PhD Scientist and Biochemist Reveals Hidden CDC Documents Showing Thimerosal In Vaccines Increase Neurologic Disorders
The
CDC has been shunning the correlations between thimerosal and
neurological disorders for a very long time. Although the FDA gave a two
year deadline to remove the mercury based preservative from vaccines
after the neurotoxin was banned in 1999, it still remains to this day in
60 percent of flu vaccines.
A vaccine industry watchdog has now obtained CDC documents that show
statistically significant risks of autism associated with the vaccine
preservative, something the CDC denies even when confronted with their
own data.
For nearly ten years, Brian Hooker has been requesting documents that
are kept under tight wraps by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC). His more than 100 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests have resulted in copious evidence that the vaccine preservative
Thimerosal
, which is still used in the flu shot that is administered to pregnant
women and infants, can cause autism and other neurodevelopmental
disorders.
Dr. Hooker, a PhD scientist, worked with two members of
Congress to craft the letter to the CDC that recently resulted in his
obtaining long-awaited data from the CDC, the significance of which is
historic. According to Hooker, the data on over 400,000 infants born
between 1991 and 1997, which was analyzed by CDC epidemiologist Thomas
Verstraeten, MD, “proves unequivocally that in 2000, CDC officials were
informed internally of the very high risk of autism, non-organic sleep
disorder and speech disorder associated with Thimerosal exposure.” Factually, thimerosal is a mercury-containing compound that is a
known human carcinogen, mutagen, teratogen and immune-system disruptor
at levels below 1 part-per-million, and a compound to which some humans
can have an anaphylactic shock reaction. It is also a recognized
reproductive and fetal toxin with no established toxicologically safe level of exposure for humans.
In November, 1997, the U.S. Congress passed the Food and Drug
Administration Modernization Act, requiring the study of mercury content
in FDA-approved products. The review disclosed the
hitherto-unrecognized levels of ethylmercury in vaccines.
In July 1999, public-health officials announced that thimerosal would
be phased out of vaccines. The CDC, American Academy of Pediatrics, and
FDA insisted that the measure was purely precautionary. They requested
of all vaccine manufacturers to eliminate mercury from vaccines.
Elevated Risk of Autism When the results of the Verstraeten study were first reported outside
the CDC in 2005, there was no evidence that anyone but Dr. Verstraeten
within the CDC had known of the very high 7.6-fold elevated relative
risk of autism from exposure to Thimerosal during infancy. But now,
clear evidence exists. A newly-acquired abstract
from 1999 titled, “Increased risk of developmental neurologic
impairment after high exposure to Thimerosal containing vaccine in first
month of life” required the approval of top CDC officials prior to its
presentation at the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) conference.
Thimerosal, which is 50% mercury by weight, was used in most childhood
vaccines and in the RhoGAM shot for pregnant women prior to the early
2000s. The CDC maintains there is “no relationship between
Thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism rates in children,” even
though the data from the CDC’s own Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD)
database shows a very high risk. There are a number of public records to
back this up, including this Congressional Record from May 1, 2003
. The CDC’s refusal to acknowledge thimerosal’s risks is exemplified by
a leaked statement from Dr. Marie McCormick, chair of the
CDC/NIH-sponsored Immunization Safety Review at IOM. Regarding
vaccination, she said in 2001, “…we are not ever going to come down that
it [autism] is a true side effect…” Also of note, the former director
of the CDC, which purchases $4 billion worth of vaccines annually, is
now president of Merck’s vaccine division.
There are dozens of scientific inquiries and studies on the adverse effects of thimerosal, including gastrointestinal abnormalities and immune system irregularities. Thimerosal, is metabolized (converted) into the toxic and “harmful”
methylmercury. And then in turn, the harmful methylmercury is
metabolized (converted) into the most harmful, long-term-toxic,
“inorganic” mercury that is retained in bodily tissue.
“Inorganic” mercury is the end product of mercury metabolism.
Methylmercury subject groups confirm that the metabolic pathway for
mercury in the human and animal body consists in the
reduction/conversion of the harmful methylmercury into a more harmful
“inorganic” mercury which is tissue-bound, and long-term-toxic. Hence,
both the originating substance (methylmercury) and its
conversion/reduction, inorganic mercury are found.
Based on published findings by Dr. Paul King
, the metabolic pathway for organic mercury involves the conversion of
Ethylmercury (Thimerosal) into “methylmercury” and then the further
reduction of “methylmercury” into inorganic mercury.
Congress Must Act
Dr. Hooker’s fervent hope for the future: “We must ensure that this
and other evidence of CDC malfeasance are presented to Congress and the
public as quickly as possible. Time is of the essence. Children’s
futures are at stake.” A divide within the autism community has led to
some activists demanding that compensation to those with vaccine-injury
claims be the top priority before Congress. Dr. Hooker maintains that
prevention, “protecting our most precious resource — children’s minds,”
must come first. “Our elected officials must be informed about
government corruption that keeps doctors and patients in the dark about
vaccine risks.”
Referring to an organization that has seen its share of controversy
this past year, Dr. Hooker remarked, “It is unfortunate that SafeMinds
issued a press release on my information, is accepting credit for my
work and has not supported a worldwide ban on Thimerosal.”
Brian Hooker, PhD, PE, has 15 years experience in the field of
bioengineering and is an associate professor at Simpson University where
he specializes in biology and chemistry. His over 50 science and
engineering papers have been published in internationally recognized,
peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Hooker has a son, aged 16, who developed
normally but then regressed into autism after receiving
Thimerosal-containing vaccines.
Most people believe that fluoride
is beneficial and refuse to see the detriments of it. Additionally,
the same people have no idea where fluoride comes from and the numerous toxic
applications it is used on, such as the extermination of cockroach and
rats. In a recent peer review journal, fluoride has been classified as a
neurotoxin, similar to lead and arsenic, yet governmental and health agencies still insist that it is good for you.
