Christopher Exley is een expert (een echte) in aluminium en met name het giftig karakter van dit chemisch element. Wat zeker niet onbelangrijk is aangezien aluminum één van de meest voorkomende elementen is.

• Aluminium is het derde meest voorkomende element (na zuurstof en silicoon) en i stevens superreactief:
  First, aluminum in all of its myriad forms is superabundant; it is the third most abundant element (after oxygen and silicon) of the Earth’s crust. The land upon which we walk and the mountains we endeavor to climb are made of aluminum, silicon, and oxygen.2 Second, aluminum is superreactive; it is both chemically and biologically reactive.

• Dit levert een paradox op: overvloedig aanwezig maar zonder enige biologische functie in geen enkele soort: dat betekent dat een lichaam zich niet kan beschermen tegen aluminium en ook geen mechanisme heeft om het te elimineren:
  However, these two red flags identify a paradox, as the abundant and biologically reactive aluminum has no biological function either in any organism today or in any extinct biota from the evolutionary past. We know the latter to be true since aluminum left no biochemical footprints in the sands of evolutionary time. This means in practical terms that when we encounter aluminum in our everyday lives, our bodies only see aluminum as an impostor, something foreign, and something for which we have not been preprepared through biochemical evolution.3 This in turn means that all of our encounters with aluminum are adventitious, random, and chaotic. There is no aluminum homeostasis, no protection against it, and no controlled elimination. I have not always been so aware of aluminum’s rules of engagement with life and living things, and so one might forgive others whose days, like mine, are not spent pondering the natural history of aluminum, for missing these red flags.

• De enige bescherming tegen aluminium was onze planeet zelf, maar de komst van de mens heeft deze situatie helaas grondig veranderd:
  The natural history of aluminum and life is for telling on another day and not now in this book. However, it is one of the great stories that helps to explain why Earth is unique among millions of planets in thousands of galaxies. Planet Earth is the original green economy and ultimate example of recycling, and throughout the several billion years of its existence, it never allowed the movement of biologically reactive aluminum from the geochemical cycle to the biotic—living—cycle. This glorious success in keeping aluminum out of all living things is summarized as a biogeochemical cycle recently circumvented by one significant caveat, the emergence of Man.
  However, the very recent natural history of aluminum is concerning, and it marks the advent of what I have called “the Aluminum Age.”4 When, in 1889, Charles Martin Hall invented a process of extracting aluminum metal from its ubiquitous ores of the Earth’s crust, it heralded an age as important as any before or since.5 Aluminum metal and its many salts and myriad compounds were catalysts (both literally and metaphorically) for technological change fueling (again quite literally) the advances of the twentieth century and beyond. Aluminum was lauded as a miracle metal, and, as it eventually transpired, there were no limits to its applications in modern life and living.
  Throughout the seemingly infinitely long period when there has been life on Earth, human beings, in only the latter part of the nineteenth century, achieved something not seen before in Nature. We have presided over an ubiquitome of biologically reactive aluminum. I just made up the word ubiquitome to describe and to bring to life the biological world of aluminum (since aluminum is both omnipresent and biologically available, while only the former was true prior to the Aluminum Age). A Pandora’s box of possibilities is open, and over a century of the consequences are already upon us. In the short term, at least, biologically reactive aluminum is only toxic, and its ubiquitome is why we should all worry about aluminum.

• Aluminium in een levend lichaam is giftig:
  The availability of biologically reactive aluminum is governed by processes akin to Darwinian natural selection, with the environment (where the aluminum is found) playing a crucial role in any outcome. All of the aluminum found in, or associated with, the human body has the potential to result in toxicity. Fulfilment of this potential leads to human disease. This is arguably all the basic chemistry required to have insight into the toxicity of aluminum, whether fish, fowl, or human being.

• Voorbije zomer werd heel hijgerig gedaan omwille van de hitte en dat mensen zich moesten beschermen tegen de zon via zonnecrème. Sommige meenten beslisten zelfs om zonnecrème gratis beschikbaar te stellen. Want dat voorkwam huidkanker. En ongezond was zonnecrème toch niet, kraaiden de fact checkers, al moesten ze wel toegeven dat met die kankerpreventie het maar pover was gesteld. Volgens Exley echter zijn zonnecrèmes wél gevaarlijk aangezien ze aluminium bevatten. Volgens hem zijn de crèmes zelfs kankerverwekkend:
  Personally, I continue to worry about the promotion of sunscreen and sunblock, many versions of which include aluminum salts as ingredients. Aluminum is a powerful catalyst of oxidative damage (this is why we call it a pro-oxidant2) and with sunlight and the UV filters found in sunscreen, it forms a dangerous triumvirate capable of carcinogenic effects.
  Is it only a coincidence that those countries in the world using the most sunscreen per head have the highest incidence of melanoma?

