When you see this picture what do you think of? This is the molecule thimerosal, a mercury containing compound that is a central in the mercury vs. autism debate. I will admit that I am a new to this controversy, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have an opinion. As Jeffrey P. Baker points out in his paper Mercury, Vaccines, and Autism (2008) the current mercury debate is heavily intertwined with historical opinions. To be honest I also rely on these historical opinions which are often incorrect and based off of pseudo science. This can be dangerous because pseudo science spreads like wild fire. The difficult part with this is that most current events are curent events because they are not understood. This means often scientists are still trying to figure what is right and what is wrong, so there will not be unified positions. Scientists can also be quite opinionated when it comes to what is right, and generally it biased in terms of their research.
How is the general public suppose to know what is right and wrong then? Medicine may be destroying our babies, birds now have a flu that could kill everybody, neutrinos now go faster then the speed of light. We live in a world of pseudo science, and a lightning fast information system. I think we need to slow down. We want instant results for everything including research. But we all have to realize it takes time. Once a professor told me “However long you expect an chemical experiment/research to take, multiply that by 6”. It takes time, it takes time. So my advice would be, if some sort of scientific breakthrough is announced take it with a grain of salt, scientists can sometimes over-exaggerate the implications of their work.
So it has been a while since the peak of the moms against mercury, it could be said that the smoke has cleared. So what is the scientific opinion on thimerosal at the moment? Aforementioned Jeffrey P. Baker has written a paper on thimerosal, and he does a very good job taking a holistic look. First he mentions that people not lived through the disasters that these vaccines are preventing. Just keeping the terribleness of these diseases in mind it may be enough to give vaccines another chance. He first looks at why mercury was included in the vaccines. Mercury was seen as a way of destroying the risk of contaminated vaccines which in one instance killed as many as 21 children.
Baker then goes on to mention that another problem in the misunderstanding of thimerosal is “the convergence of the history of ethylmercury with the parallel history of methylmercury in the mid-1990s.” Methelmercury being proven to be somewhat toxic which people are comparing to the ethylmercury which is found in thimerosal.
These molecules may look very simular there are only one methyl (CH3) group apart. This may be part of the reason the opposition groups get confused. It would seem that two molecules that are so close in structure must have simular effects. Aka because methylmercurys are bad for you ethylmercurys must be too. The funny comparison I would suggest would be the methlymercury/ethylmercury relation compared to the testosterone/esteriol (male and female hormones respectively) relation. Just as methylmercury/ethylmercury differ by one methly group so do testosterone/esteriol showing that the difference in methly group can create quite different results.
As always the body is much to complicated for me to talk about, let alone understand. Take the scientific world with a grain of salt.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2376879/?tool=pmcentrez
Opinions of sciences