Fluoride was found to be an equivocal carcinogen by the National Cancer Institute Toxicological Program.[1]
Further studies by the New Jersey Department of Health have now confirmed a 6.9 fold increase in bone cancer in young males.[2]
Earlier studies had found a 5% increase in all types of cancers in fluoridated communities.[3]
“In point of fact, fluoride causes more human cancer death, and causes it faster than any other chemical,” stated Dr. Dean Burk PhD who spent over three decades with the national cancer institute. Researchers suspect a connection to cancer because half of ingested fluoride is deposited in bones, and fluoride stimulates growth in the end of bones, where osteosarcoma occurs.
2. Most Developed Countries Do Not Fluoridate Their Water
Most developed nations do not fluoridate their water. In western Europe, for example, only 3%
of the population consumes fluoridated water. Only 11 countries in the
world have more than 50% of their population drinking fluoridated water:
Australia (80%), Brunei (95%); Chile (70%), Guyana (62%), Hong Kong
(100%), the Irish Republic (73%), Israel (70%), Malaysia (75%), New
Zealand (62%), Singapore (100%), and the United States (64%). In total,
377,655,000 million people worldwide drink artificially fluoridated
water. This represents 5% of the world’s population.
Leading scientists recently identified a dozen
chemicals as being responsible for widespread behavioral and cognitive
problems. But the scope of the chemical dangers in our environment is
likely even greater. Why children and the poor are most susceptible to
neurotoxic exposure that may be costing the U.S. billions of dollars and
immeasurable peace of mind.
Forty-one
million IQ points. That’s what Dr. David Bellinger determined Americans
have collectively forfeited as a result of exposure to lead, mercury,
and organophosphate pesticides. In a 2012 paper
published by the National Institutes of Health, Bellinger, a professor
of neurology at Harvard Medical School, compared intelligence quotients
among children whose mothers had been exposed to these neurotoxins while
pregnant to those who had not. Bellinger calculates a total loss of
16.9 million IQ points due to exposure to organophosphates, the most
common pesticides used in agriculture. Last month, more research brought concerns about chemical exposure
and brain health to a heightened pitch. Philippe Grandjean, Bellinger’s
Harvard colleague, and Philip Landrigan, dean for global health at Mount
Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, announced to some controversy in
the pages of a prestigious medical journal that a “silent pandemic” of
toxins has been damaging the brains of unborn children. The experts
named 12 chemicals—substances found in both the environment and everyday
items like furniture and clothing—that they believed to be causing not
just lower IQs but ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. Pesticides were
among the toxins they identified. “So
you recommend that pregnant women eat organic produce?” I asked
Grandjean, a Danish-born researcher who travels around the world
studying delayed effects of chemical exposure on children. “That’s what I advise people who ask me, yes. It’s the best way of
preventing exposure to pesticides.” Grandjean estimates that there are
about 45 organophosphate pesticides on the market, and “most have the
potential to damage a developing nervous system.” Landrigan had issued that same warning, unprompted, when I spoke to
him the week before. “I advise pregnant women to try to eat organic
because it reduces their exposure by 80 or 90 percent,” he told me.
“These are the chemicals I really worry about in terms of American kids,
the organophosphate pesticides like chlorpyrifos.” For decades, chlorpyrifos, marketed by Dow Chemical beginning in
1965, was the most widely used insect killer in American homes. Then, in
1995, Dow was fined $732,000 by the EPA for concealing more than 200
reports of poisoning related to chlorpyrifos. It paid the fine and, in
2000, withdrew chlorpyrifos from household products. Today, chlorpyrifos
is classified as “very highly toxic” to birds and freshwater fish, and
“moderately toxic” to mammals, but it is still used widely in
agriculture on food and non-food crops, in greenhouses and plant
nurseries, on wood products and golf courses. Landrigan
has the credentials of some superhero vigilante Doctor America: a
Harvard-educated pediatrician, a decorated retired captain of the U.S.
Naval Reserve, and a leading physician-advocate for children's health as
it relates to the environment. After September 11, he made news when he
testified before Congress in disagreement with the EPA’s assessment
that asbestos particles stirred into clouds of debris were too small to
pose any real threat. Landrigan cited research from mining townships
(including Asbestos, Quebec) and argued that even the smallest airborne
asbestos fibers could penetrate deeply into a child’s lungs. Chlorpyrifos is just one of 12 toxic chemicals Landrigan and
Grandjean say are having grim effects on fetal brain development. Their
new study is similar to a review the two researchers published in 2006,
in the same journal, identifying six developmental neurotoxins. Only now
they describe twice the danger: The number of chemicals that they
deemed to be developmental neurotoxins had doubled over the past seven
years. Six had become 12. Their sense of urgency now approached panic.
“Our very great concern,” Grandjean and Landrigan wrote, “is that
children worldwide are being exposed to unrecognized toxic chemicals
that are silently eroding intelligence, disrupting behaviors, truncating
future achievements and damaging societies.” The
chemicals they called out as developmental neurotoxins in 2006 were
methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, ethanol, lead, arsenic, and
toluene. The additional chemicals they’ve since found to be toxins to
the developing brains of fetuses—and I hope you’ll trust me that these
all are indeed words—are manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos,
tetrachloroethylene, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Grandjean and Landrigan note in their research that rates of
diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder and ADHD are increasing, and that
neurobehavioral development disorders currently affect 10 to 15 percent
of births. They add that “subclinical decrements in brain
function”—problems with thinking that aren’t quite a diagnosis in
themselves—“are even more common than these neurobehavioral development
disorders.” In perhaps their most salient paragraph, the researchers say that
genetic factors account for no more than 30 to 40 percent of all cases of brain development disorders:
Thus, non-genetic, environmental exposures
are involved in causation, in some cases probably by interacting with
genetically inherited predispositions. Strong evidence exists that
industrial chemicals widely disseminated in the environment are
important contributors to what we have called the global, silent
pandemic of neurodevelopmental toxicity.