• Vooral de hersenen zijn kwetsbaar voor aluminium giftigheid:
  Neurones, the brain cells, are the longest-lived cells in the body, and this makes them a prime target for the accumulation of aluminum over time.5 The brain, like bone, is therefore a tissue in the body where you might expect to find aluminum. This longevity of neurones also makes them prime targets of aluminum toxicity, as toxic thresholds are reached over (usually) decades of continuous low exposure.
  A similar health warning should accompany the use of aluminum salts as phosphate binders in individuals undergoing kidney dialysis. While aluminum helps to reduce the absorption of phosphate from the gut, it is present to such an excess in these medications that its movement into the blood is inevitable, and its subsequent uptake into the brain is responsible for dialysis-related encephalopathy.4 The latter is no longer questionable, and yet these products are still prescribed for use by hapless individuals. Aluminum antacids and phosphate binders are two medications that should be avoided by everyone if it is at all possible. Many will not appreciate that the buffer often included in many popular brand painkillers is an aluminum salt. Other well-known brands of painkillers include aluminum salts as lakes (commonly used term to describe aluminum compounds used to color products) to give tablets their distinctive color. These are products used regularly by millions of people completely unaware of their aluminum content. They represent significant exposure to aluminum by many, and choosing a type or brand of painkiller that does not include aluminum is highly recommended.

• Geneesmiddelen en vaccins zijn een belangrijke bron van aluminium:
  There are other insidious ways by which we are exposed to aluminum through regular use of medications. Fluoroquinolones are commonly prescribed antibiotics that, while not necessarily contaminated with aluminum (this is not yet known), are likely to bind aluminum in the gut and potentially increase its uptake into blood. I am reminded of recent press speculation reinforced by published medical research of a potential link between regular use of these antibiotics and poor mental health. Effects upon our mental health are certainly one outcome of chronic intoxication by aluminum. Of course, vaccines that include an aluminum adjuvant are significant contributors to the body burden of aluminum, especially in infants. I have written about this subject specifically elsewhere in this book, and I probably do not need to reiterate my opinion that I recommend avoiding vaccines that include an aluminum adjuvant whenever possible.

• Verder zijn er cosmetica:
  Cosmetics, including personal care products, are an issue, as many include aluminum as an ingredient. Some, such as antiperspirants, are obvious, while others, including aluminum in sunscreen and sunblock, are less overt.6 Often aluminum is present to aid in the manufacture or processing of the product, similarly to food, and while its inclusion should mean that it is listed as an ingredient, it may be as an E number or something equivalent. Cosmetics raise a number of additional concerns in that they are often applied liberally and regularly and sometimes to parts of the body where the potential for exposure is increased, such as in lipsticks.7 Many years ago, I was asked by Procter & Gamble to assess the possible role of aluminum in antiperspirants in Alzheimer’s disease. This was somewhat forward-thinking at the time for a pharmaceutical giant and, at times, an enjoyable consultation, since my P&G contact would meet me in London every two or three months for a working lunch at a fabulous Michelin-starred restaurant. Perhaps there is such a thing as a “free lunch”? Upon concluding the review of the evidence, my main piece of advice to them, subsequently published in the trends journal Molecular Medicine Today, was to discontinue the manufacture of antiperspirant aerosols.8 It seemed inevitable to me that aerosols of aluminum-based antiperspirant would gain immediate access to the hippocampus of the brain via the olfactory route. Essentially, if you can smell your antiperspirant, then it is highly likely that not only the perfume element of the product has accessed your nose. Outside of the area of antiperspirants, there has been limited research on the contribution of cosmetics to human exposure to aluminum. It is no longer safe to assume that the skin is an impermeable barrier to any topical application. I am personally concerned about the nose and the lungs as routes of exposure to aluminum in any cosmetic applied as an aerosol.

