Friday 21 November 2008

The dose is the poison

Having failed to find any real connection between anti-cervical cancer vaccinations and ill-health of any kind, Seonaid is using the "Green Our Vaccines" argument and claiming Gardasil is actually rat poison. Apparently there's sodium borate listed as an ingredient.

What do rat poison and the HPV vaccine have in common? The answer is a hazardous chemical known as sodium borate. Savvy readers may wonder what a toxin that is commonly used to kill rats is doing in the ingredient list for the HPV vaccine that is currently being pushed on girls as young as nine and is even being considered for men and boys.


Hmm. While it's used as an insecticide, Wikipedia doesn't list it being used as a rodenticide. According to Wikipedia (I know - not exactly the world's most accurate of sources, but good enough to counter this kind of shit), the median lethal dose in rats (which is probably where the "Rat Poison" line comes from) is 2.66g/kg. So, if, for the sake of argument, we assume a similar figure for humans… Let's take a ten stone human being. That's about 63.5kg. The lethal dose would therefore be (63.5 * 2.66g) - about 169 grams. Getting on for half a pound.

How much is there in a Gardasil injection? Well, a Gardasil dose is 0.5ml. If we consider the vaccine to have the same density as water, that's a total mass of 0.5 grams. The Gardasil leaflet doesn't list the actual mass of sodium borate, but it does list the mass of other ingredients up to 20 micrograms, so we can assume that the amount of sodium borate is less than 20 micrograms. (In fact it's likely to be trace, but I'm giving the nutters the benefit of the doubt here). 20 micrograms. 0.00002 grams. Or, at maximum, about one eight-and-a-half-millionth of a lethal dose - probably far less.

Why not check how much is in your favourite cosmetics?

Sodium Borate in Wikipedia

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Actually very few, if any at all cosmetics actually contain borax. We all use nasty petroleum based emulsifiers to hold them together as they are much better for the skin, and cheaper. Lanolin or beeswax and borax is prehistoric.
(OK thats an exaggeration, Victorian actually)

Wikipedia is a bit pants about this. Trust me on that!