Mercury Rain Man?
David Kirby: Rain, Autism, and Mercury
Read More: Autism, Autism Mercury, Autism Vaccines, Babies, Children, Mercury
A new study out of Cornell University says that children growing up in the rainiest or snowiest areas of the country seem to have a higher risk for autism than children living in drier climates.
The authors estimated that removing precipitation as a factor in autism would slice the prevalence of the disorder by 33% to 43%.
Among the possible explanations given were: A lack of vitamin D from a sun-deprived life under the clouds, an increased amount of time spent indoors amid toxic household chemicals, or the presence of dangerous neurotoxins in the precipitation itself, which in turn might trigger a genetic predisposition to ASD.
One of the most omnipresent, growing (and obvious) air-borne neurotoxins in the world to consider, of course, is mercury.
For a number of years, I have questioned whether rising levels of mercury from coal-fired power plants and other sources might be contributing to the overall body burden of heavy metals in pregnant women and infants in North America and elsewhere.
This “background” mercury, combined with mercury from maternal seafood consumption, dental amalgams, the vaccine preservative thimerosal, and other sources, might combine and accumulate in the systems of genetically susceptible infants and fetuses, resulting in autism, I have speculated.
It is not clear how mercury fallout onto land and surface water can cause higher levels of inorganic mercury in the bloodstreams of humans. But a recent study of federal data showed that the percentage of Americans with detectable levels of inorganic mercury in their blood increased eightfold between 2000 and 2004.
These are the same years that we see burgeoning levels of mercury being spewed into the atmosphere from industrializing areas of the world, particularly in China and other Asian countries.
The US Government has detected “mercury plumes” that carry the dangerous neurotoxin in great quantities across the Pacific and, within five days, found them hovering just offshore of San Diego, California.
At a recent vaccine forum at Hackensack University Medical Center, in New Jersey, I made this observation, and mentioned that the mercury carried aloft through the atmosphere will come down in the form of rain along the west coast or, during drier periods, continue eastward until it finds wetter, rainier parts of the country, where it is washed to the ground.
The evidence to show that rainy weather leads to increased mercury deposition on the ground is ample. In fact, scientists use rainfall as a measure to estimate mercury deposition in the environment.
Filed under: Uncategorized
