Its Not Just The Mercury: Aluminum Hydroxide In Vaccines

When parents began suspecting that their children's autism was triggered by their vaccines, and those parents in the scientific professions began to look at the plausibility of the vaccine/autism connection, one ingredient jumped out at them as the most likely culprit. Mercury. Excessive mercury. So much mercury in one typical shot (25mg)that according to EPA guidelines a person must weigh 550lbs to safely process the amount of mercury that was being injected into a child. And they often got more than one shot at a time.

After all mercury is the most toxic substance on earth that does not set off a geiger counter.

It has taken more than a decade, but the public and scientific community is finally on the same page on the idea that it does not belong in vaccines. And yet is it still in vaccines. We continue to work on the problem.

But now that the mercury message is out there, it is time for the scientific community to begin to turn their attention to the other three well known dangers that are in vaccines. Aluminum, Monosodium Glutamate, and Formaldehyde.

Today we are going to give Aluminum a look.

Aluminum is known to be associated with degenerative, fatal neurological conditions like Parkinson's, ALS (Lou Gehrig's) and Alzheimer's. And yet according to the CDC, it is in the following vaccines:

Anthrax, DTaP (all brands), DT (all brands), Hib/Hep B (Comvax), Hep A (all brands), Hep B (all brands), HPV (Gardasil), Pneumococcal (Prevnar), Rabies (Biorab), Td (all brands), and Tdap (all brands).

That is most of the vaccines on the CDC's list.

The reason that aluminum is in our vaccines is because it is an adjuvant.

Generally speaking, the way vaccines work is that they contain a virus and substances called ‘adjuvants’ (like mercury and aluminum) that kick the immune system into high gear so that they go on the hunt for the viruses, eat ‘um up, and create antibodies against further infection.

In people with typical immune systems, the body then stands down from high alert. But in some people, it doesn’t, and the immune system begins to behave like early 20th century Germany and attacks what ever is in sight. The result, autoimmune disorders.

A few examples of autoimmune disorders: When the immune system attacks the connective tissue, you get arthritis, when it attacks the mylon sheath around the nerves, you get Guillain-Barré Syndrome (a known side effect of the flu shot that causes paralysis), and when it attacks the pancreas you have Type 1 Diabetes. And on and on.

Because autism was first seen as a psychiatric problem caused by bad parenting, it has taken decades for it to be properly medically investigated, and for the autoimmune features of the disorder (i.e. cytokines in the brain causing swelling leading to cognitive dysfunction) to be recognized. (Which is why even mild anti inflammatory agents like fish oil improve communication skills of so many people with autism, and why parents report that children’s autistic symptoms seem to improve when their kids are sick.)

(When Chandler was diagnosed and we had his immune system tested, viola… hyper drive. I just thought he had rough skin… turns out it was mild eczema. When I started him on fish oil and his rough skin turned back into baby skin and his eye contact and verbal skills improved.)

So the reason that aluminum needs as hard a look as a vaccine component as mercury does, is because we are learning that it also causes cell death. A lot of cell death. In the brain.

Canadian neuroscientist Chris Shaw did not set out to shake confidence in vaccination, but what he and his team found when testing Aluminum Hydroxide, the form used most often in vaccines, really upset them.

"No one in my lab wants to get vaccinated," he said. "This totally creeped us out. We weren't out there to poke holes in vaccines. But all of a sudden, oh my God-we've got neuron death!"

Vaccines Show Sinister Side
By Pieta Woolley
Straight.com
March 23, 2006

If two dozen once-jittery mice at UBC are telling the truth postmortem, the world's governments may soon be facing one hell of a lawsuit. New, so-far-unpublished research led by Vancouver neuroscientist Chris Shaw shows a link between the aluminum hydroxide used in vaccines, and symptoms associated with Parkinson's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease), and Alzheimer's.

Shaw is most surprised that the research for his paper hadn't been done before. For 80 years, doctors have injected patients with aluminum hydroxide, he said, an adjuvant that stimulates immune response.

