The Swedish Chemicals Inspectorate is reporting the “mercury levels are increasing by about 0.5% per annum in the topmost layer of its forest soils and southern Sweden is already above the levels which have been shown to affect biological process and organisms in the soil.”[i] According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences between the late 1970s and late 1980s, the average level of mercury in biosolids  (inevitable by-product of the sewage treatment plants ) that are used as fertilizers for farm lands increased from 2.8 mg/kg to 5.2 mg/kg, and arsenic levels from 6.7 mg/kg to 9.9 mg/kg while levels of lead, nickel, cadmium decreased.[ii]

     Ice core studies have shown that we have already increased environmental mercury levels by a factor of 20 over the last 270 years.[iii] Fish around the world are showing dangerous levels of mercury threatening one of mankind’s basic supplies of protein with lakes, rivers and even the deep ocean badly contaminated with mercury. Many scientists and doctors from around the globe have shown how low levels of mercury toxicity is directly related to illnesses like cancer, heart disease and a host of neurological problems like Alzheimer’s, MS, ALS, autism spectrum syndromes and could even be playing a major role in the rapid increases we are seeing in diabetes because of the way mercury attacks Sulphur bonds in both insulin and insulin receptor sites. Most people are not convinced that mercury is causing most of these diseases yet doctors acknowledge a long list of horrible toxic effects that it does cause.  When it comes to mercury how many bodies do we have to find to convict it as a serial killer? Does it really matter if there might be 3 more diseases that are not added to the list of the other 147 problems it does cause? Actually it does matter for most of the harm mercury is doing is not recognized and this lack of recognition is one of the reasons public health officials are not taking the problem seriously enough.  

Mercury is a potent toxin. When ingested in even tiny amounts it can cause devastating effects on the human nervous system, especially for children and the unborn.
As early as 1999 reports found mercury levels in rain over Chicago Illinois that are as high as 42 times EPA safe levels; Detroit, Michigan rain with 65 times safe levels; and rain along the Illinois/Wisconsin border as high as 56 times safe levels.[iv]

     According to a study released in October of 2004, conducted by the University of North Carolina, 21% of women of childbearing age have mercury levels in their hair that exceeds federal health standards.[v] That is up from 8 percent in just four years using a recent CDC study as a reference point. Under United States guidelines, 79 per cent of Inuvik women of childbearing age have unsafe levels of mercury.[vi] Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a directive warning women of childbearing age to eat no more than two meals or 12 ounces of seafood, including canned tuna, weekly. That directive was based in part on the work of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency biochemist, Kathryn Mahaffey, who estimates that one in six pregnant women in the United States had high enough blood mercury to damage her child, for a total of 630,000 U.S. newborns at risk.[vii] This was the first study to calculate the numbers based on children's blood levels, not mothers'. The EPA analysis is showing that even if the mother is below the danger zone, she can give birth to a baby that's over the limit. It is exactly at this point where humanity is most vulnerable to mercury’s devastating power and this seems to be showing up in huge numbers of children with neurological and developmental disorders.

Recent research has shown that the umbilical cord can have an
average mercury concentration 1.7 times as great
as the concentration in the mother's blood.[viii]

     The really bad news is that this chemical nightmare story is getting worse, much worse. To get a real grasp of the size of the frightening story with mercury and what is threatening our children and our future - it’s a valuable exercise to take a look at the size of the earth and see how much mercury it would take to pollute it remembering that a standard of toxicity commonly used is one gram of mercury pollutes a 20 acre lake, enough to make its fish unsafe to eat. An alternative measurement sometimes used is 1/70^th of a teaspoon. Mercury is pretty heavy stuff with a ton fitting in the size of a large garbage can.

