A Toxic Waste
Jun 16th, 2005 at 9:14 am by Susie
Gary at Seeing the Forest points us to a joint Salon/Rolling Stone investigation by Robert Kennedy Jr. into thimerosal’s link to autism. If you have young children, you really need to read this:
“You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe,” says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. “It’s just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.”
There’s far too much here to excerpt, but here’s something that really jumped out at me:
As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines — the kind of population that scientists typically use as a “control” in experiments — Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three — including one child adopted from outside the Amish community — had received their vaccines.
Resource list here.
Thanks for linking that.
Those stats from Amish country are impressive. The research seems to be converging on the result that susceptible infants suffer real damage, but most infants either don’t or it’s not anything people notice at this point. That’s apparently what made it so hard to detect: study a thousand babies, and most of them will be fine. No statistical significance and talk about how thimerosal is “safe.”
I seem to remember hearing that they’ve pulled thimerosal from all pediatric vaccines several years ago. I would certainly hope so!
The other thing they need to get on with is figuring out how to identify susceptible people. Thimerosal is still used in adult vaccines (it’s a highly effective preservative because it’s, well, highly toxic…) and who knows what happens to susceptible people at any age.
Years ago I tried using a contact lens solution that contained thimersol as a preservative. I certainly had a strong allergic reaction to it.