Olmsted on Autism: Get the lead out

By DAN OLMSTED

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 -- Is it just me, or is there an "instant karma" quality to the news that the Chinese are endangering American kids by exposing them to a heavy metal that is a known neurotoxin?

I'm referring, of course, to the fact that thousands of toys imported from China, just recalled by Mattel, were found to contain lead that could harm children if they mouthed them. (Kids don't ever mouth toys, do they?)

Lead, we know, is bad. It's so bad there is no safe level. It stunts the brain and body in both blatant and subtle ways, lowering IQs and so on.

Kind of like organic mercury, right? Kind of like the organic mercury we phased out of most of our own vaccines but say is just fine for everybody else -- including a billion Chinese? (At least Mattel did a full and immediate recall rather than offer to phase out the leaded toys as toddlers outgrew them.)

And the similarities don't stop there. As with mercury, knowledge that lead is deadly spans millennia, and clear evidence of pediatric lead poisoning emerged by 1904 – yet lead actually became ubiquitous after that, powering the rise of the automobile and peaking in the environment in the 1970s. It was then that a courageous, much-vilified scientist named Herb Needleman showed a dose response between lead exposure and IQ -- enough "proof" to get the feds to finally face up to the truth.

Needleman got the lead out because he demonstrated the reality of subclinical toxicity, "the concept that relatively low-dose exposure to lead or other toxic chemicals … may cause harmful effects to health that are not evident with a standard clinical examination. … The underlying premise is that there exists a continuum of toxicity, in which clinically apparent symptoms of lead have their asymptomatic, subclinical counterparts."

I'm aware of this because I attended the Institute of Medicine's two-day Autism and the Environment Workshop in Washington in April. The quote above comes from a presentation on Environmental Toxicants and Neurodevelopment by Philip Landrigan, Chair of Community and Preventive Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. (The slides and audio are at www.iom.edu/?id=42481.) He aptly titled one slide, "How Can We Hasten the Pace of Discovery of Neurobehavioral Toxicity?"

In other words, how can we get the lead out of the government's slow-and-studied (and studied and studied) response to chemical poisons, whether we're talking about lead or mercury or any other toxicant?

If lead is any lesson, the answer is: Fight long and hard, get good science and be prepared for a death match with powerful interests.
 
To be clear, Landrigan was not making an analogy between lead and mercury – I am. Despite knowing the toxicity of mercury to children and other living things, we continued to spew it out of power plants, mix it up in paint and inject it in children in the form of thimerosal. We kinda sorta stopped doing the latter a few years ago – except in most flu shots, now recommended for all pregnant women and for kids starting at six months … and except in the hundreds of millions of vaccines used in the developing world. Remember, of the world's 6.3 billion people, only the ones after the decimal point live in the United States, and the others are worthy of worrying about, too.

Like the billion-plus Chinese. Those of you who are connoisseurs of the Simpsonwood transcripts will remember the comments of Dr. John Clements of the World Health Organization, who said, "My mandate as I sit here in this group is to make sure at the end of the day that 100,000,000 are immunized with DTP, Hepatitis B and if possible Hib, this year, next year, and for many years to come, and that will have to be with thimerosal-containing vaccines, unless a miracle occurs and an alternative is found quickly and is tried and is found to be safe."

Well, no miracle appeared, and given that Simpsonwood occurred seven years ago last month, that would make another 700 million immunizied with thimerosal-containing vaccines by now – and, make of it what you will, a rising autism incidence in China and other developing countries. There's no reason on Rescue Post to go into all the reasons thimerosal has not really been "found to be safe," as Clements implies with his comment that any alternative would have to be "safe," too.

The bottom line: China's lead goes into American kids and we're in an uproar; America's mercury goes into Chinese kids and we're fine with it.

And here's the killer analogy. At the end of Landrigan's talk at the IOM meeting, Mark Blaxill of SafeMinds asked this question: "Could you comment a little bit on the institutional response to the lead problem and some of the resistance that the science faced?"

"There was huge resistance," Landrigan said. "The problem is that lead was a very profitable chemical in the 1970s and there was a huge lead lobby that did their best to discount every scientific finding that was made in those years, in public fora and in private meetings.

"The lead industry did their best to pillory Herb Needleman (who showed the subclinical effect). They had a couple of scientists who were in their pay, although they didn't acknowledge they were in the industry's pay until later, who came forward and charged Herb Needleman with scientific fraud. His case was hung up at the NIH for four years while that terribly painful process cranked through. He was eventually completely vindicated and has won a whole series of prestigious awards since that time.

"There was great resistance to learning the results of research or to translating these research results into public policy.

"I think today one of the reasons we have 80,000 chemicals in commerce, of which fewer than 20 percent have been properly tested, reflects the same legacy of special interests not caring to know about the toxicity of chemicals. I honestly think as a society we need to get beyond that.
 
"We're flying blind if we allow kids to … be exposed to chemicals of untested toxicity. It's not a political issue – it sometimes gets portrayed as one but it's not. What it is, it's an issue of protecting kids. I think it's an issue that people all across the political spectrum in this town should get together and say, we really need to do something about this, we need to test these chemicals, we need to be examining the children, we need to be doing good research that leads to sound prevention."

In short, when it comes to ending human exposure to mercury and a ton of other toxic crap we're inflicting on our planet and particularly on our kids, it's time to get the lead out. You don't have to believe in karma to know that's true.
--
Dan Olmsted wrote The Age of Autism column for United Press International and is now an independent journalist based in Washington, focusing on autism and related issues. He can be reached at Olmsted.dan@gmail.com.