Silent pandemic. When public health experts use that
phrase—a relative and subjective one, to be deployed with
discretion—they mean for it to echo. When their paper went to press in the journal The Lancet Neurology, the media responded with understandable alarm:
“A ‘Silent Pandemic’ of Toxic Chemicals Is Damaging Our Children’s Brains, Experts Claim” - Minneapolis Post, 2/17/14
“Researchers Warn of Chemical Impacts on Children,” -USA Today, 2/14/14
“Study Finds Toxic Chemicals Linked to Autism, ADHD” - Sydney Morning Herald, 2/16/14
When I first saw these headlines, I was skeptical. It wasn’t news
that many of the chemicals on this list (arsenic, DDT, lead) are toxic.
With each of these substances, the question is just how much exposure
does it take to cause real damage. For instance, organophosphates aren’t
something that anyone would categorically consider safe, in that they
are poison. They kill insects by the same mechanism that sarin gas kills
people, causing nerves to fire uncontrollably. But like asbestos, they
are still legally used in U.S. commerce, with the idea that small
amounts of exposure are safe. The adage “the dose makes the poison” may
be the most basic premise of toxicology. And hadn’t we already taken
care of lead? Didn’t we already know that alcohol is bad for fetuses?
Wasn’t fluoride good for teeth? I found that the real issue was not this particular group of 12
chemicals. Most of them are already being heavily restricted. This dozen
is meant to illuminate something bigger: a broken system that allows
industrial chemicals to be used without any significant testing for
safety. The greater concern lies in what we’re exposed to and don’t yet
know to be toxic. Federal health officials, prominent academics, and
even many leaders in the chemical industry agree that the U.S. chemical
safety testing system is in dire need of modernization. Yet parties on
various sides cannot agree on the specifics of how to change the system,
and two bills to modernize testing requirements are languishing in
Congress. Landrigan and Grandjean’s real message is big, and it involves
billion-dollar corporations and Capitol Hill, but it begins and ends
with the human brain in its earliest, most vulnerable stages.
How Toxins Destroy Brains
About a quarter of your body’s metabolism goes toward operating and
maintaining your brain. In order to process even basic information,
billions of chemical signals are constantly being carried between
neurons. The undertaking is so onerous that even though your brain is
not moving (like, say, the powerful muscles in your legs), it uses
around 10 times more calories per pound than the rest of you. Most of that industrious brain and its 86 billion neurons were
created in a matter of months. During the first few weeks of gestation,
when your mother knew you only as morning sickness and you were a layer
of cells huddled in one corner of her uterus, those cells lined up,
formed a groove, and then closed to form a tube. One end of that tube
eventually became your tiny spinal cord. The rest expanded to form the
beginnings of your brain. For
a brain to develop properly, neurons must move to precise places in a
precise sequence. They do so under the direction of hormones and
chemical neurotransmitters like acetylcholine. The process is an
intricate, fast-paced dance on a very tiny scale. Each nerve cell is
about one hundredth of a millimeter wide, so it has to travel its own
width 25,000 times just to move an inch—which some neurons in the cortex
must. At any point, that cell can be knocked off course. Some of the
neurotoxins Grandjean and Landrigan discuss have the potential to
disrupt this journey, in a slight or serious fashion. By the third trimester, the surface of the brain begins
folding itself into wrinkled peaks and valleys, the gyri and sulci that
make a brain look like a brain. Specific areas of that cortex learn to
process specific aspects of sensation, movement, and thought, and that
starts in the uterus. As Grandjean explains this process in his 2013
book Only One Chance,
“Usage promotes function and structure, as the connectivity of the
brain cells is shaped by responses to environmental stimuli.” That is,
the fetal brain starts having experiences that form the basis for
learning and memory. The nature-nurture duality begins at conception. By age two, almost all of the billions of brain cells that you will
ever have are in their places. Except in the hippocampus and one or two
other tiny regions, the brain does not grow new brain cells throughout
your life. When brain cells die, they are gone. So its initial months of
formation, when the brain is most vulnerable, are critical. “During
these sensitive life stages,” Grandjean and Landrigan write, exposure
“can cause permanent brain injury at low levels that would have little
or no adverse effect in an adult.” Federal health officials are aware of this risk. The National
Institutes of Health, as Landrigan puts it, “finally woke up in the late
1990s to the fact that children are much more sensitive and vulnerable
to chemicals than adults are.” Over the past decade, the federal
government has invested substantially more money in looking at just how
pregnant women and children have been affected by industrial chemicals.
The EPA has awarded millions of dollars in related research grants, and
the NIH started funding a network of what it calls Centers for
Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research. There
is one at Mount Sinai and another at Harvard (the respective homes of
Landrigan and Grandjean), and there are others at Columbia, UC Berkeley,
and elsewhere. Those centers have established strong research programs called
prospective birth-cohort studies. Scientists enroll pregnant female
subjects and carefully record objective measures of environmental
exposure, using things like blood samples, urine samples, and maybe even
dust and air samples from their homes. After the babies are born, the
researchers follow up with them at various points in their childhoods.
