Cross posted at Science@home, my main blog about science for little ones.
You’ll have to indulge me a little here, but elements and compounds is year 7 or 8 science so this is a class I teach pretty much every year. I’ll actually avoid mercury and vaccines to the end, and start by telling you a little story …
Chlorine is a highly poisonous gas, it was used in 1915 to devastating effect on soldiers in Ypres. It is a pale yellow green and smells terrible, so it’s pretty noticeable.
Sodium is a soft silvery metal that is extremely reactive in water – it has to be stored under oil because it will react with the water in the air. It gets so hot it is molten and will burst into flame, it is even worse with acids such as vinegar and reacts explosively.
So you would expect that these two chemicals are very dangerous and must be handled with caution. You would think that a substance with both of them in it would be hazardous and treated with the utmost care.
Introducing sodium chloride, this most dangerous of chemicals. It is made up of one chloride ion bonded to one sodium ion and forms a crystalline white solid shown above. You’re probably familiar with it, in fact it’s almost certainly in your kitchen right now. Because it’s salt. Common table salt. If we were to go by the elemental properties, this would be far too dangerous to have anywhere near us. It would be poisonous and explosive (especially with acids). But we all know it isn’t.
And that’s why there has never been mercury in vaccines. There used to be a preservative called thiomersal (or thimerosal in the US) that contained mercury as part of a compound. But the properties of a compound have nothing to do with the properties of the elements that make it up. The fact that it has an atom of mercury bonded to the other atoms of sodium (Aaaaargh!), sulphur (oh dear), oxygen (burns), carbon and hydrogen (explosive in the presence of oxygen) is completely irrelevant when working out whether or not it is dangerous. You might as well say it is flammable because it contains hydrogen and oxygen, but then water would be as well and we don’t get all upset about that. As it happens, thiomersal has been removed from all the vaccines in the childhood schedule anyway (in Australia, I can’t speak for the rest of the world), it is used during manufacture to kill bacteria but not in the final product.
This isn’t to say that thiomersal is as safe as water (and it doesn’t matter anyway because it isn’t in there). What it is saying is that thiomersal and every other ingredient needs to be evaluated on its own properties, not those of mercury or whatever other atoms happen to be in them. Otherwise you would need to be wary of poison gas when cooking, and stay well away from salt and vinegar chips – they might explode.
Deb, great and very humorous way to present this important point! Thanks!
There may not be mercury but there IS high levels of aluminum and various other toxins.
Miss your not-so-common sense, Deb.
I really liked the article Deb. I have a feeling that I would love sitting in one of your classes.
This is a wonderful rebuttal to use on people who still believe the mercury thing. Thanks and I’m sure I’ll be passing it along.
Thankyou AU, Sylvie, Carrie and ZenMonkey.
Krista – Basically no, there isn’t. Vaccines do contain aluminium, so do breastmilk and formula. There are far, far higher levels in formula – a soy-based formula will deliver about 120 mg of aluminium to a baby in the first 6 months. Absorption from the gut is roughly 1%, which means a baby on soy formula will recieve about 1.2 mg of aluminium into their blood stream. In that same 6 months a baby will receive about 4 mg of aluminium from vaccines intramuscularly, which eventually makes it way into the blood stream and out through the kidneys. Aluminium is the most common metal and you are continuously breathing, drinking and eating it. This fact sheet is very good and fully referenced http://www.chop.edu/export/download/pdfs/articles/vaccine-education-center/aluminum.pdf
As for ‘other toxins’ they are all different and have to be treated differently. Squalene, for example, is produced by your liver whenever you eat fruit. So is formaldehyde, which suffers from a bit of an identity crisis – there is a chemical called formaldehyde that is produced by your body as a normal part of your metabolism and is also found in vaccines, then there is a completely different mix that happens to contain formaldehyde as well as other chemicals and is used for preserving bodies. That one isn’t in vaccines. And so on through the list of ‘toxins,’ never forgetting the tiny doses involved.
Uhh.. Krista..did you not learn something here?… Is the aluminum free in the vaccines or would it be bound to another element? Please check on that and restate your ‘fact’ in the proper context after reading Deb’s 7th grade level explanation a few more times.
Great….Now let’s figure out why there are so many kids regressing after vaccination. It was a never-heard- of phenomenon in the 1980′s…regressive illness…..Now…All the parents who had a child suddently regress, are reporting it occured following a set of vaccines. Usually a group of 6-9 vaccines in a visit. If we are putting Mercury to bed…so to speak, lets figure out why children regress, almost exclusively following vaccination. We can get to the root problem with the Pedi vaccination schedule. There is clearly an issue with the schedule, as there are just too many reports to continue to bury our heads in the sand.
Deb- Great piece, especially the point that “the properties of a compound have nothing to do with the properties of the elements that make it up.” It’s the same confusion when people talk about how there’s “antifreeze” in common household substances (like toothpaste).
Maria – I don’t know the US schedule but in Australia vaccines are given at 2, 4, 6, 12 and 18 months. When exactly could a child regress that isn’t following a vaccination? (Bearing in mind I’ve had people include 30 month olds in that!)
As for saying regression was never heard of until the 1980s, there are always big problems dealing with historical data. Have a look at the history of Tourette’s Syndrome. I’m not for a moment suggesting this has anything to do with vaccines or autism – it doesn’t. But what you have here is a syndrome that seems very, very obvious to laypeople or family members, yet it wasn’t described until 1885. It was all the rage for a while then disappeared for decades and was classified as a very rare problem, then it started coming back. Today it is considered relatively common – between 1-10 children per thousand – but there is a wide range of severity and some are misdiagnosed. The public perception of Tourette’s is a lot more dramatic than for most people living with it. Do you honestly believe the disease has appeared, disappeared and changed like that? Or is it more likely that there are changes and even fashions in diagnosis?
Going back to autism, the fact that it was only recently described tells you absolutely nothing about its past. I suggest you look for mythical, literary or historical accounts of changelings, village idiots or ‘the simple.’ While some of these obviously refer to people with other disabilities such as Trisomy 21, there are others which match the symptoms of autism. A father of a boy with autism also suggested insane asylum records, I think he specifically mentioned New Orleans. These aren’t easy to get or fun to plough through, but they strongly suggest autism has been with us for a very long time.
On a more modern note, the number of children who develop noticeable symptoms autism after a set of vaccinations is meaningless without putting it into context. This has been done in multiple studies, in multiple countries and multiple types of studies. Vaccines don’t cause autism.
Deb, the US schedule for vaccinations is very similar to the Australian schedule. My grandson is six months old, he has had three sets of immunizations. I think later in the schedule is a bit different, unless they have changed things since mine were little. I remember taking the girls to get shots about age five, prior to their entering kindergarten. My son I delayed, he had a bad reaction to the DPT shot at age 2, and it scared the crap out of me (fever with convulsions). It was probably coincidental as something else may have going on at the same time, but I didn’t want to take any chances. He got caught up when he entered college.
Helpful details, many thanks to the author. It can be puzzling to me now, but in common, the usefulness and importance is overwhelming. Quite much thanks once again and great luck!
I loved your descriptions! If H and O were that dangerous when combined, you certainly wouldn’t want to throw H2O on the fire! …and salt is soooo dangerous! LOL
I do think that scientific literacy is a problem…many don’t understand essential elements verses compounds…middle school science! [or earlier if you read this stuff to and have conversations with your children about it]…Thank you for writing.