[Gunnair]

DanSC DanSC:

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

None of those involve magical thinking however.

Homeopathic medicine doesn't involve magical thinking?

Apparently not...

[BeaverFever]

LOL actually thought of amending my post to say "except homeopathy" but was too lazy.

[Thanos]

DanSC DanSC:

You'll find anti-science people everywhere. Here in southern California, we still have people who insist that organic food is far superior to other varieties, choose homeopathic medicine over conventional medicine, and think their Toyota Prius is more environmentally-friendly than a Toyota Yaris. Science supports none of these claims, but they still believe it.

In liberal Washington state they have the highest numbers of people who believe in the sheer lunacy that immunization causes autism in children, a celebrity-driven conspiracy theory promoted by the likes of Mensa-members like Jenny McCarthy, and one that's been factually debunked by every serious study that's ever examined the issue. As a result of this ignorant paranoia, Washington's been afflicted by a large breakout of whooping cough thanks to the terrified anti-immunization people who never got shots for their kids.

Stupid is stupid. It doesn't matter which part of the political or religious scale you can find it on.

[BartSimpson]

jeff744 jeff744:

I've worked with a few, there is no arguing with a lot of them, they are the type that mock anything they don't agree with and never actually listen.

This applies to an awful lot of people, not just those who don't accept the supporting facts behind evolutionary theories.

[BartSimpson]

Thanos Thanos:

In liberal Washington state they have the highest numbers of people who believe in the sheer lunacy that immunization causes autism in children

To clarify, they don't believe the immunization causes autism, they believe that thimerosol, a mercury based preservative, causes neurological damage.

The MSDS on this chemical makes it clear that this is a neurotoxin that should not be inhaled or even touched yet it is supposedly perfectly safe to inject into small children.

http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9925236

A neurotoxin is a neurotoxin, period. This does not need to injected into children.

[Unsound]

That's a pretty scary MSDS. How bout this one...
http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9924344

[Khar]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Thanos Thanos:

In liberal Washington state they have the highest numbers of people who believe in the sheer lunacy that immunization causes autism in children

To clarify, they don't believe the immunization causes autism, they believe that thimerosol, a mercury based preservative, causes neurological damage.

The MSDS on this chemical makes it clear that this is a neurotoxin that should not be inhaled or even touched yet it is supposedly perfectly safe to inject into small children.

http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9925236

A neurotoxin is a neurotoxin, period. This does not need to injected into children.

Thimerosol doesn't cause autism. The paper that this entire movement was based on from The Lancelet has been retracted due to it's inaccuracy and the claims of such problems arising from Thimerosol has not been replicated in any follow up study.

For the record, several million people are aware of Thimerosol and the MSDS, including doctors, scientists, and a vast majority of people like me, who did any level of university science. I know of numerous substances that have MSDS pages telling me I will die -- including aspirin, for example -- but I am well aware that properly administered, aspirin is actually good for me. I even handled aspirin by hand in introductory biochemistry courses -- note that it's sheet is even worse than the one for thimerosol. The assumption that the broad majority of this international community are complicit with pharmaceutical companies in producing a dangerous compound for wide spread use without consideration seems questionable. Given every single disease control body or national medical authority I can find all state precisely the same thing, I think I'll go with the massive body of expertise on this one.

The difference between the MSDS and this is, first, that an immunization contains a few micrograms of thimerosol. 2 or 3, max. We're talking microscopic here. To get to a level listed by the MSDS as toxic, you'd have to inject yourself roughly 10,000 to meet the threshold for any chance of health issues. 10,000 times! Your body has rare elements and a dozen compounds which would kill you... but the amounts found within any human are incredibly small. The amount of thimerosol in these injections is so small as to not even cause problems. It wouldn't cause skin irritation or any of the problems indicated on the MSDS sheet, because you literally pass more dangerous things out of your system every day.

Toxicity has everything to do with dosage. It's one of the most basic, key points of toxicology. Ethanol will also lead to your eventual brain-death, but we use it in dozens of compounds you inject into your body. Note too that ethanol has a rather fascinating MSDS list, even though, used with proper dosages, ethanol can be used safely for everything from children's medicine through solvents. And that's simply alcohol.

You shouldn't roll around in thimerosol and then lick it off the floor, but then again, who would? I don't need an MSDS to tell me not to roll around in an organomercury compound -- I need the MSDS only to tell me the toxicity level, an oft overlooked fact whenever MSDS is used to impose the idea that such chemicals are dangerous. Note, however, that there is yet another difference here -- the term "organomercury." This is not inorganic mercury, of the kind which collects in your brain. This is actually an "organomecury compound," a compound that contains mercury as a component of a larger body, much like table salt contains sodium, which is incredibly reactive. Not only does it react different in a compound, but studies indicate that organomercury flushes out of the system, with all but a fraction of a percent being excreted from your system via urine or feces. The remainder remains by the tissue surrounding the injection site. Not just in humans, but in the hundreds of millions of animals given rabies shots. Every dog out there? Treated with thimerosol.

