standing Paracelsus on his head.
i was chemically injured while in graduate school in 1998, suffering similar MCS consequences.
paxil? guess what? paxil comes in liquid form, and 1 drop per day (about 1/50th regular dose) for about a week in me caused massive liver damage (i have the lab tests with elevated ALT and other liver enzymes to prove it is not "bullshit"). same for zoloft in similar amounts, effexor caused heart damage (eleveted c-reactive protein and b-natriuretic protein), celexa caused increased immune deficiency (WBC 3.9 to 2.5), prozac caused microvascular angina: 4 mg./day. people such as you (who know nothing) say "it can't happen," and "bullshit," but the lab tests prove it.
why does MCS happen? because modern industrial synthetics and toxins need to be processed and eliminated from the body, and that happens in the liver with sulfur enzymes called "cytochrome" enzymes. because of genetic polymorphism everyone has different expression and amount of those enzymes, and furthermore, mercury (from coal burning powerplants, medical waste incineration, seafood consumption, etc. and also vapor leakage from dental fillings) BINDS to those enzymes and disables them (because mercury has a high molecular affinity for sulfur -- ask any doctor: when someone is acutely [as opposed to subacutely, which they do not know anything about thanks in part to the propaganda of the ADA] mercury poisoned, the doctors give sulfur-based chelators such as DMSA (dimercaptosuccinic acid: mercaptan = sulfur) to get the mercury out.
doctors from Baylor college of medicine a few weeks ago testified at US House subcommittee hearing on the astronical rises in the rates of autism that they are now starting to attribute to Thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines, describing exactly what i have told you here regarding the damage to the cytochrome P-450 enzyme system. probably mercury from the mother eating contaminated fish and from mercury fillings (scientifically proven to offgas mercury vapors for the life of the filling and required to be disposed of as hazardous waste by US Federal law when removed from the mouth) gets many of those kids in utero, making them even more susceptible later (as recent news shows that californians have mercury levels 85percent higher than "safe" (though none is safe) after eating fish).
people who are genetically susceptible cannot process the body burden of mercury and other modern synthetic chemicals, and at an acute point the detoxification system (Phase I cytochrome enzyme system and Phase II glutathione conjugation in the liver) breaks down, flooding the body with the toxic partial metabolites and free radicals. the free radicals damage many organ systems and much fat (called lipid peroxidation), and of course the brain is mostly made up of fats called phospholipids, meaning it gets a healthy dose of damage.
furthermore, the olfactory nerve has a direct connection in the brain to the limbic system (called the olfactory-limbic-neural pathway) and every time from then on that the person is exposed to chemicals, fragrances, etc. not only are they massively impaired as far as removing them from the body, but the olfactory limbic neural pathway is stimulated, causing cascading seizures (called excitatory neurotoxicity and "neurologic kindling" -- look it up on medline) along with a host of assorted symptoms, both emotional and otherwise (as the limbic system is one of the seats of emotions, fight/flight, hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal axis neurohormonal regulation, and so on). then the victims are blamed for having "psychological problems," "psychosomatic" disorder, etc. (by people who are not even using the term "psychosomatic" correctly and do not even know what it actually means). yeah, sure. my mind is so powerful it is going to raise my liver enzymes when i take 1 drop of paxil, raise my CRP, BNP, cause protein to show up in urine indicating kidney damage, and wipe out my white blood count from 9 to 3.1 overnight. yeah, okay.
yes, immune system is involved, too, and it's not an "allergy." my WBC
the dose no longer solely makes the poison, that's outdated misinformation.