"This is suspicious," he told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview from his lab near Heather Street and West 12th Avenue. "Either this [link] is known by industry and it was never made public, or industry was never made to do these studies by Health Canada. I'm not sure which is scarier."

Similar adjuvants are used in the following vaccines, according to Shaw's paper: hepatitis A and B, and the Pentacel cocktail, which vaccinates against diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, and a type of meningitis.

To test the link theory, Shaw and his four-scientist team from UBC and Louisiana State University injected mice with the anthrax vaccine developed for the first Gulf War. Because Gulf War Syndrome looks a lot like ALS, Shaw explained, the neuroscientists had a chance to isolate a possible cause. All deployed troops were vaccinated with an aluminum hydroxide compound. Vaccinated troops who were not deployed to the Gulf developed similar symptoms at a similar rate, according to Shaw.

After 20 weeks studying the mice, the team found statistically significant increases in anxiety (38 percent); memory deficits (41 times the errors as in the sample group); and an allergic skin reaction (20 percent). Tissue samples after the mice were "sacrificed" showed neurological cells were dying. Inside the mice's brains, in a part that controls movement, 35 percent of the cells were destroying themselves.

"No one in my lab wants to get vaccinated," he said. "This totally creeped us out. We weren't out there to poke holes in vaccines. But all of a sudden, oh my God-we've got neuron death!"

At the end of the paper, Shaw warns that "whether the risk of protection from a dreaded disease outweighs the risk of toxicity is a question that demands our urgent attention."

He's not the only one considering that.

The charge that there's a sinister side to magic bullets isn't new. With his pen blazing, celebrity journalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. popularized vaccine scepticism with his article arguing that mercury in vaccines causes autism, which ran in the June 2005 Rolling Stone and on-line at Salon.com. So did last year's vaccines-linked-to- autism bestseller, Evidence of Harm by David Kirby (St. Martin's Press). But there's a potential public-health cost to all the controversy, according to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

"Vaccines have been a victim of their own success," spokesperson Ian Roe told the Straight in a telephone interview from Ottawa. Diseases such as polio, which killed his father-in-law, are almost eradicated and therefore no longer serve as a warning to parents. But the epidemic threat is still real. "If everyone decided to not get vaccinated, we'd live in a very different world."

Canada's last national immunization conference, in December 2004, heard a report that vaccine coverage is sometimes low. For diphtheria, the Public Health Agency of Canada found that just 75 percent of two-year-olds are immunized; the target is 99 percent. For tetanus, just 66 percent of 17-year-olds are immunized, compared to a target of 97 percent.

Dr. Ronald Gold, the former head of the infectious-disease division at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, told the conference that "we will never be without an anti-vaccine movement," but "in reality, there is no scientific evidence for these myths."

Can I just stop here for a second and point out that in the middle of offering you scientific evidence for the theory that vaccines cause serious and permanent brain damage that I AGAIN have to be faced with someone in medical authority saying, "NO LINK"! How many studies have to find a link before they will stop saying it, "no link"?

There are hundreds of studies, but they don't want to look at them.

I will start writing more about them.

The collective denial is staggering.

Shaw acknowledges that there's a lot of pressure on parents to vaccinate their children. "You're considered to be a really bad parent if you don't vaccinate," he said-and your child can't attend public school. "But I don't think the safety of vaccines is demarcated. How does a parent make a decision based on what's available? You can't make an intelligent decision."

Conservatively, he said, if one percent of vaccinated humans develop ALS from vaccine adjuvants, it would still constitute a health emergency.

It's possible, he said, that there are 10,000 studies that show aluminum hydroxide is safe for injections. But he hasn't been able to find any that look beyond the first few weeks of injection. If anyone has a study that shows something different, he said, please "put it on the table. That's how you do science."

Neuroscience research is difficult, Shaw said, because symptoms can take years to manifest, so it's hard to prove what caused the symptoms.

"To me, that calls for better testing, not blind faith."

