It’s flu season again, and I’ve been receiving countless e-mails from patients and readers regarding the flu vaccination asking whether they should get one, or if they should take some other type of natural alternative. A good place to start answering that question for yourself would be to understand what, precisely; a flu vaccine is made of.
After officials select the three strains of flu virus they think are most likely to be circulating during the next winter season (they picked the wrong ones last year, by the way), vaccine makers grow the viruses in fertilized chicken eggs — 500,000 of them per day for up to eight months. To inactivate the virus, formaldehyde (a known cancer-causing agent) is used, and aluminum is then added to promote an antibody response. Aluminum is a neurotoxin that may play a role in Alzheimer’s disease.
Other additives to the flu vaccine include Triton X-100 (a detergent), Polysorbate 80, carbolic acid, ethylene glycol (antifreeze), gelatin, and various antibiotics (neomycin, streptomycin, and gentamicin), all of which can cause allergic reactions in certain people.
Two-thirds of the vaccines made for the 2008–09 flu season, 100 million of them, contain full-dose thimerisal, an organomercury compound, which is 49 percent mercury by weight. It is used to disinfect the vaccine. Each one of these 100 million flu shots contain 25 micrograms of mercury – a mercury content that is 50,000 parts per billion, 250 times more than the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety limit. Mercury is a known neurotoxin, which has a toxicity level 1,000 times that of lead.
There is some evidence that flu shot may cause Alzheimer’s disease. This, most likely, is a result of combining mercury with aluminum and formaldehyde, which renders them much more toxic together through a synergistic effect than each would be alone.
One investigator has reported that people who received the flu vaccine each year for three to five years had a 10-fold greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s than people who did not have any flu shots. According to this study the brains of people with Alzheimer’s display three pathologic hallmarks (bare with the technical terms: neurofibillary tangles, amyloid plaques, and phosphorylation of tau protein).
Brain cells grown in test tubes develop these changes when exposed to doses of mercury similar to the amount of mercury a person gets from a flu shot.
According to the package inserts that come with the flu vaccine, three serious and acknowledged adverse reactions to the flu vaccine are joint inflammation and arthritis, anaphylactic shock (and other life-threatening allergic reactions), and Guillain-Barré syndrome (a paralytic autoimmune disease that can affect people several weeks after their flu shot).
Within the past year alone, I’ve had several patients develop joint inflammation or allergic reactions after a flu vaccine and one still suffers from an arthritic condition that has yet to resolve. So before you get your next flu shot, remember the facts, and maybe even discuss possible flu vaccine alternatives with a naturopathic physician.
Dr. Frank Aieta is a board-certified and licensed Naturopathic Physician with a private practice in West Hartford, Conn. He specializes in the treatment of disease, using natural therapies such as acupuncture, homeopathy, spinal manipulation, clinical nutrition, herbal medicine and natural hormone balancing. For more information please visit www.draieta.com.