Plus, people forget why we even had thimerosol in there. First off, even if thimerosol did cause any form of mental degradation from immunizations, it is better than potential other problems. It is used in the creation process to kill bacteria -- bacteria which have lead to infections with a 50% mortality rate historically when the wrong bacteria gets in there. The end of infections from bacterial or fungal intruders was one of the bigger advances in medical sciences and one of the major reasons immunization became so feasible from then to now.

Second, it's a preservative. Now, I've heard the argument "why don't we just use it immediately," and the answer is that you need to send things in larger groups than one in a time to immunize, say, a workplace. You also want a stockpile in case there is an outbreak or a sudden demand for it. Finally, even if you were just walking down the hall to inject someone, the chances of contamination or break down of the components of what is in there is possible. This stuff needs to be created in large batches for it to even be possible socially, so we need to keep that in mind -- in addition to the fact that manufacturing needs to be done, which can't be finished in individual test tubes.

The use of things like thimerosol have greatly improved the viability of immunization and made it far safer. The perpetuation of the anti-immunization trend, by people such as Bachmann who tried to claim that HPV immunizations caused mental retardation (no such reports, 35 million vaccination sample size) only serves to harm people as a whole.

Here are some previous posts that answered this in direct response to analogous posts of yours, Bart. I'm honestly kind of surprised it's still coming up. This is (or was, since they are removing it after 8 safety panels found nothing to keep the anti-science crowd happy) the safest, cleanest, and healthiest way to ensure infection, viability and efficacy were maintained. You'd need 10,000 shots a day to garner any of the effects people worry about with mercury, and you'd literally need them in a day, because of how fast it flushes out of your system. Stating that a toxin at any level is dangerous violates basic scientific laws within the toxicology field and fails to recognize the reasons why such a compound was massively beneficial.

[BartSimpson]

Look, what I know is what I see. At Kaiser Hospitals any leftover immunizations containing Thimerosol are handled as a Class A hazardous material and if a nurse drops one of the vials containing the substance then the floor is shut down until a hazmat team can clean up the spill. I saw exactly this situation occur when I went to get a flu shot back in 2008 and I haven't had a flu shot since.

If it's so innocuous that it is safe to inject into me then why isn't it safe enough for the exact same amount to be cleaned up with a paper towel?

[BartSimpson]

Khar Khar:

Stating that a toxin at any level is dangerous violates basic scientific laws within the toxicology field and fails to recognize the reasons why such a compound was massively beneficial.

Exactly how much plutonium salt do you thnk you could tolerate?

[Lemmy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

I went to get a flu shot back in 2008 and I haven't had a flu shot since.

Furthermore, I just read that people who got the 2008 shot got more flus than those who didn't.

[Khar]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Look, what I know is what I see. At Kaiser Hospitals any leftover immunizations containing Thimerosol are handled as a Class A hazardous material and if a nurse drops one of the vials containing the substance then the floor is shut down until a hazmat team can clean up the spill. I saw exactly this situation occur when I went to get a flu shot back in 2008 and I haven't had a flu shot since.

If it's so innocuous that it is safe to inject into me then why isn't it safe enough for the exact same amount to be cleaned up with a paper towel?

Unless you believe that mercury is capable of simply becoming gaseous in large amounts from a compound it's molecular bonded to and will fly at your face from meters away, I don't think they evacuated the entire floor because mercury was present inside compound within a liquid. Given that they evac'd the floor, I have a feeling it was because of something other than whatever preservative was in the flu shot -- and I remind you that only some types of flu shot even contain it. This presumes you believed it was a flu shot -- otherwise, you'd not have stated thimerosol was in it, since that compound is only used in a few types of shots.

Memory serves, it doesn't matter WHAT is used in the flu shot. Breaking it opens the contents of the vaccine to the air, rather than opening it into the bloodsteam. Evac is mandatory, pretty sure. They don't want to make people sick, and there is a possibility of that happening because it is, specifically, a flu shot. For many who get the shot, the flu is dangerous -- influenza is a pretty vicious killer. As Lemmy hinted, people get sick from the flu shot itself -- the vaccine potentially being dangerous for reasons beyond thimerosol is entirely possible.

You generally don't want to expose people to any vaccine save through injection, and in a place in America where health is taken so seriously (or you'll get sued), I'm not surprised they evacuated the area. If my Hep A vial broke when I was getting my vaccination in March, they'd likely have closed off part of the place too, although likely not much of it, and it's not virulent as an airborn pathogen.

The medical field is literally paranoid when it comes to handling anything. If I dropped a tip on the floor (a little plastic tube), even an usused one, I had to put it into a biocontamination box... and it's made out of plastic. Are you now going to fight for the idea that we should not use plastic in labs because if I drop plastic on the floor I have to use a box that sends it out as biohazard waste? In a hospital, where they sterilize everything, dropping a vial of anything that breaks (especially if it can enter the skin) immediately calls for very stringent safety regulations.

Procedure is designed for the absolute maximum of safety. I mean, the absolute maximum. Regardless of what cells I worked with, it was under a hood, I had gloves on and the entire area was being airated artificially. Protocol has always been above and beyond what was necessary.

