Toxic overload: assessing the role of mercury in autism. (Health).

Publication: Mothering

Publication Date: 01-NOV-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine

From 1996 to 1997, J. Curtis Pendergrass, PhD, did some experiments in my research laboratory at the University of Kentucky that confirmed the toxicity of thimerosal in vaccines. The results appeared on our website (www.altcorp.com), where they attracted the attention of some parents of autistic children.

These parents informed me that increased mandatory vaccination of infants was, in their opinion, the cause of an apparent epidemic of autism. This was the first time I had heard of this situation. The rationale for considering vaccinations as the cause of their children's problems seemed sensible and worth an investigation. I would like to state here that I am a very strong supporter of the national vaccine program, and that nothing in this article should be construed to imply that parents should avoid getting their children vaccinated. But I do recommend avoiding vaccines that contain thimerosal.

My laboratory was well experienced in mercury research. We had earlier demonstrated that mercury, when exposed to normal human brain-tissue homogenates, is capable of causing many of the same biochemical aberrancies found in Alzheimer's diseased (AD) brains. (1-4) Also, rats exposed to mercury vapor show the same major protein aberrancy as AD brains. Specifically, the rapid inactivation of important brain enzymes occurs following the addition of low levels of mercury or exposure to mercury vapor, and these same enzymes are significantly inhibited in AD brains. (5) Also, mercury exposure to neurons in culture by other researchers, at a concentration lower than that found in many human brains, has now been shown to produce three of the widely accepted pathological diagnostic hallmarks of AD. (6,7)

Therefore, we hypothesized that exposure to mercury is involved in the etiology of AD, or at least would exacerbate this...

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