This is very true, as shown by the decision to remove thiomerosal form most children’s vaccines. However this is largely precautionary. While environmental methylmercury is a cumulative toxin, right now the research seems to agree ethylmercury is efficiently eliminated by the kidneys and released into the environment as inorganic mercury.
So I can certainly see wanting to avoid it, and you have fair points about Kettering et al., but it’s not really right to equate it to eating contaminated tuna let alone straight lead.
I read the Trust Us, We’re Experts book. I am familiar with this case (and more), though I’d have to reread the book to refresh the details.
Edit: Also, milligram-level of mercury comparable with common dietary intake is not exactly quantitatively similar to pumping thousands of pounds of lead into the air.
Maybe such low doses don’t have grave enough effects to show noticeably in the results? It’s quite like low-level radiation, the linear non-threshold model is more an ass-covering handwaving in the very low dose rates.
That said, there are things I wouldn’t worry about (metallic mercury, we fooled with it at school rather intensely in the polarography lab, it’s a fun thing to play with), and things I’ll steer well clear from (dimethyl mercury).
I have teeth-related trouble. Got a lot of amalgam-based repairs, they generally work better than the resins and most of the cements because the amalgam slightly expands on setting and fills the hole better. And they tended to last longer, at least in my mouth.
You have the money to spare. Others count pennies to go month by month. Yet others don’t have even the pennies.
…also, you won’t get to influence the decision. The additional money you pay will go to the bombs, not to the butter, as the bombs lobby is stronger.
Rather than blaming opposite ends of the political spectrum, I think we need a better term to describe the issue.
Primitivist is probably a bit strong, some of them may want to return to pre-industrial times but I expect it would be a minority. I prefer Technological Reactionary, but some people might see the term as offensive.
I’ll have to read that one, thanks for the link. I’ve read the Secret War on Cancer and the Merchants of Doubt, and I am sitting just across the river from the Butterfly Factory as I type.
If you can get high quality photo-set composite fillings they’re as cheap as amalgam, last longer, and have less effect on your sense of taste. A dentist who understands how to use them properly (in particular, how to drill for them) can make them adhere more closely and strongly than is possible using amalgam. I’ve got quite a few of them in my own mouth, and several are more than 20 years old. But I don’t know how available those materials are world-wide; they were brand new in the mid-Atlantic US when I first started getting them. Exposure to the curing lights gave a lot of dentists (including mine) cataracts, unfortunately, before that problem was identified; keep your eyes closed when the light is on.
And of course if you have the money, you really can’t beat gold for dentistry. A gold crown costs ~$30 more than a porcelain crown and lasts 50 years. A porcelain crown lasts five to fifteen years, and can cost significantly more than $500. Dentists and their families are more likely to choose gold crowns than any other identified consumer group, which tells you something.
But yes I’m aware that not everyone has my resources, and that I can’t direct politicians as I wish. I don’t have to roll over and pretend to like that, though - tilting at windmills is what keeps me getting out of bed in the mornings.
In any case it’s still complete bullshit to use the unfortunate fact that mothers’ milk is contaminated with more than a few industrial toxins as a talking point to defend unnecessary mercury in vaccines. The people and corporations who bought the exemptions from the global mercury ban for vaccines and cosmetics are vile; they are morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest, and care far more for their personal profits than for anyone’s health. Cooper Anderson, by associating himself with such people and their tactics, makes himself just as worthy of my contempt and disgust as any Tea Party nabob - if not more so.
I got both kinds. But my enamel is crap so neither held much and the photocured ones seemed to be a bit worse in the durability department. I did not notice any effect on taste with the amalgam ones, once had a problem with a galvanic cell against a crown (and that apparently passivated itself before I got around to solve it).
Have to tell my dentist. Just to be sure that she knows.
Metal, in general. Lots of dental alloys. I opted for something no-gold or low-gold, cheaper but as durable. (Shame, I don’t remember composition of my own teeth.) Given that both mating surfaces are metal, I did not care that the cheaper alloy is a lrttle harder; no natural teeth to wear against it.
The quip that you cannot attack a windmill with a spear from the front but could be successful with a Molotov from the back earned me a long stare back at school…
A lousy argument but does not invalidate the relative harmlessness of such a low dose.
Also, many of the detected toxins are in concentrations that are more a testament to the sensitivity of contemporary analytical techniques than posing a risk.
