Australian Researcher Finds Mercury Poisoning Symptoms Eerily Mirror Autism
SafeMinds proudly announces the launch of its new documentary: From Acrodynia to Autism:
Mercury Across Generations, More Evidence of Harm. This heartbreaking story about the forgotten childhood illness, acrodynia, has lessons for us today as we face an eerily similar disorder, that of autism. As the acrodynia epidemic disappeared from the earth through scientific truth, so can the autism epidemic end in our own lifetimes.
Acrodynia, more commonly called Pink Disease, ravaged children in Europe, North America and Australia in the first half of the 20th Century. Besides developing bright pink hands and feet, common symptoms included social withdrawal, lack of eye contact; loss of language; repetitive and self-injurious behaviors; body-rocking; toe-walking; sensitivity to light, noise and touch; low muscle tone; immune disorders and respiratory problems.
After decades of scientific dead-ends, the primary cause of this mysterious illness was found to be exposure to widely promoted and purportedly "safe" medicines given to infants and young children when their teeth started growing in. The drugs contained inorganic mercury. Scientists later found that 1 in every 500 children exposed to the mercury powders developed the disease as the result of an unusually strong sensitivity to mercury, likely due to their genetics. Once mercury was removed from the drugs, no new cases appeared, although those exposed still live a lifetime of suffering.
Dr. David Austin, a psychologist and autism researcher living outside Melbourne instrumental in the making of From Acrodynia to Autism, provides a riveting account of his research. After coming across a book describing acrodynia symptoms, Dr. Austin was astonished. "It read exactly like you would write a case study about an autistic child," he marvels. "The withdrawal from social contact, the loss of eye contact, the loss of language, the irritability, the banging the head against the wall or beating your head with your fist, the light sensitivity, the sleep disruption. I was speechless after reading this book."
Dr. Austin went on to review data on thousands of children and grandchildren of acrodynia survivors and documented an autism rate of one in 25 in the grandchildren, representing a seven-to eight-fold elevation above the prevalence of autism at the time in Australia. The study, published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, supports the hypothesis that autism can result from the interaction between mercury and a genetic predisposition to heavy-metal sensitivity.
As the film points out, children today are exposed to mercury in many ways: food, air, water, dental amalgams and regularly prescribed medications including vaccines. Such cumulative exposures to mercury, both pre- and post-natal, would clearly be more dangerous to those children with a genetic vulnerability.
Watch the entire story From Acrodynia to Autism through the link at www.safeminds.org.
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SafeMinds seeks to stop the tragic legacy of mercury through advocacy and research. We are identifying individuals at increased vulnerability to the toxic effects of mercury. Our efforts continue to help decrease exposure to mercury from all sources globally. SafeMinds relies on public support to help end the autism epidemic by eliminating all mercury exposures - just as eliminating mercury in teething powders ended the epidemic of acrodynia.
SafeMinds seeks to restore good health and protect future generations by eradicating the devastation of autism and associated health disorders induced by mercury and other toxicants resulting from human activities.
Hi David,
I am producing a film on shark fin soup and the mercury poisoning that can occur as a result of consuming the dish.
I would like to get in contact with someone who has suffered from the debilitating condition so that I can demonstrate to my audience the consequences consuming mercury can have, not only on the individual, but on next generation family members.
I you know of anyone in Perth, WA, or can point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.
All the best.
Amanda Elizabeth
Posted by: Amanda Elizabeth | November 30, 2015 at 09:33 PM
My son regressed developed autism . He had reactions to every vaccine I told nhs I was ignored I have just spent a yr very I'll after having a 1in10000 reaction to insulin ... I had to prove this as was again ignored ...his first shot theoneandonlybambi at birthday sons face bright red and swollen .... I haveno trust for doctors my son suffered terrible bowel problems bowl compaction . 20 movacol a day for 7 days he still couldn't go .... My granddaughter is now diagnosed autistic and has bowel impaction .....mercury and antibiotics caused my sons autism
Posted by: Linda | November 22, 2013 at 04:15 AM
Here is a link to a 2003 report by a committee of the United States House of Representatives that discusses mercury toxicity, vaccines, autism etc.
http://vaccines.procon.org/sourcefiles/Burton_Report.pdf
While many children's vaccines no longer use mercury, they still put it in the flue vaccines. Every vaccine needs an adjuvant, if not mercury then aluminum.
