Definitely Aluminium Poisoning (Part One)

Dr's Newsletter dons a white coat and stethoscope to offer a definitive diagnosis

During those heady days when I straddled the globe pontificating on aluminium to anyone who would listen, and some who would not, I once testified in a vaccine court. The case was, to my mind, simple enough, an infant brain damaged following multiple vaccinations that included aluminium adjuvants. Simple to my mind was not so simple in law. There was no direct evidence that aluminium, never mind aluminium administered in a vaccine, was the culprit. I hear this argument a lot including from a lawyer in the last few days. I am told that there are no experiments to show that aluminium adjuvants are toxic in humans, where are the clinical studies they ask. On serious reflection anyone asking such a question appreciates that we do not perform toxicity experiments on humans, well at least not in plain sight.

In truth the law is well aware of this and in the case of the vaccine damaged infant it was only necessary to offer a reasonable, scientifically sound mechanism of possible toxicity. Various neurologists had already diagnosed encephalopathy (accelerated loss of neurones in a significant part of the brain) as an underlying cause of the infant’s symptoms. My role was to inform the court about the history of aluminium-induced encephalopathy, often referred to as dialysis encephalopathy, and to provide a mechanism whereby neurotoxic aluminium would result in brain damage almost immediately following vaccination involving aluminium adjuvants.

Dialysis encephalopathy, as the term suggests, occurs when individuals are dialysed using tap water contaminated with aluminium. The use of tap water in dialysis was common practice throughout the UK (and indeed Europe and the US) in the latter half of the last century. Even after Alfrey wrote about this in a landmark paper published in The Lancet in the mid-seventies the practice continued and may even be continuing today in some parts of the world. The brain tissue of those who died due to dialysis encephalopathy was loaded with aluminium. Those who survived did so due to early treatment to remove aluminium from the body using the iron chelator desferrioxamine (DFO). These observations provided incontrovertible evidence of the neurotoxicity of aluminium in humans, perhaps these unfortunate circumstances actually provide the human experiments much craved by lawyers and elsewhere.

So how might vaccination involving aluminium adjuvants substitute for dialysis in bringing about an encephalopathy in an infant. Dialysis using tap water contaminated with aluminium loaded the bloodstream with aluminium. The contaminated tap water provided a continuous source of aluminium over extended periods of dialysis. Aluminium is distributed between many different compartments in blood, those of you interested in this will enjoy reading my post on this subject, The Blood-Aluminium Problem.

These compartments influence the uptake of aluminium from the blood into the brain across the blood-brain barrier. Read all about this barrier below.

However, unlike contaminated tap water and dialysis, aluminium adjuvants administered in vaccines cannot be considered as a continuous supply of aluminium to the bloodstream and hence the brain. They are an acute exposure to aluminium at the vaccine injection site and the body attempts to counter this acute exposure by accumulating aluminium adjuvant in phagocytic cells such as macrophages attracted to the vaccine injection site. These cells loaded with aluminium remain viable for days, possibly weeks and this means that they may carry their toxic cargo throughout the body. We have observed such cells on either side of the blood-brain barrier in brain tissue from donors who died with a diagnosis of autism. This observation provides the link with dialysis encephalopathy. Cells loaded with aluminium and originating from vaccine injection sites transport neurotoxic levels of aluminium into brain tissue in susceptible vaccinated infants. When the aluminium-loaded cells die, as is inevitable due to their cargo of aluminium, they deposit aluminium in brain tissue causing further toxicity, inflammation and an ensuing encephalopathy.

Thankfully we do not have experiments on infants demonstrating the neurotoxicity of aluminium adjuvants. However, we do have sound and irrefutable scientific evidence of a plausible mechanism whereby aluminium adjuvants could be responsible for an encephalopathy in a vaccinated infant. This SHOULD carry the day in vaccine court and elsewhere.

The attribution of vaccine adverse events/effects to aluminium adjuvants is not always as straightforward as in the case of infant encephalopathy. In adolescents and adults vaccine damage may be even more difficult to prove and particularly where the damage seems to centre upon a general malaise. This will be the subject of Part 2.