Maybe Big Pharma is where the Mafia ended up... wait, the Mafia supposedly didn't kill their own. Then I guess they're working for the Devil......... I'm not really joking... Good for you KeithKief. I don't do their drugs either.

“All forms of mercury are quite toxic, and each form exhibits different health effects.”

-US EPA

"The nervous system is very sensitive to all forms of mercury.”

-ATSDR, CDC.

“Mercury in all of its forms is toxic to the fetus and children, and efforts should be made to reduce exposure to the extent possible to pregnant women and children as well as the general population.”

-Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics

“Lead and mercury are both highly toxic to the developing brain and nervous system. Excessive exposure can begin in the intrauterine period, leading to adverse effects at birth. Prenatal exposure is more common with mercury.”

“Mercury is a neurotoxic agent that is particularly harmful to the developing nervous system.”

“Mercury exists in several forms. First is the volatile elemental form, which is liquid at room temperature (thermometers). A second form is inorganic compounds, such as mercury salts. Third is organic compounds, such as methyl mercury, ethyl mercury, and phenyl mercuric acetate. The organic forms of mercury are the most hazardous to humans because they are the most readily absorbed by the body and have the greatest uptake into the central nervous system.”

-James Roberts, MD, MPH.

[Source: Medscape]

“The MIND Institute supports the removal of thimerosal from all vaccines, and encourages parents to specifically request that the vaccines given to their children be thimerosal free. … The level of mercury that is “safe” to the developing nervous system has not been determined."

-Current consensus statement: University of California, Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute.

Robert:

Toxicity is all about dosage. At a high enough dose, any chemical can be toxic.

For example...

The acute toxicity for thimerosal is 75 mg/kg: http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9925236

The acute toxicity for caffeine is 127 mg/kg: http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9927475

So thimerosal is more acutely toxic than caffeine, but not by much. A dose of 130 mg/kg of either chemical kills more than half of the animals.

What's the threshold to kill brain cells?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKuznYVn40s

banning the deadly chemical completely would be dangerous for public health

Even the writer doesn't recognize propaganda.

How nutritious is mercury. Is it good for you? No it's potentially dangerous and has no use for human health! It's use is for chemical/pharmaceutical company pocket books. It's cheaper for them to use mercury. It has no health advantage to the consumer.

Whatever,

Yes, “dose makes the poison.” That is a fundamental tenant of medical toxicology. It is also a favorite quote of Thimerosal defenders. Yes, of course dose makes the poison. And that is just THE point.

The toxicity of a neurodevelopmental toxicant such as ethyl mercury depends upon several factors, not simply "dose." The toxicity of a mercury containing compound depends upon the species of mercury (e.g., elemental mercury, mercury salts, methyl mercury, ethyl mercury, phenyl mercuric acetate, etc.); route of exposure (oral ingestion, vapor inhalation, IM/SQ injection, etc.); dose (acute dose, subacute dose); dose frequency; age (this is critical!); and every child’s or persons’ individual ability to excrete heavy metals.

A persons’ individual ability to excrete heavy metals can be profoundly effected by stress, illness, concurrent exposure to other toxins, total body exposure (the excretion capacity is not infinite), and genetic factors. With regard to the latter, for example, it is currently hypothesized that a small subset of the population (including pediatric poulation) has significantly reduced ability to excrete heavy metals due to less efficient methylation cycle and glutathione production due to genetic (and/or other) factors.

Please remember, "The level of mercury that is “safe” to the developing nervous system has not been determined."

-Current consensus statement: University of California, Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute.

...

John and Robert: There is no peer-reviewed science that shows that thimerosal at the doses found in vaccines causes neurodevelopmental deficits. Also the vast majority of vaccines don't have thimerosal. So I think you should move off the vaccines are bad because they have mercury position--it's not supported in reality or science.

Also the vast majority of vaccines don't have thimerosal.

Apparently there is enough that "scientists" have created a hub-ub about a ban on mercury and it is threatening vaccine margins. Otherwise if they were eliminated it would be a non-issue.

I think this is well known now, but one of the most prominent vaccinologists in history also stated his concern about mercury to Merck in an internal memo:

'91 Memo Warned of Mercury in Shots

"When viewed in this way, the mercury load appears rather large," said the memo from Dr. Maurice R. Hilleman, an internationally renowned vaccinologist. It was written to the president of Merck's vaccine division.

