Hormesis. Sounds kind of odd, but it’s the idea that high doses of a compound are a poison, low doses are a tonic. Dr. Edward Calabrese advances the theory of Hormesis based on thousands of studies performed on all kinds of organisms. The proposed mechanism is that the low doses stimulates the body and the response is beneficial – for instance, a low dose of radiation causes a small amount of DNA damage which stimulates the body to repair it – if the dose is low enough, the repair exceeds the damage do to the radiation. Too high, and you die. It’s hard to build a therapy around, but it does mean we might not have to sweat the small stuff – for instance, there is a point past which cleaning up certain pollutants is actually counter productive, let alone pointless. And the EPA’s linear dose models would need to be changed. Still, it’s not widely accepted.
This passage caught my eye in the article:
In one session of the conference, veterinarian Dennis Jones, of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta, presented recent findings on low-dose mercury exposure. Jones analyzed data from a study at the Centers for Disease Control that tracked more than 100,000 infants. The infants were given thimerosal, an organic compound of mercury used as a preservative in vaccines. The researchers worried that giving the infants too many vaccines might harm them. But Jones found that limited exposure to mercury actually lessened the children’s chances of developing neurological tics, delayed speech, and other pathologies. Jones’s analysis is preliminary, so he declined to give concrete numbers. But he called the study “exquisite” and said that it “really amazed” him. Calabrese was not amazed. “In our most recent database search,” he said softly into the microphone, “mercury is perhaps the most studied element showing a hormetic effect.”
So while there’s no scientific evidence so far that mercury in vaccines cause autism, if hormesis is accurate, then there might actually be a benefit to mercury in vaccines. I can see why it’s hard to accept.
