Heavy-Metal Toxicity: 16 Ways to Limit Your Exposure

Heavy-Metal Toxicity: 16 Ways to Limit Your Exposure

posted by Megan, selected from Experience Life Nov 3, 2009 5:08 pm

filed under: General Health, Health & Wellness, arsenic, cadmium, heavy metals, lead, mercury

By Catherine Guthrie, Experience Life

What would you think if someone asked you to consume a dose of heavy metals every day for the rest of your life? Most likely, you’d be horrified. But truth be told, you’re already doing it. Everyone ingests small amounts of arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury daily. It’s not an option or an immodest proposal - it’s an environmental mandate.

The environment, unfortunately, is laden with heavy metals, mostly as a result of big-industry waste. Anyone who eats a fish sandwich, inhales secondhand smoke, drinks a glass of water or simply breathes air can be exposed.

Heavy-metal toxins is one of those doomsday topics that makes John Q. Public and even some medical experts want to scoff and look away. But the threat is real, and while the extent of the potential damage is still being debated, you don’t have to wait to begin protecting yourself. There are dozens of simple ways to minimize your exposure and curtail potential dangers.

The key is to be proactive about what you can change and mindful about what you can’t. Knowing what you’re up against can help you strike a healthy balance, and may inspire you to learn more about the heated environmental and political debates that surround this important issue.

Tom McGuire, DDS, a holistic dentist in Santa Rosa, Calif., and an expert on mercury-free dentistry, compares the body’s slow accumulation of heavy metals to the damage done by smoking. A person isn’t going to get lung cancer from the first cigarette, he says, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t worry about the long-term health risks of smoking. “Sadly, most people don’t realize they are being poisoned by heavy metals until they have already affected their health.”

To confound matters even further, heavy-metal toxicity can masquerade as a host of other ailments, so it may fly under the radar of conventional healthcare practitioners. “Most physicians don’t think to look at heavy metals as an underlying cause of disease,” says Liz Lipski, PhD, an expert in dietary detox and author of Digestive Wellness (McGraw-Hill, 1999). “It’s just not in their training.”

Symptoms of chronic heavy-metal exposure include depression, irritability, mood swings, tremors, autoimmune diseases, chronic infections and cancer. Skeptics point out that most of these ills can be caused by any number of other factors.

You can cut down on the amount of heavy metals you imbibe by cleaning up your diet and living space. Here’s a guide to four of the most common heavy metals - arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury - the effects they have on the body, and the ways you can mitigate your exposure.

ARSENIC

What It Is
There are two types: organic and inorganic. Organic arsenic occurs naturally in the earth and small amounts are necessary for the body to function properly. Because the soil contains organic arsenic, many foods have traces of the metal, but it’s not considered toxic. The problem is inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen. Inorganic arsenic is released into the air by burning fuel oils and coal and also by the widespread use of weed killers and insecticides.

The wood industry is one of the biggest culprits in arsenic pollution. The industry has used arsenic to preserve wood since the 1940s. Arsenic-laced wood has been used to make an estimated 90 percent of wooden play structures, decks and picnic tables. In 2002, the EPA announced the industry decision to phase out arsenic-treated wood, but some consumer advocates assert that the agency hasn’t gone far enough.

Adults and children can absorb arsenic simply by touching wood treated with arsenic. In a study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an environmental watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C., researchers found that “the amount of arsenic wiped off a small area of wood about the size of a 4-year-old’s handprint typically far exceeds what EPA allows in a glass of water.”

Other sources of arsenic exposure include herbicides and many foods, including meat, fish, poultry and even wine. (Arsenic-containing pesticides are often sprayed on winemaking grapes.)

What It Does
The average person’s body contains about 10 to 20 milligrams of arsenic. The good news is that the body efficiently rids itself of the metal. Up to 95 percent of the arsenic the body absorbs is excreted by the kidneys and bowels. The bad news is that chronic exposure to low levels of arsenic can create problems for nearly all the organ systems and is strongly linked to lung and skin cancer.

What You Can Do

• Buy organic, pesticide-free fruits and vegetables.

• Avoid insecticides and weed killers. If you must spray, avoid products that contain lead arsenate.

• If your home has arsenic-treated wood, consider replacing it with newer, healthier, arsenic-free alternatives. Keep children away from wood treated with the chemical.

• Don’t eat food directly off of picnic tables.

• Add vitamin C to your diet by upping your intake of citrus fruits, strawberries and red peppers. The nutrient can help protect the body from arsenic toxicity.

CADMIUM

What It Is
Cadmium is a growing source of environmental toxicity. Found deep below the earth’s surface, cadmium began to contaminate the food and water supply when people began mining for zinc, which is often found mixed with cadmium.

What It Does
Since cadmium is naturally drawn to zinc, it can elbow zinc out of the body, which throws key biological functions out of whack. Without a proper zinc-to-cadmium ratio, the body becomes more vulnerable to cadmium toxicity.

One of the biggest contributors to cadmium toxicity is refined grain. Grains are exposed to cadmium in the soil. The cadmium nestles into the grain’s inner kernel. Zinc, on the other hand, is housed primarily in the outer germ and bran layers. When grains are refined, the outer zinc-rich layers are stripped off and the cadmium-rich kernel is kept. Eventually, too much cadmium can lead to a depressed immune system, kidney damage and cancer.

Cadmium is also found in cigarette smoke. One cigarette contains 1 microgram of cadmium. When smoked, 30 percent of a cigarette’s cadmium is absorbed directly into the smoker’s lungs. The other 70 percent is released into the air.

What You Can Do

• Don’t smoke and avoid exposure to secondhand smoke.

