Don't you think the mercury myth cheapens our existence?

Post Reply New Topic

Measles in pregnant women has been linked with autistic children. Measles came before humans worked with mercury.

Good point.

Here is the ASU link and a quote: http://www.eas.asu.edu/~autism/Research/Completed.html

Exposure to Heavy Metals, Physical Symptoms, and Developmental Milestones in Children with Autism
J.B. Adams, C.E. Holloway, M. Margolis, F. George

Summary: A questionnaire was used to assess heavy metal exposure in the mothers of children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) vs. controls. Four exposures were found to be statistically significant, including maternal seafood consumption, oral antibiotic use (which greatly decreases excretion of mercury), adverse reactions to vaccinations (many of which contain thimerosal), and pica (which leads to increased consumption of heavy metals).

Several major physical problems were much more common and severe in the ASD population, including chronic gastrointestinal problems, sleep problems, excessive ear infections, low muscle tone, and excessive salivation/drooling.

Finally, 62% of the children with ASD were reported to have developed normally, with normal developmental milestones, and then had a major regression at an average age of 18 months.

-----

Found that interesting. In my case, it was a little startling when I found that... was born on coastal Alaska, which meant my mother was eating a lot of fish; was frequently sick from infancy through childhood, often on antibiotics with latent allergies to all in the penicillin family; did not respond well to vaccinations, although the reactions were not severe. While no pica, did grow up drinking well water with high iron/mineral content - not directly related but interesting to consider. Have experienced GI issues and insomnia in a chronic and highly impacting manner since my mid-to-late teens. Had 4-6 major ear infections a year while living in Alaska (still susceptible in my right ear). Have strength, but not tremendous muscle tone or development despite efforts to the contrary. Mercury may be like gasoline on a fire, making something more intense, or it might be the match thats ignites a predisposition, or it may just be a strange co-incidence. It was the overwhelming overlap that I found pretty striking for me.


M.

It puts us down as a disability caused by enviromental effects.

The geographic location of my birth makes me American.
My genes make me hazel-eyed.
My upbringing makes me scrupulous about not being too much "trouble" to anyone.

All things have a cause. Even events on the quantum level are their own causes. The existence of a cause doesn't cheapen the existence of anything unless you let it. Unfortunately, some autie moms are letting it.

Recently, a woman suffocated her autistic daughter, and told the police that she was not a murderer, but just someone who wanted to "kill autism." Autism was a cause of suffering, so she had to kill her daughter.

The merging of the disease and the human being in the mind is a dangerous thing. If its widespread, more than one kid is gonna end up getting asphyxiated. Case in point: the Nazis were infamous for not being able to tell the difference between a person and an aspect of that person. That's why they felt compelled to kill all Jews rather than just religious ones. The final solution began with the T-4 euthanasia program for people with disabilities and illnesses, especially hereditary ones. We were killing epilepsy, they said after the war, and what's wrong with that? The few Nazi doctors that were put on trial had a tendency to use collective medical metaphors to say that they had not in fact violated the Hippocratic oath at all, even in their meanest moments. It was usually something along the lines of "the Jews were a diseased appendix we had to remove from the abdomen of Europe." In other words, killing a bunch of individuals who belong to a collective identity is killing the collective identity, not those individuals.

Last edited by MissPickwickian on 05 Aug 2008, 2:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.

That's really interesting, Marukonososhi...

It really wouldn't surprise me. I know I don't get any 'brownie points' for saying that on this website, but stuff it. There are way too many people on the spectrum who fit in with the mercury hypothesis for it to be a big coincidence like they say it is.

Personally, I won't vaccinate at all - myself or my future kids - and I've just paid $300 to have a composite filling rather than the amalgam ones that leech into the body. Spirulina and chlorella are both on my daily food list. Life's too short to much around with these things! You summed it up well though - it could be the cause, a trigger of something preexisting, or something that exacerbates what's already there. Who knows?

Of the statistically significant factors in that article, three out of four have to do with generally poor health (that is, pica, vaccine side-effects, and antibiotic use), and the fourth is involved with prenatal stress.

I don't think it puts us down as people; what it does do is put autism down. Rather than a different way of thinking, the way we're supposed to think because we were born to it, it becomes a sickness that needs to be cured. So that is like saying a part of your personality needs to be cured. It's like saying that you need to be cured of extroversion or conservatism because those things aren't 'really you'.

