Headline: Mercury Ban agreed

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Intro:

Global treaty to control neurotoxin

OVER 120 nations have agreed to have legally binding measures to control the pollution by mercury, a neurotoxin. Formal negotiations for the treaty will begin in 2010.

The agreement, reached at the 25th session of the Governing Council of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is a change from previous years, when major powers, including the US, China and India, sought voluntary reductions. On February 18, they agreed to consider the binding treaty.

Some countries, including India, had earlier said a legally binding agreement is not necessary for unintentional mercury emissions. It was supported by China and Indonesia. “Switzerland agreed that different mechanisms were necessary for unintentional and intentional emissions, but stressed that all mercury emissions must be addressed under the legally binding measures,” said Prashant Pastore of Toxic Link, Delhi-based non-profit, who attended the meeting.

A consensus was reached after the US supported the call to ban mercury use worldwide. Changing its stand, the new US administration under President Barack Obama wanted a legally binding international treaty to reduce the toxic pollutant’s content in the environment. Till now, the US had supported only voluntary and partnership measures.

“This came as a surprise,” said Pastore. “Several non-profits said they were floored during the US announcement,” said a press release of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB), a news service for environment and development negotiations. “The US said the measures should address all significant sources of mercury, especially sectors with the greatest global impact including coal combustion,” said the press release.

The treaty would mandate signatory countries to follow measures to phase out the toxic pollutant.

An Inter-governmental Negotiating Committee will begin formal negotiations on the treaty in 2010, which will be wrapped up by 2013. The committee will devise modalities for phasing out mercury in terms of addressing the anthropogenic sources of the chemical, capacity building and technical and financial assistance to countries.

On behalf of developing countries, India called for a committed financial assistance to introduce mercury-free technologies. The EU rejected the proposal initially, but after consultations delegates agreed that developing countries and transition economies should be provided with technical and adequate financial assistance to help them implement the legally binding obligations effectively.

Widely used in chemical production and small-scale mining, mercury is also known to affect the cardio-vascular system. It persists in the environment once released and can travel long distances. Thus even countries which release little or no mercury and areas far away from industrial activities are at the risk of being contaminated. The Arctic, for instance, has high mercury levels, although it is far from major release sites. Its toxic forms such as methylmercury can cross the placental and blood-brain barrier affecting fetuses and children.

Reference: Adapted from: http://www.downtoearth.org.in/full6.asp?foldername=20090315&filename=news&sec_id=4&sid=3  

More on Vaccine and Autism link

African-American Autism and Vaccines*

By: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

By concealing the link between vaccines and autism in African-American boys, the CDC had once again violated that public trust.

Last August, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention senior scientist, Dr. William Thompson, invoked federal whistleblower status and confessed that the CDC has known since 2001 that Black boys exposed to the MMR vaccine have a disproportionate risk of autism.

Thompson, a 17-year CDC veteran is the author of some of the leading studies cited by the CDC to exculpate vaccines from the autism epidemic. Thompson, who still works at the CDC, released the raw data sets that he says his bosses at the CDC ordered him to conceal. Those data show that Black boys who received the MMR vaccine before 3 years of age, as the CDC recommends, were 3.36 times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis than those who received the vaccine after 3 years of age. This effect was not observed in other race categories. Nevertheless, when the CDC scientists published their results in the journal Pediatrics in 2004, they omitted the damaging data, fraudulently declaring there was no risk of autism from the MMR vaccination. In August 2014, Thompson issued a press release through his attorney stating,

I regret that my co-authors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African-American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism.”

The buried data were disturbing, but hardly surprising. The most reliable studies in the scientific literature indicate that African-Americans are more susceptible to vaccine injury and may also have increased susceptibility to neurological disorders such as autism.

A 2010 nationwide study of the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disability Monitoring Network found autism incidence about 25 percent higher in African-Americans than Caucasians. A 2014 study published in Pediatrics showed higher rates of all categories of autism among African-Americans in Los Angeles County compared with Caucasians, with the incidence of severe autism elevated by 263 percent among foreign-born Blacks and 152 percent for U.S.-born Blacks as compared with U.S.-born whites.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health showed that Blacks were at significantly greater risk for regressing into autism after receiving the thimerosal-containing Hepatitis B vaccination series as infants. When analyzed further, the data showed that Black boys receiving the Hep B series were 53 percent more likely to have autism than those Black boys not receiving any HepB shot.

On the basis of all the population data and the CDC’s most recent autism incidence estimates, at least 100,000 African-American male children could have been spared debilitating neurological injury if the CDC scientists had told the truth when the increased risk was first known to them in 2001.

Thompson has requested to testify before Congress about corruption at CDC and has handed over to Congress thousands of pages of documents showing widespread fraud in CDC’s vaccine division.

It’s not the first time the CDC has concealed vaccine risks from African-Americans. Less than 10 years ago, in June 1996, African-Americans in Los Angeles learned that the CDC had been conducting vaccine experiments in their communities. Beginning in 1989, the CDC conducted an experiment on nearly 1500 Black and Hispanic infants using an unlicensed measles vaccine without disclosing to parents that the drug was a high-potency experimental vaccine designed to overwhelm the baby’s maternal immune system. The CDC only halted its secret experiment in 1991, when companion clinical trials conducted in Africa and Haiti showed an increased death rate and severe immune-system disorder among female infants who received the vaccine. Those children died within two years after the vaccination.

Source * Down to Earth org, VOL 17 ,NO 20   Thursday, March 05, 2009

Related Topics:

CDC Admits MMR Vaccine Increases Autism Risk, Particularly in African American Boys.

From Flu to Ebola: CDC a Corrupt and Dangerous Organization*

Ebola hoax update: my FOIA request to the CDC

Ebola Virus GM Bioweapon Invented by CDC*‏

Courts Confirm MMR Vaccine Causes Autism*

Why Is Polio With 68 Cases Worldwide This Year A “Global Emergency” But Autism Not With 1 in 25 Families Affected?*

Post-Ebola Syndrome or Fluoroquinolone Poisoning?*

Ebola Donations Never materialized, but that’s not surprising!*

Where else, but U.S.: Vaccine Bills That Remove Consent and Incarcerate the Infected

Australia, Forced Vaccines, and Ethnic Cleansing*

 

This entry was posted on July 12, 2015, in AfricaDiasporaFamilyForumHealthHumanitiesPeopleRacismThe Americasyouth and tagged African CarribeanAfrican-Americancolonialismglobal governanceglobalizationHaiti,healthhuman rightshumanitiesmental healthNWOoppressionsecularismsocietysovereigntyU.S..