Mercury Exposure Makes People Go Nuts

Mark Sircus
IMVA

It is very interesting to note that that everyone is concerned in this video about green house gasses from coal fired plants but nothing is mentioned of the 50 tons of mercury that these plants put into the atmosphere each and every year in the United States alone. Coal plants put out lots of nasty stuff that have covered the globe but none as nasty as mercury. Now that the greenhouse gas theory has been run down by increasing global cooling we do not have to worry about CO2 emissions, unless one wants to worry because one has nothing better to do, but we do have to worry about many of the other foul emissions, especially that of mercury. After all without sufficient CO2 we would all be dead.

In a recent Associated Press release we find out that along a stretch of Highway 21, in a pastoral, hilly region of Texas, is a vegetative wasteland. Trees are barren, or covered in gray, dying foliage and peeling bark. Fallen dead limbs litter the ground where pecan growers and ranchers have watched trees die slow, agonizing deaths. Visible above the horizon is what many plant specialists, environmentalists, and scientists believe to be the culprit: the Fayette Power Project—a coal-fired power plant that for nearly 30 years has operated mostly without equipment designed to decrease emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.

Jim Berry, a horticulturalist who owns a wholesale nursery in Grand Saline, Texas describes a 30-mile stretch of Highway 21 as a place where “The plant community was just devastated. There was an environmental catastrophe. It wasn’t just the pecan groves. It was the entire ecosystem that was under duress,” Berry said recently. Pecan grower Harvey Hayek said, “Everywhere you look, it’s just dead, dead, dead.” Coal is really dirty stuff and we get exactly what we expect in terms of environmental degradation. Sulfur dioxide is just one of many pollutants that degrade life forms but in terms of toxicity nothing is as potent per gram as mercury.

Mercury-contaminated brains are not going to function normally.

One does not have to be overdeveloped in the intelligence department to understand that a highly potent neurological poison can cause neurological problems in animals and humans exposed to it. Hotwiring of neurological tissues with mercury leads to serious problems such as diminished sexual development and fertility—which covers only a sliver of the full range of pathology that can manifest from mercury contamination. Mercury can be contained in the smoke stacks but the government does not even bother to regulate the industry’s output of mercury. They would rather spend billions of dollars radiating or feeling people up at the airport than contain the real threat of mercury pollution.

Female birds exposed to mercury yielded 35 percent fewer babies than the control group.

National Geographic published on December 3, 2010, Male birds that eat mercury-contaminated food show “surprising” homosexual behavior. In a recent experiment with captive white ibises, many of the males exposed to the metal chose other males as mates. These “male-male pairs did everything that a heterosexual pair would do,” said study leader Peter Frederick, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “They built their nest, copulated together, stayed together on a nest for a month, even though there were no eggs—they did the whole nine yards.”

The point of this research extends far beyond the issue of sexual behavior. I take great exception to Frederick’s assertion that this study has no ramification for humans. Lou Guillette, a zoologist at the Medical University of South Carolina who was quoted in the National Geographic article said, “A study like this that looks at environmentally appropriate levels of mercury is probably the most powerful kind of study to tell us what’s going on in the real world.” And truly, we need to stop, look at, and reflect upon this study.

States that are reporting the highest levels of mercury emissions also have the highest rates of developmental disorders including autism — Dr. John Palmers

The news offered by Dr. Palmer from the University of Texas and a Harvard Research team is that the mercury in the air is having its direct effect on our children, playing its part in the devastating epidemic of neurological disorders including autism. It is not just the fish, the vaccines or the dental amalgam that are saturating our bodies with mercury. Americans and people around the world are going to have to wake up to the fact that mercury is in the air they breathe, in the soil they plant in, and in the water they drink. Hundreds of millions of people in the world are exposed to mercury contamination but our government health officials are not really concerned even when scientists speak up about how it is even devastating our children’s mental and emotional health.

The FDA’s own panel of scientists advises that mercury-containing dental amalgam should “definitely not” be implanted in children, pregnant women, and hypersensitive people. Pediatric neurologist Dr. Suresh Kotagal of the Mayo Clinic summed it up for the entire panel: “There is really no place for mercury in children.” Other panelists went on to explain that dental mercury is like lead. The panel urged the FDA to quickly contraindicate amalgam for these vulnerable populations and insisted that it provide consumers with labeling containing clear warnings. Has the FDA responded as it should? No! One more time they demonstrate is the last thing in the world they are interested in is protecting people from serious harm.

Then we have billions of people around the world exposed yearly to mercury-containing vaccines. In the first world it’s mostly the ineffective flu vaccine but for the rest of the world they have purposely left the mercury in many of the vaccines given. Pediatricians deserve credit for incredible cruelty and ignorance for injecting mercury into babies on their first day of life with their totally unnecessary hepatitis B vaccine.

