Health Spectator

There’s a new report out that says mercury fillings—the so-called “silver” dental amalagam most of us have in our teeth—may not be so harmful after all. Using x-ray analysis, Graham George of the University of Saskatchewan analyzed the surface of mercury-based fillings that were about 20 years old and compared those to the surface of new amalgam fillings.

The old fillings had lost up to 95 percent of their mercury. What’s more, their mercuric composition had changed. While new fillings contain metallic mercury, the old ones contained primarily beta-mercuric sulfide (metacinnabar), according to the paper George and colleagues published in the American Chemical Society journal, Chemical Research in Toxicology in late October.

Over the past week or so, that paper’s conclusions have been finding their way into the scientific press. So maybe those mercury fillings aren’t so toxic after all, the journalists have been saying. At least, not after they’ve been in your mouth for about 20 years.

The only problem is that the harm scientists have been claiming from amalgam fillings comes from the mercury vapors given off by those fillings, not by the direct action of food or saliva against the fillings themselves. Mercury vapor is what put the “mad” in mad hatters, a nineteenth-century reality independent of the writings of Lewis Carroll. Indeed, the primary reason mercury thermometers have become so rare is that if one breaks, despite the low vapor pressure of mercury, the air of a small room such as a bathroom can easily exceed the acceptable limit of the dangerous fumes, even at room temperature. When mercury is heated, the vapors become far more toxic. What’s more, the lungs provide the most efficient path for absorption of mercury.^{1 2 3}

So while we believe the authors of this article had good intentions, we reject the notion that mercury fillings are not harmful. If after 20 years most of the mercury from those fillings is gone, where do you suppose it went? Probably into your body, a substantial portion of it absorbed through your lungs and digestive tract as inhaled fumes.

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Editorial

We came across a post on the autism site Adventures in Autism by Ginger Taylor claiming that former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) chief Julie Gerberding, who stepped down from that agency in January of this year, has since accepted a position with public relations giant Edelman.

The Edelman website confirms this, and we quote:

Edelman has created the Global Task Force on H1N1 Influenza to help its clients and partners navigate the communications challenges associated with the potential outbreak of H1N1 flu. The task force comprises a network of public health and crisis communications specialists, including former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who are ready to help organizations engage their internal and external stakeholders early and protect their reputations.

Perhaps this is vindication for those Gerberding critics who claimed that while she was head of CDC, her interest was more in protecting careers and reputations than in saving lives. We don’t know.

We do know that the transition back and forth between agencies in the public sector and such major industries as the oil, chemicals, food and pharmaceuticals industries supposedly regulated by those corresponding agencies has been an easy one to make of late, a situation that we find mildly upsetting. We say “mildly” because, while we could easily work ourselves into a sleepless frenzy over this, it happens all the time. That would leave us sleepless for life were we to agonize over it too much.

Gerberding has every right to represent the same large pharmaceutical companies she was accused of representing all along, and at least now her paycheck does not come directly from our taxes. (It is siphoned off, instead, via the extra healthcare costs we pay for healthcare we may or may not receive, depending upon our ability to pay for it after having supported with our taxes massive government agencies that are supposed to be guarding us. For more on these issues see the interview with a CIGNA exec and Michael Moore’s Sicko.)

Corporate vs. public interests

We wouldn’t mind the job security conferred upon the ruling elite by these arrangements nearly so much if only those public servants were more diligent in their defense of the public (as opposed to corporate) interests while serving their brief tenure in public posts. But so few of them have actually been able to switch off the defending-corporate-interests part of their personalities while allegedly serving the public.

If you read Ginger Taylor’s references to Gerberding it becomes clear that she feels intense frustration at Gerberding’s frequent calls for more research that were then followed by total inaction in instigating such research.

Taylor, meanwhile, is a Maine housewife living the daily frustration and horror of parenting a child disabled by autism. It is one thing to sit and read countless papers (as we do) trying to decipher the contradictions among research reports to arrive at some sort of informed opinion on the subject and quite another to have witnessed, as Ginger Taylor and too many other parents have, the transformation of a formerly healthy child to a sick and damaged one after receiving a shot or a series of shots.

Cause and effect are total abstractions in the first case and heartless assassins in the second. If you watched your child or spouse regress from a healthy state to an autistic or demented one, wouldn’t you too be bitter or at least hostile towards the vaccine and mercury amalgam manufacturers who continue to claim there is no relation at all between these afflictions and their products?

As for Gerberding, she probably makes the sort of next-door neighbor you would visit with for hours given the opportunity. But we can understand Taylor’s feelings towards her. That frustration comes through in the interview below of Julie Gerberding by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, with text insertions provided by Ginger Taylor. Following that, we have also posted an interview with John F. Kennedy, Jr, who has performed extensive research on the thimerosal issue.

Thimerosal and vaccines

Thimerosal, in case you’ve forgotten, is a preservative used in many vaccines. Kennedy’s article Deadly Immunity, published in Rolling Stone and Salon.com is a must read on that subject.

While we’re on the subject of mercury and autism, we would like to add that we don’t think the thimerosal in vaccines (or that in mercury fillings, for that matter) is the sole cause of autism and other apparently mercury-related injuries and illnesses. We do believe that many individuals have been injured by the mercury in vaccinations and in mercury fillings, don’t get us wrong.

