Children's Health Defense By
Even one amalgam dental filling exposes pregnant women to potentially harmful mercury vapor levels compared with women with no fillings — and multiple fillings increase exposures and risks proportionally, according to a paper published Feb. 5 in Human & Experimental Toxicology.
All pregnant women with one or more fillings exceed at least one published “safe” exposure limit for mercury vapor.
Dental amalgam fillings are made from a mixture of mercury and other metals. Mercury — the silvery substance inside old-fashioned mercury thermometers — is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
Like all other liquids, mercury evaporates, turning from liquid to gas. Inhaling mercury vapor is a significant source of mercury exposure.
Other sources include fish and seafood, industrial processes and products, including mining, and mercury-containing products like thermometers.
Vaccines are another source of mercury exposure. Many seasonal influenza vaccines contain thimerosal, an organic mercury preservative that negatively affects several organs, particularly the nervous system.
Thimerosal was an ingredient in many childhood vaccines but was removed from those products in 2001. However, it is still present in flu vaccines administered to children and pregnant women.
Lead researcher Dr. Mark Geier, an advocate for mercury-free pharmaceuticals, tapped into data on 1,665,890 pregnant women from the 2015-2020 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
Of those, 606,840 had at least one dental amalgam filling and 1,059,050 did not.
Pregnancy was determined during the NHANES intake exam through a rapid pregnancy test and a confirmatory clinical-grade blood test for human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone released during early pregnancy. The number of amalgam dental fillings was noted through a standard dental examination.
By measuring mercury levels in the study subjects’ urine and their daily urine output, the authors calculated each subject’s daily mercury exposure from inhaling mercury vapor released from their fillings.
They expressed these values as micrograms of mercury per kilogram of body weight per day (µg of Hg/kg/day), which is how regulators and agencies express toxic metal exposures.
Geier then compared calculated daily mercury exposures to “safe” exposure limits from four government agencies and one other study (Richardson et al.). Those results are summarized in Table 5 from the study.
Table 5 lists exposure limits by increasing stringency, with the highest U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exposure limit at the top and California’s standard, which is almost tenfold lower, at the bottom…
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