graham: yes you’re right it’s a metal but I’m trying to give a general public lecture here so I have to generalize a lot . Metallic mercury is possibly a hazard to us if you ingest it. Some of you know that metallic mercury was used in the medical industry to cure constipation. The techniques involved taking a draft of metallic mercury sitting on a commode and the blockage was cleared. it’s not as bad as all that l if people I could do that and survive with no apparent ill effects then it can’t be deadly as all that but it is true that there is a lot of concern these days about a type of bacteria in about guts call sulphate reducers. Perhaps at any given time as many as 50% goof we might have sulphate reducers in our guts. What sulphate reducers can do is they can take the mercuric mercury or the forms of mercury that are organic salts and elemental mercury and they can turn them into the neuro toxic methyl mercury spaces that we know are deadly. It’s recently been found that these sulphate reducers can do that and whether or not they actually do that in our guys we don’t know that an unknown.
Audience: what about the mercury content of wild salmon?
Graham: wild salmon aren’t particularly high on mercury compared to things like salt fish and tuna. I don’t know how much we should worry about eating fish because as you heard the data that the guilds that the data is bead on is ambiguous. I am content to eating wild salmon myself but I’ve stopped eating salt fish and shark
audience that actually was my second question but my first questions do you have any information as to how much of the mythl mercury in the fish is humanly introduced in the last century or so and how much of it is naturally reoccurring?
graham: I don’t have direct information on that but my direct understanding is mercury has been in Iran for very many years and some of it from our activity , form human being introducing mercury into he environment , most of it was there all along . It’s been there a very long time.
Audience: it looked like you spectrum showed not only methyl mercury system but methyl mercury chloride?
Graham: there is no methyl mercury chloride there. We didn’t find it there e. Those were things we checked in examples.
Audience it wasn’t clear which one was the data
Graham: the little dots were the data.
Audience: why is there a higher reports of mercury in farm `fish?
Graham: there isn’t, its lower. The concern with farm fish is too do with PCB and other toxins. We run a piece of fish we can always tell which one is the farm one. The vendor may say this is wild court which of course s more expensive, we’ll know. The mercury is really low in the farm one.
Audience: you spoke about <inaudible>
Graham: this is a very touchy subject. I didn’t want to really elaborate on it too much. a few years ago it was suggested primrose which is a compound , its methyl mercury they soliciolite, it was introduced in vaccines in the 1930s it’s been there a long time and it was introduce as a bacteria side and a fungus side. They put it in little bottles of vaccines that many needles go into. Something like your flu shots. Many needles go into that big bottle and they want something in there to prevent any accidental infections that might be introduce. It should be sterol but of course it’s never perfect form growing. You don’t want to introduce a culture of some miscellaneous bacteria into someone’s bloodstream. They put this stuff in there to stop bacteria and fungi growing in vaccines. The controversy is all about the use in childhood vaccines its being discontinues in third country as mentioned. It been discontinues in many civilized country. in act two weeks ago I was in the paper in the united kingdom because it had just been discontinued in the united kingdom and do the daily telegraph and mail a couple of others carried this story and it’s a big deal .
The medical establishment is firms of the opinion that priomerocel is not a problem. Here’s what I think. I think its crazy stuff to have in vaccine. It was introduced in the 1930s, we know its neuro toxic why on earth are we putting a Nero toxic thing in a vaccine to begin with. this is a arcaake molecule that should get approve thse days that’s my personal opinion and I’m going a bit out on a lab. I don’t know whether or not that it cause s autism. I don’t know whether it causes ill effects in anybody and I don’t know that anyone knows for sure either. There was a recent study from Colonel that showed that some of the symptoms of autism occurred when mice of a particular strain and it was a strain dependent thing that was given primprcel. strange things happen with autism , there is social isolation , also autistic children brain tend to be a title larger, the mice had larger brains , they showed isolation like symptoms so this study perhaps was the first compelling evidence that I know of . It was published in a journal called Molecular Psychiatry. There is no form tie between mercury and autism. I think we might as well get rid of it. If we understood how mercury was bound in the brain we might be able to design a custom collator to get rid of it. That’s kind of farfetched but you never know.
Audience: you said that <inaudible> in their diet when they’re taking supplement pills?