After this memo leaked, damage control ensued. And then the mercury apologists followed. Mercury apologists? Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? But vaccines ideology makes even sane people irrationally crazy. It's the emotion of the politics of vaccines.

More about Hilleman:

The Unsung Vaccinologist

Under Hilleman's guidance, Merck avoided the polio and pertussis vaccines, which had the biggest safety problems.

One former Merck employee testified to Congress in 1972 that he had attended meetings where Hilleman roared, "Getting vaccine products licensed has nothing to do with science; it's politics, not science that gets products licensed!"

Robert: It's simple. Provide the direct scientific evidence that thimerosal at doses found in vaccines causes neurodevelopmental deficits in children, and I'll support the removal of the preservative. Until then, you're just spewing baseless rhetoric.

You provide the direct scientific evidence that it was tested and deemed safe to use in the first place!

Most chemicals in modern use have not been tested for their impacts on human health, even very basic effects.

The hard truth is that if every chemical had to be tested and deemed safe before it is put out on the market, there would probably not be much out on the market and your lifestyle would drastically change.

For instance:

The average household typically uses and stores more than 60 hazardous products, including household cleaners, automotive products, paints, solvents and pesticides. (Source: Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce)

The U.S. government has not conducted even basic toxicity testing for about 75 percent of the 15,000 high volume chemicals in commercial use. More than 90 percent of these high volume chemicals have not been tested for health effects on children. (Source: Children's Health Environmental Coalition)

Over 150 chemicals found in the average home have been linked to allergies, birth defects, cancer and psychological abnormalities. (Source: Consumer Product Safety Commission, via www.earthwellness.com)

Of the chemicals found in personal care products:
884 are toxic

146 cause tumors

218 cause reproductive complications

314 cause biological mutation

376 cause skin and eye irritations

(Source: United States House of Representatives report, 1989)

My point is not to go with the status quo but to say that life is full of trade offs...and risks. Even we give up all these chemicals, life as we know it will be changed forever...and while some of the changes are worth it, other changes would be rejected by society. Take pesticides for example, and not even the ones used for farming but household pesticides. While there are new pesticides coming out on the market that are starting to be as effective as the more harmful chemical, if you have an old home that gets over run with termites or mice, you have to do something about it so you turn to a chemical that takes care of the problem. This chemical might have possible and hidden health effects on you but you take on that risk because the alternative...having a huge mouse or termite population in your home is unacceptable.

Coming up with green chemicals and alternatives to substitute in for harmful chemicals seems to be a better approach.

Robert: You claim that thimerosal causes neurodevelopmental deficits in children. You need to provide the evidence. There have already been studies showing no link between thimerosal and autism or other cognitive deficits. So if you want people to take you seriously, pony up some peer-reviewed data.

You claim it's perfectly safe. Yet you have never seen direct scientific evidence that it is safe for all kids or even a certain amount. Why? Because those safety studies were never performed. Certainly were never performed BEFORE they were put in the first place. NO evidence. Don't give me crock about some flawed epidemiology studies unless you are prepared to defend that crap and the scientific inadequacies they present. Do you stand for integrity of science or do you stand for ideology and dogma? I think the latter.

Who wants those god awful orange sodium lights anyway.

Dentists have been phasing out mercury for years. It's time the rest of the world did too. It's not going to hurt big pharma one bit. People don't need most of the slop they peddle anyway, especially flu shots, the scam of the century.

I wonder what the incandescent light bulb manufacturers think of this idea to ban mercury?

Mercury is an element used to purify gold. Through amalgamation, gold is extracted from ore using mercury because the gold is usually full of impurities. This is a common method. The other method to extract gold from ore involves leaching with sodium cyanide. So, if you ban mercury, you have to use cyanide to get the gold.

With a global ban on Mercury, what will happen to gold prices when they no longer can purify it as effectively and it costs more to purify and you also have all the byproducts of leaching with sodium cyanide?

My point is a global ban on mercury may inadvertently affect GOLD prices...and we need gold in addition to just monetary needs, for circuits and electronics. (not as much for jewelry because realistically we really do not need that, just that many people want it.)

Two different species of mercury. Two very different routes of exposure.

Thimerosal containing flu vaccines (TCVs) are on the market (and comprise the majority of the flu supply in the US) are are approved and recommended for injection into 6 month + old infants and pregnant women.