• Replace white bread, white rice and white pasta with their whole-grain alternatives. Eat zinc-rich foods, such as whole grains, beans and nuts, wheatgrass and spirulina.

• Take a daily multivitamin or super-green supplement that includes zinc, calcium and selenium. All three help the body rebuff cadmium deposits.

LEAD

What It Is
Lead was discovered as a byproduct of smelting silver and has been used by humans since the beginning of civilization. Unfortunately, lead is a potent neurotoxin that affects brain development and the nervous system. Too much can be deadly. In fact, some historians blame lead for the fall of the Roman Empire. Romans used lead to make water pipes and storage containers for food and water.

In the 20th century, gasoline was single-handedly responsible for most of America’s lead emissions. In the 1920s, oil companies discovered lead was an inexpensive octane booster. Unfortunately, it took several decades for scientists to realize that people were being slowly poisoned, according to Pirkle. Gas makers began phasing lead out of the production process in the 1970s.

Paint is also a significant factor in lead pollution. Before 1955, much of the white house paint used throughout the country contained up to 50 percent lead. It wasn’t until 1971 that the government lowered allowable lead levels in paint to 1 percent. By 1977 that number was reduced to .06 percent. But that doesn’t mean paint no longer poses a threat: 83 to 86 percent of homes built before 1978 still contain lead-based paint.

Today, one of the main sources of lead exposure for adults is drinking water. Lead can seep into water from lead pipes, faucets and solder, found primarily in older buildings. It is also found in lead-wicked candles.

What It Does
Of all the heavy metals in our bodies, lead is the most plentiful. It’s estimated that people have between 125 and 200 milligrams of lead in their bodies, nearly 1,000 times more than our ancestors. Inside the body, high lead levels may cause less pliable arteries, an irregular heartbeat and high blood pressure. The body stores lead in the teeth and bones, both places that welcome minerals. “There is no known minimum level of lead that is safe for humans,” says Liz Lipski, PhD, an expert in dietary detox and author of Digestive Wellness (McGraw-Hill, 1999).

Authors of a recent study, published in the March 2003 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found a link between high blood pressure and lead in the blood. The relationship was most pronounced in postmenopausal women, a population already at high risk of heart disease.

Specifically, women with the most lead in their blood had a 3.4-fold increased risk of hypertension compared with those women whose blood contained the least amount of the mineral. Although scientists don’t fully understand the connection between lead and heart disease, they suspect the higher blood levels in postmenopausal women may be related to the fact that the body stores lead in the bones. Therefore, when women begin to lose bone mass during menopause, lead is released into the body.

When a patient with hypertension comes to see him, naturopathic physician Crinnion immediately tests for heavy metals. “We are finding very high heavy-metal burdens in people with hypertension,” he says, “especially those who don’t respond well to medication.”

What You Can Do

• Consume more vitamin C. The vitamin latches onto lead and ushers it from the body via urine. Eat plenty of citrus fruits and take a daily supplement containing between 250 and 500 milligrams of the vitamin.

• Keep up your calcium levels. Calcium vies for space with the metal and prevents it from entering bone cells. Stock up on calcium-rich foods, such as low-fat dairy products, broccoli, sardines and collard greens.

• Do not burn candles unless their labels specify that the wicks are lead-free. Many metal-wicked candles, especially imports, contain lead. When burned, the metal is vaporized (meaning you can breathe it) as well as turned into ash, which can put a fine layer of leaded dust on nearby surfaces.

• Before you fill up your drinking glass with tap water, flush standing water from the pipes by letting the faucet run for a few minutes. (Better yet, install a water filtration system.) Also, drinking cold water will cut down your exposure, since leaching rates rise when water is heated.

• If you are renovating an older home, consult a professional or your county lead-abatement program.

MERCURY

What It Is
Of all the heavy metals, mercury often gets the greatest spotlight. Coal-burning power plants are the biggest mercury polluters. Each year hundreds of power plants in the United States spew around 98,000 pounds of mercury into the air. From this air and ground contamination, mercury seeps into rivers, lakes and oceans, where small organisms, like algae, absorb it. The toxin makes its way up the food chain to bigger and bigger fish, becoming more concentrated at each level. Mercury levels in fish at the highest levels of the food chain, such as shark, can measure thousands of times higher than the water in which they live. Once it enters the environment, mercury never leaves.

Another use of mercury is in dental amalgam fillings. The controversy is still swirling over whether or not people with amalgam fillings suffer ills because of mercury exposure. (See “Mouthful of Mercury?” on next page.) Although mercury-free fillings are now available, many dentists swear by conventional amalgam fillings.

What It Does
Mercury competes for space in red blood cells with oxygen. When oxygen can’t get through, the body is deprived of energy. As a result, a common symptom of mercury poisoning is fatigue. Mercury is also a potent neurotoxin. The heavy metal disrupts the development of the central nervous system, therefore mercury is most dangerous for pregnant women, children and teenagers. But scientists are just beginning to understand how chronic, low-level exposure to mercury may contribute to chronic ills most often seen in adults, such as heart disease and cataracts.

What You Can Do

• Be fastidious about fish. Much of the world’s fish supply is contaminated with methylmercury, a particularly hazardous form of the metal. When shopping for seafood, aim low on the food chain. That means more cod and sardines and less swordfish. If you’re a tuna lover, proceed with caution. The popular fish lands smack in the middle of the mercury scale. Light canned tuna and fresh yellowfin tuna are likely to be less contaminated than white canned tuna and albacore.

• According to an advisory published by the Food and Drug Administration, pregnant women, women who may become pregnant, nursing mothers and young children should avoid shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish, as well as limit their consumption of other fish (shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollack and catfish) to 12 ounces (roughly two meals) a week.

