Research Chelation Therapy

Paul Watson: Toxic roulette and the revenge of the fish

Tuesday August 22, 2006

It looks like the fish are turning the tables on humanity. Not by choice but because ecological realities have boomeranged back upon humankind.

Tins of tuna fish now contain warnings that the product should not be eaten by pregnant women or young children because of high levels of mercury and other toxic heavy metals.

Farm raised salmon in North America contain antibiotics, growth hormones and even a dye to colour the flesh a pleasing pink while still alive.

Long-living fish like halibut, cod, orange roughy and swordfish contain large amounts of heavy metals. When you can live over a century like a halibut, you accumulate decades of toxins. When you live high up on the food chain, you build up mercury and other heavy metals.

Orcas in the Pacific Northwest of the United States are the most chemically contaminated animals in the world. Beluga whales in the St Lawrence River are treated as toxic waste when they die.

We treat the oceans like sewers and then act surprised that the fish that is eaten is polluted.

Humans can be wilfully blind and deliberately ignorant when it comes to food. We would never eat a piece of fish sitting in a bowl of mercury, arsenic and PCBs garnished with a lump of human fecal material on top. Yet when the lump of crap is brushed off and the toxins washed away, we serve that lump of sautéed toxic fish flesh up without a thought of what has penetrated the cells of the meat.

The federal government of Canada has just allocated C$190,000 to investigate the impact of traditional fish diets on West Coast native communities.

Canadian Inuit have exceptionally high levels of toxic contaminants in their bodies because of their traditional reliance on whales and seals. The study currently being undertaken on the West Coast will reveal how high the level of contaminants are among Pacific Northwest First Nations.

I predict that the study will reveal that over 100 West Coast aboriginal communities are indeed facing a crisis of increasing levels of toxicity in the fish they eat.

This crisis is not one created by the activities of most Native people but is the consequence of mining, logging, sewage, manufacturing and salmon farming. Clear-cutting, agricultural run-off and mine tailings are actions that invite ecological consequences.

The chemical stew includes dioxins, furans, PCBs, flame retardants and DDT, mercury, arsenic and lead, all of which can accumulate in the bodies of humans and animals.

Quatsino First Nation Chief Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi, who was raised in the traditional style on the northwest tip of the island, said in a recent interview that in a recent seven-day period, she ate salmon and crab on four of the days.

Unfortunately for the Chief and her people this is no longer a healthy diet.

On the other side of the world in the Faeroe Islands about halfway between Iceland and Scotland, the level of mercury toxicity in the brains of Faeroese children is the highest in the world. Mercury literally eats away brain tissue. Faeroese health officials are now the world’s experts on Minamata disease which is the name given to mercury poisoning.

I myself was raised in a fishing village on Canada’s East Coast. The staples of my childhood were lobster, scallops, clams, cod, flounder, and smelts. We did not eat mussels because they were considered dirty. Today the restaurants in my hometown serve mussels because they are the most common shellfish that remains. They are even dirtier today than they were three decades ago.

It is hard to have an appetite for clams when the mud they are being dug from reeks of raw purplish oozing sewage.

I’ve given up “seafood”. I don’t have the ability of disassociation needed to separate the realities of over-exploitation and toxicity from the food that I eat.

And eating the flesh of mammals and birds instead still does not alleviate the pressure on marine wildlife. More than 50 per cent of the biomass taken from the sea is converted to fishmeal to be fed to domesticated land animals. We have literally converted herbaceous mammals like cows, sheep, pigs and sheep into the world’s foremost aquatic predators.

The main staple of the puffin in the North Sea, the sand eel, has been so overly exploited by Danish fisheries for animal feed that puffins have starved by the thousands.

A great percentage of the fish caught off Chile goes to feed the ever-expanding populations of farmed salmon.

Domestic cats throughout the world actually consume more tuna than all the world’s seals combined.

This kind of biological upheaval in feeding patterns is having serious environmental consequences.

And then to add insult to injury, humans point an accusatory finger at seals, dolphins, seabirds and whales - and whine that diminished fish populations have been caused by these aquatic predators. At the same time they suggest that humans are innocently just trying to feed their families and enjoy a prawn cocktail.

This disassociation has gone so far that recently a branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Canada attempted to host a live crab boil where they would have inflicted cruelty on some sea animals to raise funds to prevent cruelty to cute and cuddly land animals.

We humans can justify anything and everything we do.

In the end, nature bats last, and the fish are having their revenge as the natural reaction to our ecologically criminal actions kicks into high gear.

But telling people that smoking causes cancer does not deter some people from smoking and telling people that eating fish can kill you will most likely not deter some people from eating fish.