     The world is 510 million square kilometers and 71 percent of that is ocean. When we talk about one gram polluting a 20 acre lake, 20 acres equals .081 square kilometers. One ton of mercury contains 1 million grams of mercury which would thus pollute 81,000 square miles of lakes. One thousand tons would pollute 81 million square kilometers so 7,000 tons of mercury would pollute a lake the size of the world. The world is not a lake so the one gram rule does not work but it offers us a beginning reference point. The oceans are quite deep and the atmosphere also holds a vast capacity to hold mercury as does the soil.

     With an additional 210,000 tons or so over the last 37 years total production of mercury over the last five hundred years has been approximately 1 million tons. That is 1,037,000,000,000 grams (over a trillion) or enough to blanket each 20 acres on earth with 148 grams. It is these 148 grams that is responsible for mercury levels increasing by a factor of 20 times over the last 3 centuries though if those ice core studies had gone back two centuries more the increase from the year 1500 would be greater. Though mining production of mercury has now declined to about 4000 tons a year - production is up in coal plants, hospital and industrial incinerators, landfills and sewage sludge. “There are large quantities of mercury-containing waste within society,” say the Swedes, “and the quantities will increase as goods in use today reach the end of their of their useful life.” Mercury production peaked in the early 1970s but the direct pollution of the air through a broad collection of other sources has increased dramatically. It is reasonably safe to assume that more mercury is entering the environment now each year than ever before.

     Another point of reference is plutonium toxicity. Experiments with beagle dogs suggest that approximately 27 millionths of a gram of insoluble plutonium would be sufficient to cause lung cancer in an adult human being with virtual certainty, with significant risks probably associated with far lower doses,” reports International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.[ix]  It has been said that 20 milligrams will cause death in a month; 100 milligrams death in 1 to 10 days and that 100 micrograms will cause death through cancer with a delay measurable in years. Thus according to the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR) 0.1 grams would overdose one million people, a gram ten million, 100 grams one billion people and 600 grams six billion, the entire worlds’ population.[x] 600 grams is about the size of ten AA batteries.

    Mercury is also a potent toxin but is a big step down from plutonium. Yet even when absorbed in tiny amounts mercury can cause devastating effects on the human nervous and immune systems, depending on the sensitivity of a person; and this is especially true for young children and the unborn who are ultra sensitive to mercury’s poisonous effects. Associated illnesses include brain, lung and kidney damage and even death. The EPA sets daily safe limits at .1 micrograms per kilogram and the World Health Organization sets it at .47 micrograms per kilo. That would put the daily safe limit somewhere between 5 and 25 micrograms of organic mercury a day.   

Mercury alters biological systems because of its affinity for sulfhydryl
 groups which are functional parts of most enzymes and hormones.

It induces a change in cell structure while disrupting critical
 electron transfer reactions leading to cells being perceived as
 foreign by the body’s immune defense and repair system.

The prevalence of mercury in our environment is endemic in nature.

                                                                                                     Dr. Rashid Buttar

    Even if we placed the toxicity of plutonium 10,000 times higher than that of mercury we can still see that the amount of mercury being put on earth and in our mouths and in our children’s bodies through vaccines is astonishingly high. Sixty thousand tons of mercury would be equivalent perhaps to 6 tons of plutonium and six tons of plutonium released on earth would turn our beautiful planet into a wasteland when you think that only 600 grams divided up between 6 billion people would overdose them.  The FDA says that 2 to 3 thousand tons[xii] of metallic mercury is being released into the air from manmade sources so in general we have a current pollution contamination factor somewhere between 6 to nine thousand tons when land, soil and water pollution are factored in. Much of this comes from past mercury production that is stored in products that are at the end of their life cycle, from old mercury mining sites leaching into water streams, from cremation where amalgam teeth fillings evaporate, from discharges from dental offices, current mining operations, broken thermometers in land fills, scraping of cars with mercury loaded light switches, used florescent light bulbs etc. Power plants in the US put 48 tons of mercury a year into the atmosphere through burning coal;[xiii] world wide that number rises to approximately 250 tons. In the U.S. hospitals that burn their wastes put 20 tons a year into the air and potentially upwards of 200 tons are lost into the environment because that is how much Hg is ordered into hospitals to repair sphygmomanometers.[xiv] Every plastic manufacture pours it out and every new car is laden with its fumes.    

