I thought it was RFK jr.

Someone asked me a while back why I wasn't John F. Kennedy Jr.'s biggest fan, and this is why.

Think you mean Robert, not John.

Parental induced natural selection.

The Mrs. and I had this discussion before The Boy was born, and decided the threat of autism was far, far less likely than him getting the host of diseases prevented by vaccinations.

The problem, of course, is whether or not immunizations should be forced outright through law, or more so through schools telling parents their little non-immunized snowflakes can't attend school until they have them.

Yes, there are public health risks for kids without immunizations, but it seems more likely the risk is to themselves, rather than at large. And once we cross that line, not sure how far more we go -- do we force a balanced diet? More exercise? Less TV? After all, all of those are health risks as well.

Anyway, I hope this article spurs some people to rethink their decisions.

**shrugs shoulders, worries about his own kid rather than everyone else's**

This is just people being stupid about risk analysis. There's a much larger risk of death or serious injury from getting measles than the risk of autism from vaccines (I'd say an infinitely larger risk since the autism link has no supporting data.) Yet parents are perfectly willing to intentionally infect their kids at measles parties to get them the same immunity they could acquire from a vaccine, because there's lots of talk and rumors about how dangerous vaccines are. On the bright side, I guess if your kid dies of measles they won't be autistic.

We had the same thing happen up here in the San Juans. 22 cases of Whooping Cough! I haven't heard of anything like that for decades.

One point that gets missed is that immunity can wane. Many adults who received vaccines in the 50s/60s/70s may have attenuated immunity to many of these diseases. That is one reason pertussis (whooping cough) has made a comeback. When kids don't get these vaccines to maintain the herd immunity, they are putting adults at risk as well.

Additionally, they put at risk younger children who would get the vaccine once they reach the right age. If a parent wants to play Russian roulette with their child, fine, but that unimmunized potential contagion should not be allowed to go to daycare, preschool, or school to put the rest of the kids at risk.

Josh - the father of a young baby in daycare.

Darwin Awards shouldn't be forced on kids who don't have a choice in the matter.

And, just to continue with Josh B's comment, 'childhood' diseases like measles or mumps can be life-threatening for adults. Vaccine-skeptics are putting all of us at risk.

I just despise epidemiological free riders. For more on that, click here.

John McCaiu is another politician who deserves criticism on this issue. A few weeks ago, he made a statement supporting of the supposed link between autism and vaccines.

McCain said, per ABC News’ Bret Hovell, that “It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.�

http://www.pajamasmedia.com/2008/03/memo_to_mccain_vaccines_not_li.php

In fact, rather than "strong evidence", there's no evidence at all.

I'm as classically liberal as they come: but the point is that you're only allowed to act as you wish as long as your behaviour harms no one else.

The loss of herd immunity (and we've had a similar scare in the UK about the MMR vaccine and autism and vaccination rates are below 80% in some areas)is indeed a danger to others as a result of personal decisions.

This is a simple public health issue where the public good means that you should have your children vaccinated. And the law should force you to do so.

Same moral and logical basis as people with extreme drug resistent TB being quarantined.

I can't wait to hear the outrage when several of the in vaccinated kids die from an outbreak of one of the standard childhood diseases. Think about the children who might emerge from a high fever with brain damage.

I had an aunt who was permanently brain injured by measles back in the 1930s. It was a horror for my grandparents to realize that their normal daughter of last week was permanently brain damaged by the measles that swept through the family. After they died my aunt spent the rest of her life in group homes.

The potential wounds those young conspiracy theorist new age parents are inflicting on their children are horrible. Too bad no body is grown up enough to tell them they are being irresponsible.

"unvaccinated"

We have a lot of chiropractors in SC and those quacks do the same thing -- refuse to get their kids immunized but counting on the rest of us "stupid" people to get our kids immunized so that their's don't get sick.

In SC, it is chiropractors who don't get their kids immunized. If only it was the parents instead of the kids who got sick....

(Get ready to throw some bricks, but, frankly, as a social worker I see a lot of kids whose parents claim they have "mild" autism, but who clearly just need a little discipline in their lives. "Mild" autism has become the trendy diagnosis for brats.)

Imus was, and may still be, a major conduit for this nonsense about thimerasol. He claims he has no scientific opinion in the matter, but regularly airs various and sundry crackpots.

It boggles my mind when Democrats take an anti-science stance the way RFK Jr. did. After all, haven't we spent the last seven years decrying the Bush administration's war against science? How can we demand that they base decisions on science, and then turn around and defy the science on this? Every time researchers have looked at it, they have concluded that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

Sign me.

