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WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — Is it just me, or is there an "instant karma" quality to the news that the Chinese are endangering American kids by exposing them to a heavy metal that is a known neurotoxin?

I'm referring, of course, to the fact that thousands of toys imported from China, just recalled by Mattel, were found to contain lead that could harm children if they mouthed them. (Kids don't ever mouth toys, do they?)

Lead, we know, is bad. It's so bad there is no safe level. It stunts the brain and body in both blatant and subtle ways, lowering IQs and so on.

Kind of like organic mercury, right? Kind of like the organic mercury we phased out of most of our own vaccines but say is just fine for everybody else — including a billion Chinese? (At least Mattel did a full and immediate recall rather than offer to phase out the leaded toys as toddlers outgrew them.)

And the similarities don't stop there. As with mercury, knowledge that lead is deadly spans millennia, and clear evidence of pediatric lead poisoning emerged by 1904 — yet lead actually became ubiquitous after that, powering the rise of the automobile and peaking in the environment in the 1970s. It was then that a courageous, much-vilified scientist named Herb Needleman showed a dose response between lead exposure and IQ — enough "proof" to get the feds to finally face up to the truth.

Needleman got the lead out because he demonstrated the reality of subclinical toxicity, "the concept that relatively low-dose exposure to lead or other toxic chemicals . . . may cause harmful effects to health that are not evident with a standard clinical examination. . . The underlying premise is that there exists a continuum of toxicity, in which clinically apparent symptoms of lead have their asymptomatic, subclinical counterparts."

I'm aware of this because I attended the Institute of Medicine's two-day Autism and the Environment Workshop in Washington in April. The quote above comes from a presentation on Environmental Toxicants and Neurodevelopment by Philip Landrigan, Chair of Community and Preventive Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. (The slides and audio are at www.iom.edu/?id=42481.) He aptly titled one slide, "How Can We Hasten the Pace of Discovery of Neurobehavioral Toxicity?"

In other words, how can we get the lead out of the government's slow-and-studied (and studied and studied) response to chemical poisons, whether we're talking about lead or mercury or any other toxicant?

If lead is any lesson, the answer is: Fight long and hard, get good science and be prepared for a death match with powerful interests.

To be clear, Landrigan was not making an analogy between lead and mercury " I am. Despite knowing the toxicity of mercury to children and othher living things, we continued to spew it out of power plants, mix it up in paint and inject it in children in the form of thimerosal. We kinda sorta stopped doing the latter a few years ago " except in most flu shotss, now recommended for all pregnant women and for kids starting at six months. . .and except in the hundreds of millions of vaccines used in the developing world. Remember, of the world's 6.3 billion people, only the ones after the decimal point live in the United States, and the others are worthy of worrying about, too.

Like the billion-plus Chinese. Those of you who are connoisseurs of the Simpsonwood transcripts will remember the comments of Dr. John Clements of the World Health Organization, who said, "My mandate as I sit here in this group is to make sure at the end of the day that 100,000,000 are immunized with DTP, Hepatitis B and if possible Hib, this year, next year, and for many years to come, and that will have to be with thimerosal-containing vaccines, unless a miracle occurs and an alternative is found quickly and is tried and is found to be safe."

Well, no miracle appeared, and given that Simpsonwood occurred seven years ago last month, that would make another 700 million immunizied with thimerosal-containing vaccines by now " and, make of it what you will, a rrising autism incidence in China and other developing countries. There's no reason on Rescue Post to go into all the reasons thimerosal has not really been "found to be safe," as Clements implies with his comment that any alternative would have to be "safe," too.

The bottom line: China's lead goes into American kids and we're in an uproar; America's mercury goes into Chinese kids and we're fine with it.

And here's the killer analogy. At the end of Landrigan's talk at the IOM meeting, Mark Blaxill of SafeMinds asked this question: "Could you comment a little bit on the institutional response to the lead problem and some of the resistance that the science faced?"

"There was huge resistance," Landrigan said. "The problem is that lead was a very profitable chemical in the 1970s and there was a huge lead lobby that did their best to discount every scientific finding that was made in those years, in public fora and in private meetings.

"The lead industry did their best to pillory Herb Needleman (who showed the subclinical effect). They had a couple of scientists who were in their pay, although they didn't acknowledge they were in the industry's pay until later, who came forward and charged Herb Needleman with scientific fraud. His case was hung up at the NIH for four years while that terribly painful process cranked through. He was eventually completely vindicated and has won a whole series of prestigious awards since that time.

"There was great resistance to learning the results of research or to translating these research results into public policy.

"I think today one of the reasons we have 80,000 chemicals in commerce, of which fewer than 20 percent have been properly tested, reflects the same legacy of special interests not caring to know about the toxicity of chemicals. I honestly think as a society we need to get beyond that.

"We're flying blind if we allow kids to . . . be exposed to chemicals of untested toxicity. It's not a political issue — it sometimes gets porrtrayed as one but it's not. What it is, it's an issue of protecting kids. I think it's an issue that people all across the political spectrum in this town should get together and say, we really need to do something about this, we need to test these chemicals, we need to be examining the children, we need to be doing good research that leads to sound prevention."

In short, when it comes to ending human exposure to mercury and a ton of other toxic crap we're inflicting on our planet and particularly on our kids, it's time to get the lead out. You don't have to believe in karma to know that's true.

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Dan Olmsted wrote The Age of Autism column for United Press International and is now an independent journalist based in Washington, focusing on autism and related issues. He can be reached at Olmsted.dan@gmail.com.

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