• Vrije tijdsbesteding en het inademen van aluminium (roken...). Het kan zelfs best dat de aluminium in sigaretten longkanker en andere longziektes veroorzaakt:
  Recreational social habits can be significant contributors to the body burden of aluminum, particularly those involving inhalation through the nose or lungs. Remember that anything absorbed into the blood via the gut will have to pass through the liver before potentially accessing the rest of the body, including the brain. This means that there is an opportunity for some degree of detoxification. Aluminum in any form that is inhaled through the nose or the lung bypasses this first line of defense. Tobacco has long been associated with human disease and with lung cancer specifically. Sir Richard Doll in his seminal work9 made it very clear that smoking tobacco is a significant environmental factor in the development of lung cancer, and indeed other respiratory diseases. However, Doll used epidemiology to demonstrate this link, and to this day, we still do not understand the mechanism whereby tobacco smoking increases the incidence of lung cancer. I have always been intrigued by “how” an agent causes a disease, and, with this in mind, I decided to investigate the aluminum content of tobacco.10 We found that tobacco was aluminum-rich, not because the plant has any requirement for the metal, but, similar to tea and coffee, because many tobacco crops are grown on acidic soils allowing the adventitious accumulation of aluminum in the plant. By setting up a smoking machine in the laboratory, we also showed that aluminum in tobacco is biologically available in that it is trapped upon its passage through a surrogate lung fluid. These are sobering experiments to carry out. Smoke exiting the filter on a cigarette is thick and black, while it appears wispy and white exiting the surrogate lung fluid. Aluminum is part of the black retentate trapped by the surrogate lung fluid; it is little wonder that smoking contributes to lung disease. Smoking tobacco is a significant contributor to the body burden of aluminum, and I hypothesized that aluminum could be responsible for many smoking-related lung diseases.
  The arrival on the market of electronic cigarettes might inadvertently herald an opportunity to test the toxicity of nicotine in smoking. The e-cigarette takes tobacco out of the equation and allows smoking of nicotine products in an inert vehicle. These products intrigued us, and we set about testing the aluminum content of e-liquids.11 We also investigated whether or not a surrogate lung fluid would capture any aluminum released during vaping. The aluminum content of a wide range of e-liquids, including several rated as high in nicotine, was found to be almost negligible, at least in comparison to aluminum in tobacco. However, to our great surprise, when e-liquids were “vaped” in our laboratory smoking machine, the amount of aluminum collected by the surrogate lung fluid was much higher than we had seen previously for tobacco. We went on to find that the aluminum was not originating from the e-liquid, but from the heating element in the body of the e-cigarette used to vaporize the e-liquid. This immediately suggested that e-cigarettes were not going to be safe alternatives to smoking tobacco, and this has been borne out by a burgeoning body of research into their safety. One recent study likened lung damage following regular vaping to that which had been observed over many years of occupational exposure to metals. The experiment that remains to be carried out is one where e-liquids containing high amounts of nicotine (and preferably nothing else) are vaporized using a stainless steel (or at least aluminum-free) heating element. Long-term observation of individuals using this form of e-cigarette could go a long way toward establishing if aluminum (and/or nicotine) in tobacco is in fact responsible for some smoking-related diseases.

• Ook cannabis bevat aluminium en diet aluminiumvrij gemaak te worden voor gebruik (in dat geval kan cannabis wel geneeskundige werking hebben -- ook hier is het wellicht de aluminium die de "ziektes" geassocieerd met cannabis (zoals multiple sclerose) veroorzaken:
  In related research, we also showed that street cannabis is aluminumrich, as is pure tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), its active ingredient. In my opinion, this is sufficient to warn against the use of cannabis in human disease therapy, for example, multiple sclerosis. I make this warning with the proviso that the products tested were off the street and provided to us under license by the police. Cannabis grown hydroponically in the absence of aluminum should be aluminum-free and therefore could be used as a putative therapeutic agent.

• Andere problematische drug is cocaïne:
  Tobacco and cannabis are not the only recreational drugs that contribute toward the body burden of aluminum. Research elsewhere has shown that cocaine is heavily contaminated with aluminum, and this may be due to the presence of aluminum in the original plant tissue or, perhaps equally likely, the fact that aluminum is introduced into the product during its illegal processing. The latter is probably the case, since we did not find that street heroin, a related product, is contaminated with aluminum, at least not appreciably.12 However, we did find very high levels of aluminum in the urine of heroin addicts. The answer to this particular conundrum probably comes down to the way in which heroin can be taken. In “chasing the dragon,” the addict inhales heroin that has been vaporized off aluminum foil, which is a form of exposure to aluminum similar to vaporized e-liquids in e-cigarettes. Recreational drugs, legal or otherwise, are significant contributors to the body burden of aluminum, and not using them will reduce your exposure to aluminum and, perhaps specifically, the brain’s exposure to aluminum. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that early stages of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease are consistently observed in the brain tissue of young heroin addicts dying of an overdose.

• Dus aluminum vermijden: geen bewerkt voedsel en drinkern, bepaalde vormen van medicatie, cosmetica, roken...Maar we moeten ook aluminium kunnen verwijderen uit het lichaam. Hoe?

