In 2001, a now-famous paper titled Autism: a novel form of mercury poisoning (PDF) was published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. It described the many, many similarities between the symptoms of mercury poisoning in the literature and the symptoms of autism (or autistic spectrum disorders). Developmental delays and learning disorders can also be caused by lead, aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, and so forth. But mercury is about as neurotoxic as it gets, and a certain generation of children received enormous amounts of organic mercury in their vaccines. [For several articles relating the increase in autism to the increase in mercury from vaccines, see the work of Drs. Mark and David Geier.]
I've heard people say "Well, if mercury in vaccines caused autism, why don't all vaccinated kids have autism?" That's like saying "Well, if smoking causes lung cancer, then why don't all smokers get lung cancer?" Genetic predisposition, risk factors, and protective factors explain why only some smokers get lung cancer, and only some mercury-poisoned children get autism.
While the mainstream medical community plugs its ears and sings LA LA LA in a display of determined ignorance, a community of parents and physicians have set about solving the puzzle of autism and reversing autism in many children. These kids have heavy metals poisoning, not necessarily because their exposure was higher than other kids', but because they could not excrete the metals. They couldn't get rid of the stuff.
For instance, people normally excrete metals in their hair. "Neurotypical" kids show some mercury if you analyze a hair sample. Autistic kids, though, usually have very low or occasionally undetectable levels of mercury, because metals are not leaving their bodies properly. In one study, mercury levels in the hair samples of autistic children were 0.47 ppm on average, compared to 3.63 ppm in hair from healthy children. In other words, the healthy kids were excreting close to 8 times more mercury than the autistic kids. However, the study also found that the mothers of autistic children had significantly higher mercury exposures during pregnancy than moms of healthy kids. So we know the autistic kids were exposed to more mercury, and yet, they had less mercury in their hair. This is exactly what we would expect, because autistic children do not readily excrete toxic metals.
The mainstream media widely misreported this study as proof that mercury
couldn't be the cause of autism, because autistic kids' hair showed less mercury. This was deliberately misleading. Yes, their hair contains less mercury, because their mercury is trapped in their bodies, especially the brain. You might also find less mercury in urine samples, but this is not a good thing. It means the mercury is stuck somewhere, such as the nervous system.
You may read that at certain scheduled vaccinations the mercury exposure exceeded EPA safety guidelines by 80 times or 120 times (those are real estimates, alas). But the EPA is certainly not assuming that the mercury you are exposed to in the environment is going to be injected straight into your bloodstream. The EPA is concerned about, for instance, mercury-contaminated fish. But if you eat mercury, that's not anywhere near as bad as having the stuff injected. If you have a healthy gut (autistic children often don't, but more on that later) then your body will be largely protected from mercury which you consume. The good bacteria (several pounds of it in an average adult) convert the organic mercury into inorganic forms and then you excrete it. No big deal. But inject it into a kid's bloodstream and it's many times more dangerous, and goes straight through the blood-brain barrier (which is not fully developed in babies and young children). It's also organic mercury, roughly estimated to be 1,000 times more toxic to humans than inorganic forms.
Between dentistry, pollution, and vaccines, pretty much every kid has to deal with major metals exposures. But most kids are still fine because they can get rid of these metals as they come in. Autistic children can't do that, for any of the following reasons:
- genetic differences in a protein which carries (or fails to carry) mercury out of the brain
- genetic differences in glutathione production
- genetic differences in testosterone levels
- genetic differences in estrogen levels
- genetic differences in metallothionein production
- viruses in the gut
- yeast and other fungus in the gut
- Clostridium difficile and other harmful bacteria in the gut
- leaky gut syndrome
As Drs. Mark and David Geier and Dr. Boyd Haley (former chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Kentucky) have shown, testosterone increases the neurotoxicity of mercury, while estrogen is protective against neuron death from mercury. Testosterone and mercury also mutually trap each other in large tangles of molecules, preventing either substance from leaving the body, which is why aggression and precocious sexual behaviors are more prevalent in mercury-poisoned children. These facts help explain why 4 times as many boys have autism than girls, why more boys have ADHD, and why boys are now as much as two grade levels behind girls in some states.
Glutathione and metallothionein are chemicals produced by the liver which bind to metals and help them to be excreted. Glutathione levels are generally inversely related to testosterone levels. High testosterone levels usually indicate that less glutathione is available to remove metals, creating a vicious circle where metals increase testosterone, testosterone decreases glutathione, and insufficient glutathione allows metals to be retained, further increasing testosterone....
The reason the health of the gut (intestines) is so critical is that when the liver filters something toxic out of the bloodstream, it attempts to get rid of it by sending it out in the bile. The liver thinks these toxins will then exit the body, but in fact, that all depends on whether the good bacteria are present in sufficient numbers to neutralize the toxins. Bacteria such as acidophilus, bifidus, and others actually convert organic mercury (which would simply be re-absorbed) into an inorganic form (which is eliminated). It's a case of symbiosis: the good bacteria protect their own home, the human they live in, by assisting that human in eliminating poisons.