Then add the intense downwind mercury pollution of all incinerators, crematoriums and coal-fired electrical plants. Mercury is thus in the water, in our food—it’s everywhere as a background toxic neurological agent affecting even those who would deny ever being affected. Almost ten years ago the FDA itself said that mercury is everywhere and the problem only gets worse each and every year.

Mercury is dangerous and can cause more than just sexual problems and general mental confusion. In fact, the heavy metal can cause death through a number of mechanisms. Exposure to mercury can be acute—usually occupation-related—or chronic—caused by continuous low-dose exposure over a long period of time. It is generally invisible in the environment as are the mercury fumes released 24 hours a day from dental fillings, which offer the worst type of chronic exposure.

In human brain samples, exposure to mercury dramatically reduced the viability of a major brain protein called tubulin but had little if any effect on another major protein, actin. Both tubulin and actin are critically important for the growth of dendrites or maintenance of axon structures of neurons. Exposing neurons to mercury rapidly results in the stripping of tubulin from the axon structure, leaving bare neurofibrils that form the tangles that are the diagnostic hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mercury is of concern because it is a persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT) pollutant. As a natural element, it cannot be degraded or broken down; once released into the environment it remains in the biosphere for long periods of time. Some forms of mercury can also bioaccumulate in living organisms, such as fish, to levels that are hundreds of thousands of times greater than the surrounding water. Depending on its precise chemical form, route of exposure, and dose, mercury can damage the brain, kidneys, immune system, nervous system, and cardiovascular system. It can also affect the reproductive system and act as a mutagen.

Levels of mercury currently regarded as safe for adults is already impairing brain function, yet doctors and health officials fail to diagnose mercury poisoning—acute or chronic. Mercury is reducing the mental performance of millions if not billions of people worldwide and medical experts are just not seeing it. At the beginning of the 21st century, the EPA’s top mercury scientist found that 630,000 American children—one in every six—are born each year with potentially unsafe levels of mercury in their blood.

EPA experts acknowledge that there are tools available today that can measure the toxic dangers in any locality, which can dramatically improve decisions on where people can safely live, work, go to school, or play. What no one has clearly communicated is that those safe places have become extinct, especially in the northern hemisphere, leaving us and our children with no safe haven from a chemical onslaught that will only continue to get worse.

It is now accurate—scientifically and medically—to state that we are poisoning every man, woman, and child on earth. We have reached a milestone in human history. Awaiting each and every child born on the planet is a life doomed to being poisoned. There is “overwhelming evidence that every child, no matter where in the world he or she is born, will be exposed, not only from birth, but from conception, to manmade chemicals that can undermine the child’s ability to reach his or her fullest potential—chemicals that interfere with the natural chemicals that tell tissues how to develop and construct healthy, whole individuals according to the genes they inherited from their mothers and fathers,” wrote Dr. Theo Colborn, Senior Program Scientist, at the World Wildlife Fund.

Doctors need to be advised that all efforts to derail the chemical buildup taking place in us have failed, and the direct effects of this chemical poisoning are resulting in more and more symptoms. But doctors will not be told about any of this by medical officials from either the government or private medical associations. The fact that toxic damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster are being hidden, denied, and covered up, and the fact that the government is against natural chelation of mercury, adds up to a one-two punch against trusting much of anything from the official medical world when it comes to heavy metal contamination—or anything else for that matter.

It really does matter where one lives and what pediatrician and dentist parents choose. Parents need to be highly informed to protect their children today from abusive governments, doctors, and dentists who seem to purposely work against the health and wellbeing of their children. Parents must also be aware of powerful poisons that can rain down on their children if they live too near a coal-fired plant or any other point source of mercury pollution.

Special Note, A Case in Point: Texas might be one of the nastiest places to live in terms of mercury contamination but Pennsylvania, one of the states at the center of the gas rush, is only partially treating substances that gush from gas wells, then actually dumping environmentally harmful liquids into rivers and streams from which communities get their drinking water. Ever increasing levels of toxicity are the main threat to humanity at this point (besides a possible coming Ice Age and financial/economic collapse with an accompanying collapse in agricultural production) and unfortunately there are fewer and fewer places to run to for safety.

Today the Huffington Post ran an article about dead birds dropping from the skies and more massive fish kills all – at the present moment unexplained but happening at numerous locations around the globe. There is a lot going on in our world today and the signs and symptoms are beginning to become biblical in proportion. Chemical, heavy metal and radiation exposures have been increasing dramatically through the years as chronic diseases have surged, even among the young who are the most vulnerable, and we have done absolutely nothing about it except to worry about CO2, a gas very necessary for life.

We have mostly shrugged it all off and left our governments to resolve our problems. What a huge mistake! Even faced with massive insanity and theft on the financial front most go back to their TVs and sleep without much alarm. I think the day is coming soon that this denial is going to be crushed by events and life will no longer continue to be the massive amusement park that we have made it.