• Eat seaweed with your fish. “Seaweed is a natural chelator in the gut,” says Elson Haas, MD, author of Staying Healthy with Nutrition (Celestial Arts, summer 2005). “I always make sure I have seaweed when I eat fish.” Seaweed not your thing? Then take a daily selenium supplement of at least 200 micrograms. Selenium helps the body ward off toxicity from heavy metals, including mercury.

SIDEBAR:

Mouthful of Mercury?
The debate over the safety of silver mercury amalgam fillings has raged nearly as long as the fillings have been in use. While the American Dental Association claims amalgam fillings are safe, alternative practitioners are divided on the issue.

Tom McGuire, DDS, a consultant for the book Mouth Full of Poison: The Truth About Mercury Amalgam Fillings, says everyone with amalgam fillings, especially those with any mercury-related health issues, should have them safely removed and replaced with a nontoxic filling material. To support his rationale, he points to new high-tech devices that measure mercury vapor in the mouths of people with mercury amalgam fillings. “Next to plutonium, mercury is the most toxic naturally occurring substance on the planet. Even one atom of it in the body is going to do some harm,” he says. “Chewing, drinking hot liquids and grinding the teeth all release mercury vapor.”

Others are less zealous. “Over my 30 years in practice, I’ve seen a lot of people with amalgam fillings who don’t test high for mercury - yet they still may be mercury toxic from it being stored in the tissues,” says Elson Haas, MD. “It’s like vaccines; I don’t think there is a right answer. Both sides have benefits and risks.”

What’s the bottom line? If you suffer from a vague or hard-to-treat chronic health condition, getting your amalgams removed may be worth considering. Just be careful to ask your dentist to follow safe protocols to reduce the potential for mercury exposure. For a copy of the protocols or to find a mercury-free dentist in your area, visit www.mercuryfreenow.com.

Catherine Guthrie is a freelance health writer in Bloomington, Ind. Her work also appears in Alternative Medicine, Yoga Journal and Arthritis Today.

Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Eating Animals' Book Will Fundamentally Change the Way You Think About Food

Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Eating Animals' Book Will Fundamentally Change the Way You Think About Food

By Kathy Freston, AlterNet. Posted November 4, 2009.

"He is the Michael Pollan of a younger generation: grittier and more daring, more insightful and decisive."

If ever there was a book that could profoundly affect our lives at the most fundamental level, this one is it. I loved Jonathan Safran Foer's novels (Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close); they were glorious to read and get lost in. But his new non-fiction kindles something more: it is somewhat of an awakening, and it just might tip us farther into what is being called the next great social movement of our time: eating consciously.

Eating Animals takes a bold and fresh approach to our most important relationship with the world around us -- our food. The originality of the thinking and depth of research establishes Foer as a major player in the national discussion of the ethics of eating. He is the Michael Pollan of a younger generation: grittier and more daring, more insightful and decisive. And as we would expect from Foer, the stories he tells explode off the page and into our hearts.

Foer takes us alongside him as he bungles through undercover investigations and into the hidden world of today's industrial farming. We find out that turkeys have been so genetically modified they are not capable of sexual reproduction. We learn that the chickens on American's plates have been bred to grow so large so fast that their mere genetics destines them to suffering. We learn that "free range" means next to nothing and why it's fish and chicken you want to most avoid.

The book is a case against factory farming, but we don't hear only the bad news about animal agriculture. Foer also takes us to the most humane and sustainable animal farms in the nation. We get to hear a dizzying variety of voices: factory farmers, slaughterhouse workers, animal activists, a turkey farmer who apologizes to his animals, a vegetarian cattle rancher, and a vegan helping to build a slaughterhouse.

Part of the appeal of the book is the real-life characters we meet and the new landscape of animal protection and food advocacy that Foer plugs us into. He has us meet the head of the nation's largest cooperative of family-owned pig farms, gives us a fresh perspective on the ever-controversial PETA as it approaches its 30th year and introduces us to exciting new groups like Farm Forward that are building unique coalitions with animal activists, small farmers, and sustainability advocates.

While Foer makes a strong case for vegetarianism, he gives dissenting voices a place and never forgets that the stories we tell about food are always about more than what we eat. "Stories about food are stories about us -- our history and our values."

Foer is quite fair to the "humane" animal farmers who he writes about appreciatively. In the end, he leaves us opposed to factory farming as something beneath human dignity, but stops short of an explicit case against all meat. His opposition to factory farming appears to be his central message, but I think he accomplishes something much less modest: For careful readers, the book offers an indictment of all meat. Virtually all of the "humane" producers he discusses mutilate animals without pain relief and treat them more as commodities than living beings. And as Foer himself says, "Every farm, like everything, has flaws, is subject to accidents, sometimes doesn't work as it should. Life overflows with imperfections, but some imperfections matter more than others. How imperfect must animal farming and slaughter be before they are too imperfect? Different people will draw the line in different places... But for me, for now - for my family now - my concerns about the reality of what meat is and has become are enough to make me give it up altogether."

Eating Animals is filled with powerful statistics, like the fact that 99% of all animals eaten for food in America come from factory farms or that animal agriculture is the largest contributor to global warming in the world (and one of the top two or three contributors to virtually all serious environmental problems). But it's not the facts that make this book so special, but its heart, humor, emotion, and spirit.

Foer was inspired to write the book after the birth of his first son, Sasha. "Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (his physical health matters, the pleasure of eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter. These stories bind our family together, and bind our family to others." From the book's intimate start with childhood memories to its visionary ending of the deeper meaning of Thanksgiving, Eating Animals is a personal journal that not only feeds us facts, but helps us digest them.

In the end, the book is about much more than food. It is not only a book about eating animals, but about how we shape our world by what we eat. It is a book about who we are and who we could become. As one of Foer's friends wrote to him upon his son Sasha's birth, "Everything is possible again." The world is never fixed and neither are we. When we think seriously about the food we eat, we all have another chance at being more true to ourselves. We have another chance to be better.

If you can't wait to get your hands on the book, check out Foer's New York Times Magazine piece based on it.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/ieating-animalsi-why-eati_b_339071.html

See more stories tagged with: vegetarianism, meat, vegetarians, cafo, jonathan safran foer, eating animals, feedlot

Kathy Freston is a health and wellness expert and a New York Times best-selling author. Her latest book is The Quantum Wellness Cleanse: A 21 Day Essential Guide to Healing Your Body, Mind and Spirit. Freston promotes a body/mind/spirit approach to health and happiness that includes a concentration on healthy diet, emotional introspection, spiritual practice, and loving relationships. Kathy’s recent television appearances include The Oprah Winfrey Show, Ellen, The View and Good Morning America. www.kathyfreston.com

Inequality: The Root Source of Sickness in America

by Susan Rosenthal / November 3rd, 2009

The United States spends more on health care than any other industrial nation, yet it has the highest infant death rates and the lowest life expectancy.

This problem is attributed to a fragmented, profit-oriented medical system that denies millions of people access to care.¹ While a national medical plan that covers everyone is desperately needed, improving the general health of the population requires more fundamental change.

Studies show that social inequality affects the health of populations more than any other factor – more than diet, smoking, exercise, and even more than access to medical care.²

Americans suffer the worst health statistics in the industrialized world because they live in the most unequal society in the industrialized world.

Poor health and lack of access to medical care are both symptoms of social inequality. In 1970 the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans took in 100 times the average annual income. By 2001, they were taking 560 times the average annual income. In 1980, U.S. life expectancy ranked 14th in the world. By 2007, it ranked 29th.

Inequality is built into and generated by the capitalist system. Capital is created when employers pay workers less than the value of the goods and services they produce. The resulting profit, or capital, is used to extract more capital. As this process repeats over time, capital accumulates at the top of society and misery accumulates at the bottom.

The strategy of divide-and-rule generates even more inequality: between men and women; White and Black; national and foreign-born; straight and gay; etc.

As social inequality grows, the health of the entire population suffers, not just those on the bottom.³

Inequality Kills

A study of 282 metropolitan areas in the U.S. found that the greater the difference in income, the more the death rate rose for all income levels, not just for the poor.

Researchers calculated that if income inequality could be reduced to the lowest level found in the United States, it would save as many lives as would be saved by eradicating heart disease or by preventing all deaths from lung cancer, diabetes, motor vehicle crashes, HIV infection, suicide and homicide combined!⁴ We would see even greater benefits if we eliminated social inequality entirely.

Consider the lives that would be saved just by ending racial inequality.

Without racism, death rates for Black and White Americans would be the same. Yet, every year, Black Americans suffer 300 more deaths per 100,000 people than White Americans. Compare these 300 additional deaths with the 2005 U.S. homicide rate of fewer than 6 per 100,000. Do the math. Racism kills 50 times more people than die at the hands of individual murderers.

Inequality kills kids. Forty-two nations have lower infant death rates than the U.S. The infant death rate in the capital of the U.S. is more than double the infant death rate in the capital of China. In 25 nations, people live longer, on average, than they do in America.

Inequality is so destructive that it can even counter the benefit of higher incomes. Studies show that poorer people living in more equal nations tend to be healthier and live longer than more-affluent people living in more unequal nations. For example, middle-income people in Britain enjoy better health than wealthier Americans.⁵

Men living in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, are more likely to reach age 65 than Black American men living in Harlem. Harlem men have higher incomes than Bangladeshi men but live in a more unequal society. Black Americans tend to die prematurely from cardiovascular and other diseases that are linked with class and race inequality.⁶

How does inequality do so much damage?

Power = Health

A study of the highly-stratified British civil service found that health deteriorated as social status fell. This decline in health could not be explained by smoking, exercise or body weight.⁷ Income is not the factor, because professionals who earn less than non-professionals still enjoy better health.⁸

The answer lay in the surprising finding that those near the top of the power structure had worse health than those at the top, even though their life-styles were essentially the same.⁷ The only difference that could account for this is social power.

People with more control over their lives enjoy better health. Bosses live the longest, healthiest lives because they have the most power. As power diminishes, stress rises and health deteriorates. This relationship between social status and health has been found in every nation studied, including the United States.⁹

A 2008 study found widening differences in health between income levels in America. (Income level is often used to measure social status.) The nation’s poorest adults were nearly five times more likely to be in “poor or fair” health than the richest, and at every income level the wealthier group was healthier than the next lower one. This trend was seen in all racial groups.¹⁰ Michael Marmot, who studies the link between social status and health, explains,

Your position in the hierarchy very much relates to how much control you have over your life…Sustained, chronic and long-term stress is linked to low control over life circumstances.¹¹

Under capitalism, only a few people get to make the important decisions. The rest of us get no say over how work will be organized and how social resources will be used. We don’t get to decide if we will build more schools or more prisons, wage war or make peace.

Exclusion from decision-making is strongly linked with cardiovascular disease,¹² and the more powerless a person feels, the faster the disease progresses.¹³ Oppressed sections of the working-class suffer the highest rates of cardiovascular disease,¹⁴ because they have the least social control.

