by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
The parents have pictures of their son on his first birthday, pushing a tiny handful of cake into his mouth.
Now, four and a half years later, he won’t touch cake.
One 4-year-old girl kept biting her lip until it bled.
Other children shriek unexpectedly.
Some had been learning new words and were figuring out how to string sentences together.
“Now you get a mumbling, or no response at all,” said Alan Pickert. “You might get a word or two. They might say their name, and that’s it.”
Pickert, an attorney with Brown, Terrell, Hogan, claims at least 36 children in Jacksonville are the victims of a “devastating one-two punch” of mercury poisoning that will leave them incapacitated for life.
Punch one, Pickert said, came from a preservative used to prolong the shelf life of vaccines.
Punch two, he added, are the thousands of pounds of mercury expelled over time from JEA’s fossil fuel-burning facilities, particularly at the Northside Generating Station.
Pickert has mailed, or is mailing, about two dozen letters of intent to file complaints to officials with JEA and the City. The letters are required to be sent six months in advance of potential filings.
No such letters have been sent to the pharmaceutical companies, he said, “because it’s not required by the statute, and they know what they’ve been doing.”
Repeated phone calls to the JEA offices were unanswered.
Heather Murphy, spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said the General Counsel’s Office should respond to inquiries about the letters of intent. There was no reply to those requests.
Pickert’s 36 clients, all between the ages of 4 and 7, began life as normal infants, he said. They progressed normally until they were between 30 and 36 months old, when they began regressing,
“By the time they’re 3 and a half, 4, they’ve been diagnosed as fully autistic, or having gastrointestinal disease . . . autoimmune disorder, or some other type of neurological injuries or mercury poisoning,” he said. “That is from accumulative doses of the mercury, from the vaccinations and from the fossil-burning facilities.”
In 1988, the autism rate in the United States was one in every 25,000 children, Pickert said. By 2002, the rate was one in every 250.
“So the question is, what has happened to get us to that point?” he asked.
Studies and a series of investigations have pointed the finger at mercury, he said.
During the late 1980s, Pickert said, several “pharmaceutical giants,” including E.I. Lily and Merck began shipping some of their vaccines in gallon containers in addition to individual vials.
“The physician could pop the top and draw the vaccine out,” said Pickert. “It would be more convenient.
“The only problem is, once you unsealed it, how do you keep it fresh? So they added this preservative called thimerosal. But thimerosal, unbelievably, is comprised of 49.6 percent mercury.”
A growing number of articles have been published, condemning the effects of mercury on children.
A study of 300 children conducted by Dr. Mark R. Geier evaluated the “doses of mercury that children received from thimerosal-containing vaccine, as part of the “routine U.S. childhood immunization schedule.”
“This study provides strong epidemiological evidence for a link between increasing mercury from thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and neurodevelopment disorders and heart disease,” Geier wrote in the spring 2003 edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
The U.S. House Committee on Government Reform issued a report in May attacking federal agencies for being negligent in not addressing the danger of thimerosal in vaccines.
“Upon a thorough review of the scientific literature and internal documents from government and industry, the committee did in fact find evidence that thimerosal posed a risk,” according to the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness.
“Mercury is hazardous to humans. Its use in medicinal products is undesirable, unnecessary and should be minimized or eliminated entirely,” the report added.
Although pharmaceutical companies have said they no longer use thimerosal, Pickert said, none has issued a recall.
Pickert said he has recommended that parents ask pediatricians for vaccines from individual vials.
According to a point source mercury emission report, JEA’s Northside facility put 2,985 pounds of mercury in the air in 1997. The level was 289 pounds in 2000.
Pickert doesn’t know how far the emissions’ reach is, but, “almost without fail, a client can see a fossil-burning facility from their home. I’ve got some clients who live right in the shadows of Northside.
“It’s a devastating one-two punch.”
Pickert said his intention is not to shut down JEA or force it to turn to alternative fuels.
“There are fossil-burning facilities throughout the U.S. that are not producing these large quantities of mercury in the atmosphere,” he said. “If it can be done at other facilities, it can be done here.”
When parents are told to take their children for scheduled vaccinations, they do it “because they assume everybody is doing their job,” said Pickert. “Your pediatrician, the FDA, the pharmaceutical giants. I dare you to find anybody who would hear, ‘I want to inject your child with this vaccine, which, by the way, contains 50 percent mercury,’ who would say, ‘OK.’
“What makes this sadder is the children were normal. So the parents got a glimpse of what their child could be in life. And now they’ve got a child who’s going to be injured for the rest of their life.”