Real Brain Damage

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 (2 atoms of mercury out of the brain)
• APO-E3 (1 atom of mercury out of the brain)
• APO-E4 (no atoms of mercury out of the brain)

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 the people over the age of 85 and 20 percent of ages 75-84.

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 (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 × 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 radio-labelled 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, 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 two to three times higher than that seen in normal people.

The mercury in flu vaccines also plays a role in this disease. One investigator has found people who received the flu vaccine each year for 3-5 years had a 10-fold greater chance of developing Alzheimer‘s disease than people who had 1, 2 or no shots.

Another important factor with regard to mercury on 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 1 in 100 rats and a dose of aluminum that will kill 1 in 100 rats, when combined have a striking effect: all the rats die.

Doses of mercury that have a 1 percent mortality will have a 100 percent mortality rate if some aluminum is there. Vaccines contain aluminum.

Why Ignore the Truth?

Why do officials at the CDC and 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 (see my article on him), each new truth passes through three stages:

1. It is ridiculed.
2. It is violently opposed.
3. It is accepted as self-evident.

The mercury truth is now in the second stage.

In the 1790s, Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids did not have pockmarks on their faces, like people did 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. 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 U.S. and U.S.S.R. 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.)

Today, the medical establishment, led by the AAP, AAFP, AMA, CDC and IOM, has gone to the other extreme.

The Cold, Hard Facts

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 1900-30, 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 1915-58, 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 third edition that I reviewed (a slightly longer fourth 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 to their flu vaccines, and pediatricians are vaccinating children with their remaining supplies 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. Russell 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.

Spending More on Cows than People?

Much more research needs to be done on the neurotoxicity of mercury and excessive vaccination. Dr. Haley terms autism as Mad Child Disease. Finding one cow in the United States 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 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 who follows the protocol established by The International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology for safely removing them.

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 online links I‘ve provided

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.

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 the safeminds.org Web site.

Also, read 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" -- in fish, vaccines, and dental amalgams -- by Thomas Clarkson in Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 110 | Supplement 1 | February 2002 | pages 11 -- 23. 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 on this website. I sent it to my dentist who I had been going to for a number of years. When he chose to ignore it, I changed dentists -- to a mercury-free one and had him remove all my amalgam fillings.

"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.

The 78-page book, Are Vaccines Safe and Effective? by Neil Z. Miller (2002), is well worth reading, especially if you have children or if you are being pressured to get a flu shot.

For a comprehensive review, with 167 scientific references, on how vaccines damage infants‘ and soldiers‘ brains (Gulf War Syndrome) when given too close together, see Dr. Blaylock‘s "Interaction of Cytokines, Excitotoxins, Reactive Nitrogen and Oxygen Species in Autism Spectrum Disorders" in the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association (JANA 2003;6[4]:21 -- 35).

Also read his study, Chronic Microglial Activation and Excitotoxicity Secondary to Excessive Immune Stimulation: Possible Factors in GulfWar Syndrome and Autism, in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPS 2004;9[2]:46 -- 52). Dr. Blaylock has written a simplified version of these studies for the general public, titled Vaccines: the Hidden Dangers, in his Blaylock Wellness Report (Vol. 1, No. 1), which is published monthly and can be purchased online.

Donald Miller is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com, and you can contact him at dwm@u.washington.edu.