These studies are expensive and take a long time, but they’re
incomparably good at connecting prenatal exposures with lost IQ points,
shortened attention span, or emergence of ADHD. Functional
MRI reveals the effect of prenatal methylmercury exposure in three
adolescents. Subjectes were asked to tap the fingers of their left
hands. In the control group (row B), only the right side of the brain
was activated. In the subjects who had been exposed to methylmercury
(row A), an abnormal activation pattern shows that both sides are
involved. (The Lancet Neurology)“That’s the big
breakthrough,” Landrigan says. "The scientific community has mastered
the technique of doing these studies, and they’ve been running long
enough that they’re beginning to put out some spectacularly good
results.” At Columbia, for instance, the children’s center is
investigating whether children exposed in the womb to BPA and polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—byproducts from burning fossil fuels—are
more likely to develop learning and behavior disorders than children not
exposed. They have also shown that high prenatal exposure to air
pollutants like PAHs are associated with attention problems, anxiety,
and depression at ages 5 to 7 years. It was this center, together with
the UC Berkeley and Mount Sinai children’s centers, that first
identified the detrimental impact of chlorpyrifos on IQ and brain
development. The researchers even used MRI testing to show that these
chemicals appear to change children’s brain structure, causing thinning
of the cortex. Other children’s centers are looking at the extent to
which these and other chemicals—including arsenic from well water,
brominated flame retardants, and the anti-corrosion agent manganese—are
to blame for a range of possible neurologic disorders. Impressive as all this research
investment is, the larger question remains: Why are we looking at these
hazards now—instead of before we introduced these chemicals into the
world?
It's surprising to learn how little evidence there is for the safety
of chemicals all around us, in our walls and furniture, in our water and
air. Many consumers assume there is a rigorous testing process before a
new chemical is allowed to be a part of a consumer product. Or at least
some process. “We still don’t have any kind of decent law on the books that
requires that chemicals be tested for safety before they come to
market,” Landrigan said. The law we do have is the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA, pronounced toss-ka
among those in the know). Passed in 1976 under President Gerald Ford,
it is still today the primary U.S. law regulating chemicals used in
everyday products. On its face intended to protect people and the
environment from dangerous chemical exposure, it is widely acknowledged
to have fallen short of its magnanimous goal. It only requires testing
for a small percentage of chemicals, those deemed an “unreasonable
risk.” “It’s just an obsolete, toothless, broken piece of legislation,” said
Landrigan. “For example, in the early 1990s, EPA was unable to ban
asbestos under TSCA.” This was after the National Toxicology Program had
classified asbestos as a known cancer-causing agent, and the World
Health Organization had called for a global ban. The EPA did briefly
succeed in banning asbestos in the U.S. in 1989, but a court of appeals
overturned the ban in 1991. Asbestos is still used in consumer products
in the U.S., including building materials like shingles and pipe wrap,
and auto parts like brake pads. Landrigan also calls it “a particularly egregious lapse” that when
TSCA was enacted, the 62,000 chemicals already on the market were
grandfathered in, such that no toxicity testing was required of them.
These chemicals were, as Landrigan puts it, “simply presumed safe” and
allowed to remain in commerce until a substantial health concern came to
public attention. In
the nearly 40 years since the law’s passage, more than 20,000 new
chemicals have entered the market. “Only five have been removed,”
Landrigan says. He notes that the CDC has picked up measurable levels of
hundreds of these chemicals in the blood and urine of “virtually all
Americans.” Yet, unlike food and drugs, they enter commerce largely
untested. Landrigan and Grandjean’s purpose in declaring a silent pandemic was
less about the 12 named substances and more about using them as
cautionary tales. They named in their list a few chemicals that still
appear be imminent threats, but they also include some that have been
highly restricted in their use for a long time. And at least one of
them, fluoride, has proven beneficial in small doses. “Fluoride is very much a two-edged
sword,” Landrigan said. “There’s no question that, at low doses, it’s
beneficial.” Flouride has been shown to prevent dental cavities and aid
skeletal growth. At higher levels, though, it causes tooth and bone
lesions. The epidemiologic studies cited by Grandjean and Landrigan,
which came from China, imply that high fluoride exposure has negative
effects on brain growth. “Are the exposure levels in China comparable to what we have in our drinking water and toothpaste?” I asked. “No, they’re probably higher,” Landrigan said. “In some places in
China, there are naturally high levels of fluoride in the groundwater,
which picks it up because it’s water-soluble.” “So your advice isn’t to take it out of our toothpaste?” “Not at all,” Landrigan said. “I think it’s very good to have in toothpaste.” He’s more concerned about flame-retardants—a group of compounds known
as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals came into
vogue after their predecessors, called PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl
ethers), were banned in 1979. By the time it became clear that PCBs
caused cancer—and a variety of other adverse health effects on the
immune, reproductive, nervous, and endocrine systems—they’d been put
into hundreds of industrial and commercial uses like plastics and rubber
products. So manufacturers switched to PBDEs and advertised PCB-free
products, assuming—or, at least, implying—that PBDEs wouldn’t cause
problems of their own. “California, at the urging of the chemical industry several years
ago, put the highest standard in the world on the levels of PBDEs that
needed to be included in them,” Landrigan explained. “The result is that
people in California have the highest levels of brominated flame
retardants in their bodies.” The state finally banned PDBEs in 2006, after studies from Columbia
showed high quantities of the compound in women’s breast milk and linked
it to IQ losses and shortening of attention span. Between 2008 and
2012, PDBE levels in the blood of California residents decreased by
two-thirds. Landrigan and Grandjean argue that stronger chemical safety
legislation could have made all of this back-peddling damage control
unnecessary. They don’t expect every chemical to go through long-term,
randomized control studies prior to its release. Rather, they want to
see industrial chemicals screened through a simple cell-based test. If
that test were to come out positive—if the cells in the petri dish
showed any kind of toxic reaction—then the chemical would be tested
further. A next step from there might be an
animal testing model. The drawbacks there, Grandjean told me, are that
“those programs are expensive, they take time, you have to kill hundreds
and thousands of mice and rats.” However, he adds, “if a company has
developed a very useful substance, and it turns out to be toxic to nerve
cells in petri dishes, then maybe animal testing is the next step.” “I don’t think that that should necessarily be a requirement,”
Grandjean said. “But I can see if a company has developed a very useful
substance, and it turns out to be toxic to nerve cells in petri dishes,
then maybe that is the next step.” Landrigan and Grandjean both mentioned something they called Tox21,
the Toxicology in the Twenty-First Century program program, which is
laying groundwork for a new kind of accelerated, large-scale testing.
