Dimethylmercury
from amalgam- Death of Prof. Wetterhan
Dear Boyd,
You know the
extraordinary toxicity of Dimethylmercury. One drop on her gloves caused the
death of Prof. Karen Wetterhan 10 month later (see below).
Is it possible
that microorganism in human mouth, in Parodonditis areas, in infected jaw areas
and root canals etc. are able to produce
Dimethyl-
mercury-compounds from mercury, which
stems from dental
amalgams? (in
nanomolar concentrations)
You know, mercury
vapor from dental amalgam penetrates to the gums and from tooth in alveolar
bones and jaw. These tissues showed high levels
of mercury 28 days
after amalgam insertion.
I think, that this
compound may be a factor, which cause severe neurological illnesses in humans,
like Amyotrophic Lateralsclerosis
(ALS). And I
think, resolving such diseases need tooth
extractions and surgical interventions in infected jaw bone (NICO), and
systemic
detoxification.
Which chelators
did the physicans (also Prof. T. Clarkson) tried for
detoxification of
Prof. Wetterhan? You know, I give up to four DMPS
vials i.v. per day
together with 1000 µg Selenium and 3000 mg reduced
Glutathion and
Phospholipids.
What do you think,
an new chelator may be able, to catch dimethylmercury
or dimethylmercury
compound, produced in humans mouth?
Below is the
report of the death of Prof. Karen Wetterhahn, after 10
month of mercury
exposure (just one spill).
I have one patient
(54 years old, french), who had the same symptoms month after his dentist make
a root canal filling with amalgam. After 6
month, he was in
Coma. In France, it was not possible for his daughters,
to find a dentist,
who removed him the amalgam teeth. The french
dentists claimed
that there is no mercury in "theirs" amalgam fillings! The daughters
contacted me per Email. I tried to give them a treatment
protocol (some
orthomolecular agents- no detoxification!). The man
awaked from his
coma an get rid of his pneumonia (MRSA) in hospital. The
family was able to
bring him from hospital to home. In this time, he
realized his
daugthters, sometimes. This was good for them. But without
removing the toxic
teeth, he went in coma later and died immediately.
Best wishes
Joachim Mutter
Scientist Prof.
Karen Wetterhan 1949 - 1997
Mercury Changed
Scientist's Life
It was just a drop
of liquid, just a tiny glistening
drop. I
Scientist Karen
Wetterhan knew the risks: The bad stuff
kills if you get
too close. She took all the precautions
working with mercury in her Dartmouth
College lab -- wearing protective gloves and
eye goggles,
working under a ventilated hood that
sucks up chemical
fumes. So on that
sunny day in August, when she accidentally spilled a drop, she didn't think anything of it. She
washed her hands, cleaned her
instruments and went home. It was just a drop of liquid, just a tiny glistening
drop.
At first, friends
thought she had caught a stomach bug
on her trip
to Malaysia. It wasn't until she started
bumping into doors that her husband,
Leon Webb, began to worry. Karen, always so focused, always so sure of her next
step, was suddenly falling down as if she
were drunk. In 15 years together, she had never been sick, never stopped
working, never complained. Leon was stunned when she called for a ride home from work. Over lunch a few days
later, Karen confided to her best friend,
Cathy Johnson, that she hadn't felt right for some time. Words seemed to
be getting stuck in her throat. Her hands tingled. It felt like her whole body was moving in slow
motion. "Karen," Johnson said as she drove her back to the college,
"we've got to get you to the hospital." "After work," Karen
promised, walking unsteadily into the Burke chemistry building for the last
time. That night, Leon drove her to the emergency room. It was Monday, Jan. 20,
1997, five months since she had spilled the drop in the lab. Just a single drop
of liquid. Yet somehow it had penetrated her skin.
By the weekend,
Karen couldn't walk, her speech was
slurred and her
hands trembled. Leon paced the house. "Virus" seemed an awfully vague
diagnosis for symptoms that were getting worse every day.
"It's mercury
poisoning," Dr. David Nierenberg said. "We
have to start
treatment immediately."
Leon hung up with
relief. At last, they understood the
problem. Now maybe they could fix it.