"Low Doses May Be More Potent than High Doses
"Another key shift [in scientific thinking] is the acknowledgement that the assumption that the dose makes the poison can be misleadingly simplistic, if it is used to imply that only high dose exposures induce effects. In fact, low exposure levels sometimes cause effects not seen at higher levels [for example, see 12,13,14]. Researchers are now intensely pursuing these non-monotonic dose response curves and the uncertainty about their underlying mechanisms, which likely vary from case to case. [A "non-monotonic dose response curve" means that as the dose of a chemical is raised or lowered, the effect does not necessarily rise or fall in lock step with the dose. In some cases, low doses may cause greater effects than high doses.] One plausible hypothesis [to explain why dose and response do not always move together in lock step] is that at low, physiological levels, the contaminant interferes with developmental signaling but does not activate biochemical defenses against impacts that would be caused by higher exposures. At somewhat higher levels, these defenses are activated and the contaminant is successfully detoxified. At even higher levels, the defense mechanisms are overwhelmed by the toxicant and more traditional toxicological effects are induced."
http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/bulletin.cfm?Issue_ ID=2284
Slashdot Mirror
more about why the dose no longer solely makes the poison:
INTRO:
"The science of toxicology has been fundamentally altered by the discovery, 20 years ago, that industrial chemicals released into the environment can disrupt the hormone systems of plants and animals, including humans.
For more than 450 years, toxicologists have relied on an idea expressed by Paracelsus in the fifteenth century: "The dose makes the poison."[1] By this, Paracelsus meant that everything is poisonous in a high enough dose and, "Even strong poisons are harmless if the dose is low enough." Implicit in these two ideas is a third, "The higher the dose, the stronger the poison." Together, these ideas have been used to justify dumping billions of tons of biologically-active chemicals into the environment each year: even the most active were considered OK to dump because they would be diluted by air and water down to doses that were considered safe."
~snip~
"Because we are all exposed to mixtures of chemicals every day, the toxicity of mixtures is an important public health matter. If insignificant doses of several chemicals add up to a significant dose then "the dose makes the poison" misrepresents reality and may put us in harm's way. Two studies published recently in ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES examined this question.
"The first study tested a mixture of four organochlorine chemicals (the pesticide Lindane, plus two forms of the pesticide DDT and a breakdown product of DDT called DDE). Each of these chemicals by itself is known to behave like the female sex hormone, estrogen, when tested on human breast cells. The researchers conducting this study wondered whether low concentrations of these four chemicals (too low to cause estrogenic effects by themselves) mixed together would cause an estrogenic effect on human breast cells -- in other words, could low doses of four separate chemicals add up to an effective dose?
"This study showed unmistakably that these four estrogenic chemicals at low levels DO add up to an effective dose. This is a very important finding because it means that chemicals present in food and water at "harmless" levels may combine with other "harmless" chemicals in the environment and, together, cause harm. [EHP Vol. 109, No. 4 (April, 2001), pgs. 391-397.]"
~snip~
"But the newly-discovered difficulties for the old "dose makes the poison" school of toxicology don't stop there. Many hormones are only active during a brief period in the life of an organism. To test whether a chemical disrupts a hormone, it must be tested during the particular time when that hormone is active. This was illustrated by a study of Bisphenol A published recently in ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES.
"Bisphenol A is a chemical used extensively in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics, including soft drink containers. Bisphenol A can also be found in some modern plastics used as "dental sealants" and in the lacquer lining of tin cans. From these sources, hundreds of millions of people are being exposed to low levels of Bisphenol A, without their knowledge or consent. Bisphenol A is known to be "weakly estrogenic" -- meaning that it behaves like the female sex hormone, estrogen, but with a potency about 10,000 times less than pure estrogen. Because it is only "weakly estrogenic" many toxicologists have assumed that it is safe to expose hundreds of millions of humans to Bisphenol A and ethically acceptable to expose people without their informed consent.
"The new study in ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES reveals that Bisphenol A is particularly potent in mice exposed near the time of birth. Pregnant female mice exposed to low levels of Bisphenol A near the time of birth produce offspring that gain excessive weight early in life and maintain excessive weight thereafter. This effect does not occur in mice fed Bisphenol A as adults. (The study also found that low doses of Bisphenol A produced a greater effect than higher doses, standing Paracelsus on his head.
i was chemically injured while in graduate school in 1998, suffering similar MCS consequences.
paxil? guess what? paxil comes in liquid form, and 1 drop per day (about 1/50th regular dose) for about a week in me caused massive liver damage (i have the lab tests with elevated ALT and other liver enzymes to prove it is not "bullshit"). same for zoloft in similar amounts, effexor caused heart damage (eleveted c-reactive protein and b-natriuretic protein), celexa caused increased immune deficiency (WBC 3.9 to 2.5), prozac caused microvascular angina: 4 mg./day. people such as you (who know nothing) say "it can't happen," and "bullshit," but the lab tests prove it.