“TSCA reform really falls under EPA’s jurisdiction,” Landrigan said. “At
the NIH and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences,
though, that’s where the latest research on this is.” When
I heard that this Tox21 program is teaching a very large yellow robot
to do large-scale rapid chemical testing, I had to learn more. Dr. Linda
Birnbaum is the director of the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program in North Carolina’s
Research Triangle. Birnbaum oversees federal funding for research to
discover how the environment influences health and disease, including
Tox21. “If you want to do the full battery of current tests that we have on a
chemical, you’re looking at least five years and about $5 million,”
Birnbaum told me. “We’re not going to be able to do that on large
numbers of chemicals.” The robot is being trained to scan thousands of
chemicals at a time and recognize threats inexpensively and
quickly—before people get sick. It’s also using alternative testing
models—looking at not just isolated cells, but also simple organisms
like the roundworm C. elegans or zebrafish—to answer certain basic questions. The Tox21 robot screening system at the NIH
Chemical Genomics Center in Rockville, Maryland. This robot is part of a
program that is refining a process to test industrial chemicals for
safety quickly and efficiently. It places chemicals on plates with more
than 1,500 wells that contain different types of human or rodent cells.
(NIH)The program is also
looking at how a single chemical might affect a wide range of people.
“We’re looking at 1,000 different human genomes from nine different
ethnic groups on five continents,” Birnbaum told me. Like Landrigan, Birnbaum raised the specter of the tens of thousands
of chemicals grandfathered in 1976 that underwent no testing, as well as
the commonly cited data that less than 20 percent of the 80,000
chemicals in commerce have had any testing at all. She spoke wistfully
of the European Union’s chemical testing protocol, a model Grandjean had
told me was “very reasonable.” It’s called REACH (Registration,
Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals), and it
involves a tiered approach to regulation: If a compound is produced in
small amounts, only some cursory information is required. If greater
amounts are produced or imported, the EU requires more in-depth testing,
such as animal experiments and two-generation studies. “We’ve learned a heck of a lot in the last 30 to 40 years about the
safety of chemicals and what can cause problems,” Birnbaum said, “and it
would be really nice if our regulations required us to use some of the
newer science to answer the questions of safety.”
Don’t Panic?
“When you use the word pandemic, that’s a scare word,” said
Laura Plunkett. “And that’s my problem. There’s a more responsible way
to express it. I understand that they want to bring it to attention, but
when you bring it to attention, you can still do it in what I would say
is a scientifically defensible manner.” Plunkett has a Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology. Reviewing articles written in the wake of the publicity around The Lancet Neurology
paper, I was struck by the definitive title of her blog post on a site
called Science 20: “There Is No Pandemic of Chemicals Causing Brain
Disorders in Children.” Plunkett has been a diplomat for the American
Board of Toxicology since 1984. She taught for a while and did research
at NIH, but she is now an independent consultant running her own
company, Integrative Biostrategies. One
of her clients is the American Chemistry Council. She also has clients
in the food, pesticide, and chemical business—“industry ties,” as they
say. With that in mind, I sought her out as an established scientist who
has worked on the side of the chemical-producing companies. Her blog
post about the Lancet article was the only response I found telling people not to panic. “What [Landrigan and Grandjean] are doing with the data is missing
the key component, which is the dose,” Plunkett explained. “Many of the
chemicals they talk about are well established to be neurodevelopmental
toxicants in children—but it’s all about how much they’re exposed to.
Just like anything else. If you don’t give people enough, or if you
don’t take enough in your water or food or the air you breathe, you’re
not going to have an effect.” Plunkett insists that, unlike lead, some of the chemicals on the Lancet Neurology
list are only developmental toxicants at very high levels—the sort, she
says, “that nobody would be exposed to on a daily basis.” Plunkett says she has no problem with a call to ensure that chemical
testing is as thorough as possible. “But then to say, and by the way, if
you look at the data, ‘We’ve been poisoning people for the last 10
years’? That’s a whole other step that isn’t supported by the data they
point to.” I asked her how concerned American parents should be about certain
individual chemicals on Grandjean and Landrigan’s list. “I mean, we knew
lead was a problem 30 years ago,” she said, “and that’s why we removed
it from gasoline, and that’s why we don’t let it in solder and cans, and
we’ve taken lead-based paint off the market.” “If you really look at the data on fluoride,” she continued, “trying
to link an IQ deficit in a population with that chemical is almost
impossible to do. Even though statistically, randomly they may have
found a relationship, that doesn’t prove anything—it identifies a hazard
but doesn’t prove there’s a cause and effect between the two things.” What about the chemical that most concerned Landrigan, the pesticide chlorpyrifos? “No, because the organophosphate pesticides are one of the most
highly regulated groups of chemicals that are out there. The EPA
regulates those such that if they’re used in agriculture, people are
exposed to very, very low levels.” Pesticides are indeed more regulated than other industrial chemicals.
Before manufacturers can sell pesticides in the U.S., the EPA must
ensure that they meet federal standards to protect human health and the
environment. Only then will the EPA grant a "registration" or license
that permits a pesticide's distribution, sale, and use. The EPA also
sets maximum levels for the residue that remains in or on foods once
they’re sold. An EPA spokesperson told me that a company introducing a new
pesticide must “demonstrate more than 100 different scientific studies
and tests from applicants.” The EPA also said that since 1996’s Food
Quality Protection Act, it has added “an additional safety factor to
account for developmental risks and incomplete data when considering a
pesticide’s effect on infants and children, and any special sensitivity
and exposure to pesticide chemicals that infants and children may have.”