Low levels of most contaminants are rather unavoidable. Getting worked up over them may quite well be less healthy than shrugging them off.
If we don’t get worked up about it, and take unilateral action, nothing will change. Industry will continue to pump poison into the shared commons while the 1% retreat into their gated enclaves.
My dad got a mercifully quick lung cancer, likely from smoking. But some decades before worked on mercury rectifiers, and did not show any signs of neurological damage.
There is also a rather big difference between day-to-day exposure to industrial levels of volatile chemicals, and an occasional trace amount.
(For the record, I use tetrachloroethylene as a pretty good degreaser, but not daily and would take quite more precautions if it was more often and in bigger amounts. And am pissed at EU for clamping down on trichloromethane in paint strippers, as there goes my project of a vapor degreaser. I won’t use something that has flammable vapors as I have no desire to blow myself up. (Thought: a microreactor-style thing to make it from natural gas and table salt?))
If we get overworked up (or, worse, hysterical) about things that have too little effect, we’ll miss the ones that could achieve an actual benefit. One fish-equivalent of mercury per blue moon falls to the former category.
I would not presume to tell you how to live your life, but you do sound like you are quoting my father. His exposure was not daily, either. But he’s the only person in his blood line to have Parkinson’s in at least five generations, and he was repeatedly exposed to five different chemicals that are now strongly linked to Parkinson’s. The onset of the disease was subtle enough to remain unidentified until he was much older, but it probably started when he was in his late 60s.
I’ve had mild lead poisoning from soldering in an insufficiently ventilated space, and I hang out with metal workers a lot so I’ve seen some pretty bad cases. Pretty little white moths start arcing through your peripheral vision, and it takes considerable mental effort to classify them as phantasms.
More details, please? The worst I got was a mild metal fume fever from unventilated welding, and that passed with one night of sleep and the literature says it is pretty harmless.
Lead poisoning from soldering sounds to me a bit weird. Possibly there were some extreme conditions that led to volatilizing of the lead?
I see weird things when I am extremely tired (and some rare other states when I am just “out of it”). Always was aware that the visions aren’t real; but then, it may be because of my somewhat high degree of mental detachment from my physical self, and awareness that the senses may lie. (Todo: try out some real hallucinogen, see how I’d react.)
Actually some notable republicans with strong anti-gay positions have turned out to be very into completely fucking men.
The half-life for the molecule containing mercury atoms found in this vaccine has a biological half-life of 18 days. It took me a few seconds to find this out (as well as the fact that it’s toxicity is currently unknown). Sodium would be extremely dangerous to consume as a raw element but it is necessary for biological function as a part of molecules. No one is drinking a vial of straight mercury.
You claim that using preservatives is all about making more money for drug companies, and that vaccines behind cheaper would not help poorer people. I don’t think the drug companies simply ate the cost when they had to switch to single dose vials, I think they raised their prices. Since our whole culture accepts the idea of marking things up by a percentage, I would bet they make more money by selling the no-preservative vaccines than they did the ones with the preservatives (a certain percentage of the cost of each dose is profit, the cost goes up, the profit goes up). I could certainly be wrong, but unless financial statements show otherwise, it seems safer to assume that drug companies selling things for more money are making more money than drug companies selling things for less money.
This is why I don’t get all of these claims of profit motive. Do you know how much more money these drug companies would make if they were selling us drugs to mitigate the symptoms of endemic illnesses than they are selling us vaccines? Drug companies basically don’t even do research into vaccines anymore for this reason - that’s why the Gates foundation is doing vaccine research, to counter the complete lack of it in the private sector. Drug companies keep selling vaccines and anti-biotics (there’s demand andif they don’t, someone else will) but they research maintenance drugs. I think profit motive is completely corrupting medical research and medical care (especially in the US) but I can’t see the logic in what you are saying at all.
That would actually be not so dangerous. Elemental mercury will just cause a bad diarrhea (antimony pills work similar way, were used against constipation and as a general purgative, and, drumrolls please, were reusable), with minimal resorption.
You can survive even injection of elemental mercury (two cases, one survivor). It’s an amazingly nontoxic thing, if you can control the vapors.
I would like the research financing at least partially shifted to the health insurance companies. These are more motivated to cure instead of maintain, than the pharma corps. If done via some worldwide trust, the resulting meds could even go generic since inception, further reducing costs. That would also eliminate the marketing overhead, which is said [citation needed] to be as much or more as the research budget.
