I was going to leave this alone, but--- can't help it. Two years ago my husband, who was forty four, was diagnosed with Parkinsons. We did a lot of research. If you are curious,there is a wealth of information on the Internet. Do a search for Parkinsons Disease. There are numerous factors that can contribute to development of this condition. The ones I remember off hand, because they apply to my husband, are: family history of neurological problems, exposure to pesticides (you can probably put heavy metal exposure in here too), living in rural areas, and head trauma. The area of the brain involved seems to be sensitive to many different assaults. Symptoms do not develop until 90%+ of the relevant cells are gone. This means you do a lot of damage before you know about it. Parkinsons takes away first your ability to control your movement, then your ability to move and can lead to dementia and a host of other unpleasant side effects. Using manganese in clay and glaze may not be enough to produce symptoms now, but if you add in all the other factors, why take the risk that you are adding the straw to break the camels back? Kristen Giles mgiles@onramp.net --------------------------------------------------------- First, Kristen Giles, I'm deeply sorry about your husband's illness. I also want to thank you for a gloriously common sense answer to the discussion. You are so right: there are many things that will destroy the particular cells in the brain that transmit our brain's intent to our muscles. Older literature simply said that Parkinson's is an inherited condition. Manganese was known to cause the identical symptoms because the disease was seen in Manganese miners and others who worked with manganese. But it was not really appreciated that these were indeed the same disease from different causes. The turn around in Parkinson's research came in 1982 when a small group of heroin addicts shot up a designer drug similar to Demerol. All developed [41 lines left ... full text available at <url:http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go?choice=message&table=04_1997&mid=3819409&hilit=DESIGNER+DRUG+DRUGS> ] -------------------------------- Article-ID: 04_1997&3676275 Score: 78 Subject: Re: The Truth About GHB