Metal toxicity and deficiency e.g. lead, mercury, selenium

Split thread

@Colin If you check out some of the OMF Community Symposium's you'll see the results of a study of metals in people with ME. From memory: one person had high mercury and they ate a lot of (pacific?) salmon; pacific salmon are long lived and bioaccumulate mercury.
A couple of people had high levels of weird stuff normally associated with nuclear energy (strontium, plutonium?) but that presumably related to where they lived. All in all, the results were forgettable.
A few people were right at the deficiency level for some metals (selenium, iron?) I assume metal toxicity/deficiency would turn up in downstream tests.

 

Thanks for that. I was aware that they'd found mercury and selenium associations but not that it was on their website. I shall check that out as I have long had an interest in toxic-metal poisonings. Brisbane has a place in the history of the field as a Brisbane doctor, John Lockhart Gibson, discovered, in 1904, that lead-based paints were the source of lead poisoning in children. Sadly, his pioneering work didn't stop the big lead/silver mines, such as at Mt Isa and Broken Hill, poisoning their workers' children to save a few pounds. And Australia has very-low-selenium soils so I've been supplementing with selenium for years.

Your post has prompted me to post a study about lead poisoning based on the Dunedin Longitudinal Study. I wasn't sure if it was relevant enough but it might be of some interest.

And whether lead or mercury lodged in the brain would show up in any tests is disputed, as I understand it. Again, I'd be happy to be corrected but, as I understand it, only post-mortem studies are an accurate test and they are pretty thin on the ground in general, let alone for those who have had ME/CFS.

 

I was a (failed) science technician back in the day and one of my jobs was to test sick swans for lead poisoning. The levels were pretty horrendous; I fleeting thought they must have had enough to act as ballast. Heard recently that the "voluntary" code (non-toxic shot over wetlands) has failed - surprise!

There was another case where a field was used for clay pigeon shooting, and then cut for silage, and the silage fed to cattle. Yes the cattle got sick, and died, but determining lead as the cause was more difficult [blood and kidney levels of lead not that high] eventually it was determined based on a more sensitive enzymatic method - I wasn't involved so I don't know the technique used.

There's been a bit of talk about mercury in tooth fillings but I don't recall that going anywhere.

From memory your right about selenium (not strontium as I'd guessed). Selenium is important in itself i.e. glutathione [very important antioxidant] is selenium based so low selenium equals low glutathione - feel free to correct me. According to the OMF material selenium is necessary to eliminate some toxic metals so the few weird high results, for an unusual metal/s, were correlated with low selenium - kind of excretion mechanism. Most people will get selenium from their diet e.g. if you eat foods from a wide geographic area then you should have some high selenium foods in there. The classic dietary selenium deficiency, resulting in cardio myopathy, was in an area of China with low selenium soils. "Unfortunately" the locals now eat food from a wider geographic area so they don't get deficient!

Although I was slightly interested in metal toxicity, and indeed deficiency, I never found anything convincing.