Thimerosal is the infamous mercury-containing preservative in use, to this day, in some vaccines and also in dozens of other pharmaceutical products approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
1-3 Public health agencies, government regulators and medical trade groups have repeatedly declared thimerosal to be safe,
4,5 but the published peer-reviewed science argues that nothing could be further from the truth. For anyone who bothers to investigate thimerosal's appalling record, there is a vast, still accumulating and compelling body of research that contradicts the public health establishment's deceptive safety claims.
Thimerosal is almost 50 percent ethylmercury by weight. Ethylmercury is an organic mercury compound with toxicity mechanisms similar to methylmercury
6 (the hazardous type of mercury in seafood). The danger posed by both types of mercury was evident in earlier eras when fungicides containing either ethyl- or methylmercury poisoned farmers, sometimes on a large scale, from the 1950s through the 1970s.
7,8 Of the two compounds, the ethylmercury in vaccines is far more toxic to and persistent in the brain, where it has a propensity to accumulate as inorganic mercury,
9,10 with an estimated half-life of as long as twenty-seven years.
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Comment: For a more in depth look at disease mongering and Big Pharma fear tactics read the following articles by Martha Rosenberg: