I hate having to do
this. I like learning, but hate proving that I learned things. I hate even more
putting down what I have learned into an essay format complete with citations,
but this is the way of science. In science it is not enough to say something,
one has to prove it and such was the power of the scientific method that essays
had to be backed up with actual proof and not here-say or supposition. Proof
means going to original sources and citing them in the correct form so that
someone can check the fact used to prove your statements. Your sources have
reputable and original. Simply stating that something is this way because I say
it is so, is not reputable nor is it a valid source.
I once had a professor in university who painted a picture for us of what happens when people start sourcing their papers in this manner. It started with a 'historian' who wrote a book about the Huron Nation, a group of Native Americans who lived at one time near the present town of Midland, Ontario. He wrote the definitive book on what the Huron people were all about, only he was not sure about what they were about, because he was the first to write about them in modern times and he never once talked to or even participated in a single archeological dig on the site where they were thought to live. In short he made it up. Then a couple years later he wrote another book on the Huron’s and in that book he cited his original book as a source. He wrote a third book which he cited the two previous books as sources. His third book looked like a more proper researched book, it had multiple sources, but the sources were useless. If I wrote an essay on the age of the planet and used only 'Young Earth Creationist' sources, the essay would look well researched but would not be worth the paper it was printed on.
So back to the article, this is a deceptive piece, it seems to report things as is, but it has some key words in it that raise suspicion in the title: truth, uncorrupted and the phrase Big Pharma. The funny thing is that the first two words are false. It is not giving anyone the truth and it is corrupting the truth by only giving people part of the truth. Maybe the authors believe what they are saying is the truth or maybe they do not have enough base knowledge to actually give their readers a true picture. In either case, they are still occluding the truth and causing harm.
In order to pick apart their statements it is important to see where their information is coming from. Luckily for us, they want to appear to have scientific credibility, so they link their statements with the relevant articles. Unfortunately for them following the trail of documents leads not to a scientific journal that holds weight, but to an anti-vaccination group that attributes that vaccination causes ASD. Here are the links, one here then here. The organization behind these claims is here.
At the crux of their argument, stretching back nearly a decade is that vaccines contain mercury and everyone knows mercury is bad. I know mercury is bad. I know that it bioaccumulates which means that it sits in the body and just adds up until at some point it causes the victim to die. It is a long process and it interferes with the brain, link here. But there is more to it than that. Bioaccumulation is not as simple as filling a cup with water. It is more like filling a sieve with water, depending on how small the holes are the water empties before the sieve can be filled. Sometimes, depending on the substance it leaves the body faster than it can accumulate and sometimes it does not.
There is more than one type of mercury found in the world and very little of it is in a pure form. For the purposes of this article we will be talking about two forms, methyl-mercury and ethyl-mercury. They are different, substantially so. Methyl-mercury is the form the mercury takes in the environment, when mercury bearing rock is weathered, when plants take up mercury from the soil and when these plants are then burned, it is the mercury that is released into the air. When coal is burnt for any purpose, it releases methyl-mercury into the air. Methyl-mercury is the dangerous mercury that people talk about bioaccumulating inside people and all types of animals. Methyl-mercury stays in the body for a long time, as measured by scientists it has a half life in the body of 70 days.
Half life in the body is the length of time it takes the body to remove half the substance. In the case of Methyl-mercury this means that if one ingested a gram of material, after 70 days only half a gram would be left and after 140 days a quarter left, 210 days and eighth left and so on. This means that a small dose will last a long time and if someone is eating methyl-mercury contaminated food, every day, the toxic mercury will continue to accumulate in the body. And it would take a long time for it to leave the body. For the record, the body leaves the body in the feces, which is the reason why human excrement is not used on farm fields, as humans are the pinnacle of the food chain out feces tends to contain a lot of methyl-mercury. Methyl-mercury is often shortened to Me-mercury, but I chose not to so I could hammer in the name.
The other type of mercury in this article is Ethyl-mercury. Even though it lacks only one letter from the other, the chemical form is quite a bit different. Ethyl-mercury is removed from the body quite a bit faster than its more sinister cousin. Ethyl-mercury has a half life in the body of about 3.7 days meaning it quite quickly leaves the body in comparison to me-mercury. Literally a million times faster, really. By the time me-mercury has removed half the original dose, by comparison e-mercury has removed all but two millionths of the original dose. For those that hate math it is like this:
70 days is divided by about 3.7 days about 19 times and half multiplied by a half 19 times is about 2 millionths or two over a million as a fraction.
But why is this important? Some Vaccines, not all, but some use Thimerosal as a preservative. Thimerosal has antiseptic properties that kill bacteria. Thimerosal is ethyl-mercury attached to a compound similar to aspirin. When it is introduced to the body it is metabolized leaving the e-mercury as a waste product. Thimerosal is used in the vaccine so that more than one dose can be stored in the same bottle. Vaccines are stored this way to be more efficient. Without the Thimerosal, the vaccine would need to be stored smaller single dose containers.