Leaky gut syndrome is when the situation in the digestive tract has been very bad for so long that the lining of the intestine is eroded, and foreign particles travel straight into the bloodstream. In particular, it turns out that gluten and casein (wheat and milk protein, respectively) break down during digestion to form opiate-like substances. These opioids are produced in everyone, but they are not supposed to go through the intestinal wall at that stage of digestion. If, however, you've got an intestinal wall like Swiss cheese, the opiate-like molecules go straight into the blood-- and the child is literally drugged.
A lot of autistic parents say their child will only eat carbs and dairy. Well, this is why. They have a sort of addiction to these weird proteins that wind up in their blood. Many parents begin the journey of recovery by gradually putting their child on the GFCF (Gluten-Free Casein-Free) diet. One mother who did this cold turkey said that her son screamed for two weeks solid when they took away the bread, pasta, and dairy (she did not recommend going cold turkey!). She said she got on her internet support boards crying every day, saying she couldn't do it. But at the end of the two weeks, her son's crying stopped, and he began to talk.
That mom's name is Julie Berle. You can see before and after video of her son Baxter, who is now indistinguishable from normal kids, in the first video at this Recovered Autistic Children page. Diet was not enough in Baxter's case; they also did chelation.
"Chelation" is the removal of heavy metals using a drug. If you go to your pediatrician and they do a test and find out your child has very high lead levels, they'll say "Oh my gosh! We've got to get your kid to the hospital for chelation!" And you'll go and have IV chelation using one of three drugs: DMSA, DMPS, or EDTA.
If, on the other hand, your kid has sky-high levels of mercury, arsenic, uranium, cadmium, antimony, tin, or aluminum (or even all of those), they'll go "Well, the lead levels look fine," and that'll be the end of it. They don't chelate anything but lead, even though mercury is considerably more neurotoxic than lead.
I am simply agog at the stupidity of this. Mercury? No prob. Arsenic? Eh. Aluminum? No biggie. Uranium? Yawn. Lead? Oh my God, it's an emergency!!
Now they're trying to say chelation is dangerous. Not dangerous if you chelate lead, and yet dangerous if you chelate mercury. Even though the two procedures can be done in exactly the same way using the same drugs at the same dosages. Uh-huh.
Actually, the doctors who are treating autism and recovering children are considerably safer than the hospital staff who treat lead poisoning. Alternative doctors often load up a child on minerals such as zinc, iron, and copper, because these can be depleted along with harmful metals. They also try to heal the child's gut before beginning chelation, to insure that freed-up toxic metals will be properly excreted, and not just float around in the body. They've developed a transdermal form of DMSA (think "the patch"), which is FDA-approved for use in children. You can chelate more slowly and with less trauma to the child that way.
There was an autistic boy who died following chelation a couple of years ago, which was publicized to the effing hilt by mainstream medicine. But that doctor was not a DAN doctor, nor familiar with their methods. Defeat Autism Now is a group that developed a treatment protocol and trains doctors in things like the GFCF diet, anti-virals and anti-fungals, chelation, etc. The doctor involved in the boy's death was using the wrong kind of EDTA at the wrong dosage, and screwed up the calcium levels so badly that this kid died of myocardial infarction. DAN doctors, if they do use EDTA (which seems to be rarely), add magnesium to balance out the rise in blood calcium levels. In short, the alternative medical doctors know what the hell they're doing, but the doctor involved in that child's death did not. Anyway-- the entire issue is easily avoided by using DMSA or DMPS, which have never caused any child's death. Again, DMSA is FDA-approved for chelation of metals in children, and is used thousands of times per year by mainstream doctors to remove lead from poisoned kids. There is also a transdermal form of DMPS used by hundreds of families.
The folks at the NIH, FDA, CDC, Merck, etc, are now faced with declining autism rates in states which reduced thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines. (And by the way, in most of the country thimerosal is still used in numerous vaccines, and mercury exposures have fallen by less than half of what they were in the 90's. It is patently NOT TRUE that mercury is gone from our vaccines.) The medical establishment is additionally faced with children who are "formerly autistic," who recovered following chelation of heavy metals. Doctors regularly test the urine of children undergoing chelation and find that metals just pour out of them, and the more metal comes out, the more the child improves cognitively and socially. I would say we've got all the proof we need that metals, but mercury in particular, are the cause of autism.
My pediatrician once said that anyone suggesting that autism is curable is preying upon vulnerable parents by giving them false promises. This is a claim that can be trotted out whenever anyone finds a treatment that the mainstream doesn't believe in. People who suggest treating lymphoma with IV vitamin C could be accused of "preying upon vulnerable cancer patients with false promises"-- and never mind what was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The "false promises" accusation is usually a flat-out attempt to silence anyone who wants to explore a treatment that doesn't profit Big Pharma, and isn't under the control of the American Medical Association (may they rot in hell). I'm not preying upon anyone, but they sure are covering their asses.
You can find further stories of recovery from autism, often with before and after video of the child, here:
Autism Research Institute (here and here)
Stan Kurtz's site
Generation Rescue
And a last word from Julie Berle, mentioned above:
If I had listened to the naysayers, Baxter would most likely still be lying on the floor in a room by himself, drooling and perseverating on car wheels. Please don't give up!
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