Marylynn Schmidt wrote: > Quite long but interesting.
Quite long, indeed! Here's a quote: Dr. Johnson says on page 17, "We agree that it would be desirable to remove mercury from U.S. licensed vaccines, but we did not agree that this was a universal recommendation that we would make because of the issue concerning preservatives for delivering vaccines to other countries, particularly developing countries, in the absence of hard data that implied that there was in fact a problem." In other words, there isn't any hard evidence of a problem. Vaccine preservatives have been used since the 1930's, so we should be seeing a very large impact across the population. If the follow-up study in the Seychelles indicates poor recall among children exposed to environmental mercury from fish, we should be noting a corresponding decline in memory function among immunized people elsewhere, if in fact, exposure to thimerosal in vaccines can be equated with the dietary intake of mercury-contaminated fish. (Can it be?) So if the link between thimerosal and developmental defects, ADD and other cognitive problems is causal, why do we not see generalized evidence of this within the population? I've been immunized, as have my sisters, my wife, her brother and his wife, and all of our children, yet none of us exhibits any symptoms of impaired neurodevelopment. I don't want to dismiss you, nor do I wish to stop the recent discussion. It seems, however, that we have a camp of people who find danger in Western medicine and seem very willing to discard the entire corpus of knowledge humanity has developed from the occidental perspective. I think the case in the article is overstated. For example: "In other words, both of these studies tell us nothing about the actual development of these children's brain function except that they reached the most basic of milestones. To put this another way, your child may be able to stack blocks, recognize shapes and have basic language skills but later in life they could be significantly impaired when it came to higher math, more advanced language skills (comprehension) and ability to compete in a very competitive intellectual environment, like college or advanced schooling. Their future would be limited to the more mundane and intellectually limited jobs." That may be true with or without exposure to thimerosal in vaccines. I work with children who have learning disabilities, and it's not possible to uncover a singular cause that explains the breadth and depth of learning issues in children. Often, multiple causes synergize, ranging from utterly ineffective teaching all the way down the scale to serious, organic brain dysfunction. I had no trouble and no regret authorizing vaccinations for my children. Neither of them suffer from neurological problems. They're doing well in school, too. Yet I've talked to clients whose children are the same ages as mine, who attribute their children's learning difficulties to vaccinations. When I ask these concerned parents about diet, sleep, exercise and water consumption, they're very quick to dismiss any link between something as obvious as sleep and their child's brain development. Sigh . . . robert luis rabello "The Edge of Justice" Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ranger Supercharger Project Page http://www.members.shaw.ca/rabello/ _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/