Evidence of Harm

Mercury is one of the most toxic elements and a persistent

traveler through our environment.

So who's the travel agent for this elemental poison?

Coal-fired power plants?

Most definitely.

Mining operations?

Of course.

Your neighborhood dental office?

Surprisingly, yes.

Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing

but the truth so help you God?

Is mercury toxic?

Elemental mercury is toxic.

Silver amalgam fillings, does it contain mercury?

It does.

Almost up to 50%?

Yes.

Mercury is a toxic substance.

If you're exposed to mercury, we start seeing much more

serious health effects.

These health effects would be...

Chronic fatigue.

Double vision.

Couldn't sleep.

Depression.

Panic attacks.

Memory loss.

A lowered immune system.

Loss of vision.

Chronic headaches.

Is both an immediate problem in some individuals,

and a very long term problem in others.

I started having neurological symptoms.

I didn't feel like a human being.

In the deepest part of myself, I thought I was dying.

People think you're crazy, and you're not crazy.

You have mercury poisoning.

Why is it that the ADA will not tell the public that

mercury amalgam is harmful?

Frankly, the American Dental Association welcomed new looks

at all of the dental restorative materials.

The American people are being overtly lied to by the American.

Dental Association and the dental branch of the Food,

Drug Administration.

4, 3, 2, 1.

You're watching Fox 17 News at 9:00.

Three years ago, I was diagnosed with multiple

sclerosis, a debilitating disease that scared me

to death.

But I stand before you tonight not for pity,

but to share my hope that I believe

could help hundreds of thousands of other sick people like me

in "My Journey to MS and Back."

My aspiration was to be a journalist

and tell stories that affect change,

and tell stories that help people,

and tell stories that right wrongs,

and expose things that need a light shined on them.

I'd just left my dream job with "CBS News"

as a national correspondent.

My husband had just left his career.

And we made those two decisions based on the kind

of parents we wanted to be.

We wanted to be engaged parents.

We wanted to be active parents.

We wanted to be full-on, hands-on, 24/7 parents.

We're very much an outdoorsy family, love nature.

And I run or do some type of exercise,

workout five days a week.

No issues with my energy level at all, I mean just felt great.

I mean, I felt great.

Typical day, taking care of my kids and working,

and basically just focusing on my family.

Yeah, life was good until the day I had the dental work done.

The thing about mercury is it looks cool, but it's not.

It's really poisonous.

When you mess with mercury, it gets

in your clothes, your games, your stuff, your furniture,

your house, until everything it touches is trashed.

Elemental mercury is toxic primarily through inhalation

exposure.

And people just don't realize how dangerous it is.

But it is very important to recognize

that you can't see it, you can't smell it,

and there's no way to know that it's there, except that we know

that it volatilizes into air.

And you'll see it in literature all the time,

it will volatilize at room temperature and higher.

That's a very bad misconception people have.

It will volatilize at anything above negative 38 degrees.

The higher the temperature, the more readily it

will volatilize, the quicker it will be volatilize.

When a woman is pregnant, we hope that she's never exposed

to mercury vapor, because we know that it can pass

the placenta and cause neurological problems

in the unborn baby.

And if we see residences or buildings that

have 10 micrograms per cubic meter or more of mercury,

then we consider that it poses a health risk.

And we recommend that people don't

stay in the building or the residence.

10 micrograms is generally considered inhabitable without

some kind of respiratory protection.

Two schools will be closed tomorrow after a custodian

finds a small amount of mercury on the floor of a room

at Picklin Mills High School.

Now, how much mercury are we talking about?

Not very much.

About the amount the size of the eraser on this pencil.

But school officials explained to us,

it would only take the amount of mercury

about the size of the sharpened end of this pencil

to contaminate the entire building.

They'll evacuate a public building for a broken

thermometer.

But each one of your amalgam fillings

contains roughly the same amount of mercury.

I had one tooth hurting.

So when I went to the dentist and he looked at my mouth

and looked at the one tooth, but she's more focused on the fact

that my silver fillings are 30 years old.

And there were eight of them.

And he was telling me that I needed

to get all of these silver fillings out

and I needed to get them replaced.

And I kept saying, well, this is the only tooth

that's hurting, just this one.

Can we just replace that one?

And I let him talk me into replacing

all the silver fillings on the right side.

When it came time to refill them, he said,

what do you want in there?

Do you want amalgam, or do you want the composite,

the white version?

And I said, well, what does insurance cover?

And he said, well, insurance covers amalgam.

And the composite is a little more expensive.

And I said, well, oh well, you know,

I've had these other ones for 30 years, they work fine.

And if that's what insurance covers,

let's just get that again.

There was never a discussion about what

was in a silver filling.

I never gave it a second thought.

So I got four bright, new, shiny silver fillings

put in on the right side.

And that's when everything started.

I was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry

at the University of Kentucky.

I'd been doing mercury research since about 1985.

I came to the University of Kentucky,

and my research here led me into Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Markesbery had found elevated mercury

in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

So I did a set of studies showing what

heavy metals would do this.

And mercury was one of them I put in.

And at that time, I had no concern

about amalgam fillings, anything regarding mercury toxicity.

And the results were dramatic.

Phenomenal data that came out was

that mercury and only mercury would

cause the same biochemical abnormalities

as you saw in Alzheimer's disease

using our technology for evaluating

the activity of certain enzymes.

And then all of a sudden, the problem changed.

It was no longer a scientific problem that I ran into.

That was easy.

I mean, I could do that.

The problem was political.

When I tried to get funded to look at mercury as a neurotoxin

and its possibilities of contributing to Alzheimer's

disease, they shut me down.

My grants were just totally rejected.

And they said something to the effect.

Doc Haley has to realize we don't

need to see any more of these kinds of studies.

And since that time, I have never gotten another NIH grant.

And that was soul destroying.

I had been funded for 20 some years of doing research.

Then all of a sudden, I couldn't get a grant.

I had no money to run my laboratories.

And I felt like I just walked off a cliff

and was hanging onto that last branch.

And I was devastated.

And Sandy helped me through that.

When I first wrote in those grants,

I remember talking to Sandy about how important I

thought they were.

Sandy is a good sounding board, gives good advice.

And she helped me accept the fact that my ideas were not

going to be accepted by the current medical establishment.

My name is Karen Burns.

I was a dental assistant for 24 years.

I got a lot of name tags here.

Time for my biannual dental appointment.

Hopefully, I'll have no cavities.

Going to Dr. Goldberg's office.

Dr. Goldberg is the dentist that I