Or perhaps it’s in yours, my friend! Perhaps I see a truth you are ignoring?
Uncritical worship of modern corporate medicine leads to tragedies. I have lived a minor one myself, and seen several others. Aspirin has killed many an innocent child. And I know that there is simply no real reason to support feeding children mercury. None. It’s not necessary or desirable - therefore it cannot ethically be defended or ignored. I will walk away from Omelas.
@anon50609448, I do not know of any vaccines that cannot be produced without mercury. I had zero difficulties obtaining non-mercury vaccines for my children (unless you count the difficulties involved in persuading the medical establishment to order the preparation - feeding mercury to children unnecessarily has become a cult shibboleth at this point, a way of declaring allegiance to an anti-anti-vaxxer meme set, so a parent has to actively fight it).
Drugs are sold at the maximum price a market allows - which is often set by regulation, which is why regulatory capture and intellectual property regimes are both very popular with big pharma! But of course you can’t sell any drugs at all if you price them beyond the means of the people who need them. So less cost of production = more profit. No mercury = higher cost of production.
Anyway I believe the abortive, now rescinded ban on mercury in vaccines included subsidies to cover claimed costs, didn’t it? And the costs of vaccines in places with no refrigeration are not borne by the poor; I pay money every month to charities doing that work, although certainly those costs could have been easily carried by the massively profitable, massively subsidized pharma companies. Their CEOs could have done it from pocket change.
Metal fume fever (I’m assuming galvanization burn-off) is most definitely not harmless, since it kills blacksmiths and welders on occasion. Although, it seems like pretty much always the people who get killed are already on record as saying it’s no big deal. My friend Brak used to hot-forge bronze without a respirator… after he went mad and was institutionalized, tests were done and the docs said the high levels of arsenic in his blood were the only thing that kept the heavy metals from killing him. So please be careful, I enjoy your web site! I’m male, and I’ve finished reproducing biologically, but I still try to avoid all metal vapors. You never know when some cadmium or molybdenum might have gotten into that salvage pile.
Normal copper pipe soldering, lots of it, in a tight space. And there was also some de-soldering of 80+ year old joints, now that I think of it, that probably had nearly straight lead in them.
I don’t know for sure it was lead poisoning, but I do know I saw the little white moths for a couple of days… and it was hard not to believe in them, even though logically I knew that they could not be there. Pretty little things.
The costs are translated to availability, when the same limited cash that would buy 100 doses suddenly can buy only 80 doses. The 20 people will get screwed.
All depends on dose. Pure water can kill in high enough dose. The “monday morning fever” version of metal fume fever is largely survivable.
Getting used to the risk leads to taking more… until it is too much.
Thanks, will try (Todo: write more.)
I seem to be unable to attract a mate, decade after decade. An occasional round of a heavy metal Russian roulette in a way doesn’t feel that bad in such context…
If it was with an open flame, it could quite easily volatilize the oxide. I was thinking about the electronics-grade soldering and it was not making sense. Now it does, thanks!
The business model of an insurance company is the same as the business model of a casino. They know they get the rake, so they want you to put as much money on the table as possible. Casinos are happy when you put $1M on craps even though they know there is an almost 50% chance they’ll have to pay you a million dollars. People who sell house insurance make more money when the price of houses goes up because they are insuring larger assets. The same is true for medical insurers. Sure, they’d rather pay less dollars for any particular thing, but they want your health to be worth as much money as possible, it’s in their interest for everything to cost more.
Identical services often multiply in price by five or ten times when you cross the border from Canada to the US, US health insurers make billions in profits. The higher cost doesn’t seem to be bothering them.
Either the price is set by the market or it is set by regulation, it is not both. Why would there be regulations setting the price? It’s because otherwise the price would be higher. As you say, when they banned mercury the drug companies got subsidies to pay for it. If it hadn’t been for that, they would have successfully lobbied to have the regulated price increased to cover their costs. They are not going to lose money when the government is largely in their pockets.
Which brings me back to my percentages. The limit on drug company profits is a kind of moral limit - limit by public outrage. If the percentage of their revenue that goes to profit is too high then eventually it will be in the news, eventually there will be a backlash. I don’t think lawmakers think of this explicitly, I think they are mostly dupes - but they understand profit margins. If a drug company told them they needed to increase the regulated cost of treatment X to 100 times the production cost then they’d get that “Oh, that doesn’t sound right” feeling. But when profits are only 5% of revenue then it doesn’t trigger any alarm bells. As long as prices are limited by regulation, it is obvious that drug companies want the price to be higher. Higher production costs mean public justification for higher prices (or for more subsidies) to the tune of (increase in production cost) * (1 + non-zero number).
