Evidence of Harmby Edmund Arranga and Teri Small.
David Kirby, author of the book Evidence of Harm, presents a summary of his investigation concerning increasing use of Thimerosal in vaccines and the potential association with increasing rates of neurological developmental disorders (NDDs), including autism, in the United States. He details how exposure levels to mercury exceeded the Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA) guidelines.
When does Evidence of Harm begin? When did parents begin to investigate the possible connection between Thimerosal and autism?
Well the big moment, and there is an actual date, would be July 9th of
1999 when the Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics
issued a joint statement announcing that they had added up mercury burden in children’s vaccines and found out they were over the EPA limit. Up until
that time, parents were certainly researching alleged connections between
vaccines themselves-particularly MMR, but also DTP-but not necessarily
mercury. With one notable exception, a man named Albert Enayati out of New
Jersey. He was the head of Cure Autism Now in New Jersey. And he started
researching this on his own-even before the joint statement was issued. But
he was not entirely convinced, and couldn’t get a lot of information on it
at the time. But then when the joint statement was issued, he put it all
together.
I think that one statement in your book that really hit me was that
Albert had called Merck and a representative told him that Thimerosal was as
safe as lemon juice that you put on your food. Is that correct?
I could not confirm that with Merck. They wouldn’t return my calls
when I called to inquire. I had no reason to doubt Albert. He seems like a
perfectly believable and rational person to me. I wasn’t on the phone call.
I reported what Albert said. I tried to confirm it with Merck, and I
couldn’t. I imagine that the young man from Merck who was answering the
phone that night wasn’t speaking off some official script, I think he was
just giving his own personal knowledge-or misinformation.
Yes, so that’s something that could mislead some parents to the
detriment of their children. What are the numbers like- cases of autism in
the U.S. and in the United Kingdom?
That’s an excellent question. They appear to be just about the same-60
per 10,000 children, or 1 in 166. Now, that is for ASD, not full-blown
autism. However, in other countries in Europe where they have done extensive studies, and where Thimerosal use has not been a common practice for the last decade or so, the autism rates are considerably lower- particularly in Denmark because that’s where it has been studied, probably, more than anywhere in Europe. I believe the rates are about 7 per 10,000 children; whereas, in the U.K. and U.S. which have been using Thimerosal up until recently, the rates are 60 in 10,000.
Tell us about mercury-the types, the difference between ethyl and
methyl, the difference between a bolus and chronic exposure?
Sure. And those are all really important questions because the
manifestation of mercury toxicity depends very much on the type of mercury,
the route of exposure, the age of the person exposed, and their body weight
as well as other issues. We are as humans basically exposed to three or four
different kinds of mercury-some as natural environmental pollutants and some as manmade pollutants. There is inorganic mercury and there is also
elemental mercury. Elemental mercury is what is found in thermometers and
fluorescent light bulbs and things like that.
That’s what comes out of a thermometer when you have to clean up a
mercury mess. Inorganic mercury, the main sources of that are: in
nature-volcanoes; and man-made sources, of course, are coal-fired power
plants.
Then we have two forms of organic mercury: we have methyl mercury and
ethyl mercury. The inorganic mercury that comes out of the coal plants,
according to a report from the National Academies of Science (because this
has recently been challenged) goes up into the air, comes back down in the
form of rain, washes into the soil, lakes, and rivers, where it is consumed
by microorganisms, which then convert it into organic mercury. It then goes
into fish and goes up the food chain. My understading is Thimerosal, or
ethyl mercury, is manufactured-but they are both organic forms of the metal
which, in terms of neurons, organic mercury seems to be even more neurotoxic than inorganic mercury, because organic mercury is absorbed by fat cells; whereas, inorganic is absorbed by water.
So, if you are exposed to organic, the chance of nerve damage is
probably higher; whereas, inorganic would be washed out of your system
through your kidneys.
How much Thimerosal did infants get prior to it being reduced, in
general, recently, and did this exceed EPA guidelines?
At the peak of exposure, if a child had received all mercury-containing vaccines, that is, vaccine brands that contained mercury, they would have received many, many times over the EPA limit on those particular days of the visit to the doctor.
That would be a ‘bolus’ exposure-a peak, intermittent exposure, as
opposed a chronic, low-dose exposure. So, these children would have received at birth 12.5 micrograms of mercury and, depending upon how much they weighed, for an 8 pound child that would be about 35 times over the EPA limit, but for a 4 pound child it would be double that-so, it would be 70
times over the limit. At 2 months the children were brought back, that’s
when they were still relatively small and when many important systems inside
the body are still developing. And that’s when they received the most
amounts of mercury, 3 shots, 62.5 micrograms of mercury. For a 10 pound kid,
it’s about 137 times over the EPA limit. And then of course, at 4 months
they came back, at 6 months, and then a year. So, in that first year most
kids who were receiving mercury got about 212 micrograms.
With all these bolus exposures, didn’t someone at the FDA realize this
is a dangerous thing? Or did they not look at it that why?
It would appear they never looked at it until 1999, when they were
ordered by Congress to do so. We know that company officials at Merck did
the math way back in 1991, thanks to an excellent report in the Los Angeles
Times about two weeks ago.
The company never bothered to tell the government or the public that
they had done this math. When I talk about the ‘math,’ I mean the simple
conversion of percentage of volume into actual micrograms of weight. And no
one at the FDA as far as we know did that until 1999. When they did do that,
that’s when they got the statement out and urged companies to start removing mercury from the childhood shots.
To get a copy of David Kirby’s book “Evidence of Harm” click here.
The full interview, originally conducted on Autism One Radio, is to be
published in the April 2005 issue of Medical Veritas: The Journal of Medical
Truth, which is a publication of Medical Veritas International (MVI).
For more information: www.MedicalVeritas.com