Apr 13 2009
Is Autism Caused by Environmental Toxins?
Not long ago, autism was suspected by lots of people to be caused by mercury in vaccines, or by the preservative thimerosal which contained mercury. Thimerosal has been removed since then from nearly all (but not all) vaccines. In February, a federal court ruled that there is no obvious cause and effect between mercury in vaccines and autism. When I heard about the court ruling, my first though was, well then how about mercury in the environment? There is a lot of mercury in the environment, which people don’t always realize. In fact, I live in Minnesota, and some lakes in Minnesota’s famous “10,000 lakes” have been determined to be unsafe to take fish from due to high levels of mercury. Also, our public health department puts out warnings about eating even small fish from these lakes due to concentrations of mercury in the fish themselves. So my thought was that possibly kids with autism are getting it from something in the environment, and there is plenty of toxic stuff, including mercury, in our environment.
Where does a lot of mercury in our environment come from? Coal burning plants. Coal plants emit about 50 tons of toxic mercury into the air each year. There are a few very large coal plants in or near my state, which could possibly explain the high levels of mercury in our environment and the high levels of autism here too. And according to the U.S. EPA, “Coal-fired power plants are the largest single man-made source of mercury pollution in the U.S.” And autism rates are now 8 time higher in my state than they were in the 1980s. Doesn’t that tell us something?
We are poisoning ourselves in more than one way with this cheap, big power source. Is it worth it? Not when the EPA has to even warn us about eating too much tuna fish because of mercury, and not when it might be leading to growing numbers of cases of autism. This hasn’t been proven yet, but environmental causes of autism have been suspected for years.