People with little control over demanding jobs are more likely to be overweight and have high cholesterol regardless of age, amount of exercise and smoking habits. By itself, hard work is not bad for your health unless there is also a lack of control. The most health-damaging jobs saddle workers with great responsibility (e.g. caring for patients) while denying them the resources required to meet those responsibilities (enough time to do what is needed).¹⁵

In Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality, Richard Wilkinson links inequality with health-damaging stress. Children show rising levels of stress hormones as their social position falls.¹⁶ Nurses who work under “unfair and unreasonable” bosses have higher blood pressure.¹⁷ Simply speaking with someone with higher social status will raise your blood pressure.¹⁸ The greatest damage is done to those who are put down and ordered around their entire lives.

Stress triggers a higher heart rate, a release of adrenaline, glucose and other neurological responses to help the body respond to a short-term threat. But when extended over long periods of time, they can harm the cardiovascular and immune systems, making individuals more vulnerable to a wide range of conditions including infections, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, asthma and aggression.¹¹

Solidarity is the Best Medicine

Human survival has always depended on the cooperation that flows from strong social bonds. People who pull together enjoy better health and longer lives.¹⁹ Strong social ties may explain why Hispanic Americans have lower rates of chronic illness than White Americans, despite having lower incomes.²⁰

Human beings cannot be healthy in class-divided societies. From birth to death, capitalism ranks people on a vertical scale, with those higher up being treated as more worthy than those lower down. The unequal relationship between bosses and workers is maintained by divide-and-rule policies that generate more inequality based on sex, skin color, religion, nationality, etc. These divisions rupture social bonds and generate sickness throughout the population.

Universal access to medical care would reduce some of this inequality. However, even the best medical system cannot eliminate the health-damaging effects of poverty, social discrimination, unsafe work, bad housing, poor schools and being denied the right to make decisions that affect our lives. To end these miseries, we must eliminate class divisions and all the other inequalities that follow.

Human sickness is a product of sick social relationships, and human health is a product of healthy social relationships. Replacing class divisions with a cooperative, socialist society would reduce the burden of disease and raise the level of health more than any other measure.

1. Hadley, J. (2002). Sicker and poorer: The consequences of being uninsured. Kaiser Family Foundation. [↩]
2. Wilkinson, R.G. (1992). National mortality rates: the impact of inequality? Am J Public Health, Vol 82:8, p. 1082-1084. See also, PBS (2008). Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? [↩]
3. Rosenthal, S. (2006). POWER and powerlessness, Chapter 11, “Divide and Rule.” [↩]
4. Lynch, J.W. et. al. (1998). Income inequality and mortality in metropolitan areas of the United States. Am J Public Health Vol. 88, p. 1074-1080. [↩]
5. Quoted in Bowe, C. (2008). U.S. society helping to make people sicker. The Financial Times Limited, February 29. [↩]
6. McCord C, Freeman H.P. (1990). Excess mortality in Harlem. New England Journal of Medicine Vol. 322, p. 173-7. [↩]
7. DHSS (1980). Inequalities in health: Report of a research working group. Middlesex: U.K. Author. [↩] [↩]
8. Cited in Schmidt. J. (2000). Disciplined minds: A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives. Rowman & Littlefield, p. 103-104. [↩]
9. A discussion of American studies linking class and heath can be found in Schmidt. J. (2000). Disciplined minds: A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives. Rowman & Littlefield, p. 103-104. [↩]
10. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (2008). Overcoming Obstacles to Health. [↩]
11. Cohen, P. (2004). Forget lonely. Life is healthy at the top. New York Times, May 15. [↩] [↩]
12. Raphael, D. (2001), Inequality is bad for our hearts: Why low income and social exclusion are major causes of heart disease in Canada, North York Heart Health Network, Toronto, Canada. [↩]
13. Everson S, et. al. (1997). Hopelessness and 4-year progression of carotid atherosclerosis. Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, Vol. 17:8, p.1490-5. [↩]
14. Raphael, D. (2002). Poor choice or no choice?: Even more evidence links low income with disease so why keep blaming lifestyle choices like fries? Toronto Star, October 11, p. F6. [↩]
15. Kivimääki, M., et. al. (2002). Work stress and risk of cardiovascular mortality: prospective cohort study of industrial employees. BMJ October 19. Vol. 325, p. 857. [↩]
16. Lupien S.J. et al. (2000). Child’s stress hormone levels correlate with mother’s socioeco­nomic status and depressive state. Biol Psychiatry Nov 15. Vol. 48, p. 976-80. [↩]
17. CBC. (2003). Bad bosses bring blood pressure to boil: Study. June 24. [↩]
18. Long, J.M, et. al. (1982). The effect of status on blood pressure during verbal communication. Journal of Behavioral Medicine Vol.5, p. 165-71 [↩]
19. Cacioppo, J.T. et al. (2002). Loneliness and health: Potential mechanisms. Psychosom Med May/June, Vol. 64, p. 407-17. Also, House, J.S. et. al. (1988). Social relationships and health. Science, Vol. 24, p. 540-545. [↩]
20. Cited in Cohen, P. (2004). Forget lonely. Life is healthy at the top. New York Times, May 15. [↩]

Susan Rosenthal is a practicing physician and the the author of POWER and Powerlessness (2006) and Class, Health and Health Care (2008). She is a founding member of International Health Workers for People Over Profit. She can be reached through her web site www.susanrosenthal.com or by email: susan@susanrosenthal.com. Read other articles by Susan, or visit Susan's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under Class, Health/Medical, Solidarity.

Size Matters: Is the U.S. a Dinosaur?

