Dang girl!
Now I know more about mercury poisoning than I would have ever imagined
Thanks for the info... seriously. That was quite intersting!

Kate

"paghat" wrote in message
news | 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