And a lot of people think anti-mercury dentists are "quacks".

Would you want your kid to eat lead paint? No? Well, lead, cadmium and mercury are all in the same column in the Periodic table, so they have very similar properties. I was awake in chemistry class.

The EPA says mercury is the most dangerous non-radioactive substance they know of.

Sounds like their rationale is, "Hey! At least it's not plutonium!"

http://www.fda.gov/medicaldevices/productsandmedicalprocedures/dentalproducts/dentalamalgam/ucm171094.htm

"Studies have shown that the amount of mercury you are exposed to from your fillings is less than the amount that most people are exposed to in their daily environment or in the food they eat." http://www.colgate.com/app/CP/US/EN/OC/Information/Articles/Oral-and-Dental-Health-Basics/Checkups-and-Dental-Procedures/Fillings/article/Dental-Amalgam-A-Health-Risk.cvsp

The "Mercury Toxicity" Scam: How Anti-Amalgamists Swindle People Stephen Barrett, M.D. http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/mercury.html

The science has been done. The verdict has been in for decades: off gasing is in minute quantities, barely detectable. People aren't being turned into zombies or drooling dementia cases by the fillings in their teeth. Nor do fillings cause autoimmune disease or getting rid of them cures autoimmune disease.

Of course, inhaling large quantities of elemental mercury vapor is bad for you, it's why hospitals now treat broken glass thermometers and mercury containing CFLs like hazmat scenes. However, what's coming off a filling is negligible.

This post is what we mean by SCIENCE. It has been tested and proven.

Your video is a cartoon.

dendrites in a snails brain. Did you confuse the OP with post #1?

It's a screed against amagam fillings.

OK, heard it the second time. The actual film of the effect is disturbing though and that was what I was focused on.

and not as a reply to this video, which happens to be the work of accredited scientists and contains no statements at all about amalgam fillings...

It claims that amalgam fillings are the major contributor to body load of mercury.

This is bad science. This has already been fought to the death.

If they had left that out, it would have been minimally interesting. Instead, it's just more "OH NO MERCURY IN MY FILLINGS GOTTA GET RID OF IT.

If they had left out that and the cartoons, then it would have been interesting. As it is, it's just more quackery.

Plenty of people have suffered on account of mercury. Modern Day sewage treatment plant operators, and scientists who work in that field, women who remodeled their homes during the later part of the Nineteenth Century when mercury was in wallpaper.

And one of the things about amalgam fillings: it became quite the thing to have the fillings removed. So people rushed into their dentists' offices demanding to have their mercury fillings taken out. So the dentists would take out several fillings at a time, and the teeth would be ground into oblivion with drills, so the patients, the dentist and the staff all had that stuff floating in the air around them. I had several acquaintances who had that done, and were ill for some time afterwards. Like you point out, a filling only outgasses a bit (maybe two percent or so per year), but when it all goes into the air at once, it becomes a problem.

People have multiple silver fillings for a lifetime without any problem. The science is IN. They might be unattractive but they're safe and much more durable than any of the replacements.

Some of the microphotography in your film was interesting. However, the propaganda ruined it.

I would hope the university submits a cleaner version at some time in the future.

What I don't get about your concern is this - it is damn hard to find any dentists that continue to use amalgam silver/mercury fillings.

There are zero dentists in my rural community that use them.

Why? Because composite fillings are prettier, and match the pearly whites as though they were part of what you were born with.

The whole amalgam controversy is so 2007.

but they're not nearly as durable as the old silver amalgam fillings. However, fluoridated water will help people keep those fillings longer by preventing decay around them.

I have a feeling silver amalgam will never go away completely. I might still try to choose them for deep fillings in molars just because of the durability.

At 2,4,6,12 months and 2,4yrs

Only one brand of DPT still contains it--at the microgram level. Given the size of the kid and the size of the dose, after injection we're looking at perhaps 30 picogram (smaller than nanogram) blood serum levels.

It's ethyl mercury, not elemental mercury at that. Methyl mercury is the worst; thimerosal is quickly reduced to ethyl mercury, which is eliminated from the body much faster than methyl mercury. So the concentration quickly goes from picogram levels to less.

So, yeah. It's dangerous. In higher doses and other forms.