Do you think a 25 mcg injection of ethyl mercury is a safe dose (exposure) to the developing CNS and brain of a 6 month old infant or fetus whose weight can be measured in ounces?

John: Ethyl mercury is less toxic than methyl mercury, the species found in fish. So 40 mg of methyl mercury in a 200 g fish steak is more toxic than 25 mg of ethyl mercury in a shot. That is a simple toxicological fact.

Fish are eaten and pass through the system while vaccines are administered intramuscular/under the skin. (Unless it is the live version of the vaccine through the nasal passage)The mercury then ends up in the various prats of the body which is the cause of adverse side effects.

How many people have regressed into autism etc......directly after eating fish, compared to those who were injected with a vaccine or multiple vaccines?

I will eat fish any day.

Whatever,

1. Are you attempting to claim that ethyl mercury is -not- a hazardous neurodevelopmental toxicant?

2. Ethyl mercury is not "less toxic" than methyl mercury. This is an extremely outdated belief. Burbacher (2005) demonstrated this is false. More anon.

The facts are that methyl mercury and ethyl mercury are both mercury-containing organic compounds (organomercurials). Like all organomercurials, both methyl mercury and ethyl mercury are extremely hazardous neurodevelopmental toxicants.

Parents should be concerned about prenatal and postnatal exposure to both methyl mercury (tuna, swordfish) and ethyl mercury (most vaccines from ~1990-2000, much of the flu vaccine supply TODAY), and to -all- neurodevelopmental toxicants.

Thimerosal (sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate or C₉H₉HgNaO₂S) injected into the body is metabolized or degraded into ethyl mercury (and thiosalicylate). Some of the ethy lmercury is then partially excreted from the body and some of the ethyl mercury is degraded into inorganic mercury where it is deposited in various organs, including the kidney and the brain. Inorganic mercury is highly toxic to the brain. It literally kills brain cells (astrocytes).

*Burbacher TM, Shen DD, Liberato N, Clarkson T. “Comparison of blood and brain mercury levels in infant monkeys exposed to methylmercury or vaccines containing thimerosal.” Environ Health Perspect. 2005;113 (8):1015 –1021.

While Burbacher (2005) demonstrated that methyl mercury clears from the blood faster than ethyl mercury, that does not allow you to assume that the Hg is leaving the body! Much of the Hg is being deposited into tissue, including the brain, as Burbacher 2005 demonstates.

Burbacher et al. showed that EtHg converts into inorganic mercury in the body much more readily than MeHg. This is critical because inorganic mercury is deposited in the brain, where it is effectively trapped. It take years to be excreted, if it is in fact ever removed. The accumulation of inorganic mercury in the brain is associated with increased numbers of microglia, decreased numbers of astrocytes (brain cells) and higher risk of autoimmune reactions.

In sum, Burbacher (2005) found that thimerosal is distributed to the brain much more readily than methyl mercury. Burbacher et al. found that a larger fraction of the ethyl mercury remained in the brains of the primates, where it was converted to more harmful inorganic mercury.

Ethyl mercury is NOT less toxic than methyl mercury. They are different compounds (though "close chemical cousins") and their toxicokinetics are different, but it is inaccurate to state that ethyl mercury is "less toxic" than methyl mercury.

Let's put it another way, Burbacher (2005) demonstrated that...

****Primates exposed to injected ethylmercury from vaccines, as opposed to equal doses of ingested methylmercury, end up with twice as much Hg++ deposited in the brain.

Read the study for yourself.

Burbacher TM, Shen DD, Liberato N, Clarkson T. “Comparison of blood and brain mercury levels in infant monkeys exposed to methylmercury or vaccines containing thimerosal.” Environ Health Perspect. 2005;113 (8):1015 –1021.

John: Do you have a peer-reviewed study that shows that thimerosal in doses found in vaccines causes neurodevelopmental deficits in children? Yes or no?

How many years have we been vaccinating people with thimerosal? How many people can you formally document have developed medical conditions due to thimerosol in vaccines?

Love to see them come up with a better preservative, but you and I know, anything they add will be subject to ridicule.

So get rid of the vaccines and take chances with life. You do not have to worry about any adverse side effects. We will all die, so why allow vaccines to hasten your odds with vaccines?

Why has autism increased when the exposure is less ?

Exposure is not less by a country mile! Fifty years ago there were four childhood immunizations...diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and smallpox. According to the current CDC schedule, "Before a child reaches the age of two he or she will have received 32 vaccinations..."

