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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is running a pretty exhaustive piece on mercury in flu shots.
Flu shot fun. Grant Haller/P-I
It weighs the benefits of flu shots (flus and related disease are blamed for approximately 36,000 deaths annually), with worries about the mercury -- in the form of ethyl mercury -- used as a preservative in the shots.
From the article:
The Environmental Protection Agency and federal Food and Drug Administration have not set an exposure limit for ethyl mercury. The FDA says it's continuing its efforts to reduce the exposure of infants, children and pregnant women to mercury from various sources.
The federal agencies have, however, set exposure limits for another organic and closely related form of mercury, methyl mercury - the type that comes from coal-fired power plants and is found in fish. They use that standard when estimating the safety of ethyl mercury...
... A typical 0.5 milliliter flu shot contains 25 micrograms - or 50,000 parts per billion - of mercury.
The EPA classifies a liquid with 200 parts per billion of mercury as hazardous waste. The limit for drinking water is 2 parts per billion.
Using the standards set for methyl mercury consumption - the kind that's in fish - an average 130-pound person getting the flu shot would exceed the daily limit by more than four times.
The story continues to look in more depth at potential health risks and the mixed messages given for pregnant women and children about flu shots.
On Wednesday the U.S. House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee is holding a hearing on EPA and FDA regulation of mercury in dental fillings.
In Washington, the state Ecology Department two years ago began requiring dental offices to install equipment to remove mercury-based dental amalgam from waste water. Years previous to that dentists were asked to voluntarily install the separators, but fewer than 20 percent of King County dentists did. The state also has an action plan for reducing mercury exposure.
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Posted by unregistered user at 11/15/07 8:15 a.m.
The largest scientific study on the benefits of the flu shot is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine Feb 2005. It concluded there is NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF that the flu shot program over that past decade reduces mortality in the US and states the benefits are "overstated". Just as the CDC claims there is NO scientific proof of harm from ethylmercury in the flu shot, they don't give the same weight to scientific proof demonstrating a lack of efficacy in their campaign. Likewise, in Feb 2005, a pediatric study did not find any impact for the flu vaccine in the early childhood population. LOOK back over the past 10 years, the 36000 mortality rate is re-stated every year with no epidemiological reference. It never goes down - never goes up. In fact, there are only 1-2000 flu deaths each year in the CDC prevalence records when you do NOT count pneumonia or respiratory illnesses which occur from multiple origins.
100% of flu vaccine recipients will get mercury injected into their tissues each year unless they are educated to demand thimerosal free doses. In light of the weak evidence that the flu shot delivered to 70-80 million Americans has any impact on mortality - other than making money and giving administrators a program to cheerlead, the mercury exposure should be a significant deterrant for those of us concerned about preserving brain health for the long term.