It seemed
impossible to believe that anything could be
wrong with Karen Wetterhahn, one of those quietly
impressive individuals whose lives
seemed charmed from the start.
Serious and
hardworking, she excelled at everything she
turned to --
science or sailing or skiing. She grew up near Lake Champlain in upstate New York in a family so close that
when she and her only sister became mothers, they named their daughters after
each other: Charlotte and Karen. Karen was always the brilliant one of the
family, the one who would do great things. And she did, becoming the first
woman chemistry professor at Dartmouth, running a world-renowned laboratory on
chromium research, devoting herself to her work. It was important work, the
kind that could lead to cures for cancer and AIDS. Karen thrived on it. She
loved nothing more than experimenting with a chemical, figuring out its bad
side and how it breaks down living things.
In the often
cutthroat world of scientific research and
ideas, where work
is judged in academic journals and egos are as enormous as intellects, Karen
stood out. Other professors would send their students to her office just to
meet her. Talk to Karen, they would say. See how you can balance the demands of
work and life and still be on top of your field. The only place on Earth more
precious than her lab was the dark cedar house that Leon, a mason, had built
with his own hands. Home was Karen's haven, her retreat from the rarefied halls
of Ivy League academia.
Here, in the
pretty village of Lyme, at the top of a
hill at the end of
a dirt road, she would listen to rock music -- heavy
metal was her
favorite -- and tend her garden.
Here, science came
second to 12-year-old Charlotte's
baby rabbits,
14-year-old Ashley's mountain bikes, Todd the goat and Dillon the pony.
At home, she would
throw great neighborhood parties by
the pool, or
gather up the family and drag them off to the golf course, or the tennis court,
or Ashley's hockey game. "We never knew she was a world-famous
scientist," one neighbor said afterward. "She was just Char and
Ashley's mom."
Mercury poisoning.
Karen beamed when
she heard the news. Finally, something
she understood.
Something she could explain. They would feed her fat white nasty-tasting pills
that would flush the poison out of her system. Science would cure her, she told
her husband, giddy with excitement as she sat in bed surrounded by her children
and her notes. "Karen was happy, so I was happy," Leon says now. "We
just didn't know." How could they have known? Back in January, virtually
nothing was known about the extraordinary dangers of dimethylmercury, the rare
man-made compound Karen had spilled.
Scientists didn't
know it could seep through a latex glove like a drop
of water through a
Kleenex. Doctors didn't know it could break down the body over the course of a
few months, slowly, insidiously, irreversibly.
Above all, no one
knew how to stop its deadly progress,
as it cut off her
hearing, her speech, her vision, reducing her body to a withered shell.
Today, because of Karen, the world knows so
much more. Quicksilver, as mercury is called, has long played a sinister game
of seduction with science. One of the world's oldest metals, it comes in
various forms -- some that heal, some that kill. Dimethlymercury, a colorless
liquid that looks like water but is three times heavier, is far more toxic than
other forms -- the kind used in thermometers and batteries and medicine. It's
made purely for research and is rarely used. Aug. 14, 1996. Just one shimmering
drop. Now, six months later, Karen's body was riddled with it. Karen was the
one who remembered the spill. It nagged away at her in the hospital as she
underwent CT scans and spinal taps and tests for everything except chemical
poisoning. But I work with mercury, she said. Shouldn't I be tested for the bad
stuff?
The results
plagued the doctors even more: Why had it
taken so long for
the symptoms to show? What kind of brain damage had already occurred? Had
anyone else been exposed? Was she contagious? And the question that still
stings Leon's heart, the one that still seems almost obscene: "Does your
wife have any enemies?"
"Enemies!"
he whispers incredulously through tears.
"Karen didn't
have enemies. Everyone loved her."
She was easy to
love, this tall athletic woman with the
deep infectious
laugh. Comfortable to talk to. Always there
for students,
colleagues and friends.
And for Leon.