Landrigan and Grandjean don’t believe that’s always sufficient; the
dose may make the poison, but not everyone believes the EPA’s limits are
right for everyone. When I asked Plunkett whether new industrial chemicals were being
screened rigorously enough, even she cited the need to strengthen the
Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. “I’m a very strong proponent of
fixing the holes we have,” she said, “and we do have some holes under
the old system, under TSCA, and those are what the new improvements are
going to take care of. They’re going to allow us to look at the
chemicals out there we don’t have a lot of data on—and really those are
the ones I’m more concerned about.”
The High Price of Lost IQ
Everyone I spoke to for this story agreed that TSCA needs to be
fixed. But every attempt has met with bitter opposition. All parties
want it to happen; they just want it to happen on their own terms.
Unless it does, they don’t want it to happen at all. Last May, a bipartisan group of 22 senators, led by Frank Lautenberg
and David Vitter, introducing the Chemical Safety Improvement Act of
2013. Lautenberg, then 89 years old, was the last surviving World War II
veteran in the Senate and a longtime champion of environmental safety.
(Among other things, he wrote the bill that banned smoking on commercial
airlines.) A month after he introduced his TSCA reform bill, Lautenberg
died of pneumonia. After Lautenberg’s death, Senator Barbara Boxer told reporters the
bill “would not have a chance” of passing without major changes. “I will
be honest with you,” said Boxer, who chairs the Committee on
Environment and Public Works, “this is the most opposition I’ve ever
seen to any bill introduced in this committee.” Some of the resistance
came from environmental and health advocates who felt the bill would
actually make it harder for states to regulate the chemicals that were
grandfathered in by TSCA. Their fears intensified in January, after
10,000 gallons of a coal-processing substance poured into West
Virginia’s Elk River, contaminating a nearby water treatment plant. (The Wall Street Journal
reported, “Little is known about the chemical's long-term health
effects on people, although it isn't believed to be highly toxic.”) In
February, with Lautenberg’s bill stalled in the Senate committee,
Republican Representative John Shimkus seized the opportunity to
introduce another reform option called the Chemicals in Commerce Act.
The chemical industry applauded Shimkus’ bill—it won support from the
American Chemistry Council, American Cleaning Institute, and the Society
of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates. Earlier this month at the
GlobalChem conference in Baltimore, Dow Chemical’s Director of Products
Sustainability and Compliance Connie Deford said that TCSA reform was in
the interests of the chemical sector, acknowledging that consumer
confidence in the industry is at an all-time low. Yet the Chemicals in Commerce Act has provoked strong
criticism from groups like the Center for Environmental Health and the
Natural Resources Defense Council. A senior scientist with the
Environmental Defense Fund called the bill “even more onerous and
paralyzing” than the present law, and Representative Henry Waxman,
ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the bill
“would weaken current law and endanger public health.”
I asked the EPA to comment on Landrigan and Grandjean’s claim that we
are in the midst of a “silent pandemic” and inquired what, if anything,
is being done about it. The agency responded by sending me a statement:
“EPA has taken action on a number of the chemicals highlighted in this
report which have and are resulting in reduced exposures, better
understanding, and more informed decisions.” The agency included a list
of the actions it has already taken to reduce exposure to the chemicals
identified in the report. (See sidebar.) And it emphasized a 2012 “Work
Plan,” which includes plans to assess more than 80 industrial chemicals
in the coming years.
When I emailed the statement to Landrigan, he replied, “Many of the
items that they list here are things that I helped to put in place.” (In
1997, he spent a sabbatical year setting up EPA’s Office of Children’s
Health Protection.) He agreed that the EPA is doing a lot to protect
children from environmental threats. “But the problem is that the good
people within EPA are absolutely hamstrung by the lack of strong
legislation,” he wrote. “They can set up research centers to study
chemicals and outreach and education programs, but without strong and
enforceable chemical safety legislation, they cannot require industry to
test new chemicals before they come to market, and they cannot do
recalls of bad chemicals that are already on the market.”
Meanwhile, researchers like David Bellinger, who calculated IQ
losses, are highlighting the financial cost to society of widespread
cognitive decline. Economist Elise Gould has calculated that a loss of
one IQ point corresponds to a loss of $17,815 in lifetime earnings.
Based on that figure, she estimates
that for the population that was six years old or younger in 2006, lead
exposure will result in a total income loss of between $165 and $233
billion. The combined current levels of pesticides, mercury, and lead
cause IQ losses amounting to around $120 billion annually—or about three
percent of the annual budget of the U.S. government.
Low-income families are hit the hardest. No parent can avoid these
toxins—they’re in our couches and in our air. They can’t be sweated out
through hot yoga classes or cleansed with a juice fast. But to whatever
extent these things can be avoided without better regulations,
it costs money.
Low-income parents might not have access to organic
produce or be able to guarantee their children a low-lead household.
When it comes to brain development, this puts low-income kids at even
greater disadvantages—in their education, in their earnings, in their
lifelong health and well-being.
Grandjean compares the problem to climate change. “We don’t have the
luxury to sit back and wait until science figures out what’s really
going on, what the mechanisms are, what the doses are, and that sort of
thing. We’ve seen with lead and mercury and other poisons that it takes
decades. And during that time we are essentially exposing the next
generation to exactly the kind of chemicals that we want to protect them
from.”
The notice was issued on a Friday afternoon so that it would not get
much media coverage. But patients are already in an uproar as it has
spread through social media.
The essence of the press release is that patients who had been
growing their own cannabis are now legally obligated to send Health
Canada a letter confirming they have destroyed all their home-grown
medicine by mixing it with kitty litter, and also killed all of their
plants.
If Health Canada doesn’t get this notice, then they will call the RCMP in an effort to have patients arrested for cultivation.
The press release begins by saying “Health Canada does not endorse
the use of marijuana.” What an odd statement to come from the
organization which is overseeing the creation of a national medical
marijuana program!
The very first sentence reminds us that Health Canada doesn’t believe
in the medical use of cannabis, and that the only reason there is a
medical cannabis program at all is because it was “ordered by the
Courts.”
