Lead is even deadlier than was feared

Well regarding mercury, it has been phased out of most vaccines in the US and European Union.

> "FDA is continuing its efforts toward reducing or removing thimerosal from all existing vaccines." [1]

Note to self: don't touch dimethylmercury even with nitrile gloves, it goes right through within seconds. The last person to do so, KW, slowly turned into a vegetable and was ultimately euthanized [2, 3]

[1] https://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/Question...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7M01jV058

> Well regarding mercury, it has been phased out of most vaccines in the US and European Union.

http://medcraveonline.com/IJVV/IJVV-04-00072.php

General Aviation (private planes) are STILL spewing lead into the atmosphere. It's not like they don't have the money to fix it, they just don't care about the externalities.

You can't compare the biological effects of table salt (sodium chloride) to molecules containing heavy metals. Sodium is an extremely reactive alkali metal and chlorine is an extremely reactive halogen. Because it is strongly ionically bonded, NaCl won't suddenly bond with the organic material of your body. As the body is mostly water, it will be in Na+ and Cl- form, dissolved in water, and thus won't be able to form the dangerous diatomic forms like chlorine gas, Cl2.

Mercury on the other hand, is a heavy metal and isn't super reactive. It's not water soluble, it's fat soluble. Chellation therapy will not save a person if their mercury levels are too high from an accident with it. It will sit in the fat of their brain and they'll slowly die while becoming more and more brain damaged. No treatment.

But lets talk about mercury-based compounds like Thimerosal. The danger isn't Thimerosal as a substance, it is an effective and safe chemical. But we don't know all the intracacies of the human bodys' chemical pathways. All we know is that most large molecules/substances break down eventually - either via the bodys' enzymes or something else consumed and interacting - or just time. So though we can do tests on the stability of Thimerosal through en vivo studies, with fluorescent tagged molecules, or piss tests on rats, ultimately we don't know what reactants are in everyones' body entirely. And it is unwise to give people something of questionable stability that is composed of toxic parts, dangerous upon decay.

I was actually pondering something related today. I worry about my cats' paws getting glass in them. Because the pavement is full of tiny pieces of glass, even worse if someone breaks a bottle outside, they won't actually vacuum and clean it up, I guess wind can help a bit..but it's just shuffling the glass around. Glass doesn't decay on a human time scale.

Which brought me to the grim fact that there are so many substances that do not decay in a reasonable time..that you are pretty much stuck with them in your body if they somehow get there. With glass, at least if you realize early enough, you can yank it out. And some people say that 10 or 20 years after getting glass stuck in them, that it came to the surface of their skin on a random day.

Which brings me to thinking about if we'll ever be able to truly know what substances are doing to our bodies in full fidelity. Like, some people believe that food colorings are unhealthy - will there eventually be a time where we have a machine, you stand in it and eat the fruit snacks and we get a full picture of where every molecule of titanium dioxide is headed? ..Imagine, we see a HUD of a human body, and a heatmap, overlaying that 99.95% goes to the kidneys but we see that 0.05% gets stuck in the prefrontal cortex of the brain in a peculiar area. We test more people and see that they also get the deposits in the same area...something we thought was totally harmless turns out to be depositing itself in some arcane area by some arcane mechanism... Yes, I eat fruit snacks and I don't think this is the case...it's just a silly hypothetical situation. And I am aware of fluorescent tagging technology which can do something similar but sometimes poorly, because ultimately it is modifying the original molecule. (Incompleteness sucks doesn't it?)

Maybe some day..