He pointed out that George W. Bush passed legislation that opens the door for the USA to order a nationwide anthrax immunization campaign, with the threat of bioterrorism.

Shaw's paper is currently undergoing a peer review.

Despite the fact that Shaw announced his study in March of 2006, only three months ago, Melinda Wharton, Deputy Director of the National Center of Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, gave an interview to Jaye Watson of WXIA TV in Atlanta and here is what she said about the dangers of aluminum content:

Q. Aluminum is used in vaccines. This is a question I bring with me from attending the conference and seeing a panel of 3 doctors or so talk about aluminum and the amount in vaccines. One said that the aluminum exposures for the vaccine’s recommended of the 2 month visit exceed the suggested safety limits set by the FDA. Has the CDC tested the toxicity of aluminum in vaccines?

A. The vaccines are licensed by the FDA, and the vaccines meet FDA standards, so no, CDC hasn’t looked at that particular issue, but that is handled by the Food and Drug Administration’s part of vaccine licensing.

Q. So, that would almost be counter productive….

A. It wouldn’t be licensed if it was toxic.

Because we all know that the FDA would never license something that was harmful to people. (Thalidomide is currently an FDA approved drug? What the hell?!)

Shaw's study completed peer review, it was published in in 2207 in Neuromolecular Medicine:

Aluminum adjuvant linked to gulf war illness induces motor neuron death in mice.
Neuromolecular Med. 2007;9(1):83-100.
Petrik MS, Wong MC, Tabata RC, Garry RF, Shaw CA.

Department of Ophthalmology and Program in Neuroscience, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Gulf War illness (GWI) affects a significant percentage of veterans of the 1991 conflict, but its origin remains unknown. Associated with some cases of GWI are increased incidences of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other neurological disorders. Whereas many environmental factors have been linked to GWI, the role of the anthrax vaccine has come under increasing scrutiny. Among the vaccine's potentially toxic components are the adjuvants aluminum hydroxide and squalene. To examine whether these compounds might contribute to neuronal deficits associated with GWI, an animal model for examining the potential neurological impact of aluminum hydroxide, squalene, or aluminum hydroxide combined with squalene was developed. Young, male colony CD-1 mice were injected with the adjuvants at doses equivalent to those given to US military service personnel. All mice were subjected to a battery of motor and cognitive-behavioral tests over a 6-mo period postinjections. Following sacrifice, central nervous system tissues were examined using immunohistochemistry for evidence of inflammation and cell death. Behavioral testing showed motor deficits in the aluminum treatment group that expressed as a progressive decrease in strength measured by the wire-mesh hang test (final deficit at 24 wk; about 50%). Significant cognitive deficits in water-maze learning were observed in the combined aluminum and squalene group (4.3 errors per trial) compared with the controls (0.2 errors per trial) after 20 wk. Apoptotic neurons were identified in aluminum-injected animals that showed significantly increased activated caspase-3 labeling in lumbar spinal cord (255%) and primary motor cortex (192%) compared with the controls. Aluminum-treated groups also showed significant motor neuron loss (35%) and increased numbers of astrocytes (350%) in the lumbar spinal cord. The findings suggest a possible role for the aluminum adjuvant in some neurological features associated with GWI and possibly an additional role for the combination of adjuvants.

(One note on what Apoptosis is. It is basically when a cell self destructs.

Apoptosis is also the process that is taking place, via mitochondrial dysfunction, when Thimerosal is administered, that came to our attention when Dr. Jon Poling discussed the details of his daughter Hannah's case.

Hanna was the first case of an autistic child paid from the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund to be made public, although details are coming to light that she is at least the 10th such child. The other families are currently working to make their cases known.)

So here is the questions that parents are currently beginning to ask: as thimerosal has been in the process of removal from vaccines, have manufacturers replaced it with higher doses of aluminum to added to make up for the adjuvant properties lost when mercury was no longer present? How do we know what a safe level of aluminum is for our children? Does the CDC even care?