[erimir]

Hey, F-X you do realize that thimerosal is a compound, not just mercury, right?

You realize there's a large difference between a compound and the element by itself, right? You realize that just because a compound contains a metallic element, that doesn't make it "a metal", right? I mean, is salt a metal? It's NaCl. Sodium chloride. Sodium is a metallic element, so salt must be a metal right? I love sprinkling metal on my fries. Ingesting sodium (Na) on its own would be a bad idea. Sprinkling NaCl (i.e. table salt) on your food is just fine.

So just pointing out that there's mercury in a compound doesn't mean that you can say that it's necessarily all that similar to putting mercury by itself into your body. The Mad Hatter got the name because hatters worked with mercury (plain mercury) and it caused brain damage. Nobody is going to say that drinking mercury would be a good idea. But thimerosal is not plain mercury, so its properties are different.

Water is not "basically oxygen" just because it's mostly oxygen by weight, you know.