In article et,
"SVTKate" wrote:

My grandfather was a gold miner.
"Back in the day" before anyone knew any better, he used quicksilver to
separate the gold out from the quartz.
In his later years, he went crazy. I think it was due to Mercury Poisoning.
I don't even think that they put mercury in thermometers anymore do they?

Kate

Right, it's not in thermometers anymore. But I can remember breaking a
thermometer as a kid, rollikng the mercury around in the palm of my hand,
& putting it in a small pill bottle to keep in a little rock collection --
then being sad that it evaporated. Its dangers were not unknown yet at the
time every household had several easily broken glass thermometers laying
about, for checking fevers or weather thermometers. That's a danger now of
the past.

It was once widely used as a medicine for treatment of minor & severe
illnesses from acne to syphyllus. Its side-effects included kidney
failure, dissolving the spine & other bone loss, gum loss, tooth loss,
nail discoloration, hair loss, Crohn's disease & other severe
gastrointestinal illness, cardiovascular disease, severe fatigue, mental
deterioration, memory loss, moodiness, & madness, palsy, seizure
disorders, blindness, deafness, damage to central nervous system,
neurological disorders, language difficulty, diminished motor skills,
Cushing's syndrome, endocrine disturbances.

When a large toxic exposure occurs the health issues that result are
severe & unmistakable. At lower but persistent exposures, mercury may pass
undetected as the cause of Guillian-Barre syndrome, long-term memory loss,
dementia, & senility, colitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, & many other
problems for which a causal link to mercury is difficult to prove but
which many researchers suspect. Dental amalgam, normal amounts of mercury
in even wild-caught fish, & evaporative levels accumulating in basements,
may well be contributing factors.

"Causal link" is the key word here. Many health problems have been shown
beyond any statistical dought to have an increased incidence in people
with mercury in their teeth. They study that started the debat was a 1993
compilation of 1,569 patients from four countries with an array of minor
symptoms potentially associated with mercury poisoning, chiefly memory
difficulties & chronic fatigue (another area difficult to quantify beyond
each patient's own subjectivity). All 1,569 patients had their dental
amalgams removed, with an 80% recovery rate for the sufferers. This is a
highly indicative study, but it analyzed existing case studies that were
not set up to prove any causal link. But a second study of 2,000
additional cases undertaken in Germany had the same high rates of recovery
after removal of mercury amalgams.

The American Dental Association has remained stubborn about acting on such
findings on the basis of there being no "causal link" firmly established.
And by now they don't dare take a belated stand or dentists will risk
being sued out of existance by everyone with so much as a headache or
recurring fatigue because all mercury fillings done since the early 1990s
can certainly be regarded as legally & medically a known risk that
dentists consciously decided to ignore. Such lawsuits are already being
brought, which puts the ADA in the sorry position of having to support
growing numbers of dentists who've done the wrong thing, & their best
method of support right now is to deny it is the wrong thing to do. The
ADA actively threatens anti-amalgam dentists who speak openly about the
current science, because the ADA rightly believes such concerned dentists
who refuse to stick to the party line are a threat to dentists
collectively. And dentists have left the ADA in droves over this issue;
half of all dentists under the age of thirty-five with more modern
awareness of their trade never join the ADA at all.

Yet the studies keep coming. A University of Kentucky study established
conclusively that people who die of Alzheimer syndrome have twice as much
mercury in their systems as is normal. Low-level but ongoing exposure from
such sources as fillings have been implicated "a possible factor" in
multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, & Parkinson's disease. The near
impossibility of turning statistical likelihood into definitive causal
link is what made it possible for the tobacco industry to pretend for
decades that cigarettes were harmless, & permitted clean up of asbestos to
be put off for more than fifty years after it was nominally known to be
extremely hazardous. If the government declared dental amalgams
definitively harmful, the lawsuits would increase by factors of thousands.
The hope is that the dental industry will voluntarily correct its behavior
before that is necessary, but it will probably take government action
before what does need to be done is done.

But for the greater whop-a-doodle levels of sickness that are not so
frought with subjectivity, & for which causal links are firmly
established, exposures must generally be greater than from amalgams,
needing the extra kick of industrial activity, waste disposal, spills,
contaminated products such as Chinese medicines or imported facial creams,
or such grotesque cases as the Illinois boy who stole mercury from a
school lab, covered his body with it to play Tin Man of Oz, permanently
damaging himself neurologically & making the family home uninhabitable for
ten months with expensive clean-up by the EPA. Other severe cases include
eating contaminated pork & farm-fish that had been given
mercury-contaminated feeds, contaminated water, living near or working in
mines or along rivers into which mining contaminants are dumped, or near
coal-burning plants or plants that use boilers, or near medical &
hazardous waste incinerators.

After a couple centuries western physicians finally caught on & stopped
recommending it for illnesses it was more apt to cause than cure. But in
Chinese & Tibetan herbal medicines or dietary supplements, the most active
ingredients are frequently mercury & arsenic. Herbal hypochondriacs who
have Romantic superstitions about Chinese Traditional Medicine are at
particular risk. One study of Chinese herbal compounds, undertaken by the
California Department of Health Services, ran analyses on 251 Asian herbal
medicines & found that 14% contained toxic levels of mercury, 14% toxic
levels of arsenic, besides such deadly herbs as birthwart, monkshood, &
foxglove that are banned for such use in the US & never listed as
confessed ingredients. A UK study found that some Chinese medicines as
much or more than 11% mercury, which was either not mentioned on the
labels or was mentioned only in Chinese; other Chinese medicines
purporting to be herbal turned out to contain as their active ingredients
cortico steroids or glibenclamide (a drug for diabetics). So when
"believers" in this crap feel it really has an effect on them, they're
quite right! But do they know that what they're responding to is not
Natural Herbal Medicines, but steroids, diabetic drugs, mercury, &
arsenic?

The "wise" Chinese Traditional take on mercury is it causes longevity &
good health, basing its use on astrological charts rather than on effects
on human subjects. The majority of the products are of the
sucker-born-every-minute type.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com