Posted by: Anna S. | October 25, 2013 at 09:42 AM
To Birgit, You're right on the dot there. I would love to see the truth of mercury come out with a big bang, but it seems that it is just going to seep out slowly, drop by drop, so to speak, as more and more people realize that it has affected their lives in some way. One interesting comment by Chris Shade, PhD, biochemistry : He says something like he "has never seen a case of schizophrenia that was not off the charts for mercury ".
Posted by: Cherry Sperlin Misra | October 23, 2013 at 01:28 PM
White Rose! This is exactly the discussion we have to have. The use of mercury in medicines was criminal, in retrospect. The problem is nobody could convince the medical establishment that it was really a toxin. The mantra "the dose makes the poison" is still used as the guiding priinciple for what is being put in vaccines.
The Olmsted/Blaxill book "Age of Autism" talks about Sigmund Freud's cases as being really cases of mercury poisoning. Psychiatry would likely not have become what it is today if the toxicity of mercury had been known to be as insidious as it really is.
Mercury is not the only element that has the dubious distinction of having been a medicine when it really was a poison. Before antibiotics were discovered, there was a medicine, Salvarsan, used against syphilis just like mercurials. That contained arsenic. It was not quite as toxic as mercury, but toxic nevertheless.
The real problem here is your and my high-level reading does not have much weight compared to those famous doctors and denialists in medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. The discussion has to revolve around how do you make believers of those people whose profession you are attacking. Their whole life's work revolved around what they believed to be healing. To tell them that they are criminals is an accusation that is not easily accepted, and those people, as you well know, are fighting tooth and nail against that.
Posted by: Birgit Calhoun | October 22, 2013 at 01:54 PM
Birgit , the use of mercury has been criminal on every occasion . And there are certainly no excuses anymore .
There is no such thing as "safe mercury" , so for me this is a deliberate poisoning, which makes vaccines Hg-enocide.
Particularly obvious when you look at the accelerated vaccine program and a rush to go global with them coupled with a refusal to really ban mercury altogether .
Nothing works quite so well as mercury for destroying the neurological systems of babies and they know that .
Themiserol is the ZyklonB of our time .
How could the WHO agree to phase out mercury amalgams but keep mercury in vaccines , well my reading of that is simply mercury amalgams dont work very well anyway , but mercury in the bloodstream is a real winner for them .
My high level reading about Minimata also suggested/included a great deal of criminal behaviour by the authorities and those with vested interests .
Posted by: White Rose | October 22, 2013 at 03:53 AM
I personally suffered for many years with mercury toxicity. It all started after the Hep B shot when I was 18. I'm sure that was just the catalyst to set my symptoms in motion. After 5 years of medical doctors telling me nothing was wrong, I finally found a holistic doctor, a naturopath/chiropractor. It took him one visit to discover that I was loaded with mercury, a couple weeks to clean my system out and my symptoms almost disappeared. Not completely though. It's been 7 years and I still see a naturopath monthly. Recently mercury has made it's way back to the surface and is stirring up trouble in my body. So after all these years and lifestyle changes (no mercury fillings, eating a clean diet, organic foods, trying to live an organic lifestyle), it's still there in my body, waiting. It never leaves completely. My heart hurts for all these infants that are completely loaded with toxic waste because no one wants to hear the truth. Luckily I suffered and so my child doesn't have to. Her immune system is perfectly intact.
Posted by: Nicole Beers | October 21, 2013 at 10:55 PM
Just wait and see. The movie will probably get "retracted."
Posted by: Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB | October 21, 2013 at 08:54 PM
Thank-you Dr David Austin.
And I appreciate how you helped me with my son.
Elizabeth Gillespie
Posted by: AussieMum | October 21, 2013 at 07:23 PM
The reason why it took so long for it to be discovered to be toxic is that mercury is a very slow poison. It has "worked" for so long for so many people that there was a basic refusal to accept the fact that mercury was not a medicine. It was still recommended as a diuretic in medical textbooks in the '60s. When I first tried to find out about my son Erik I read about Minamata disease, and there were two tiny paragraphs about this disease. The reason for Minamata disease took 30 years to be discovered, and it took another 30-something years for those Japanese who were affected by it to be recompensed by the Chisso plant that made plastics usings mercury in the process. Mercury in amalgams has been used for over 160 years, and there were the so-called amalgam wars over whether to use amalgams in the 1850s and again in the 1920s. The ADA and the AMA were both founded over whether to use or not to use mercury as a tooth filling or a medicine material. The people behind the use of mercury had much at stake and they didn't want to let go.
Posted by: Birgit Calhoun | October 21, 2013 at 07:01 PM
Excellent article, and great points about mercury poisoning, but I have to echo what Joy B said in her comment.