That’s not actually true, in the case of vaccines, and rarely true for any prescription medication, as I pointed out to @anon50609448. Drug availability is determined by political actors who override the mechanics of supply and demand at will, and all legally controlled medication in the USA is massively overpriced. Every child in the world could be vaccinated, without mercury, using a small percentage of the profit pharmaceutical companies make directly from government regulation. Medical care has its own special economic rules anyway, and you can’t apply the same principles that govern the price of bread or water, but the only thing “screwing” 20 people in your example is greed, sociopathy, apathy and an uncritical acceptance of the self-serving lies of pharmaceutical company representatives. There’s literally no economic barrier to eliminating all mercury from all vaccines. None. Any appearance of economic issues is simply corporate mischaracterization of a billionaire’s greed being placed above society’s interest in vaccination - and when an anti-vaxxer puts their wrongheaded ideas above society’s interest, everybody gets upset, but somehow it’s totally OK for a millionaire or billionaire to do the same thing and claim it’s economics?
In re: metal fume fever - just watch out for fluid accumulation in the lungs. Whenever someone dies from a relatively mild dose, it seems to be through the mechanism of pneumonia.
In re: lead poisoning - In all soldering other than electronics I use an open flame torch, either propane or MAPP depending on how massive the joint is. I use several different kinds of solder - hard silver solder for jewelry or high tensile strength electrical connections, rosin core tin/lead solder for electronics, solid tin/lead for plumbing - but I also disassemble and repair old things, and they could have any imaginable sort of metals in them. I was surprised to find my sister’s house in England actually has hand-formed solid lead pipes, as did the club we stayed in while visiting London!
In a corruptly regulated marketplace, the changing set of regulations can be considered part of the market conditions, and that’s how I intended my own remark. I should have found less confusing semantics to make my point, since so many conversations today are about how to eliminate all regulation of marketplaces (as though such insanity would be desirable).
Medicines that can determine life or death, or severe pain (such as Imitrex) can easily bear absurdly high market prices, as long as your government enforces so-called “intellectual property regulation”. If people could copy medicines as they did before governmental interference, normal marketplace mechanisms would curb this vampirish cruelty and greed…
But today in the USA you can have situations like the legalization of aspartame, for example, where politicians trade otherwise unrelated political favors and corporations pass money around in a complex dance of corruption in order to buy federal regulatory regimes to their liking. Large corporations have repeatedly bought the entire government of California, in order to repeal clean air laws and create fake energy crises, etc. Since regulations are for sale (or at least US federal regulations such as those governing vaccine creation, distribution and pricing certainly appear to be) it seems to me that they are part and parcel of the market.
Okay, that’s fair. I also take your point above about how the whole system is created by sociopathy and greed. I’d like that to stop, but I don’t think preservatives in vaccines are a unique feature in that battle. Everyone in the world could be fed and housed too, and probably we could all have iPods, if we didn’t have to funnel so much of our resources into a phantom economy of high-score boards for bored sociopaths.
I think the pharmaceutical company representatives you mention uncritically accept their own "lies’ (it’s not really a lie if you believe it…) about costs of bringing drugs to the market and so on, ignoring how much of those costs are propped up by the rest of society. Rich people constantly talk as if they made it all on their own, because they genuinely think they hit that proverbial triple, and most not-rich people essentially agree.
I’d like a revolution, but in the meantime cheaper things usually mean more people can get them, whether that’s vaccines, rice or baby clothes. If 20 people don’t get vaccinated because it is too expensive then they got screwed by a system that denies them important things because giving them those things doesn’t sufficiently enrich some already rich guy (and they probably are getting screwed by that system all day every day). But they also got screwed because the price went up for whatever reason the price went up from an inside-system perspective.
America is a really weird place where you have first world nations down the street from third world nations. It’s unforgivable that people have to make terrible life and death decisions for their families over problems that could be solved for an insignificant fragment of the nation’s wealth, but they do. That’s a much bigger problem than ethyl mercury.
I’m male, and I’ve finished reproducing biologically, but I still try to avoid all metal vapors. You never know when some cadmium or molybdenum might have gotten into that salvage pile.
(Todo: write more.)