The dose of Thimerosal in each dose of vaccine is very small and the resulting ethyl-mercury is quickly expelled from the body of even the smallest child. Furthermore, Thimerosal is not present in most vaccines, currently according to the Center of Disease Control Thimerosal is not being used in childhood vaccines, nor was it ever used MMR, Inactive Polio, Chicken pox and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. Currently it is used in some of the Influenza vaccines until production of the Thimerosal free vaccines can be increased.
The article where that started this long rant does not mention any of this. It lumps both types of mercury together. It does not mention that Thimerosal is not present in some vaccines and it fails to mention anything constructive. It only mentions that 'Big Pharma' and the American Academy of Pediatrics agree with the World Health Organizations recommendation to use Thimerosal in vaccine production.
That is the first part, explaining mercury and its forms and how it is present in vaccines. The second part I will devote to the claim of the Autism groups and the true danger that they pose.
ASD is a behavioral disorder that many people have. The effects are broad and range greatly in severity. The severe cases are delayed severely and have many social problems, while the mildest cases appear to be normal but have many difficulties fitting into society but can otherwise appear quite intelligent. Many people suggest that some of the greatest thinkers the world has seen such as Newton, Einstein and Gates. Others suggest that the rare genetic abnormality might be the reason why humans were able to rise to dominance over all the other creatures. I think that both of these groups have been smoking something that has affected their perceptions. I have ASD, so I know that even if it were true, it does not matter squat. I would rather be normal.
ASD is an invisible disorder; on the outside all sufferers appear normal. We are not like those that have Down Syndrome; we do not have a distinctive appearance. Our social skills develop on a time scale that is different from normal people and we think differently too. Our physiology is slightly different and this may mean that drugs do not work the same way as they do with others, but then it is not uncommon for many drugs to have different effects on different people. The thing is parents always think that their child is special and normal at the same time, but when ASD becomes apparent it is often not until a child becomes older, after the age of two and often much later.
Some parents, look at what has changed in their child's life in the six or more months before the diagnosis and recently many of them have placed the blame on vaccinations, because they often start early in a child's life. This assertion is patently false. To understand where ASD comes from one must look to their parents. It is genetic. My father for example has many of my traits which I consider part of ASD. I will not go into this in depth, I blog about a lot about these things as it is, needless to say the signs are present if you are observant.
There is great harm in saying that ASD is caused by vaccines, because since vaccines have become prevalent in society, many diseases that were common have all but disappeared. As a child I suffered through Chicken Pox, the proscribed method of vaccination in those days was for the family to throw a pox party, where all the neighbourhood children would play with the infected kid where they would then catch the disease and gain immunity to it. Even in the mild cases Chicken Pox can cause scarring and in the adult form call shingles it is painful and can cause a lot of scarring, thus the Pox Party. I even suffered through a form of mumps or measles, not sure which, the one that gives you large, brown, quarter sized welts all over your body.
In my father's day, some children caught Polio, a lovely disease that could cripple and kill sufferers with the nasty habit of coming back decades after the original infection with similar effects. There is the HPV vaccine, just developed a few years ago that could wipe out the most common strain and in the future there may be a vaccine for HIV and quite possibly the entire influenza virus, right now we can only get a vaccine for individual flu strains as the mutation rate is so high. On a mild year, influenza kills thousands of people and in a bad year it kills millions
In the article, it mentions that the AAP recommends that boys should get the HPV vaccine, even though boys cannot get the cancer that is causes, cervix cancer, on account of all men lacking a cervix. The article is critical of them for this fact, but never mentions why the AAP believes that boys should be immunized, Herd Immunity.
Herd immunity is the level of resistance within the group to prevent a plague of cases within the group. For example, if two towns of ten thousand people are given the vaccine for Diphtheria, but in one town only 80% of the town get vaccinated and in the other town 85% of the people are vaccinated. If someone from out of town should arrive who has Diphtheria, the towns will fair differently. Since the Herd Immunity Threshold for Diphtheria is 85%, the first town is much more likely to have an outbreak of the disease. The first case ran into enough people without protection that it spread quickly within the town, while in the other town one a few people caught the disease and all the cases were minor. In the first town, some of the cases were severe. Historically between 5-15% of all cases of diphtheria were fatal.
Giving boys and girls the HPV vaccine would increase the likelihood that if a case of HPV came in contact with the population it would not spread and the disease would die out.
Since the Anti-Vaccination crowd has gained traction in a communities that feared their claims that vaccination leads to ASD, herd immunity has dropped below the levels needed to prevent the spread of diseases like whopping cough, an illness that is in no way as jolly as the name suggests, from gaining a foothold. Deaths have occurred, preventable deaths. It should be noted that I am forty years old and my father is seventy; we are still alive and well as ASD has never been a dangerous condition.
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