• Vaccins, hoe zit het daarmee?
  While I write these words about infant exposure to aluminum in the diet, I can almost feel the pressure from many readers asking, “But what about aluminum in vaccines?” Is there a more contentious subject in human health today than the safety of vaccines? Is there a subject laced with more vitriol? In the United Kingdom, the admission that you are researching vaccine safety is something akin to science heresy. If so, then I am proud to stand on the shoulders of past heretics like Galileo in my questioning the safety of the vaccines we administer to our children. I will not be bullied from doing so. Well, getting off my soapbox for a moment, I have written specifically about aluminum and vaccines elsewhere in this book, and I will simply emphasize here that which is important and specific to infants. Actually, as has already been implied, the unique vulnerability of infants to aluminum magnifies their predisposition to aluminum administered as an adjuvant in vaccines. The aluminum content of pediatric vaccines is absurdly high and a significant cause for concern.11 Recall that vaccines requiring an aluminum adjuvant do not work in the absence of the adjuvant. The antigen is not by itself sufficiently antigenic to initiate any form of effective immune response. With this in mind, imagine the scene in the vaccine manufacturers’ research laboratory at the time when they are testing the efficacy of a vaccine and, borrowing a term from the vaccine charlatan Andrew Pollard, its truly “minuscule” content (unlike the aluminum adjuvant) of antigen, to elicit the required antibody response. Every negative response is met with a war cry to increase the amount of aluminum adjuvant added to the vaccine until eventually an effective antibody titer is achieved. At no point does anyone in the research team question the significance of the amount of aluminum required to achieve the desired effect. There is no requirement to ask such a question. In spite of the obvious, that it is the aluminum adjuvant and not the vaccine per se that is immunoreactive, the adjuvant is considered as being benign in the process of development of the vaccine. There is no requirement in law to test the safety of the aluminum adjuvant alone,12 and the safety of the whole vaccine is tested, nominally at least, against either the aluminum adjuvant or another vaccine that includes an aluminum adjuvant. Surely, this is “the dirty little secret” of vaccinology. When is a vaccine not a vaccine?
  When it doesn’t contain an immunoreactive amount of aluminum adjuvant!
  The translocation of aluminum from the vaccine injection site involves a number of processes including its transport as complexes in blood and lymph and its transport within housekeeping, immunoreactive cells such as macrophages and lymphocytes (white blood cells). Unlike the majority of aluminum that enters the bloodstream via the gut, aluminum from a vaccine will not pass through the liver, our major organ of detoxification, before having access to other major organs such as the heart and brain. Once again, returning to the thesis that the infant is an ideal laboratory model for aluminum intoxication, vaccination is the optimal route of exposure in such an ideal model. The infant is actually undergoing chronic, that is, day-to-day, intoxication by aluminum through diet, for example infant formula, and acute exposure to aluminum through vaccination. Human beings are robust, and infants are clearly no exception to this general rule. Wearing my toxicology hat, and remembering how aluminum killed fish, it is a wonder to me that more infants are not overtly damaged by aluminum in their first few years of life. I emphasize, overtly, the covert damage suffered by infants from exposure to aluminum is only likely to manifest as chronic disease in adolescence and adulthood.

• Aluminium is een antigen, maar een dat niet geneutraliseerd wordt door een antilichaam:
  The hypothesis was built upon two important immunoreactive properties of aluminum; it was capable of acting as both adjuvant and antigen. The latter was perhaps considered the more novel of the two, though burgeoning research was already demonstrating that many different types of biologically reactive molecules, not just proteins, could act as antigens, aluminum included. Pioneers in demonstrating the antigenicity of aluminum is the group run by Beka Solomon in Tel Aviv, Israel, world leaders in antibody research. The notion that aluminum is an antigen means that the body retains a memory of previous exposures to aluminum. This means that any de novo exposure to aluminum might result in antibodies being raised not only against the new insult, but also against existing stores of aluminum in the body.
  aluminum, perhaps unlike a virus, cannot be neutralized by an antibody, and therein lies some of the issue and the long-term toxicity suffered by this individual. Antibody binding of extracellular aluminum may both liberate and redistribute aluminum in the body, changing, and possibly exacerbating, its propensity to bring about toxicity. We simply do not know if this is the case. The research into this hypothesized phenomenon has yet to be carried out. The perfect storm of toxicity in this individual was brought about because prior to receiving the five aluminum adjuvant vaccines in just four weeks, he already was subject to a higher than normal body burden of aluminum. The aluminum he received in the vaccinations was not sufficient in itself to explain his high body burden as measured by us postvaccinations at Keele. How, why, and when this body burden was built up is impossible to ascertain, but these previous exposures were sufficient to leave behind memories, antibodies primed for any future significant exposure to antigenic aluminum.

