Poisoning children for fun and profit
Kathleen Seidel, famous for standing up to the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*), has written about an industrial chemical which exists nowhere in nature but is being sold as a chelator anti-oxidant (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean? say no more) for use in defenseless human beings, specifically autistic children, without FDA approval because it’s a “dietary supplement”.
Kathleen has described the minimal testing of the chemical, and I am frankly appalled that people are putting this stuff in their own mouths, much less in the mouths of their defenseless children. Apparently it was tested by feeding small doses, briefly, to cats and rats, and applying it (in some fashion) to goldfish. Man, I’d rely on that, wouldn’t you?
The fact is that there are chemicals that are safe to take in small doses or briefly, but not in large doses or for a long time. There are even chemicals that are vital to your health that fall into that category.
Consider, specifically, Vitamin A. Vitamin A is essential to your health (that’s why they call it a vitamin), but it is also poisonous in large doses. People have died of it. The body has ways of getting rid of excess Vitamin A (having evolved in an environment where Vitamin A may be encountered), but they don’t work well with large doses. They also don’t work well with chronic excess Vitamin A in quantities not large enough to kill. Excess Vitamin A in a pregnant woman can cause birth defects in her child.
For another example, I used to take some rather powerful asthma medicines*. They were essential to keep me alive, but at the same time they were plastered with warnings about the necessity to do blood tests to verify that blood levels of the drugs weren’t getting too high. Fortunately I didn’t take them long enough or in large enough doses to require that.
So now we have this chemical that was tested briefly in animals that are not terribly close to humans (goldfish??). It may even have been good for them in certain cases (the claim is made that it was beneficial for a cat that had demonstrably been poisoned, and maybe it was). And therefore it’s okay to dose children with it.
Are the doses large or small relative to the ability of the victim patient to excrete the stuff? Who knows? Who cares?
Is this chemical safe over the short term but toxic over the long term? Who knows? Who cares?
Does this chemical cause birth defects if women take it in the early stages of pregnancy, before they know they’re pregnant? Who knows? Who cares?
There’s money in them thar industrial chemicals!
Update: I had forgotten this example. One of the treatments for nerve gas is atropine, but you don’t really want to use the atropine unless you’ve been exposed to the nerve gas, because atropine is poisonous too. So I’m not terribly convinced of the safety of daily use of a chemical just because it is (or is alleged to be) effective in treating an animal that has been poisoned.
*The eeevil Big Pharma seems to have slipped up by helping me get my asthma completely under control and therefore don’t get to sell me powerful asthma medicines any more.