Comments

[Do'C]

"The logic behind Dan's argument is very hard to oppose."

Hmm JB, I respectfully disagree. Here's one of the things Mr. Olmsted's argument put forth as a bottom line:

"The bottom line: China's lead goes into American kids and we're in an uproar; America's mercury goes into Chinese kids and we're fine with it."

Looks like equivocation to me. Since toys from China don't prevent or reduce disease transmission, and vaccines do, the comparison itself seems incongruous. Don't get me wrong, I think removal of mercury from vaccines is a *very* good idea (as is removal of lead from anything that might end up in a child's mouth), but while his argument makes great sense emotionally, the logic of that one of Mr. Olmsted's arguments is completely fallacious from a scientific perspective.

[Do'C]

"One study we do have, as I'm sure you know, is the first-baby haircuts, which found that autistic kids have LESS mercury in their hair than typical controls, and the more autistic they are, the less they have."

While the Holmes et al. study did find that the autistic children in their study had less mercury in their hair than the typical controls in their study, what it didn't tell you is that their controls had about 15 times higher mercury than the very large NHANES study (838 children 1-5 years old) average. Additionally, the autistic children in the Holmes et al. study had mercury levels in their hair higher than NHANES average (not lower than "typical controls").

"So the question is, where is the mercury, and the answer has to be, it's trapped SOMEWHERE, quite likely the brain."

Which doesn't follow, because the kids in the Holmes et al. study did not actually have lower hair mercury levels compared to that large national study. They had higher levels.

[Dan Olmsted]

Thanks to all for such positive and thoughtful comments. I'm so excited to be back writing about autism and to have a congenial home with Rescue Post. David, you point out issues of measuring lead vs. mercury in the body that I wasn't aware of, and I can see how they add complexity to the issue. One study we do have, as I'm sure you know, is the first-baby haircuts, which found that autistic kids have LESS mercury in their hair than typical controls, and the more autistic they are, the less they have. So the question is, where is the mercury, and the answer has to be, it's trapped SOMEWHERE, quite likely the brain. As I understand it, this fits perfectly with the whole idea that thimerosal is "ideally" suited to get organic mercury across the blood-brain barrier, where it converts back to inorganic and is effectively trapped. I've always thought this first haircut study is one of the two or three most compelling pieces of evidence linking autism to mercury, yet I think the IOM trashed it and the mainstream media and medical world ignored it. One question I would have is whether autopsies have been done on brains of deceased people with autism -- do we have the techniques to do that and if so is it being done or has it been? (And the usual follow-up question, If not, why not?) I would welcome further dialogue on this and could make it the topic of a future column. Best, Dan

[David Halls]

Congratulations, Dan, on yet another brilliant article. I can not understand the medical intransigence in removing thimerosal from vaccines.

In comparing the thimerosal debate with the prolonged campaign to reduce lead exposure, one distinct advantage for lead was that there were reliable indicators of exposure. Blood lead measurement was demonstrated to be a reliable index of lead burden and the quality of analysis improved when it was adopted for occupational monitoring and formed the basis of legal limits. As most absorbed lead is stored in bone and teeth, Needleman used teeth lead measurement in children to assess their exposure.

Unfortunately we do not have such reliable indicators of mercury exposure and this is a problem. Mercury as inorganic mercury or its organic derivatives, methyl- and ethylmercury, is relatively quickly eliminated from blood so that blood mercury does not give a reliable index of overall exposure. For occupational exposure, urine measurements are used. However, there are problems with that. Mercury is naturally volatile and some mercury is lost before the sample reaches the lab. Mercury is stable in hair samples where it binds to sulfur atoms in the keratin. Hair mercury may be the best index but it subject to external contamination and also only indicates the exposure in the lifetime of the hair. Hair grows at around 1 cm per month. Other more indirect measures of mercury exposure have been proposed but I am not convinced that they are the answer. If only we had an index as reliable as blood lead was for lead exposure.

Thanks again for some excellent arguments.

[Heidi Roger]

Thanks Dan for continuing to write articles that can quickly and simply educate John Q Public about our cause.

[Stagmom]

Ah, but Dan, you can SUE Sherwin Williams for lead paint and Mattel for lead toys. You can NOT sue for mercury in vaccines though. Such a difference, don't you think? And mainstream docs may NEVER admit to mercury poisoning in kids - they routinely test for lead but never for mercury. Why? If they test for mercury they're likely to find it - and then when Mommy asks, "Where did that mercury come from" they'll have to say, "Well, we injected it into your child." That's a sticky wicket, eh?

[JB Handley]

The logic behind Dan's argument is very hard to oppose.

The Simpsonwood quotes reveal the motivations of the people in the position to do something for why they don't.

The bloated vaccine schedule, with mercury as a preservative, is a castle of sand that cannot be supported as it has no foundation.

Thank you, Dan, for putting the obvious into such clear, compelling prose- its an honor to feature your work!!

JB

[Allison]

Dan,
Per usual great piece! I often use "what would you say, if I told you lead was in vaccines??". The answer is usually outrage and I wouldn't get them for my children. HUH?? But mercury is 1000x more toxic. Usually I get silence after this. I send out information on mercury and it's effects to a host of people but the biggest responses I get are from the lead in toys articles, energy saving light bulbs and alcohol in hand sanitizer. Somehow mercury in vaccines becomes mute unless you have a personal stake. I thank you for taking our issue on without a personal stake! I look forward to reading more from the Great Dan soon.

[Editor]

Welcome to Rescue Post, Dan. It's an honor to run your work here. Thank you.

Kim Stagliano
Editor