• Aluminium in vaccins is bijzonder gevaarlijk en fabrikanten en wetgever gaan er bijzonder licht over:
  There is no requirement of vaccine manufacturers to demonstrate that aluminum adjuvants, the most critical component of this type of vaccine, are safe for use in humans. Consequently, there are no safety studies, and there are no aluminum adjuvants approved for use in human vaccines. Only whole vaccines including an aluminum adjuvant are tested to establish their efficacy and, often a secondary endpoint, safety for use in humans. However, the validity of safety tests, such as they are, for whole vaccines that include an aluminum adjuvant is brought into question when one considers that not a single aluminum adjuvant vaccine in use today has been tested against a true placebo or control.19 Manufacturers have always chosen to test the efficacy (often couched as a safety trial) of a new aluminum adjuvant vaccine against either a previous vaccine that includes an aluminum adjuvant or, as is often the case, against the aluminum adjuvant alone. There is only one conceivable reason why they do this, and it is to cover up, or mask, the toxicity of aluminum adjuvants. They know that aluminum adjuvants are toxic both from their unpublished in-house work and from scarce published data. Regarding the latter, in the only example in the scientific literature of a whole aluminum adjuvant vaccine, Gardasil, being compared against a true placebo, saline, zero adverse events were recorded for the saline group, while both the whole vaccine and the adjuvant alone groups recorded identical incidences of adverse events of 2.4 percent. The stark reality of this vaccine is that for every one million recipients of a single injection of Gardasil, 24,000 are injured by the vaccine, and the majority of these injuries are almost certainly due to Merck’s proprietary adjuvant, aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulphate. This adjuvant appears to be a sulphated version of the commercially available adjuvant aluminum hydroxyphosphate. However, Merck has repeatedly refused to make their adjuvant available for independent verification and testing.

• Waarom is aluminium giftig?
  Aluminum is toxic because it disrupts cellular biochemistry. This is why it kills fish in acid waters and destroys trees in catchments affected by acid rain. It is also why renal patients died of dialysis encephalopathy. The problem in defining why, or perhaps how, aluminum is toxic lies in deciding which cellular biochemistry is most affected in which environment. The latter, the physicochemical compartment housing the biochemistry, is perhaps most critical.
  The relatively small size and comparatively large charge of biologically reactive aluminum, Al3+(aq) make it an ideal metal-cofactor for oxygen-based functional groups on myriad biomolecules. Fluoride functional groups also bind aluminum with high avidity, especially in slightly acidic compartments.
  in considering aluminum’s toxicity, we can restrict thinking to oxygen-based functional groups, and there are plenty of these. If we allow for a ready and infinite supply of biologically reactive aluminum, then an array of ligands will compete to bind aluminum. These ligands could include pyrophosphate groups on nucleotides like ATP, carboxylic acid groups on organic acids such as citrate, and infinite combinations of hydroxyl, carbonyl, phosphate, and carboxylic acid groups on proteins and amino acids, the latter including neurotransmitters such as glutamate. The binding of aluminum by  each group or combination of groups is the first step in an equilibrium, and together competitive equilibria involving aluminum and all these possible groups define the fate of aluminum and any subsequent possible toxicity.
  To understand this further, we need to go back to Darwinian natural selection, especially the concept of “survival of the fittest.” This is often wrongly interpreted as biggest, strongest, fastest, etc., is best and ultimately the winner. However, the critical term is “fittest,” and this brings the environment to the fore. For example, in the highly competitive world of ligands binding biologically reactive aluminum, small changes in the environment housing the biochemistry have significant impact upon which of the competitive equilibria triumphs. In its simplest form, a change in pH from 5.5 to 6.0 switches the triumphant ligand  from fluoride to hydroxyl and is hence why the former increases the absorption of aluminum across the stomach but not the latter regions of the small intestine.
  What I have termed anomalous or unexpected prooxidative biochemistry, iron-dependent or otherwise, will be significantly accelerated by the additional presence of aluminum acting through AlO2•2+, and this is why I have chosen the prooxidant activity of aluminum as my “Top Trumps” of mechanisms of aluminum toxicity. I have been asked many times if aluminum might exert its toxicity by a particular mechanism, and my usual answer is yes, that is possible and I might even add that such a mechanism of action has been demonstrated in vitro, in cell models, and in animal models. Understanding the toxicity of aluminum in humans is less about the identification of a specific mechanism, since there are myriad potential mechanisms, and much more about the probability that biologically reactive aluminum will be in the right place at the right time in sufficient quantity to manifest toxicity in the body. Aluminum is only toxic; it really should not be in the body.