Mercury is a heavy metal poison occurring in three different groups.  These groups vary in effects due to differences in their absorption and metabolism, among other factors.   Mercury poisoning is an illness caused by exposure to mercury or its harmful compounds.

All mercury-based toxic compounds damage the central nervous system and other organs and organ systems.  Standard mercury poisoning symptoms include sensory impairment, disturbed sensation, and decreased motor skills.  The type and degree of the symptoms exhibited by mercury poisoning depend on the individual toxin, the size and method of the dose, and the duration of the exposure.   

While preparing for the birth of her daughter, Christy Rue stumbled across a concern that she is now trying to share with every parent.

The 25-year-old mother is one of thousands who have picked up the cause to promote cleaner vaccines.

“The doctors give the shots, you know, so they must be safe,” Rue said.

But the disheartening facts, she said, are children are being disabled and pharmaceutical companies are paying lobbyists to help the vaccines pass through Washington.

“I’m not against vaccines,” Rue said. “I just want them to clean up the stuff they’re putting in there and give them a safer schedule.”

To make her concerns heard, Rue and her children traveled to Washington, D.C., for the “Green Our Vaccines, Too Many, Too Soon” march and rally two weeks ago. The three were among 8,000 people that walked from the Washington Memorial to the Capital Building, holding signs demanding change and pictures of children who lost their lives from reactions to vaccines.

“It was amazing to see how many people have been affected by vaccines and nobody knows about it,” Rue said. “To look around and see all these children, these innocent children who are victims, who now are having severe issues mentally and physically.

“When we walked down Independence Avenue it was a surreal feeling because so many other Americans had done this before for an important cause. But this is not just any old cause that will be forgotten about tomorrow. These are our kids and they are our future.”

The support for clean vaccines – meaning extracting toxins like formaldehyde, aluminum, antifreeze and mercury – has been slow because a majority of the medical community denies a link between vaccines and certain disorders such as autism.

Parents of autistic children believe autism is linked to mercury-based vaccines given to children as infants.

The mercury-based thimerosal was removed from most childhood vaccines in 2001 because of the autism fears. The number of autism cases continue to rise, though, leading health officials to set aside the connection. Today, 1 in 150 children have the disorder.

“Scientist say there’s no link, but who is paying for the research?” Rue said.

One of the main battles green-vaccine promoters face are the special interest and biased ties scientists have, she said.

Along with Mothers Against Mercury, a North Carolina-based organization, Rue is spreading the word about N.C. House Bill 431. The bill, which would limit the amount of thimerosal in vaccines, passed in the N.C. House last year, but failed to make it past the Senate’s Health Committee, Rue said.

Sitting in the pediatricians office last week, Rue said she looked around and wondered how many parents knew what was in the vaccines their children would receive.

“I’m not against vaccines by any means, I just don’t want my child being 1 in 150,” Rue said. “I don’t want anyone’s children.”

Last Friday, scientists from the University of Pittsburgh released findings from a study that showed primates that were given vaccines showed autism-like symptoms.  The vaccines that were used were the same ones recommended by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics; several of the vaccines had thimerosal in it.

The study’s results are being released as a federal case goes underway.

 As of the first of this year Norway has been the first country to ban amalgam fillings.

In addition they have banned any products produced, imported or exported or sold in the country with mercury.

According to Erik Solheim, Norway ’s Minister of Environment and Development:

“Mercury is among the most dangerous environmental toxins. Satisfactory alternatives to mercury in products are available, and it is therefore fitting to introduce a ban.”

Sweden has joined this action as of April 1, 2008.

Amalgam fillings are 50% mercury that continuously off gas throughout the life of the filling. This off gassed mercury enters the body and can move into vital organs like the brain, thyroid, heart and kidney and cause damage. Mercury blocks vital steps in the Krebs cycle and denatures neural proteins. In the pregnant mother the mercury vapor can enter the mother’s body and be concentrated in the fetus causing birth defects or other injuries.

The environmental impact is also significant. By EPA statistics, medical waste incinerators put out 70,000 pounds of mercury into the atmosphere every year.

This is significant when you consider that only 500 mg of mercury can contaminate a ten acre lake so that the fish cannot be eaten safely.

There is no reason to continue dental mercury as there are good substitutes for dental use. Vaccine mercury should also be banned as it is toxic to all who receive it.

A study released today by the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, claims that there is a link between the release of mercury and rates of autism.  It’s the first time that a report suggests that there is a statistically significant association between autism risk and distance from a source of mercury.