     The present situation with mercury is a lot like radioactivity after a nuclear war. It has spread out into the atmosphere and into the oceans where it gains strength and toxicity through the process of methylation. Radioactivity tends, with the passing of many years, to lower in toxicity but mercury runs up the hill to more toxic levels with the help of fish, mammals and bacteria. (Bioaccumulation) Fish can concentrate mercury in the water by a factor of many thousands of times with organic mercury being 100 times more toxic than metallic mercury. In the next ten years we will pollute the world with approximately another sixty thousand tons of mercury after already adding over 300 thousand tons during the past fifty years alone. The problem currently is that the earth and our oceans are extremely close to reaching a critical saturation point. The constant tonnage of mercury added each day is adding to an already bad situation ready to deteriorate rapidly. Considering that mercury is an accumulative poison with delayed effects or a lag time measured in years, we can see that humanity has created a time bomb that is ticking while even more poison is added. 

A Dartmouth professor studying the chemical characteristics of an
 organic form of mercury – diethyl mercury – spilled two drops of it
on her gloved hand. The first sign of mercury poisoning occurred four
 months later when her speech began to be slurred. This was followed
 by difficulty walking and loss of vision. She then fell into a coma and died.

     The real secret to the toxicity of mercury lies in the fact that each atom or organic molecule containing mercury has a toxic effect on a cell, hormone, hormone receptor site, red blood cell, or neuron. When you look at the fact that a half a gram of mercury contains 1,501,430,636,558,496,585,414 atoms one begins to understand how so little can do so much damage. Here at the introduction to the rising tide of mercury we are dealing with huge tonnage quantities but later we will go down to the microscopic level to study how it destroys body chemistry and creates disease.

     No one knows the exact saturation point or when environmental conditions will pose an immediate direct threat to civilization. It is safe to say though that the level of mercury accumulation in the air, soil and waters has reached a point where it is threatening and providing a depressing effect on human physiology, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable link, to young women of childbearing age and the children they are bringing into the world. They are threatened most directly through eating fish and from two factors discussed directly below. Also mercury is making its presence felt more and more in the soil and is entering the food chain via our crops. If the story ended here we might sit back and relax thinking we probably have another century to work it all out. And this might be true for parts of the human race, those who live in the southern hemisphere far from industry where the air is somewhat cleaner and for those who do not eat fish.

     But into this nightmarish story comes a one two punch that has already hit uncountable millions of children and adults. Though dentists started using amalgam dental fillings 180 years ago (which are fifty percent mercury by weight) it was not until about 1950 that they started to place, on a worldwide level, hundreds of tons per year in peoples’ mouths. The entire baby boom population has been burdened with an average of 5 to 10 grams of mercury in their mouths; and it is they who are moving toward older age and the effects of low grade mercury vapor release (24 hours seven days a week) over decades of time. The vapors released that are absorbed directly by the lungs is much more concentrated than the pollution in the air or water and in many peoples’ cases exceeds all known safety limits made by health authorities around the world. Vapors from Hell is the appropriate chapter title that details the science of this highly toxic mercury vapor release and it is most amazing to see the vast majority of dentists in deep denial, with dental organizations over lording them with threats of losing their licenses if they warn their patients of the inherent dangers of placing mercury only three inches from their brains.

