And this week's winner of 'Most Disingenuous Headline of the Week' goes to Jonathon Benson of Natural News for the following gem:
'Pregnant women should be injected with mercury, says nurse organisation.'
Even for Natural News, the bastion of crazy that it is, this is really pretty crazy! Fact checking this story started well as Benson chose not to reference the American College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (ACOG) guidelines, instead preferring four of the seven references to be of the self-fellating kind and linking to other naturalnews.com acrticles. The Yahoo News reference provided does link to the ACOG guidelines however. Are ACOG, who are an organisation that represents two medical specialties and are not in the business of representing nurses (factual error number one), recommending mercury injections?
Of course they are not (factual error number two). That would make them mental. They are recommending that pregnant ladies get flu vaccines as it lends protection to their foetuses which otherwise would be susceptible to flu until 6 months after birth. The vaccines do contain mercury in the form of ethylmercury, which is different to the toxic form methylmercury. This study explains that ethylmercury is removed from the body much quicker than methylmercury and as a result the toxic build up leading to mercury poisoning does not occur.
The rest of the piece simply trots out the same tired vaccine myths, so I'll let John Snyder, skeptic and paediatrician, explain them all a lot better than I could.
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