So AP is finally getting on the trail...

Of course there is little surprise in that... AP hasn't yet got a good whiff of the stink coming from the FDA HQ in Washington...

Here is a little puzzle to work out however...

I will agree wholeheartedly that merc in any form is toxic. Anyone who would argue that is a fool or a liar, take your pick. I will also agree that coal-fired plants put a ton of this stuff in the air. Again, this is easily demonstrated.

Here's the puzzle...

The IOM says merc leading to autism is "plausible", but wants to key on Mama's intake shortly after conception, as tho this will block development, and not on baby's intake post-utero implying damage to already developed tissue. (An MRI should be able to distinguish between undeveloped and damaged, but that is another thread altogether...)

So here's the kicker...

Not this past summer, but the summer before tests were run on the lake in Central Park in NYC after it was found the lake water had elevated merc content (slightly higher than the Great Lakes where we get so-o-o-o-o-o-o-o much of the whitefish we enjoy when dining out). When they did cores of the muck on the bottom (which stratifies over time), they discovered that over 100 years ago, the merc content of the lake was about 100 times higher than it is now...

Think on this a sec... NYC in the mid 1800's was crowded (not like today, but still America's largest city) and nearly all the heat in the place was coal fired. They had merc as fallout in enormously higher quantities than we do now as we raise our arms and tell Appalachia to leave the poison under the ground. !)) times the current level of fallout, dropping onto the houses and street, all over the laundry strung between tennemants, in the snow the children played in and ate, into the lakes which people routinely drank from and swam in and pulled their supper out of...

Where were all the flappers and howlers then? NYC (and other towns around the Eastern US and in Central Europe and England) should have been up to their armpits in auties, AND THEY WEREN'T!! Somewhere, someone should have made notations about these "posessed" children, these feeble minded retards who flapped and rocked and grunted and ran from you. I will accept that many of the children damaged in this way would have died (or been killed) shortly after their problem would have been known. (Few autistic toddlers will have any self-preservation skills, especially the most important one - a desire to be with Mommy).

How can this be, if it is a question of merc exposure in Mommy? I know we did not keep very good records before WW2, but there are historical precedents going back to Rome, Persia, China amd Egypt for nearly every other form of birth defect, whether congenital or trauma. Why no auties? And anyone who would suggest that these children were called something else has never spent time around any auties I gare-ron-tee. There is no mistaking a flapper once you have seen one up close for any length of time.

The FDA and CDC ASSUME that ethyl merc is equivalent in effect as methyl merc, but this may not be accurate. Chemistry is full of compounds which are nearly the same chemically, but which have varying properties including the damage they can do (aspirin and cocaine are different only in the shape of the molecule, identical in molecular content; both have analgesic properties, but I don't think any junkie is gonna be smokin aspirin any time soon...) Ethyl alcohol, when mixed with fruit juice can give you a nice buzz after 3 or 4 glasses, methyl alcohol will make you blind and quite likely dead in a fourth of the quantity.

So to does the form of intake vary the effect. And we have yet to find a way that gives more kick to anysubstance than subcutaneous introduction. First you snort heroin, then when that is too slow and weak to satisfy your monkey you forget your fear of needles and mainline it.

Think about that for a bit... 100 years ago there was about 100 times the fallout. Fish still accumulated this. Many people ate fish as often (or more so) as today because it was free food. So where were all the flappers then?