In late October 1998, I had the "MELISA® Test For Metal Allergy" performed on samples of my blood. This blood was collected into special vacuum tubes, centrifuged, packaged at room temperature, and flown to Stockholm, Sweden along with the blood of three other people.

If you have completely waded through the accounts of my personal odyssey found on this website, then you know that my exposure to mercury via dental amalgam continued even after my initial "recovery". June 1997 is when the last of my amalgam hiding under gold crowns was finally removed. June 1997 to late October 1998 is one year and four+ months, lets call it a "year and half" later, that I had the MELISA test done. Except for what shows up in my normal air, water, and food, which is light on fish and seafoods, I have had no subsequent exposures to mercury.

As you can see below, I am still circulating memory lymphocytes programmed for inorganic mercury, the predominate metabolic end-form of all mercury that enters blood and tissues. The response is positive, but not strongly positive, which agrees with removal of the exposure source more than a year before, the mercury amalgam dental restorations. It is not much of a stretch to speculate that when I was still being exposed to mercury through amalgam, and symptomatic from that exposure, the lymphocyte response would have been recorded as higher.

My good fortune cannot be underestimated. Both my titanium implants, and my many gold restorations are tolerated by my immune system. Having stumbled through a dark, unlit room, filled with many obstacles and hazards, I have come out pretty much unscathed. The better way to have approached my dental work would have been to have had a MELISA test before removing all the amalgam and replacing it with gold alloys. In my case there had already been significant exposure to gold crowns, so a prospective test would have been meaningful for me, unlike my unfortunate friend described on the previous page.

What I have discovered new about myself is that I have a strong allergy to nickel. One of my metal crowns is believed to have been made from this metal. In fact, this was the last crown removed in the summer of 1997. There were bleeding gums around the crown, and other discomforts. The crown also harbored a chronically infected root canal, so it is difficult to assign specific symptoms to specific causes with this tooth. Nonetheless, nickel is a common metal found in most soils, is taken up by plants, and is almost impossible to totally eliminate from the diet. Nickel is a component of stainless steel, and enters food and liquids during cooking, water transport and storage. I'll save a longer discussion of nickel allergy for another page, but will say briefly here that I've since moved to glass cookware and filtered cooking and drinking water as part of my strategy for dealing with this metal.

With no further prelude, here are my personal MELISA results, reconstructed by me in html from the printed laboratory report. (Note: fractional notation is in European format: 2,5 = 2.5)

MELISA® Laboratory Danderyds Hospital 182 88 Danderyd Sweden
Patient code:	Jeff Clark
Date of sample:	981022
Study:	9868
Performed tests:	Al. Au, Pd, Pb, Cd, Hg, Ag, Ni, PhHg, Cu, TiCl4, Sn, Pt, MeHg, EtHg, and Sodium lauryl sulfate
Lymphocyte treatment	Cpm		Stimulation Index	Number of lymphoblasts	Comments
Negative control	2146 +/- 598		1	2	Many activated MF
Lymphocyte treatment	Conc. (ug/ml)	delta Cpm	Stimulation Index	Number of lymphoblasts	Comments
PPD	1	6889	4,2	20
Aluminum	40	267	1,1	-
	20	1591	1,7	0
	10	521	1,2	-
Gold	6,25	3724	2,7	9
	3,12	1182	1,6	0	Activated MF
	1,56	-187	0,9	-
Palladium	6,25	1055	1,5	-
	3,12	1182	1,6	-
	1,56	490	1,2	-
Lead	25	477	1,2	-
	12,5	1993	1,9	-
Cadmium	3,12	-100	1,0	-
	1,56	1526	1,7	-
	0,78	99	1,0	-
Inorganic Hg	0,5	6241	3,9	40
	0,25	4122	2,9	20
	0,125	1464	1,7	-
Silver	2,5	323	1,2	-
	1,25	1842	1,9	-
Nickel	5	22546	11,5	>100
	2,5	40596	19,9	>100
	1,25	5489	3,6	-
Phenyl-Hg	0,5	3675	2,7	8	Bad slide
	0,25	3863	2,8	15
	0,125	3023	2,4	-
Copper	0,5	-728	0,7	-
	0,25	-249	0,9	-
Titanium chloride	200	-725	0,7	-
	100	-659	0,7	-
	50	-187	0,9	-
Tin	50	1551	1,7	-
	25	-359	0,8	-
	12,5	-946	0,6	-
Platinum	25	-677	0,7	-
	12,5	214	1,1	-
Methyl-Hg	0,5	-897	0,6	-
	0,25	-731	0,7	-
	0,125	-340	0,8	-
Ethyl-Hg	0,5	980	1,5	-
	0,25	-1145	0,5	-
	0,125	-1079	0,5	-
Sodium lauryl sulfate	100	640	1,3	-
	50	109	1,1	-
	25	1680	1,8	-
Footnote:
CPM	Counts per minute
delta CPM	Cpm in test cultures minus cpm in neg. control cultures
SI	Stimulation Index = cpm in test culture divided by the mean cpm in control cultures
PPD	Tuberculin, purified protein derivative = positive control
-	Not done
MF	Macrophages
Evaluation:
Strongly Positive to:	Nickel
Positive to:	Inorganic Hg
Weakly positive to:	Phenyl-Hg
Negative to:	Aluminum Gold Palladium Lead Cadmium Silver Copper Titanium chloride Tin Platinum Methyl-Hg Ethyl-Hg Sodium lauryl sulfate
Comments	Low PPD response

J.C. comments on PPD: PPD is a good choice for a positive control in European patients, since there has traditionally been a TB vaccination program in European countries. In the USA, public health officials seemed to have decided that TB vaccination was too risky, or unneeded. I've never been vaccinated for TB, and to my knowledge have not been exposed to the disease either. Another member of my group having MELISA tests once lived at home with a parent who had developed TB. She had even gone through extensive antibiotic treatments to avoid also developing the disease. She was the only member of our USA group who didn't have a low PPD response from MELISA, her PPD scores were: SI= 205, with lymphoblasts > 100.