Size Matters

by Rosemarie Jackowski / November 3rd, 2009

Is the US too big not to fail? For everything there is an ideal size. An enlarged heart will not function as well as one of the ideal size. Giantism is a health risk. Some of the recent losses in the US economy were caused by banks that were too large to be regulated efficiently. Empires don’t survive. Size matters.

It might have been intended as a joke, but one of the most profound comments on this topic was made a while back by Bob and Ray Magliozzi, the car guys. On their radio program, while discussing how to solve the problems of world governance, they said that in order for any nation to function properly it must be small. In fact, they said that the only way for a government to work would be for the citizens to break up into groups of ten. Ten was the ideal number. That way everyone could be heard. Everyone’s rights could be honored. Every nation would consist of ten citizens.

Think about it. How many lives have been lost because of the size of the US Military. The size of the Pentagon Budget has created global harm. In addition, the size of the Black Budget is a major problem. It should be eliminated.

In a nation that is too big, there is no way that citizens can be informed on the complexities of the laws and regulations which impact their lives. Even legislators who vote on the laws are at a disadvantage when a bill is unnecessarily complicated and too lengthy. How many in Congress will have read the nearly 2000 page Health Care Bill before they vote on it? A Bill that is almost 2000 pages in length will most likely be read by Congressional staffers. They in turn will write up a brief — sort of a Cliff Notes for Congress. That’s not the way our forefathers meant for things to be. If the Ten Commandments can be written on an index card, the US should be able to write a health care bill in a few pages.

A perfect example of how complex regulations harm all of us was recently disclosed by Stan Brock during a C-Span interview. He made a shocking revelation. He said that free medical care would be more readily available in the US, if only it was not prohibited in all States except Tennessee. That was shocking — free medical care at no expense to the taxpayer or the patient. Free vision exams, free dental fillings, free medical procedures – unbelievable.

The need for medical services is of crisis proportions — sort of a Perfect Storm. Bad economy, lost jobs, home foreclosures. I started to do the research to prove that Stan Brock was wrong when he said that most States made it almost impossible for volunteer medical personnel from other States to donate their services. Tennessee was the only exception.

I owe Stan an apology. He was right. I was wrong. I had believed that no where in our nation would a doctor be prohibited from rendering free medical care to a sick person. Cause of death — lack of papers of the volunteering physician — sort of a Catch 22 in medical care.

Everyone should research the rules. They are different in each State. My research is not complete but so far this is what it looks like. State Regulatory Boards cave in to the pressure of special medical interest groups. Regulations are written to eliminate competition from out-of-state doctors. A licensed doctor from New York, Massachusetts, or New Hampshire is not permitted to cross the state line and practice in the adjoining Vermont town. In Vermont, the licensing of doctors is controlled by the State Medical Board.

On the other hand, to further complicate things, in Vermont, the licensing of dentists is not controlled by the State Medical Board. The licensing of dentists is regulated by the Office of Professional Regulation, a division of the Office of Secretary of State. The rules for doctors and dentists are different. Rule 4.8 provides for a Transient Practice Permit which allows an out-of-state or Canadian dentist to practice in Vermont for ten days per year. This rule applies only to dentists.

Figuring a way to fix this is not brain surgery, but it might allow a patient to get brain surgery if it is needed. The fix is easy. Medical licensing Boards should honor reciprocity. A licensed doctor from one State should be granted the right to practice in any other State. Red tape and bureaucratic loopholes should be eliminated. Licensing fees for humanitarian volunteers should be eliminated. The lack of reciprocity across State lines denies a patient’s right to choose. Worse, it sometimes denies a patient’s right to survive.

For those who are not familiar with the work of Stan Brock, he is founder of RAM — Remote Area Medical. The original plan was to serve those in remote, jungle areas. Now that the US has become a Third World country, RAM has held several free clinics in the US. News reports have shown people lining up in the dark of night with the hope of getting necessary medical care. Many have had to be turned away.

The need for a Single Payer system is urgent. Until we have a Single Payer system there will be a need for thousands of humanitarians like Stan Brock. On the downside, reliance on volunteer services such as RAM unfairly deprives others around the world of medical care.

In the meantime, the US bureaucracy needs to be downsized and simplified. Only then will heroes such as Stan Brock and the other volunteers be allowed to go about their work of saving lives.

Rosemarie Jackowski is an advocacy journalist living in Vermont. Read other articles by Rosemarie, or visit Rosemarie's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 9:01am and is filed under Health/Medical

RFKjr on Deadly Immunity

ROLLING STONE


Deadly Immunity

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all." He added that "the research results have to be handled," warning that the study "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.

Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.

The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist.

Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee 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."

The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical.

I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until we know the facts?"

It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's pre-eminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."

More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among eleven children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis -- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. "If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the twenty-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.

What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children's vaccines twenty years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.

"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."

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to twenty-two patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours." Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs."

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received eleven vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"

But by that time, the damage was done. At two months, when the infant brain is still at a critical stage of development, infants routinely received three inoculations that contained a total of 62.5 micrograms of ethylmercury -- a level 99 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.

Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisers, told me, "I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next twenty years, because we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials."

But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and was part of a team that developed the measles vaccine and brought it to licensure in 1963. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."

Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it works."

Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. "Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists."

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines.

If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. "We've got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. "The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge."

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.

In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and -- in a startling position for a scientific body -- recommended that no further research be conducted.

The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research." CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?"

Under pressure from Congress and parents, the Institute of Medicine convened another panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the way the VSD had been used in the Verstraeten study, and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.

So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

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, Pennsylvania, 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.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in thirty-two other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review."

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. "The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen."

It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them sincere, even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations.