Among the many facts in the article, for every 1000 lbs. of mercury released by power plants in Texas during 1998, there was a 3.7% increase of autism rates in Texas school districts in 2002. 

Though the findings aren’t completely definitive, it adds to the continuing evidence between the effects of mercury poisoning and autism.

The entire article can be found here.

A fever of the mind no more

The author’s son: Fridrik Grundvig (James Ottar Grundvig)

Is there a link between the explosion of the autism epidemic and the sharp increase in the number of elderly contracting Alzheimer’s disease?

For the past few years, I have asked myself that question whenever I took my 8-year-old son, Fridrik, who was diagnosed in 2003 with Pervasive Development Disorder (PDD), an increasingly common form of autism, to his physician, Dr. Henry Sobo, in Stamford, Conn.

That’s because Dr. Sobo, an internist who tailors individual programs for patients by using homeopathic therapy, had built his reputation on treating neurological disorders, from children with ADHD to adults with Parkinson’s disease. Although autism was new to him, it was déjà vu.

Do All Roads Point to Toxicity of the Brain?

Since doing research into the cause of Fridrik’s neurological disorder, I have come to an understanding about both diseases. Alzheimer’s, which appears in adults older than 65 years, is the incremental degradation of the brain. Autism is the acute poisoning of the brain in a growing subpopulation of children.

Besides unique genetic flaws in each, the common thread between an adult with Alzheimer’s and a baby at the onset of the regressive form of autism is myelin, the insulation of the brain’s wiring.

Myelin, or the membrane blanket that protects the brain circuitry, doesn’t completely form and wrap the brain in an infant until 18 months old. For the adult, the unwrapping of the protective sheath takes place at mid-age, or about 50. Thus, the brain is vulnerable to toxins during its development and after its primary use, due to the absence of myelin.

Little of this biological fact seems to filter back to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Maybe this will change based on a new study on autism and a new treatment for Alzheimer’s, both of which are currently undergoing more testing, both of which point to the same underlying root cause, with one maybe helping the treatment of the other, and with autism perhaps explaining the therapy for Alzheimer’s.

Fever Reduces Symptoms of Autism

Last December, Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, announced with great fanfare that fever in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) reduced or even eliminated the symptoms of autistic behavior not only during a fever, but also up to a week after it subsided. Dr. Andrew Zimmermann, whose team ran the study for the child neurological institute, which was founded in 1937 to study and treat kids with cerebral palsy, must have wondered: What caused this?

When I first heard the news, it confirmed to me what I always suspected about autism: Heavy metals toxicity is the reason behind the fever-induced, temporary relief of autistic symptoms in children of the autism spectrum.

To me, having worked in the construction industry more than 25 years and having studied the behavior of material properties in college, the fever angle made sense. The first point was due to its simplicity—one event. One global change to the brain explaining the why, how, and what of a very complex neurological disorder, for which modern medicine has failed to find the cause since the first case was diagnosed during World War II.

Imagine heavy metals on the micro scale embedding tiny specs and flakes in certain regions of the pre-myelin-protected brain, and the child being unable to excrete those particles that most children can. The particles lodge themselves in, around, and between the nodes and nerve endings that make up the neural network, and interrupt the brain’s electrical signals.

As more metals accumulate, they block more signals and break down the brain cells’ ability to process key functions—like a virus-infected computer. For ASD kids like my son that means impairing their ability to speak, rendering fine-motor skills of their fingers useless, flattening arched feet, and amplifying the auditory reception of their ears to the point of pain.

How could a fever help a child suffering from autism?

With heavy metals planted at the exact nodes in the brain where the damage occurred, the fever would heat up the metal particles, and they in turn would bridge the interrupted break points in the neural network.

In other words, metals, being highly conductive of both heat and electricity, would complete what has not been working in ASD (autism spectrum disorder) kids since the first year of their lives. Okay. But then what would cause the temporary connections of the neural network to continue to work for a week after the fever had dissipated?

Again, the answer is heavy metals. Metals consist of a different material makeup than brain tissue and blood. They would retain the heat produced by a fever longer, thus keeping the electrical pulses working well after the fever was gone. But once the heat of the metals matched the body temperature of the brain, the temporary, bridged connections would no longer work, and the full-blown symptoms of autism would return.

The week that I heard the news, I contacted Elise Babbitt-Welker, the communications manager at Kennedy Krieger Institute. I told her what I believed was the answer to the riddle.

She said that the Institute had received many inquiries to its study and that she would pass on my “heavy metals angle” to Dr. Zimmermann’s team of scientists.