Now, up until about 2 years the infant's brain is busily adding brain cells. However, synaptic pruning much later kills off many more brain cells than anybody alleges Hg poisoning does. The death of an occasional brain cell is a problem for Hg-based views of autism causation. Esp. since autism can be fairly reliably diagnosed at 6 months, *before* that first dose of mercury was given. (I know, facts can be nasty. But remember, they have a liberal spin. So adjust your views to be liberal and not a McCarthyite.)

The problem with this discourse is one of perspective. If you use preservatives, you save lives overall. Those who die from vaccines in general aren't very likely to be those who would have died, but there are fewer of them. If you're a public health person, you look at the numbers: Better to have 10 die than 500. The problem is that the 10 who die wouldn't have been among those 500. From the POV of one of the parents of those 10 kids, it's better that 100 other kids die than their own. Harsh? Sorry. Numbers aren't known to be especially empathic. They're numbers.

As for the autism hype, there's a real problem with autism. But people are so busy trying to find some scapegoat that they settle on the first possible cause that comes along and shut out anything else. Because that "anything else" might ultimately come back to something genetic (which is "blaming the mother," apparently, because Darwin knows women have great personal control over their genetics), or to lifestyle, or to some reasonable choice that the mother and/or father made (let's not rule out paternal epigenetics). And it still boils down to that basic parental POV--better that a bunch of other kids die to save my kid's life.

Mercury and vaccines in the same manner that we now look back on the cigarette industry's control of the nicotine discussion.

The last generation that didn't need to have things dumbed down happens to be the Baby Boomers. (Even Stanford Univ. Administrators had to adjust course work downwards on account of the fact that the younger generations, victims of so much pollution, Ritalin, and other items couldn't handle the same setup as prior generations.)

We Baby Boomers had vaccines - thank goodness for them too, as vaccines ended the polio epidemic. But usually no one gave kids under the age of two the shots. (Or rather only a few kids under the age of two got those shots.) And a child didn't get vaccinated if they were ill the day the shot was to be given. The personnel administering the vaccine shook up the vial so the heavier materials were dispersed evenly, and they did this before each and every shot. Now the staff at the pediatricians is oh so causal about giving the vaccines to sick babies, as "Well since you brought the baby in to be checked out for their bad cold, we might as well save you another trip and give your child their well baby shots today, rather than ten days from now as they were scheduled.

In the 1930's, our best and brightest researchers were saying that no amount of mercury is acceptable for anyone. And to give a newborn a vaccine as risky as the hepatitis vaccine is insanity.

But the brainwashing is as heavy as it is going to be. I personally came down with Guillaume Barre Syndrome, way back in the mid seventies, but I remained a total advocate of vaccination until being selected to serve on a local health council in the late nineties. After two or three years of meeting researchers who were blacklisted the moment they revealed something dastardly about vaccines, I saw the light. And the public seems inclined to be in wake up mode. In more affluent and better educated communities like Marin County Calif., parents don't vaccinate their kids until the age of two.

As far as ethyl mercury vs other mercury - the biggest problem in the USA is that fluoride is in so many communities' water systems. And the fluoride hampers the blood brain barrier, so that mercury gets a shot at entering the brain. Given that most vaccines also have aluminum, another item usually prevented from entering the brain by the blood brain barrier, but which has a chance to do so if the blood brain barriers has been opened by fluoride, then it is eye opening to realize how impacted the human being is by the shots.

It was removed in 1999. Yet people are still screaming about vaccines containing mercury. Wow.

Some conspiracy theories die a really hard death, people either not keeping up or scrambling to move the goalposts to keep the theory alive.

And it's not exposing infants to too many horrible toxins at a time. Kids get many more pathogens every time they pick something up off the ground and stick it in their mouths. Exposure to pathogens is what makes our immune systems work.

Substituting one toxin for another, even if slightly less toxic, explains why the levels of autism did not drop when the switch was made.

Our bodies are meant to handle environmental junk like nanograms of mercury and formaldehyde.

Change it to liters and you'd be in some trouble. Nanograms won't hurt you or your kids. However, they're hell on bacteria you can't see without a powerful microscope.

Scale is everything.

A minute amount was used. Notice the reaction of brain neuurons.

Researchers in the 1930s patiently explained, in published paper after published paper, that our bodies must be kept clear of mercury. And that would be doubly if not triply important if the human subject was a baby whose system is still developing.

And had they anticipated that formaldehyde would someday be utilized as a replacement for mercury, they might have published papers about the formaldehyde dangers.