The first symptoms of this disease are difficulty concentrating and variable degrees of memory loss, leading ultimately to devastating mental deterioration. The brains of people with Alzheimer's disease shrink by 25 percent and have distinct pathologic hallmarks (neurofibillary tangles, amyloid plaques, and phosphorylation of tau protein). Brain cells grown in the laboratory develop the same three pathologic findings when exposed to nanomolar (3.6 × 10-10 molar) doses of mercury, an amount approximating that found in the brains of people who have a lot of amalgam fillings.

Dental amalgams are the main source of mercury in an adult's brain. An average-sized amalgam filling contains 750,000 micrograms of mercury and releases around 10 micrograms a day. Researchers put radiolabelled mercury amalgams in the teeth of sheep and determined where escaped mercury went with a scanner. They showed that mercury atoms exhaled through the nose travel up filaments of the olfactory nerve to the hippocampus, which controls memory, and to other critical areas in the brain. In another study, rats given the same concentration of mercury that people inhale from their amalgams develop the pathologic markers of Alzheimer's disease. People with Alzheimer's disease have mercury levels in their brains that are 2 to 3 times higher than that seen in normal people.

The mercury in flu vaccines also plays a role in this disease. One investigator has found that people who received the flu vaccine each year for 3 to 5 years had a ten-fold greater chance of developing Alzheimer's disease than people who had zero, 1, or 2 shots.

Another important factor with regard to mercury on the mind, which officials at the CDC, FDA and the professors in the IOM do not consider, is synergistic toxicity - mercury's enhanced effect when other poisons are present. A small dose of mercury that kills 1 in 100 rats and a dose of aluminum that will kill 1 in 100 rats, when combined have a striking effect: all the rats die. Doses of mercury that have a 1 percent mortality will have a 100 percent mortality rate if some aluminum is there. Vaccines contain aluminum.

Why do officials at the CDC, FDA, and leaders of the medical and dental establishment discount or ignore all these important facts? Some of them being in the pay of vaccine makers is one reason. The specter of litigation for having sanctioned thimerosal and amalgams and, in the case of the  FDA, not doing appropriate safety studies on them is another. But it is more complicated than that. The hypothesis that mercury causes autism and Alzheimer's disease is a new truth. And as Schopenhauer points out (see my article on him), each new truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.  And third, it is accepted as self-evident. The mercury truth is now in the second stage.

In the 1790s, Edward Jenner observed that milk maids did not have pock marks on their faces, like people did who had contracted and survived smallpox. Milking cows with cowpox rendered them immune to smallpox. He took fluid from the pustules of infected cows, injected it into children, and found that it protected them, when exposed, from contracting smallpox. The medical establishment of the day dismissed the idea of vaccinating people with cow pus as nonsense; and Sir Joseph Banks, president of the British Royal Society (the IOM of the day), told Jenner that he would ruin his reputation if he tried to publish these findings, which were so much at variance with established knowledge.  When other doctors and informed individuals like Thomas Jefferson recognized that "vaccination" did indeed work, its value was, in time, accepted as self-evident. Jenner's vaccine saved millions of lives and eradicated a disfiguring disease that has a 30 percent mortality rate. (But laboratories in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. preserved the virus that causes smallpox, and we now know that Soviet microbiologists grew vast quantities of it in chicken eggs for use as a biological weapon of mass destruction.)

Today the medical establishment, led by the AAP, AAFP, AMA, CDC, and IOM, has gone to the other extreme. The accepted wisdom now is that vaccines are a panacea. Health-care providers start injecting them in infants on the day of birth, and government officials seek to have them made mandatory for all Americans. But some little-discussed facts belie their value. Deaths from diphtheria, for example, declined 90 percent from 1900 to 1930, due to better sanitation and nutrition, before there was a vaccine for this disease. Likewise, the death rate for measles declined 95 percent (13.3 to 0.03 deaths per 100,000 population) between 1915 and 1958, before the vaccine for measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Viewed from a risk/benefit perspective, providers and government officials downplay the deleterious effects that vaccines can have on one's health and inflate their benefits. The top medical textbook on the subject is Vaccines, edited by Drs. Plotkin and Orenstein. In the 1999 3rd Edition that I reviewed (a slightly longer 4th Edition was published last year), its authors confine their discussion of mercury in vaccines to two short paragraphs in this 1,230-page book. They do not address concerns that have been raised about its neurotoxicity.

Vaccine manufacturers have started removing thimerosal from vaccines.  And for the first time since the State began keeping records on this disease, California has had a decrease, of  6 percent, in the annual number of children over the age of 3 who have been diagnosed with autism. This occurred in children born in 2000, when the phase-out of thimerosal in vaccines began. Iowa has passed a law banning thimerosal in that state, and California has done the same thing for pregnant women and children under 3 But pharmaceutical companies still add thimerosal in their Flu vaccines; and pediatricians are vaccinating children with their remaining supply of thimerosal-containing vaccines, which the FDA has chosen not to recall.

Taking mercury out of vaccines would substantially reduce the incidence of autism, but this alone will not eliminate the disease. Giving too many vaccines over too short a time to infants whose nervous system is not yet fully developed can also trigger autism and its spectrum of disorders. As Dr. Blaylock has shown (see Recommended Reading below), multiple vaccines given close together over-stimulate the brain's immune system and, via the mechanism of "bystander injury," destroy brain cells.

Much more research needs to be done on the neurotoxicity of mercury and excessive vaccination. Dr. Haley terms autism Mad Child Disease.  Finding one cow in the U.S. with Mad Cow Disease, from Canada, prompted the Federal government to spend millions of dollars examining other cows to see if they had contracted it. With regard to Mad Child Disease, however, the government spends $59.00 in research for every case of autism diagnosed in this country.

Avoiding flu shots that contain thimerosal, and having dentists stop implanting mercury amalgams in people's mouths would lower the incidence of Alzheimer's disease. If you have amalgam fillings, particularly if there is a family history of Alzheimer's disease, you might consider having them removed. Be sure to have a dentist do it who follows the protocol established by The International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology for safely removing them.

For the third source of mercury, follow the CDC's advice and don't eat mercury-contaminated fish, especially if you are pregnant because mercury in your bloodstream crosses the placenta and is concentrated in the fetus' brain.