     If that were not enough in 1990 and 1991, the pediatricians, in their infinite wisdom, increased the number of vaccines containing mercury into the childhood schedule. In the 1990s the amount of mercury injected directly into babies in their first year of life increased by a factor of two to three and it was not until 1999 that American health officials realized a mistake was made. In the year 2005 that mistake has not been rectified in the third world and only partially in the United States where mercury is still used in childhood vaccines, though at a greatly reduced amount. This means that some babies, when receiving multiple injections, (and this was the case for 95 % of babies from 1991 until 2001) received from fifty to seventy five micrograms of mercury mixed with aluminum which supercharges its toxicity through the roof. This has been injected into babies with as little as five kilograms which means the safe level from the EPA of .1 microgram per kilogram and .47 micrograms from the WHO was vastly exceeded. Some children die within hours or days of such chemical brutality. To poison another is a soul less act so we cannot poison others and stand up proudly and announce the fact. It is from this perspective that we can understand why the majority of dentists, doctors and public health officials remain in total denial of the great harm they are doing.

     Thus we have reached a watershed point though medical and health officials are scratching their heads wondering what is going on and spend most of their time worrying about the flu and other infectious diseases when it is the non-infectious diseases that are threatening to bring civilization down to its knees. At the end of 2004 Klaus Stohr of the WHO Global Influenza Program said "Even with the best case scenario, the most optimistic scenario, the pandemic will cause a public health emergency with estimates which will put the number of deaths in the range of two and seven million. There is no reason to believe that we are going to be spared. An influenza pandemic will spare nobody. Every country will be affected," he said.[xv] Transpose these words to read, “The current nightmare with mercury and other toxins will spare nobody, every country and every person will be affected” and you will have a better approximation of the truth.

    The world is facing massive poisoning, similar to that which India and Bangladesh are already facing with heavy concentrations of arsenic in their ground water. Yet people are skeptical because the poisoning is slow in coming on. Arsenic is not something you drink and you instantly fall ill, this is something that affects your body over years. It’s the same with mercury poisoning and most of the principle chemicals that are now firmly implanted in our environment. One does not have to be bitten by a snake or spider and fall over dead immediately to be poisoned.  

     To know that we are bringing our children to a chemical slaughtering house is deeply unsettling. There is no changing the fact that even if we feed our kids organic foods, stay away from dentists, doctors and psychiatrists, and live far from the heaviest urban pollution centers, our children will still be absorbing the chemical environment in increasing concentrations. By the year 2025, after we have placed another eight billion tons of hostile chemicals on earth, more than a ton for every man women and child, no doubt the quality of life on earth will be like a bad science fiction or horror movie. We are talking a lot of tons where only a few grams or kilograms of some of these substances will put one six feet under. When it comes to some forms of mercury only a drop will do it.

     When we take the fact that as much as 350 thousand tons of mercury have been mined and put to use in one form or another over the last fifty years, and considering that pure metallic mercury pollution tends to be transformed into more toxic methyl-mercury compounds, we have a tidal wave of effects that are only just beginning to be seen. When we think what is waiting for the children we have recently or are now brining into the world one can only cry. It is truly sad what we as a race have come to, what we have done or have allowed to be done to us and our children. The bottom line to corporate capitalism, democracy, and the great American and European way is upon us. We have provided enough freedom to the selfish motive, enough freedom without any sense of responsibility to poison the world and our children.

    Medicine will have to change its tune and treatment protocols completely and begin to work with detoxification as its main healing principle. Fortunately for all who heed the message of Mercury Rising there is an antidote to mercury toxicity and poisoning that was ironically developed and used fifty years ago by the Chinese and Russians called DMPS that is just now being used in new and safe ways with children with autism with dramatic miraculous effect. There are also natural substances like spirulina and chlorella (green plankton,), natures own way of pulling poisons out of the body while supporting it with super nutrition. Out of despair there is hope for those who listen and learn the truth about what is happening in the environment and in dentists and doctors offices.

