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.
In 2006 Richard Lathe wrote a book on how autism is caused by a combination of environmental toxins, and genetic predisposition, and what the mother ate during pregnancy — most noteably, seafood. What does seafood contain now more and more of these days? Mercury.
A report today from a well-known green issue website suggests that toxic waste sites, or superfund sites, are possibly to blame. In other words, this problem might not just be mercury at all, but various other toxins from other types of power plants too.
The story says that not only has autism risen drastically in the last 20 years, but the cases seem clustered around a 20-mile radius of toxic waste sites. The researchers actually studies children in this radius in Minnesota.
“Rates of the disorder were one and a half times higher in the districts within 10 miles of the toxic sites. That translates into 1 child in 92 in districts closer to the sites compared to 1 child in 132 in the districts farther away. Schools within a 20-mile radius of Superfund sites had similar autism trends as the schools with 10 miles of the sites.”
It seems as though this indicates that there is a correlation, if not a cause and effect, relationship between toxins from waste sites and rates of autism among children. At the very least, this needs to be studied in every single state in the country. If we are poisoning the children of America with toxic waste, it’s doubtful that it’s not just autism that they are getting, but also other diseases and problems, maybe even cancer, like the people who live downstream from the Alberta tar sands in Canada.
The toxic waste in question in this study was the kind that includes mercury, benzene, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, and arsenic — all toxic byproducts of coal-fired power plants. Even if these things don’t lead to autism, it seems obvious that these toxins would have a bad reaction on humans and wildlife just being put into our environment.
More about the study can be read at Environmental Health News. And for more information, see this report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “EPA to Regulate Mercury and Other Air Toxics Emissions from Coal- and Oil-Fired Power Plants.” December 14, 2000. Available at http://www.epa.gov/ttn/oarpg/t3/fact_sheets/fs_util.pdf) (Search for Superfund sites near your home.