Autism does have a partly environmental cause. When you take all the ASDs together, there's a 95% heritability--not 100%. So if both you and your identical twin are born with the genetics for Asperger's, and you have a high fever for a few days when you are both babies, and he doesn't, you could end up with mild Asperger's and he might be NT-with-Aspie-traits. It's not a lot, but it can make a difference, especially in the sensitive prenatal and neonatal periods. 5%, in any case, is almost certainly not enough to make the difference between NT and nonverbal.

The things mentioned in the article would not "make" a neurotypical child fully autistic; but I could see how ill health might reduce coping skills to the point that autism is diagnosable. After all, who here hasn't had a temporary regression during a time of extreme stress or illness?

And vaccines that supposedly have mercury in them prevent measles! Wow, does that ever make my brain hurt!

Which explains all the vaccinated children getting measles...?

Not such a good point when you consider that it runs in families. Why would it do that, including families (like mine) who lived in such diverse locations as Sweden, Michigan, and Oregon on one side, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and California (and two very different locations within California, one urban and one rural) on the other, while all the while producing autistic children in all of those locations? It's not like they were carrying mercury around everywhere they went, or as if mercury is somehow hereditary.

And also not such a good point when you consider that one of the vaccines most often blamed for this (still erroneously), never contained mercury or mercury compounds at all.

Also, when vaccines are blamed specifically for 'regressive' autism, why is it that patterns of when a person loses speech seem to follow not age of vaccinations, not age ofmercury exposure, but age that the person acquires a certain amount of words? Such that, for instance, people with Down's syndrome who have language loss related to autism, lose language years later than people without it, because it takes them that many years to come
up with that number of words. Why would this vary so much based on initial language acquisition if vaccines or mercury exposure were the real factor?

From Castillo et al. 2008 (emphasis mine):



What's with that then? People with Down's syndrome don't get their vaccines later than people without do, but they do learn words slower.

You're missing the point. Nobody's saying all autism is caused/triggered/exacerbated by mercury/mercury combined with other neurotoxins (plenty of which are found in vaccines). Just that there's a good chance that SOME could well be.

And my point in mentioning that mercury's been around longer than autism in response to a 'autism has been around longer than vaccines' was more to point out that vaccines aren't the only source of mercury in the world.

The MMR vaccine never had thimerosol though.

(I have objections to the term regressive autism but I don't have time to list them, so I'm using it here.)

But again, seriously, people usually use regressive autism to blame vaccines, saying the person was never autistic until they lost those skills (which is likely untrue). They say that not all autism is vaccines necessarily, but regressive autism is. I have never seen someone who has a child with regressive autism, and who takes that child to one of the people who believes regressive autism is caused by vaccines, who ever gets told their autism is not caused by vaccines. The "only some" of us who supposedly got it from vaccines or mercury or other things like that, are the ones who lost language instead of never having it -- the basis for the claim is that the vaccines/etc cause the regression, and the "only some" refers to the regressive autistic people, not "some" regressive autistic people.

So how do such people explain the discrepancy between regressive-autistic kids with Down's, and those without, when it comes to the timing of the regression? (Or for that matter kids, like me, who learned words a little early, and thus also lost speech a little early -- same principle, different direction.) And why is it that they never seem to find a regressive autistic kid who isn't somehow "vaccine injured" to cause it, if there's such an obvious and strong correlation with timing of language acquisition?

I don't know about that "all." Measles occurs, but there sure as hell seems to be a lot less of it. It's just like that one in 2.5 million people who will get paralytic polio from the whole-cell polio vaccine (which isn't even in use anymore--since the western hemisphere eradication they've been using an even milder formula). But we have to compare it to the 1 in 1000 infants and 1 in 75 older people who will get paralytic polio from the highly infectious and easily imported wild poliovirus.

Recent measles outbreaks have mostly proliferated in communities that don't vaccinate for religious reasons.

You takes your chances. One thing you never see on anti-vaccine websites are the mortality rates of vaccine side-effects and the mortality rates of the diseases vaccines prevent placed side by side. Even if there turns out to be just a 90% decrease in measles cases because of mass vaccination, that's a blessing.

Last edited by MissPickwickian on 05 Aug 2008, 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I knew that. But the circular reasoning of it all always stuns me.

Good question, and another reason the hysteria needs to die down so people can start looking into these things seriously. Still, thousands of parents saying their children 'regressed' into a state later diagnosed as autism immediately following vaccines - and many long, long before it was publicised in the media or the Wakefield case came up, and in all four corners of the globe - surely deserve to be taken seriously and have some real scholarly effort put into finding out exactly what's going on with these kids, rather than ridiculed, ignored, and brushed aside into the 'hysterical', 'crazy', 'paranoid mother', or 'too hard' box?

Yeah, plus even when vaccines don't totally work, the disease is often milder when the person does get it.