Graham: why? Selenium has been linked in a good way with the incident of prostate cancer in men. Basically it’s a study that used cyelulizzed yeast which is yeast that has been grown up in a background f selenium. They use selenium yeast because they can smell the selenium compounds, the difference between the placebos when our compounds were used but when they used something a bit stinky like yeast they couldn’t smell it. they use this yeast and they used regular yeast and they use regular yeast and they gave them pills made of the solemnized yeast and there was an unexpected and really striking beneficial effect . The incidents of prostate cancer was really reduced in the group that had the selenium and since then people all over the place have been taking it, it’s advised. It’s a good idea to take selenium but I would caution you that not every selenium supplements contain the same thing. We’ve looked at bottles of selenium suppliants on the shelf from health food stores m even the same vendors with same batches they have remarkably different compositions. Who knows whether they are helping or not.
Audience: the study was done with yeast and we know how yeast changes the retinal fluoride to get you’re <inaudible>
Graham: the yeast will probably be killed by the acids into the ` stomach, it won’t change the intestinal flora. It’s not going to survive your stomach.
Audience: I was told that when we’re going to through menopause we should take aluminium. started taking it and I didn’t really prepare for it but then when I started alternating it and not taking it every day it does seem to have some physical affect
Graham: you might try a different form. One form you could try is too take a brazil nut every day. Brazil nuts come in two varieties, those with shells and those without shells on. Those with shells on they are harvested from the wild and we know what they contain, they contain a form of Selene called Selina methionine and its very pure. They’re an awful lot of it. the ones with shells on they are harvested form the wild from trees , brazil nut trees are about 50 feet high and the brazil buts are packed in little elements into this great big grapefruit sized thing , it would probably kill you if it landed on your head . They go and they pick these things up and they crack them all open and in the parts of Brazil that actually have the technology to remove the shells there is no negligible selenium in the soil. those sell brazil nuts don’t contain much selenium but if you have tome ones with the shells on they come from different part of brazil and it’s a good job they don’t have the technology to remove the shells because if you eat a lot of them like you would do perhaps if you didn’t have to crack the shell off then you would probably get pinioned. They one shell of Brazil nut per day. It’s good for us, all of us need it.
Audience: what about pumpkin seeds?
Graham: I would imagine it would depend on where the pumpkin is grown. Ii don’t know anything about the form of selenium in pumpkin seeds but I bet you your garden night be quite different than half moon bay.
Audience: it’s my understanding that mercury will appear to organs how will you test if you suspected some kind of mercury.
Graham: I don’t know about that. What it will do is it will get into your blood stream and it will find itself in your metabolism. Not much is none about its molecular form inside us in its nervous system. The experiments that needs to be done are to take pieces of tissues and put them in the x-ray bean and understand them. What we’re going to be doing I hope is to get pieces of people, samples of people who naturally have a lot of mercury in their bodies I. I hope we would be able to do those experiments in due course. Hopefully I understand hats going on. Also sample of brains of people who have died in road accidents and things like that.
Audience: can Brazilian nuts be beneficial to the prostate and if so where would you put them?
Graham: you would put them in your mouth chew tem up and swallow them.
Audience: is it wise to do analysis of near toxin affects afar finding one who is infected? Couldn’t one work backwards doing animal studies? Is this exposure so rare that it shouldn’t be worth the trouble?
Graham: I think it’s worth understanding because it will give us a clue as to how methyl mercury poison us when we eat too much methyl mercury in fish. It’s certainly worth studying. most of us here probably eaten fish at one time or another . I love fish, I eat maybe two meals per week. In the say shells they eat two meals per day so they eat more than I do. We will need to expand the study to try understand where it gives there’s a lot to do. What I did mention right at the end this is only something that has recently ben doable. We haven’t always been bale t these experiments. We basically had a threefold or thousand fold increase into few years we have been doing these experiments
Audience: are you aware of people investigating commercial applications of things like selulized yeast?
Graham: there is certainly a lot of commercial selulized yeast. Tons of different health food companies make the stuff but they seem to vary widely in hats in them. Most of the selenium in many of the samples we have looked at tends to be alpha elemental selenium which is the red form. That’s bio unavailable it will pass straight through you without doing you jolly good. I reckon that you should eat Brazil nuts.
Audience: one of the main things that I come to these is the face that we have free cookies outside. I’m anxious to get them. Could I eat and introduce many as I can. Graham I’m sure would be delighted to continue to answer questions and in fact we have other scientist who are out there you can recognise them because they have their names stick not their chest. If you would like to continue please go outside we can have a soft drink but before that let’s thank graham for a fantastic job