Mark Sircus Ac., OMD
Director International Medical Veritas Association
http://www.imva.info
http://www.worldpsychology.net

[i] Kemi Report. Mercury – Investigation of a general ban. Report by the Swedish Chemicals Inspectorate. 3.1
[ii] National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. EHP Online. http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/qa/105-1focus/focusbeauty.html Last visited on December 5, 2004
[iii] Science News, May 1, 2002  Ice cores open new window on mercury deposition.
[iv] Clean the Rain, Clean the Lakes: Mercury in Rain Is Polluting The Great Lakes. Reported by Environmental News Service. http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/courses/geog100/ENS-Mercury.htm
[v] Washington Post. Thursday, October 21, 2004. Study was commissioned by Greenpeace. The study found excess mercury levels in 21 percent of the 597 women of childbearing age who were tested. The study used hair samples so the internals levels of mercury accumulation could potentially be much higher for it is known not all people are able to excrete mercury equally well.
[vi] Bueckert, Dennis. Canadian Press. Health Canada reviews its data as U.S. adopts stricter guidelines. November 20, 2004
[vii] Washington Post. February 6, 2004. EPA Revises Risk Estimates. Mercury Threat To Fetus Raised
[viii] Office of Environmental Health Assessment Services, Washington State. Evaluation of Evidence Related to the Development of a Tolerable Daily Intake for Methylmercury: Previous works have also suggested that the average mercury cord blood levels are 20 – 30% higher than mercury maternal blood levels (Kuhnert et al., 1981). Dennis and Fehr (1975) analyzed paired maternal and cord blood samples for mercury from fish consuming women in northern Saskatchewan (n = 43) and non-fish consuming women living in southern Saskatchewan (n = 45). There was a positive association between mercury maternal and mercury cord blood levels in both regions with the correlation coefficients being 0.45 and 0.87 for the south and north, respectively. Only in the north though, was the mean mercury level significantly different (p< 0.01) between maternal and cord blood samples. The cord blood samples were higher for the north sample group with the slope of the regression being 1.3. Kuhnert and associates (1981) re-addressed this issue of maternal and cord blood mercury level differences using gas chromatography techniques, however, a limitation was that the sample size of the study group was small (n = 29). Methylmercury levels in both plasma and erythrocytes were investigated with 30% more methylmercury observed in fetal erythrocytes than in maternal, while plasma levels were not significantly different. “Total” mercury concentrations in blood were calculated and compared with other studies, with results from the various studies indicating that “total” mercury levels in fetal cord blood are 13% to 24% higher than those in maternal blood. Kuhnert and associates (1981) also suggested that fetal cord whole blood contained 32% more methylmercury than maternal whole blood which is similar to the increase observed between fetal and maternal red blood cells. Although the sample size is a limitation of this study, this work does suggest that the ratio of mercury cord blood levels to mercury maternal blood levels is greater than one.
[ix] Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Plutonium, Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age, International Physicians Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1992, page 148
[x] Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility http://www.ccnr.org/max_plute_aecb.html
[xi] EPA. Mercury Report to Congress. http://www.weblakes.com/Mercury/mercury_report.html
[xii] http://www.fda.gov/fdac/reprints/mercury.html Last visited November 27, 2004 Mercury in Fish. This article originally appeared in the September 1994 issue of FDA Consumer and contains revisions made in May 1995.
[xiii] DEP Commissioner Bradley Campbell statement about national emission levels. Associated Press. Fri, Nov. 05, 2004
[xiv] Colquitt, Phillip J. Labelling all sphygmomanometers. Using the reported 9 Kg/year of Hg ordered in to repair sphygmomanometers in one large Australian hospital without evidence of Hg spill retrieval[16], together with the estimated 24,000 hospitals in the USA reported in Goldberg et al[11], potentially upwards of 200 tons of Hg are being ordered into hospitals to repair sphygmomanometers in USA each year. If used hospital Hg is unaccounted for, as is reported to be the case in Quebec hospitals [17], then the unaccounted for Hg may be assumed to have polluted the immediate hospital environment, thence to pollute the greater environment. http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/eletters/168/1/78#221
[xv] CNN News