They prefer to continue playing toxic roulette.

* Paul Watson is founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

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The National Institutes of Health now spends more than $120 million a year studying things like yoga and herbs.Its National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is applying rigorous scientific tests to alternative treatments. But the center also has drawn criticism for studying therapies that are popular, rather than the ones that scientists believe have the best chance of working.

One of the treatments now being studied is a powerful chelation drug called EDTA.

Chelation drugs are typically used to reduce dangerous levels of lead and other metals. But in alternative medicine, EDTA is marketed as a way to clean out blocked arteries.

So the NIH is spending $30 million to study EDTA.

Edward Colditz, 67, is a volunteer in the study. The retired steelworker lives near Baltimore and has a long history of heart disease.

“It was April 7, 1994, when I had the major heart attack,” he says. Since then he’s had a quadruple bypass and five stents inserted into his arteries.

So when Colditz heard about the chelation study, he was interested.

Now he comes to a clinic at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center every Wednesday. During each visit, he spends several hours with an IV dripping fluid into his body. The fluid may be a placebo or EDTA — neither Colditz or his doctors are allowed to know which.

He says the treatments are no big deal.

“All you do is you sit here and watch TV and holler if you want a coffee,” he says. “I don’t feel a thing.”

Colditz’ doctor is Pamela Ouyoung. She’s a cardiologist who says she never expected to use alternative medicines. But she agreed to participate in the NIH study because so many patients seem to believe that chelation works.

“I Remember one young man who had severe coronary heart disease that I thought should go to bypass surgery,” she says. Instead, he chose chelation. Ouyang doesn’t know what happened to him.

That was years ago. At the time, chelation advocates believed EDTA cleared arteries by removing calcium. That made some sense because calcium is a major component of plaques that build up inside blood vessels.

Studies eventually showed that chelation had no effect on the calcium in these plaques. But Ouyang says the treatment remains popular.

“People think, well you know, I have all this buildup in my arteries,” she says. “Going to get something that sounds like Drano is appealing.”

These days, advocates of EDTA say it may work by reducing free radicals in the body. But the drug still removes calcium. And that can be risky.

Dr. Cecilia Davoli, who uses EDTA to treat children with lead poisoning at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, says that without enough calcium, muscles in the body don’t work.

“An important muscle is the heart,” she says. “So the heart won’t beat appropriately when the calcium level is too low.”

Or it may not beat at all. EDTA has been linked to several deaths.

Davoli uses a version of EDTA that doesn’t remove calcium. But the NIH study uses a type that does because it’s what chelation practitioners most often use.

Dr. Gervasio Lamas of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach is the chelation study’s principal investigator. Lamas says the EDTA study is a big departure for him. He usually tests conventional drugs developed in the lab.

“With alternative medicine, it’s different,” he says. “These are treatments that are out there. People are using them. Hypotheses have been proposed about them. Some studies have been done. But the scientific underpinning is less.”

Even so, Lamas thinks the chelation study is worthwhile. One reason is that thousands of people with heart disease are already using the approach.

Lamas says that if the study shows it works, cardiologists will have a new way to treat heart disease. And if it doesn’t, consumers should know the truth.

“They need to know that they are going to be wasting their money,” he says. “So practice habits and patient behavior in terms of seeking alternative therapies will certainly change based on this trial.”

Lamas says the NIH study was designed with help from the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM) — a group that represents chelation practitioners.

Lamas says that means these practitioners are likely to accept the results.

Dr. Allan Magaziner, a former president of ACAM, is less certain. He’s treating patients in the NIH study at his clinic in New Jersey. But he says he’ll be skeptical if the results are negative.

“Sometimes statistics can be manipulated in certain ways in certain studies,” he says. “So we’d have to make sure that wasn’t the case here.”

Magaziner says it’s possible that a negative result might change the way he uses chelation. But he adds, “I don’t know if I’d stop completely because we’re seeing great results with it.”

Ouyang hopes practitioners like Magaziner won’t dismiss a negative result.

But she hopes the study will show some benefit from chelation.

“You have to be willing to hope that it would work,” she says. “Clearly if I felt there was absolutely no way this thing could work then it would be rather pointless to ask patients to participate in it.”

Ouyang says one reason she’s comfortable with the study is that patients in it are getting the best mainstream care along with their infusions.

Edward Colditz says that’s certainly been true for him.

“Every week I’m taken care of very good,” he says “So that’s what I’m getting out of it right now. As far as what I’m feeling from this, I don’t know.”

The NIH trial of chelation is still enrolling patients. It should should be completed sometime in 2008.

by Jon Hamilton� � NPR