But the body is a complex organism and there are often multiple paths to the same result. A lack of vitamin D, for example, might induce similar disorders and certainly does induce asthma, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, to name just three among many. Pregnant mothers and infants have grown increasingly deficient in this important vitamin in recent years (See our piece Vitamin D, the versatile vitamin for more on that.)

Holistic approach works best

But there are other culprits as well. Aluminum not only exacerbates the presence of mercury, but can fill in for it as a damaging agent. Fluoride is another toxin that can cause untold damage, particularly when combined with aluminum. Even monosodium glutamate, aspartame and other excitotoxins may play a role. All these toxins—mercury, aluminum, fluoride, glutamate and aspartame, as well as vitamin D deficiency—have been implicated in the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. They can also cause, in various combinations or singly, childhood-onset disorders such as autism.

For many individuals, the sheer number of vaccinations given to children these days may be the cause. Not only are the additives such as thimerosal cumulative in their effects, the assault on a young immune system that each of these vaccinations represents has to be considered cumulative as well. Then too, the measles antigen suppresses the immune system for up to several months. During this period, another vaccination that might otherwise be tolerated by a given individual may cause disastrous results.

So a holistic approach to this problem works best. For the sake of argument, if you consider health to be the absence of disease and its contributing factors, you could define health, in this context as adequate vitamin D and other vitamins in the absence of mercury, aluminum, aspartame, MSG and fluoride from the diet and the environment.

Start adding any of these toxins back in, and you dramatically increase the risk of any given child displaying autism.

So, while a given parent may witness a child becoming autistic after, say, a flu vaccination (most flu vaccines still contain mercury) that doesn’t mean another parent may not witness either a different result from mercury or a different cause of autism.

The heartbreak of autism

In any case, it certainly does not mean that any of these parents should have to put up with ridicule or indifference on the part of the medical establishment and even less so on the part of our government. And it certainly does not mean that the CDC should continue to allow thimerosal and other forms of mercury to remain in vaccines. Nor should the FDA continue to allow it to be used in tooth fillings, for that matter.

Whereas in Europe the phrase “First, do no harm” is paramount, the United States has developed a different set of standards. Ours is more along the lines of “Do not interfere with business.” The health and welfare of our citizens, sadly, takes a back seat to the profits of corporations.

That situation has got to change.

As the Kennedy interview makes clear, autism is a disease with a well-defined history. It was first described in 1943 by Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins University. Kanner had studied 11 children between 1938 and 1943, to which he ascribed this new disease.

Thimerosal was invented in the 1920s and first put into use in vaccines in the 1930s. So those who equate autism with the use of thimerosal have a solid base on which to stand. In fact, the House Government Reform Committee that studied the history of autism and thimerosal concluded in its final report, “This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin.” The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of “institutional malfeasance for self protection” and “misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”

You can read all about it here.

Editor’s note, August 13, 2009: We have added the following video (The Truth About Vaccines) from the Shoot ‘Em Up website. The clip can also be found on the Maryland Coalition for Vaccine Choice website. The people who shot the Shoot ‘Em Up documentary from which this video clip is derived produced a feature-length film on the subject. You can purchase that film on DVD from their website. Meanwhile, watch the clip here by clicking on the image below.

Dr. Julie Gerberding Autism interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN – March, 2008, edited by Ginger Taylor.

Below, the Kennedy interview with Joe Scarborough is about Kennedy’s research on autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in many vaccines. This is a subject that both Scarborough and Kennedy know much about. (Scarborough has first-hand experience with autism.)

Keep in mind too that Scarborough is an ultra-conservative, while Kennedy is—well, a Kennedy.


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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Tuesday announced its decision that mercury amalgam fillings—the so-called “silver” fillings most Americans have in their teeth—contain insufficient mercury to warrant concern.

“While elemental mercury has been associated with adverse health effects at high exposures, the levels released by dental amalgam fillings are not high enough to cause harm in patients,” the FDA website proclaims.

A national group called Moms Against Mercury, along with three other organizations, had sued the FDA in 2006 to have mercury fillings removed from the U.S. market. Later that year, an FDA panel of outside experts voted 13-7 against two statements put to them regarding the FDA’s position that mercury amalgam fillings were safe:

“Does the draft FDA White Paper objectively and clearly present the current state of knowledge about the exposure and health effects related to dental amalgam?”

and “Given the amount and quality of information available for the draft FDA White Paper, are the conclusions reasonable?”

The panel’s rejection of these statements caused quite a flurry among pro-mercury and anti-mercury forces alike. Those opposed to the use of mercury in fillings were heartened that at last the government might be listening. The American Dental Association (ADA), which has long favored the use of mercury fillings and supported the FDA’s position, was stirred to action over the possibility that mercury amalgam might finally be banned.

According to the FDA’s website, Tuesday’s ruling was the FDA’s final word on the subject, to the disappointment of those who were hoping to have mercury banned from dental fillings because of its proven adverse health effects.

Denmark Norway, and Sweden have banned the use of mercury amalgams. Several other countries do not allow the use of mercury fillings in young people under the age of 18.

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To see a video entitled “How Mercury Causes Brain Neuron Degeneration” produced by the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine, click here.

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