NOTE: This story has been updated to correct several inaccuracies in the original, published version. As originally reported, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations before 1989, but the article failed to note that they were innoculated a total of eleven times with those vaccines, including boosters. The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms - an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. Finally, because of an editing error, the article misstated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

An earlier version of this story stated that the Institute of Medicine convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization Safety Review Committee that had found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, the IOM convened the second panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program, including those raised by critics of the IOM's earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing the committee's findings. The story also inadvertently omitted a word and transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements, and incorrectly stated that Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz was part of a team that developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure, but he never held the patent. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

CLARIFICATION: After publication of this story, Salon and Rolling Stone corrected an error that misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms ? an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. At the time of the correction, we were aware that the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered it more appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace it with another number entirely.

Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from responses to the article that the forty-percent number, while accurate, is misleading. It measures the total mercury load an infant received from vaccines during the first six months, calculates the daily average received based on average body weight, and then compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But infants did not receive the vaccines as a ?daily average? ? they received massive doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states, these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99 times. Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion, we have amended the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure.

Correction: The story misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former legislative counsel to Senator Bill Frist. The comment was made by Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone and Salon.com regret the error.

Parents: Send this note to your school principal to protect your child from swine flu vaccinations Wednesday, November 04, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor Key concepts: Swine flu, Vaccines and Health View on NaturalPedia: Swine flu, Vaccines and Health

(NaturalNews) After reading about the forced vaccination of a Brooklyn schoolgirl who ended up in the hospital, many parents are concerned about how they might protect their own children from school-based vaccination schemes.

To help parents protect their children, I've written a letter that you may copy, modify and use as a warning to the principal of the school(s) where your own children are students. This letter will serve as a warning to the school principal that if your child is vaccinated without your permission, you will unleash a hellstorm of legal action and media attention that every school principal desperately wishes to avoid. (Feel free to modify this letter to tone down the language a bit if you already have a friendly relationship with your local school principal.)

Once you're satisfied with the language, print and sign this letter, then have it notarized so the signing date can be proven in court. When that's complete, mail a copy to your school using registered mail (so you have proof it was delivered), then print off another copy for your child to carry with them at all times.

Instruct your child that if they are called to the nurse's office to be injected with the vaccine, they should produce this note and show it to the nurse. You may also instruct your child to protect themselves by running from the nurse's office and calling you at home or work (print your phone number on the back of the note).

Role-play this scenario to make sure your child understands exactly what you're asking them to do. Otherwise, they will usually just do what they're told at school, especially if they are threatened with getting into trouble by school teachers or nurses.

This letter hasn't been reviewed by a lawyer. If you want a stronger legal angle for your letter, take this to your lawyer and ask them to beef it up with more "lawyer language."

This letter, by the way, is offered as-is, with no guarantees. It's simply being published here on NaturalNews as a public service to give concerned parents something they can use to help protect the health of their children from overzealous vaccination schemes.

(Note: You may need to alter the gender references in the letter below if your child is a girl. The note is written using "he.")

A letter for your school principal (and nursing staff)

From: (Your name here)
Date: (Insert date here)
RE: Request for NON-vaccination of my child (insert child's name here)

Dear Principal Johnson (and the nursing staff),

This letter is to inform you that as a parent of a child in your school, I do not consent to any H1N1 (Swine Flu) vaccination of my child, (insert child's name here), and that if my child is subjected to such a vaccine without my permission, I will consider that a gross violation of not only my parental rights, but the civil rights of my child.

The H1N1 swine flu vaccines currently being given to schoolchildren in America were approved by the FDA using an unlawful waiver that allowed the vaccines to be approved with absolutely no credible scientific testing. No adequate safety or efficacy testing has been conducted on any of the swine flu vaccines, and those children who are being injected with the vaccines are being treated as human guinea pigs.

H1N1 swine flu has also turned out to be so mild that it can be easily overcome with a healthy immune system aided by healthy levels of circulating vitamin D. My child takes vitamin D supplementation and therefore has an extremely healthy, active immune system that can easily mount its own antibody response against swine flu or other forms of influenza. Because of his immune system health and nutritional regimen, my child poses no health threat as a "carrier" of the swine flu, even without being vaccinated.

As a parent, part of my responsibility to my child is to protect them from potentially dangerous chemicals or unproven medications that may cause neurological side effects. A previous batch of swine flu vaccines in 1976 are now known to have caused Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), a serious neurological disorder that can cause paralysis or death. The risk of such side effects may be small, but they are permanent and not worth the claimed protection against a disease that, according to CDC statistics, is many times less virulent than regular seasonal flu.

Please make note that my child is not to receive any vaccinations without my prior written consent, and that if my child is subjected to vaccines of any kind without such permission, I will immediately seek legal counsel in an attempt to hold your school responsible for all long-term medical costs potentially associated with the vaccine side effects. I will also sue for violation of my child's civil rights.

Should such a scenario unfold, I also plan to go public with this story at both the local and national levels in order to bring increased awareness to this gross violation of parental rights. A copy of this signed and dated letter will be made available to the press to prove that I clearly and specifically requested my child NOT be vaccinated. I will also be happy to provide this documentation to whatever state regulators or law enforcement investigators may become involved at that point.

You may avoid all of this by honoring my request to safeguard my child from any and all H1N1 (Swine Flu) vaccines being given at your school.

Regards,

(Your name here)
(Notary stamp here)

Final Note: If your child is violated with a vaccine without your permission, please contact NaturalNews so that we may bring awareness to your story (if you wish). Your credibility will be greatly improved if you have a signed, notarized and dated letter (along with proof of mail delivery) stating your desire to avoid having your child vaccinated.