Patients across Canada registered with Health Canada in good faith,
to protect themselves against arrest for cultivating their own medicine.
Now they are being threatened with police action if they continue.
Many patients will have perfectly good, medical grade cannabis at
home. Some grew it themselves, others paid a Designated Grower to
produce it for them. Either way, Health Canada wants them to throw it
away and then buy new cannabis from one of these new companies.
I’ve heard that some people are planning on sending kitty litter to
Minister Ambrose as well, to illustrate the absurdity of these new laws.
Also, can Health Canada decide on a spelling for marijuana? Their
press release jumps back and forth between “marijuana” and “marihuana.”
How can they be relied on to run this program when they don’t even know
how to spell the name of the plant in question?
By Suzanne Wu • Originally published in Science Daily
That chicken wing you’re eating could be as deadly as a cigarette. In
a new study that tracked a large sample of adults for nearly two
decades, researchers have found that eating a diet rich in animal
proteins during middle age makes you four times more likely to die of
cancer than someone with a low-protein diet — a mortality risk factor
comparable to smoking.
“There’s a misconception that because we all eat, understanding
nutrition is simple. But the question is not whether a certain diet
allows you to do well for three days, but can it help you survive to be
100?” said corresponding author Valter Longo, the Edna M. Jones
Professor of Biogerontology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology and
director of the USC Longevity Institute.
Not
only is excessive protein consumption linked to a dramatic rise in
cancer mortality, but middle-aged people who eat lots of proteins from
animal sources — including meat, milk and cheese — are also more
susceptible to early death in general, reveals the study to be published
March 4 in Cell Metabolism. Protein-lovers were 74 percent
more likely to die of any cause within the study period than their more
low-protein counterparts. They were also several times more likely to
die of diabetes.
But how much protein we should eat has long been a controversial
topic — muddled by the popularity of protein-heavy diets such as Paleo
and Atkins. Before this study, researchers had never shown a definitive
correlation between high protein consumption and mortality risk.
Rather than look at adulthood as one monolithic phase of life, as
other researchers have done, the latest study considers how biology
changes as we age, and how decisions in middle life may play out across
the human lifespan.
In other words, what’s good for you at one age may be damaging at
another. Protein controls the growth hormone IGF-I, which helps our
bodies grow but has been linked to cancer susceptibility. Levels of
IGF-I drop off dramatically after age 65, leading to potential frailty
and muscle loss. The study shows that while high protein intake during
middle age is very harmful, it is protective for older adults: those
over 65 who ate a moderate- or high-protein diet were less susceptible
to disease. The latest paper draws from Longo’s past research on IGF-I, including
on an Ecuadorian cohort that seemed to have little cancer or diabetes
susceptibility because of a genetic mutation that lowered levels of
IGF-I; the members of the cohort were all less than five-feet tall.
“The research shows that a low-protein diet in middle age is
useful for preventing cancer and overall mortality, through a process
that involves regulating IGF-I and possibly insulin levels,” said co-author Eileen Crimmins, the AARP Chair in Gerontology at USC. “However,
we also propose that at older ages, it may be important to avoid a
low-protein diet to allow the maintenance of healthy weight and
protection from frailty.”
Crucially, the researchers found that plant-based proteins, such as
those from beans, did not seem to have the same mortality effects as
animal proteins. Rates of cancer and death also did not seem to be
affected by controlling for carbohydrate or fat consumption, suggesting
that animal protein is the main culprit.
“The majority of Americans are eating about twice as much
proteins as they should, and it seems that the best change would be to
lower the daily intake of all proteins but especially animal-derived
proteins,” Longo said. “But don’t get extreme in cutting out protein; you can go from protected to malnourished very quickly.”
Longo’s findings support recommendations from several leading health
agencies to consume about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body
weight every day in middle age. For example, a 130-pound person should
eat about 45-50 grams of protein a day, with preference for those
derived from plants such as legumes, Longo explains.
The researchers define a “high-protein” diet as deriving at least 20
percent of calories from protein, including both plant-based and
animal-based protein. A “moderate” protein diet includes 10-19 percent
of calories from protein, and a “low-protein” diet includes less than 10
percent protein. Even moderate amounts of protein had detrimental effects during
middle age, the researchers found. Across all 6,318 adults over the age
of 50 in the study, average protein intake was about 16 percent of total
daily calories with about two-thirds from animal protein —
corresponding to data about national protein consumption. The study
sample was representative across ethnicity, education and health
background.
People who ate a moderate amount of protein were still three times
more likely to die of cancer than those who ate a low-protein diet in
middle age, the study shows. Overall, even the small change of
decreasing protein intake from moderate levels to low levels reduced
likelihood of early death by 21 percent.
For a randomly selected smaller portion of the sample – 2,253 people –
levels of the growth hormone IGF-I were recorded directly. The results
show that for every 10 ng/ml increase in IGF-I, those on a high-protein
diet were 9 percent more likely to die from cancer than those on a
low-protein diet, in line with past research associating IGF-I levels to
cancer risk.
The researchers also extended their findings about high-protein diets
and mortality risk, looking at causality in mice and cellular models.
In a study of tumor rates and progression among mice, the researchers
show lower cancer incidence and 45 percent smaller average tumor size
among mice on a low-protein diet than those on a high-protein diet by
the end of the two-month experiment.
“Almost everyone is going to have a cancer cell or pre-cancer cell in them at some point. The question is: Does it progress?” Longo said. “Turns out one of the major factors in determining if it does is protein intake.”
Morgan E. Levine, Jorge A. Suarez, Sebastian Brandhorst, Priya
Balasubramanian, Chia-Wei Cheng, Federica Madia, Luigi Fontana, Mario G.
Mirisola, Jaime Guevara-Aguirre, Junxiang Wan, Giuseppe Passarino,
Brian K. Kennedy, Min Wei, Pinchas Cohen, Eileen M. Crimmins, Valter D.