In some ways, they
seemed an unlikely match: Leon, 40,
the son of a
Vermont dairy farmer who decided early on that masonry was more profitable than
milking cows, and Karen, 48, the daughter of a chemist, the brilliant teacher
and scholar. They had an easy comfort with each other. She would watch him
coach Charlotte's basketball team; he would accompany her on lecture trips to
Italy, Norway and Hawaii. "She was always interested in what I was
doing," he says often, as if he somehow has to explain. He always knew her
work was important but, since the accident, he has made an effort to really
understand it. Today, he can recite her resume almost by heart: the awards she
won as a doctoral student at Columbia, where her research on platinum was
considered the most exciting of its kind, the Women in Science mentoring
program she started at Dartmouth, the $7 million federal grant she won to study
toxic metals. She didn't talk much about work at home, except the grant, the
largest in the college history. "She was so proud of that," he says.
The mercury research she was doing with Harvard and MIT was just something on
the side, Leon explains. Chromium was Karen's real area of expertise. He shakes
his head at the irony. Who could have imagined that the builder would
eventually learn more than the scientist about the perils of dimethlymercury?
Others were
learning, too. At Dartmouth Medical Center,
Dr. David
Nierenberg scoured the medical literature for clues about how to treat his
colleague and friend. A mile away in his campus office two doors down from
Karen's, John Winn, head of
Dartmouth's
chemistry department, grabbed every paper on mercury he could find.
The more her
colleagues read, the more their hearts
sank. There was
only one documented case of dimethlymercury poisoning this century, a Czech
chemist in 1972 who had suffered the same symptoms as Karen and died. A handful
of people had been exposed directly to pure methlymercury, another toxic
mercury compound, and died. More well-known mercury poisoning epidemics, like
those in Iraq in the 1970s and Japan in the 1950s, involved exposure to foods
contaminated by methylmercury.
There was no
telling if dimethlymercury would act the
same way. Karen
herself was beginning to understand. There was a desperate look on her face as
she pointed to the clock when it was time to take her pills. Still, she kept up
a brave face, kept saying not to worry.
"Even if I
don't fully recover, maybe I'll get well
enough to ride
again," she whispered to her horse-riding friend and fellow scientist,
Jacqueline Sinclair. And when the hospital psychologist asked if she was
depressed, she smiled. Wouldn't you be? she replied. That was Jan. 31, three
days after the diagnosis. A week later,Karen was transferred to Massachusetts
General Hospital for a massive blood transfusion that nearly killed her. Leon
was pacing at home again, torn between honoring his wife's wish not to alert
her parents and the feeling that she was sinking faster than she knew.
The phone rang.
The nurse said Karen wanted to talk to
her son. From her
hospital bed, the mother struggled. She drooled and moaned and the words just
wouldn't come. Ashley waited uncomfortably. He didn't like the sounds. He
didn't like the silence.
"Hi,
Mom," he coaxed, loud so she might hear. It was
useless. The nurse
ended the torture and took the phone.
"She just
wanted to say goodnight," Ashley says, bowing
his head to hide
the tears when he remembers the last time he talked to his Mom. "She
couldn't even say goodnight."
Others remember
final moments, too, although everything
was happening so
fast they didn't seem like goodbyes at the time. But friends could see the toll
on the scientist's mind and body. They could see her faith fading, even as she
continued to talk about being back on her feet for her new spring course. The
day the ambulance came to take her to Massachusetts, she cried uncontrollably.
"I think
that's when she knew," says Nadia Gorman,
remembering how
she tried to comfort her friend and colleague as she wondered if she would ever
talk to her again. "There was a feeling of total tragedy in the air."
In the ambulance, Karen told Cathy Johnson
for the first
time in their
15-year friendship that she loved her. In the hospital, she struggled to point
to the letters "N" and "H" on her alphabet board. Leon
nodded. He promised that, whatever the outcome, he would take her home, to New
Hampshire.
"As a
nonscientist, I couldn't comprehend it all," says
Provost Jim
Wright, Karen's friend and former boss. "And the scientist I had been
accustomed to turn to for answers was not available to help me."