The rules of the game have changed halfway through, and the other side is hiding that fact. Yes, mercury in vaccines caused autism, and continues to factor into autism.
But the pharmaceutical industry has tripled the vaccine schedule, and included vaccines with ingredients other than mercury, that have pretty much the same effect--as well as additional adverse effects on the entire population.
We do, indeed, need a new strategy.
Posted by: Taximom | October 21, 2013 at 05:48 PM
The flu vaccine bully's are in full force, my mothers cardiologist keeps pushing the junk, and she said no today yet again, this time they came out with a long form that she was asked to sign. This is another way to intimidate/bully people. didn't work!
Posted by: Victor Pavlovic | October 21, 2013 at 04:35 PM
@ Joy B, it's a tough choice, isn't it? I keep thinking of Hagrid in one the Harry Potter books, describing negotiating with giants, saying that you want to be careful not to overwhelm them with too much information at once or they might just squash you to simplify things, but I want to hope we are not fighting mentally challenged giants, typically. I know we are fighting pride and greed and the denial these feed. We are definitely fighting fear of disease, a fear some say we are forgetting, but I think we are actually acting less rationally as parents as we become more ignorant of some of these disease. I also suspect we are likely fighting a few very corrupted, powerful, some not so powerful, policy control freaks who really believe, or at least feel free enough to test a hypothesis that poisoning the most "defective" inferior fellow human beings is the genius path to both secure world domination and ultimately a better world.
I know that last part particularly turns some off. Bringing up the whole laundry list of inadequately tested ingredients and facets of vaccination probably turns quite a few off. How could something be problematic when they've heard their whole lives from every trusted institution sometimes how wonderful vaccines are?
I hope focusing on one aspect encourages more study in the honestly open minded, but I know it gives too many the opportunity to compare apples and oranges dishonestly.
We have also been calling for observation of a never-vaccinated control group. Our mainstream media propaganda sources generally avoid dealing with this issue. Maybe that says something about the value of that approach?
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | October 21, 2013 at 03:08 PM
The cynic in me strongly suggests mercury laden "teething powders" would still be recommended and approved TODAY .. for infants .. if they had been awarded the same "product liability" protections that allows vaccines containing mercury to continue in use.
It would not surprise me if a majority of the Supreme Court decided "teething powders" . while admittedly "unavoidably unsafe" .. are sooooo critical to relieving the pain and suffering of infants during the teething process .. parents cannot exercise their Constitutional Right to see legal redress in State and Federal courts for the harm done to them and their children.
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | October 21, 2013 at 02:45 PM
I get it, i really do. But it wasn't mercury that that injured my best friend's son 3 1/2 years ago, it was Hep B a few hours after birth. And then the interminable well baby visits. The mother had no "pregnancy flu shot", amalgams, no industrial proximity etc. His twin sister is fine(well, as fine as she can be in this day and age of mandated infant poisoning).
I guess what I'm saying is that if we can all agree that it doesn't matter if it's mercury, aluminum, or strawberry jam, we should be able craft a simplified message that doesn't rely on causative factors which have ostensibly been 'removed'. It's simply not the mercury for this latest generation, but the sheer volume of ALL adjuvants, and the subsequent encephalopathy and gut destruction. Focusing on mercury, then aluminum, then mercury... this only gives the industry a leg up in whatever esoteric web of lies they choose to throw onto the debate. So it's the effects of ANY and ALL vaccinations on not only the 'vulnerable subgroups', but the more subtle damage to the perfectly healthy, which must be elucidated for the general public. They, who don't have a fine enough sense of history or chemistry to see the big picture. Call me cynical but we need a new strategy.
Posted by: Joy B | October 21, 2013 at 12:57 PM
Thank you, safeMinds, for this compelling look at acrodynia, and thank you to all the individuals filmed for helping us by speaking out. Again we see that an exposure to mercury that some seem to pass through unscathed can torture through various mechanisms and even kill. I want to believe we know enough that this should never happen again, but sometimes I get the frightening impression that a symptom of mercury use is susceptibility to chronic denial that is sometimes only remedied by experiencing the extreme end of the mercury injury spectrum. We need with open minds to study the perspective of mercury use presented in the book Age of Autism and to take caution to not follow the destructive path Freud and too many others have taken.
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | October 21, 2013 at 12:52 PM
David:
Very well done.
The connections were obvious. People only needed to look and listen.
Louis
Posted by: Louis Conte | October 21, 2013 at 10:49 AM