Longo. Low Protein Intake Is Associated with a Major Reduction
in IGF-1, Cancer, and Overall Mortality in the 65 and Younger but Not
Older Population. Cell Metabolism, 2014; 19 (3): 407-417 DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2014.02.006
Extracts, as made by the usual U. S. P. methods honestly
followed, seldom disappoint.
Unfortunately, poor materials,
sophistication, and quick but defective processes characterize the
manufacture of the great bulk of solid and fluid extracts upon the market.
As an illustration of approved processes for the making of extracts
upon a large scale, we reproduce from "Red Cross Notes," Series V, NO.
3, the following: "By the term extraction is meant the operation which
has for its object the separation of the physiologic and therapeutic principles of the drug by treating it with liquids capable of holding these tinctures in solution.
"The extraction and the separation of the chemic constituents of
drugs is a comparatively simple problem, but, as is well known, the
chemically evolved products differ quite materially, in many instances,
from the structure itself. So the pharmaceutic preparations of the drug
may differ in purpose and action from the products that the chemist
breaks out of the plant. Professor Lloyd has well stated that 'the sum
of the fragments (chemic constituents) that may be broken out of a plant
structure by chemic methods, although possessed of marked
characteristics (and some of them energetic physiologically) is not
representative of the full therapeutic energy either of the plant or the
ordinary pharmaceutic preparations.' "The general process of extraction
may be described as a modified repercolation or fractional percolation,
and is in brief as follows: "The drug is bulked, mixed, dried and
ground, and then assayed. The ground drug, in lots of two hundred and
fifty pounds, is moistened with the menstruum. This moistening is
accomplished in a rotary mixer run by power. . . . The moistened drug is
packed in conical iron percolators, porcelain-lined, with vapor-tight
covers.
"After sufficient maceration the percolation proceeds. The menstruum
is fed to the percolators by a system of pipes. At the end of the row of
percolators are two large measuring tanks being fed from larger tanks
containing the main supply of the menstruum. . . . The menstruum, or the
first percolate is a weak percolate from a previous percolation. This
first percolate is a concentrated fluid extract. When two hundred and
fifty pounds of concentrated percolate have been collected, it is
reserved for concentration to a solid extract." As will be seen, this process describes the extraction of a
fluidextract without the aid of heat. To convert this into a solid
extract, the drug in the percolators is exhausted, the weak percolate
going into the next percolator, while the concentrated fluidextract is
concentrated at the lowest possible temperature, the alcohol being
recovered. This is done with elaborate vacuum concentrators, and each
batch of solid extract is assayed.
To make a solid extract some heat is necessary, but, with the
exception of a very few drugs, there is no excuse for employing heat in
the making of fluidextracts. Numerous criticisms have been made of
fluidextracts. We will consider in detail the more reasonable ones, but
it must be borne in mind that in approving fluidextracts we have in view
none but high-class products. A leading criticism is that all official
fluidextracts are made from the dried drug, and therefore, in a number
of instances, are not sufficiently active. Until recently this was the
case, but several enterprising manufacturers now offer a list of green
plant fluidextracts, the principal ones being black haw, cimicifuga, cactus, corn silk, cotton-root bark, echinacea, gelsemium, passion flower, poke root, stillingia, and saw palmetto.
The fact that large manufacturers enjoy superior facilities in
purchasing and promptly working up the crude drug militates in favor of
the modern machine-made fluidextract over those made in small quantities
in retail pharmacies. A second
criticism is that fluidextracts contain a large proportion of useless
extractive, inert resins, starch, gum, pectin, coloring matter, and
plant detritus generally. This argument certainly does strongly apply
against the cheaper grade of fluidextracts, but those made of strong
grain alcohol and without the aid of heat contain no greater relative
proportions of these inert matters than do tinctures. Naturally, both of
them carry a fair proportion of these inert substances, even with
careful preparation; but various makers have directed much intelligent
effort towards the perfecting of certain fluidextracts and tinctures;
and preparations such as Parke, Davis & Co.'s cascara, Squibb's ergot, and Norwood's veratrum, are to the credit of American pharmacy.
Another objection is that the fluidextracts of plants not very
extensively used in regular practice are not of the high quality of
those more commonly employed. This valid objection is hard to meet with a
practical solution. Many unavoidable reasons conspire to make it
frequently the case that these products are either inferior when first
made or become so by being long kept in stock.
Probably it is wise to procure such fluids from the manufacturers
direct or to employ fluids emanating from sectarian sources when drugs
are wished largely employed by sectarians and but little used by regular
physicians. A last objection is that fluidextracts so frequently
precipitate or become muddy. Cheap and poorly made ones do so to an
annoying degree. The best ones do so at times. It must be remembered
that they are very concentrated preparations, and usually the sediment
will again enter into solution when incorporated with a solvent. Certain
plants contain matters liable to gelatinization, and they spontaneously
decompose, when incorporated with a fluid medium, into a worthless brown magma with which nothing can be done. Iris, geranium,
stillingia, cotton-root bark, and urticaria are peculiarly liable to
this to change. Extractive matter and tannates precipitating gradually
in some high-grade fluidextracts can be re moved by filtration oft times
to the advantage of the product. Such substances as cannabis indica or ipecac should not be filtered to remove precipitates from their fluid preparations.
As a practical matter of fact, the little sediment existing in
high-class products is not of great consequence when one is prescribing
for the action of remedies in the usual or the large dose.
The
CDC has been shunning the correlations between thimerosal and
neurological disorders for a very long time. Although the FDA gave a two
year deadline to remove the mercury based preservative from vaccines
after the neurotoxin was banned in 1999, it still remains to this day in
60 percent of flu vaccines.
A vaccine industry watchdog has now obtained CDC documents that show
statistically significant risks of autism associated with the vaccine
preservative, something the CDC denies even when confronted with their
own data.