why does MCS happen? because modern industrial synthetics and toxins need to be processed and eliminated from the body, and that happens in the liver with sulfur enzymes called "cytochrome" enzymes. because of genetic polymorphism everyone has different expression and amount of those enzymes, and furthermore, mercury (from coal burning powerplants, medical waste incineration, seafood consumption, etc. and also vapor leakage from dental fillings) BINDS to those enzymes and disables them (because mercury has a high molecular affinity for sulfur -- ask any doctor: when someone is acutely [as opposed to subacutely, which they do not know anything about thanks in part to the propaganda of the ADA] mercury poisoned, the doctors give sulfur-based chelators such as DMSA (dimercaptosuccinic acid: mercaptan = sulfur) to get the mercury out.
doctors from Baylor college of medicine a few weeks ago testified at US House subcommittee hearing on the astronical rises in the rates of autism that they are now starting to attribute to Thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines, describing exactly what i have told you here regarding the damage to the cytochrome P-450 enzyme system. probably mercury from the mother eating contaminated fish and from mercury fillings (scientifically proven to offgas mercury vapors for the life of the filling and required to be disposed of as hazardous waste by US Federal law when removed from the mouth) gets many of those kids in utero, making them even more susceptible later (as recent news shows that californians have mercury levels 85percent higher than "safe" (though none is safe) after eating fish).
people who are genetically susceptible cannot process the body burden of mercury and other modern synthetic chemicals, and at an acute point the detoxification system (Phase I cytochrome enzyme system and Phase II glutathione conjugation in the liver) breaks down, flooding the body with the toxic partial metabolites and free radicals. the free radicals damage many organ systems and much fat (called lipid peroxidation), and of course the brain is mostly made up of fats called phospholipids, meaning it gets a healthy dose of damage.
furthermore, the olfactory nerve has a direct connection in the brain to the limbic system (called the olfactory-limbic-neural pathway) and every time from then on that the person is exposed to chemicals, fragrances, etc. not only are they massively impaired as far as removing them from the body, but the olfactory limbic neural pathway is stimulated, causing cascading seizures (called excitatory neurotoxicity and "neurologic kindling" -- look it up on medline) along with a host of assorted symptoms, both emotional and otherwise (as the limbic system is one of the seats of emotions, fight/flight, hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal axis neurohormonal regulation, and so on). then the victims are blamed for having "psychological problems," "psychosomatic" disorder, etc. (by people who are not even using the term "psychosomatic" correctly and do not even know what it actually means). yeah, sure. my mind is so powerful it is going to raise my liver enzymes when i take 1 drop of paxil, raise my CRP, BNP, cause protein to show up in urine indicating kidney damage, and wipe out my white blood count from 9 to 3.1 overnight. yeah, okay.
yes, immune system is involved, too, and it's not an "allergy." my WBC
the dose no longer solely makes the poison, that's outdated misinformation. "Low Doses May Be More Potent than High Doses "Another key shift [in scientific thinking] is the acknowledgement that the assumption that the dose makes the poison can be misleadingly simplistic, if it is used to imply that only high dose exposures induce effects. In fact, low exposure levels sometimes cause effects not seen at higher levels [for example, see 12,13,14]. Researchers are now intensely pursuing these non-monotonic dose response curves and the uncertainty about their underlying mechanisms, which likely vary from case to case. [A "non-monotonic dose response curve" means that as the dose of a chemical is raised or lowered, the effect does not necessarily rise or fall in lock step with the dose. In some cases, low doses may cause greater effects than high doses.] One plausible hypothesis [to explain why dose and response do not always move together in lock step] is that at low, physiological levels, the contaminant interferes with developmental signaling but does not activate biochemical defenses against impacts that would be caused by higher exposures. At somewhat higher levels, these defenses are activated and the contaminant is successfully detoxified. At even higher levels, the defense mechanisms are overwhelmed by the toxicant and more traditional toxicological effects are induced." http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/bulletin.cfm?Issue_ ID=2284