In an e-mail, Ms. Babbitt-Welker wrote: “This phenomenon has been widely reported on by parents, clinicians and researchers alike, but this most recent research was the first to study the association using a controlled scientific methodology. That said, [with it] being a study with only 30 children, he and his fellow researchers know that more research is needed to confirm the findings.”

The Alzheimer’s Hat

With Dr. Zimmermann applying for grants to further research the findings, we can only wonder how one would replicate a fever in a child without spiking the core body temperature.

Then, in a stroke of timing, on Jan. 28—seven weeks after the fever study had made news—an answer to that question arrived. On ABC News, a segment on Alzheimer’s disease caught my eye. Dr. Gordon Dougal, along with a team of researchers at the University of Sunderland in the United Kingdom, showed the “Alzheimer’s Hat,” which looked like a cross between a football and motorcycle helmet.

In a preliminary testing phase, the Hat, which would be worn 10 minutes per day by an Alzheimer’s patient like Dr. Dougal’s father, pulses the brain with infrared beams—the claim being that the Hat relieved memory-loss and speech-impaired symptoms in his father.

The doctor also tested the Hat’s infrared technology on 30 lab rats, “20 of which were deemed to be experiencing middle-aged mental decline,” for which he stated the “rays improved the memory functions of these rats to that of young rats.”

Many entrenched American doctors and scientists scoffed at and belittled treating the brain with infrared; they should withhold judgment until the findings from both the Kennedy Krieger fever study has run its course, while Dr. Dougal confirms the Alzheimer’s Hat in a wider study. Since the University of Sunderland has an autism department, perhaps the autism-fever study and the Alzheimer’s infrared treatment could start to share information.

With the bulk of the autism epidemic related to some form of heavy metals toxicity, I believe it’s about time that the heat angle as a form of treatment in ASD kids receives the funds to find out whether the jump-start in the damaged neural network of the brain can be produced by heat—whether it’s the body’s own temperature or artificial as in infrared.

Give your autistic child the help they need with time-tested Maxam nutraceuticals.

DOUG FLUTIE, JR. FOUNDATION GRANTS NAA $10,000 FOR BURBACHER/CHARLESTON STUDY Funds to support research into the effects on the brain following exposure to mercury

Nixa, MO  – It was announced this week that The National Autism Association (NAA) will receive $10,000 for the Burbacher/Charleston study into the effects of mercury exposure in the brain. The Doug Flutie, Jr. Foundation for Autism, Inc. awarded the grant. Funding will support the completion of a research study relating to the effects upon the brain following exposure to mercury. 

 The mercury study’s primary investigator is Dr. Thomas Burbacher, a University of Washington researcher and long-time investigator into the effects of the toxin. His earlier research found that Thimerosal, best known for its use as an ethylmercury-based preservative in infant vaccines and pregnancy shots, is actually more toxic to the brain than methylmercury. The goal of this particular investigation is to expand the knowledge of a potential link between neurotoxic exposures and the development of autism, which will in turn lead to better treatments.

“As parents of a child with autism, we are concerned about the possible correlation between mercury and autism and are pleased to see NAA continuing to support this very important research that may help resolve the mercury issue,” commented Doug and Laurie Flutie.

 The second-phase study by Dr. Jay Charleston and Dr. Burbacher will look more in-depth at brain tissue, and the effects mercury may have on this tissue once it passes the blood-brain barrier. In his first-phase study, Burbacher concluded:

• Ethylmercury is more toxic because it is less stable as a molecule than methylmercury. Like methylmercury, it gains ready access to the brain across the blood-brain barrier
• Ethylmercury leaves more than double the amount of inorganic mercury trapped in the brain than does methylmercury
• Inorganic mercury trapped in the brain can stay for many years, even a lifetime

NAA applauds The Doug Flutie, Jr. Foundation for its continued support on the project. “This is the second grant they’ve given us, and we’re extremely grateful,” says parent and NAA President Wendy Fournier. “It’s this kind of research that can make all the difference for our children.” 

Monday March 3, 2008

Autism bill put on hold

House panel wants time to study fiscal impact

by Jake Stump

Daily Mail Capitol Reporter

A bill that would have forced health insurance companies to provide coverage for autism has been downgraded to a study resolution, upsetting autism advocates and a state lawmaker who championed the measure.   Read more…

CDC Vaccine Committee Recommends More Shots for Children

The CDC has stated that they want children from 6 months old to 18 years old to receive the flu shot which still contains Thimerasol!  Unbelievable!   read more…