About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher and author with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a manufacturer of mercury-free, energy-efficient LED lighting products that save electricity and help prevent global warming. He's also a successful software entrepreneur, having founded a well known email marketing software company whose technology currently powers the NaturalNews email newsletters. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and pursues hobbies such as Pilates, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org

Brooklyn girl winds up in hospital after being injected with H1N1 swine flu vaccine without parental permission Wednesday, November 04, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor Key concepts: Swine flu, Hospital and Swine flu vaccine View on NaturalPedia: Swine flu, Hospital and Swine flu vaccine

NaturalNews) A six-year-old Brooklyn girl, Nikiyah Torres-Pierre, was hospitalized recently after being injected with the swine flu vaccine. The vaccination was conducted entirely without her parents' permission in an incident school nurses are calling "a mistake."

Mother Naomi Troy told the NY Daily News, "I was outraged." After receiving the swine flu injection, her daughter complained she was itching and her stomach was hurting. That's when school officials called an ambulance that rushed Nikiyah to the hospital.

Nikiyah is epileptic and takes prescription medication to treat the condition. Her mother was concerned about the possible side effects of combining a swine flu vaccine shot with epilepsy drugs and was waiting to hear back from her doctor before giving the school permission to vaccinate her daughter. That permission was apparently irrelevant, as some schools simply vaccinate any and all children without concern for parental permission.

After injecting her daughter without permission, the school nurse then called Naomi Troy and tried to persuade her to sign a consent form after the fact. "I was insulted. I was really angry," said Naomi.

So far, 1,800 NY students have been vaccinated against swine flu. Hundreds of thousands more are in line to be vaccinated when a sufficient supply of vaccines is made available.

Protect your children from state officials

What this incident demonstrates is the important need for parents to protect your children from the vaccination agenda being pushed by the State. Even without your permission, your children can be called to the nurse's office and forcibly injected with a substance that could harm or kill them.

You, the parent, might be called after the fact -- after your child winds up in the hospital, suffering from bizarre side effects even though doctors swore the vaccine was "perfectly safe."

Every day that you send your child to a public school, you run the risk that the next time you see your child, it may be in the hospital... or the morgue. Many state Dept. of Health employees who serve as school nurses don't pay any attention to parental permission. They just inject every child they can get their hands on.

And even if your child faints, or collapses into a coma, or even dies from the side effects of the vaccine, they'll claim such things are "pure coincidence" and couldn't be caused by the vaccine itself. How do they know that? Because they've been told "the vaccine is safe." And they believe it.

If you have a child in the public school system -- and you don't want them to be vaccinated with the H1N1 vaccines -- you need to take special precautions by writing a strongly-worded note informing your school principal (and nursing staff) that if your child is vaccinated without your permission, you will sue for damages.

As a public service to NaturalNews readers, I've written and posted precisely such a letter that you can freely use for this purpose. You'll find it here: http://www.naturalnews.com/027394_s...

Use this letter to stand up for your rights as a parent! Don't let the schools inject your child with a potentially harmful chemical substance. Take action now to protect the rights of you and your children.

What Obama Is Up Against - Another Inconvenient Truth

What Obama Is Up Against

Monday 02 November 2009

by: Russ Baker, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

The first anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?

We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. Like an orchestra conductor or perhaps a football coach, he can inspire or bludgeon and get what he wants. But that's not how things work at the top, especially where "national security" is concerned. The Pentagon and CIA are powerful and independent fiefdoms characterized by entrenched agendas and constant intrigue. They are full of lifers, who see an elected president largely as an annoyance, and have ways of dealing with those who won't come to heel.

Compound that with the Bush-Cheney administration's aggressive seeding of its staunch loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, and you have a pretty tough situation. Obama, then, has to contend not only with the big donors and corporate lobbies. His biggest problem resides right inside his "team."

***

The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game; it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the "military industrial complex." (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy's agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals "mad" and spoke angrily to aides of "scattering the CIA to the wind." The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director Allen Dulles to help place Dulles's officers under military cover throughout the federal government. As a result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every corner of the president's domain. One Nixon-era Republican Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called "military liaison," who told Congress about the White House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to CIA connections.

In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the president and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America's enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain. Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency's dirty tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it - and a one-term president.

Those who avoided problems - Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr. - were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case - no babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornets' nest.

As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director - and then, 12 years later, president.

Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement, and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many of Bush's top military brass, and even Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who himself had served as a CIA director for Bush's father. He has trod very carefully with the spy agency, and has declined to aggressively investigate Bush administration wrongdoing on torture and wiretapping. Obama's campaign rhetoric about disengaging from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan is taking on the hues of permanency.

The old boys' network is very much in place, and it is hard at work to force Obama's hand, á la Vietnam. Witness the leaking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's supposedly "confidential report" calling for escalation in Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval Intelligence shortly before he went to work at the Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks from the military and spy establishment. The White House was furious at the McChrystal release. But what could it do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have ways to hasten the latter.

Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies continue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In late October came a front-page story that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major figure in that country's opium trade, has been on the CIA's payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

Throughout its six-decade history, the CIA has resisted accountability, with even some of its own nonspook directors kept in the dark about the agency's most troubling activities. As for the public's elected representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately misleading Congressional overseers.

None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge fight. Half a century after Ike's famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue. The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.

So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government - and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold "the most powerful office in the world." However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads, is another matter.

---------

Russ Baker is an investigative journalist and founder of the nonprofit reporting web site whowhatwhy.com. His latest book, "Family of Secrets: the Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years," now available in hardcover, will be published in paperback this fall. Gore Vidal calls it "one of the most important books of the past ten years."