Doctors didn't
have answers either. They turned to
Thomas Clarkson at
the University of Rochester in New York, who had set up clinics in Iraq during
the epidemic there in the 1970s, when hundreds of people died after eating
mercury-poisoned bread. His lab stopped everything to help, testing Karen's
hair and blood samples, ordering a batch of dimethlymercury to begin its own
tests. "I felt such a sense of helplessness," Clarkson says.
"Here was one of the world's most distinguished scientists, and I was
looking at this woman dying realizing there is nothing the scientific or
medical communities can do."
Karen's lab was
shut down. Her family, students and
co-workers were
tested. Her hospital room was checked for airborne mercury from her breath. Federal
environmental and health agencies were alerted, as was the state health
department. Her car and clothes and house were sniffed with mercury-detectors.
E-mails flew
around campus, and around the country.
Students emptied
libraries of books on mercury, staying up all night to translate obscure
research papers, seizing on any sliver of information they could find. "There
would be this elation when we found a study about someone that had been
cured," Gorman says, "then crying when we read that the end point for
those who went into a coma was death." Scientists and doctors around the
world offered their services. "It was an extraordinary outpouring,"
Nierenberg says.
But Karen was
slipping too fast to appreciate it. Ten
days after the
diagnosis, on Feb. 7, she fell into a coma in Massachusetts. Leon told the
doctors he was taking her home.
Back at Dartmouth
Hitch***, her family kept vigil by
her bedside, her
parents and sister talking to her as her body thrashed and moaned. Leon
plastered the walls with cards and
photographs: Karen
on the golf course, at Disney World with the kids, lunch with her friends Cathy
and Nadia, shaking hands with President Clinton a
Just a tiny drop of
poison. And she was fighting it with
all her might. It
became too difficult for the children to visit. Even friends stayed home,
waiting for the phone call that would tell them it was over. Her husband
stroked her face. Her sister and her best friend washed her hair. Doctors tried
treatments never attempted on humans before. But they couldn't save her from
the poison. On June 8, it took her life.
"She didn't
suffer," Ashley told his eighth-grade class
the next day
"She just stopped breathing."
It was 10 months
since she had spilled the drop in the
lab, four months
after she had slipped into a coma.
Karen Wetterhahn's
death was as extraordinary as her
life and, in many
ways, just as important. Perhaps she had an idea that it would be.
While she could still
speak, she urged doctors and
scientists to
learn everything they could from her accident and to warn the world about the
dangers.
The world has
already learned so much. It learned that
the gloves that
were supposed to protect her actually acted as a conductor to the poison. It
learned that dimethlymercury, so easy to order in research catalogs, is more
deadly than anyone had imagined. Saddest of all, it learned that by the time
the symptoms showed, it was too late.
There is much more
to learn, as scientists and doctors
study her case.
There will be studies and papers, symposiums and tributes. There may even be
new federal regulations and mandatory blood tests for scientists who work with
heavy metals. There is talk of banning dimethlymercury for good. And talk of
turning her hospital room into a nurses' lounge and naming it for Karen. Her
funeral took place on a hot summer day to the strains of a flute and a choir
singing "Be Not Afraid."
In the packed
college chapel, the sense of betrayal was
as powerful as the
sense of loss. Colleagues wept as they eulogized a modern-day Madame Curie who
had sacrificed her life to her cause.
Wha
knowledge, they
cried, if they had to bury one of their own? Alone and bewildered, Leon sat in
the front pew, looking out of place in his dark funeral suit, tears streaming
down his face. It all seemed like a dream, he says later. No, he corrects
himself -- a nightmare.
He still wakes in
the middle of the night and wonders if
it's true, or if
Karen is just off on another trip. He still half
expects her to
come striding through the door with her laptop and her
notes and her big,
big smile to rustle up some tacos for dinner.
He picks up the
picture of Karen working in her lab, a
study of intensity
in her goggles and gloves, staring at her test tubes and vials.
"She loved
her work," he says. "It made her happy."
She couldn't have
known the risks. She couldn't have
known how bad the
bad stuff really was. Truth is, no one knew.
Just a tiny drop
of liquid. Sweet-smelling. Dense.
Deadly.
[ASSOCIATED PRESS,
LYME, N.H., September 13, 1997