If you don't believe me, read this: http://lewrockwell.com/miller/miller15.html

According to this article and MANY others, there has been an increase in not only autism, but ADHD, diabetes, asthma, and other auto-immune disorders.

Mercury is a poison. We can't avoid it altogether, but adding it to a product we then inject into our children is nothing short of criminal.

In their clinical trial, Powel and Jameson concluded that thimerosal was safe for use in humans. Upon closer inspection, however, essential data was not disclosed. First, in their paper Powell and Jamieson failed to reveal that all 22 subjects evaluated were, in fact, infected with (and dying from) meningococcal meningitis (!). Powell and Jamieson provided a table in their paper that noted that approximately one-third of the participants in the study were followed for only one day after injection of Thimerosal. However, Powell & Jamieson failed to disclose why. The reason is that all these participants died! In fact, ALL of the 22 participants in this study died; mostly within days after administration of the thimerosal. Incredibly, this is the ONLY study that Eli Lilly ever offered to the FDA to demonstrate the safety of Merthiolate/thimerosal and to get their product approved.

It gets even worse (if that were possible). Powell and Jamieson also conducted some safety trials on animals. The animal toxicity data was disturbing. Powell and Jamieson had already determined that administration of low milligram doses of thimerosal per kilogram body weight in several different animals was acutely toxic and resulted in significant numbers of animals dying within days of exposure. These results were buried and not followed-up upon.

In summary, the 1931 Powell & Jamieson study of 22 dying patients was the -only- data on the safety of thimerosal ever submitted to the FDA.

After the FDA strengthened pharmaceutical safety testing requirements in 1938, the pharmaceutical use of thimerosal was grandfathered in, and no further safety studies on thimerosal were ever required by the FDA, or submitted by Eli Lilly.

As even Leslie Ball, MD of the FDA blithely put it in a paper published in Pediatrics in May 2001, “A prelicensure study of intentionally administered high-dose thimerosal, cited as demonstrating its safety, may not be directly relevant to the issue of thimerosal in childhood vaccines. This study was performed over 60 years ago when different safety standards existed; the study was not designed to look for chronic toxicity, did not include pharmacokinetics, and did not enroll infants.” [2]

Furthermore, thimerosal serves its purpose as a "preservative" rather poorly. Thimerosal is more accurately described as a "bacteriostatic" (a compound that inhibits the growth of bacteria) than a preservative. The medical literature contains several reports of bacterial contamination of vaccines despite the use of a thimerosal (Bernier et al 1981; Simon et al. 1993).

Were thimerosal developed today it never would have passed FDA safety standards.

Indeed, under the FDA Modernization Act of 1997, the use of thimerosal began to be phased out of all medical and pharmaceutical products (e.g., Rho(D) immune globulin injections, anti-venom injections, ophthalmic and nasal products). In 2000, thimerosal began to be phased out of use in pediatric vaccines. On July 7, 1999, the FDA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the US Public Health Service issued their landmark "joint statement" calling for pharmaceutical companies to stop adding thimerosal to pediatric vaccines as "soon as possible."

Lastly, vaccines don’t need to be made with thimerosal at all!

For example, as a live virus vaccine the MMR has -never- been made with thimerosal. All vaccine manufacturers have to do is bottle vaccines in single-dose vials (which do not need a preservative) as opposed to multi-dose vials (which do). And it is very easy and very inexpensive to bottle vaccines in single-dose vials instead of multi-dose vials. It costs vaccine manufacturers ~ $1 more per dose to bottle vaccines in single dose vials as opposed to multi-dose vials.

Indeed, this is exactly what the vaccine manufacturers started doing in early 2000 after the (in)famous FDA/AAP “joint statement” of July 7, 1999. It took the vaccine manufacturers only two years to accomplish this.

It was that easy.

--------------------------------

[1] Powell HM, Jamieson WA. "Merthiolate as a Germicide." American Journal of Hygiene 1931;13:296–310.

[2] Ball LK, et al. "An Assessment of Thimerosal Use in Childhood Vaccines." Pediatrics. 2001;107 (5):1147 –1154.

unfortunately one dollar more at cost becomes 100 dollars more to the consumer, take that times millions and millions of vaccine. how much do governements buy? how many governments are broke? that is the problem i see.

now lets talk light bulbs and every other little thing..... how much will this cost in the end, when it doesnt seem to be hurting anyone