Thimerosal Doesn't Cause Autism. Period.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

Bobby Kennedy Jr., a lawyer beloved by the environmental movement for defending rivers and attacking coal-burning power plants, recently discovered a new cause. In a June Rolling Stone article, and in subsequent appearances on Imus in the Morning, ABC News, and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, he accuses government vaccine scientists and their academic advisers of covering up what for him is an uncontestable fact: the causal link between a mercury-containing preservative called thimerosal in vaccines and a massive increase in childhood autism in America.

As the writer who first told the thimerosal story in depth in the New York Times Magazine two and a half years ago, I have been astonished to see how badly it has been handled since. David Kirby, a Times freelancer, published a supposed exposé in April that tells the story from the perspective of SafeMinds, a group that is to autism what Act Up was to AIDS—sometimes wrong but always loud and overall pretty effective. Then Kennedy entered the fray through his activism against mercury from power plants. In his appearances to champion the thimerosal theory, he trashes establishment science and establishment journalism for having missed the story. But Kennedy's Rolling Stone piece doesn't cover any new ground, and it is full of large and small errors and distortions. Aside from a June 25 New York Times article that discussed the parallel realities of parents and scientists studying thimerosal, there has been little mainstream media response.

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Probably the most damning epidemiological evidence against the vaccines-cause-autism theory, and another point that Kennedy gets wrong, is contained in the document that got critics started on their claim of a vaccine-provoked epidemic—a 1999 Department of Developmental Services report from California. Like reports from other states in the country, it shows a dramatic increase in autistic children seeking state services, from 2,778 autistics on the rolls in 1987 to 10,360 in 1998. An impressive diagram of this increase was projected on a screen at a Committee for Government Reform hearing chaired by Indiana Republican Dan Burton, who believes that vaccines gave his grandson autism. "Look at that graph," Burton said. "They are having an epidemic out there." But the graph actually vindicated vaccines. MMR vaccination began in children born in 1970, but there was no increase in autism reports in the state until 1980, which also happened to be the first year the psychiatric definition of autism spectrum disorders changed. A 2001 study showed that while MMR vaccination rates increased 14 percent from 1980 to 1994, autism intakes in California's state programs increased 373 percent. The increase also showed no apparent connection to the addition of thimerosal-containing vaccines to state pediatric immunization schedules.

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Most of the scientists who study autism trends are not ready to rule out entirely some real increase in the disease. But the causes may have nothing to do with industrial toxins like mercury. Interestingly, a 2003 California study found that mothers older than 35 were four times as likely to give birth to autistic children as mothers younger than 20. One of the only known environmental causes of autism is congenital rubella infection (or German measles); during a 1965-66 rubella epidemic in the United States, about 1,500 rubella babies were born with autism in addition to their other handicaps. Other perinatal developments, which increase with maternal age, can't be ruled out.

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Full article may be found here here.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community