Keep in mind my other points, such as the fact that millions of accredited professionals disagree with you and supported it's use for 80 years and going, that it has numerous other aspects of immunization it helps with, and that literally hundreds of millions of humans and animals have been inoculated with no actual case being found, the lack of any study or safety panel finding evidence or a connection, or that toxicity doesn't work the way you describe.

It is safe for you to clean it up with a paper towel if that amount of thimerosol was just lying on the floor. We're talking about a few hundred micrograms here. You'd probably not even see it. However, actual safety is not in line with hospital rules.

$1:

Exactly how much plutonium salt do you thnk you could tolerate?

Inhaled? Plutonium in such combinations tends not to be able to irradiate the skin, so I assume you want this question to involve ingested amounts, which can irradiate internal organs to some degree (although this is more about radiation). Still, there is no known case of someone dying from inhaling any form of plutonium, and there are treatments for it, so it's clear that the human body can tolerate it.

Theorists put forth that if a pound of plutonium in such forms were put out, it would kill 2 million people. So, let's calculate that per microgram to keep this all simple.

453.592 grams are present in a pound. There are a million micrograms in one gram, so 453592000 micograms. Divide by 2 million to get a lethal dose for an average human. The average terminal amount is 226.796 micrograms. So even if we were using plutonium nitrate instead of thimerosol in the injections, you'd survive... 76 injections. If you were average. I'm young and healthy, so I could get away with more.

Reducing the toxicity of that to lower levels means you would get to the point where plutonium wouldn't harm you. Only 0.04% of plutonium oxide even enters the system for the long-term, for example, so it takes a loooooot of micrograms to actually kill you with it. Same with most other basic compounds. As plutonium salt is actually used in reactors, and those sources indicate that such a combination is actually safer than the analogues I am using (that source indicates 0.8 million deaths per pound instead of 2), I'm throwing a bit of a bone here.

So are there levels you can survive? Yes. There are levels you can get treatment at, and levels it won't impact you at all. Smaller levels than most compounds, yes, but no where did I say toxicity of all compounds was equal. Water can kill you if you drink enough of it, even. On top of that, this is an inorganic salt, so it's not going to be anywhere close to the tolerability for humans of a biochemical like organomercury -- all of which are important when trying to contrast organic chemistry to an inorganic salt.

[BartSimpson]

Any detectable amount of Pu-239 salt is lethal. The radioactive nature of it is immaterial as the salt itself is so toxic that it will kill you.

[Khar]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Any detectable amount of Pu-239 salt is lethal. The radioactive nature of it is immaterial as the salt itself is so toxic that it will kill you.

Notice your own qualifiers here, before we even continue. First, "detectable." Second, "so." Both show that you recognize variances in toxicity from the get-go, so I don't get why you are trying to argue this point, other than at best attempting to try and make a potential exception the rule -- a rule well documented in toxicity, and which your own terminology supports?

According to the rather lengthy book chapter by Professor Cohen and the various sources he used to create it, you are wrong. There are levels a human can tolerate. In fact, as pointed out, containment is not 100% -- minute amounts of plutonium are released every year. If any amount can kill you, we'd have quite a few deaths on our hands.

Notice I used plutonium oxide, the most toxic form of plutonium. There is an chapter that includes calculating the toxicity of plutonium, meaning that as I said, toxicity depends on volume. This debate was poignant in Japan because so many people were worried about the leftovers in various forms from Fukushima, so general knowledge on such topics has increased dramatically in that region.

I can also find numerous PubMed links demonstrate treatments for plutonium salt inhalation. Decorporation via chelators (three quick links there) is currently being studied on animals we expose to Pu239 salts orally, for example -- note I said that they had it in them, in amounts we can quantify, and they are surviving for treatment. If any amount is lethal, explain this? Perhaps it is possible because lethal probabilities is linked to toxicity, as is my own position.

Even in this extreme example using an inorganic compound, toxicological norms remain sound.

As a reminder, this thread is about thimerosol... we are kind of wandering off topic.

[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

This applies to an awful lot of people, not just those who don't accept the supporting facts behind evolutionary theories.

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Thanos Thanos:

In liberal Washington state they have the highest numbers of people who believe in the sheer lunacy that immunization causes autism in children

To clarify, they don't believe the immunization causes autism, they believe that thimerosol, a mercury based preservative, causes neurological damage.

The MSDS on this chemical makes it clear that this is a neurotoxin that should not be inhaled or even touched yet it is supposedly perfectly safe to inject into small children.

http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9925236

A neurotoxin is a neurotoxin, period. This does not need to injected into children.

Just wanted to point out Bart, the irony in these two statements. You believe science when it says Evolution is a long and ongoing process, but you won't believe science when it says that Thimerosol is not a neurotoxin.

[BartSimpson]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Just wanted to point out Bart, the irony in these two statements. You believe science when it says Evolution is a long and ongoing process, but you won't believe science when it says that Thimerosol is not a neurotoxin.

Yet the MSDS on it says that it is a neurotoxin so where am I ignoring the science?