Boggled in Wisconsin

P.S. I'm also the father of a three year old daughter with autism. Don't get me started on Wisconsin's refusal to pass a law requiring insurance companies to cover autism services...

I was raised as a Christian Scientist and as a result, never got shots for anything. The harvest was a case of measles while in college.

I figured I shouldn't roll the dice on Polio any longer and went and got my shots. Which came with a side-order of scolding from the physician.

i don't have kids, but if i did, they wouldn't be vaccinated. vaccinations don't work. disease is caused by ill humours, something that easily can be cured by a good blood-letting.

The New York Times reports on the latest hot new trend in California: refusing to vaccinate your children.

That's idiotic. If you want to be rebellious, take a bar-tour of middle America or Idaho, and have a bunch of polite conversations about politics with the people you meet.

Until real proof comes out that vaccinations are causing autism or childhood cancer or whatever, consider that it may be the pesticides, cell phone towers, air pollution, or any one of the jillions of other modern products you can't avoid that are the undiscovered cause of some of our more serious illnesses.

Another view. I have a severly Autistic child... probably a 9 on a scale of 10. (non-verbal etc.)

He was completely normal until a month of so after receiving the new (at the time) 'triple' vaccine. [which he had a considerable reaction to].

Coincidence or causation? I really don't know... and I may never know the answer to that question.

What I do know for sure is that I regret the day I had him vaccinated with that particular vaccine. If I had it to do over again, he would have received individual vaccinations, spaced out over time rather than getting a 'cocktail'. i.e. preparations that had stood the 'test of time'.

I think the thimerosol issue may be a red-herring in the entire vaccination/autisim topic. It may be more likely that there may be other side-effects arising from introducing toxins and/or pathogens into a certain subset of these children.

Reward worth the risk? Make your own call.

Unless you've lived through the nightmare of Autism, don't throw rocks.

If you want to do something productive, stop throwing stones at what parents of autistic or autism spectrum (like one of mine) come to believe, and do something to get the kids' problems handled during schooling in an appropriate and respectful manner (no, they don't belong in the same room with hyperactive kids), and stop the teachers from abusing parents of autism spectrum kids as bad parents with defective children who should be turned back to the hospital.

Every parent I have ever met with an autistic kid (within a wide range of symptoms) has heard the same line -- "You got a bad kid." "You're a bad parent." It's no surprise that these parents come to disbelieve everything they hear from authority figures, particular ones who have made it clear that they won't see the problem in its real terms and won't do anything about it.

There are reasons beyond thermisol for opting out of certain vaccinations. In some cases the disease would be extinct except for the fact that they live on through the vaccinations, and hence the only outbreaks are due to failed vaccines that spread what they were meant to kill. In some cases the vaccines have side effects that are serious while the disease they treat is more serious but also extremely rare. In other cases the disease to be treated is not so serious and the vaccines are a product of a severely over medicated and hypochondriac culture.

When my kids were born my wife and I went through each vaccine one by one and evaluated them to see how necessary they really were. Most were and the kids got them, a few really weren't. Just as we didn't bother with the eye drops that babies routinely get to prevent contraction of hepatitis while moving through the birth canal. The drops are completely unnecessary if the mother doesn't have hepatitis in the first place. Another case of dropping drugs on people (and especially kids) without bothering to find out if they are really needed.

I kind of expected to see some dissenters here in the comments. It's really nice to see the absence thereof. Some people forget how awful these diseases were. They are playing with fire.

I totally agree with you about RFK, Jr. (yes, RFK, not JFK). And his behavior on vaccination was the first thing I thought of when he tried to convince me that John Kerry had won Ohio.

Kevin, I wouldn’t be so sure this won’t catch on.

As I blogged about almost a week ago on this, when parents have “catch measles� parties, this is big-time nuttery.

And, as the story says, it’s not just California. Here in Tejas, we’re one of 20 other states with similar laws.

Michael Patrick -- Indeed, and many Greens are often worse, despite being the voice of sanity in many other ways.

Tlaloc -- the eye drops may be overprevention, but it's easier than docs running tests on every mother.

My son with mild autism reflects, chapter and verse, the type of autism (Pervasive Developmental Disorder) associated with thimerosal, the whole brain-gut connection. There are at least 1,500 rigorous studies that refute the medical establishment (a wholly owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry) in this respect.

When a person is vaccinated with thimerosal, you receive about 300 times the amoung of mercury any normal human should receive on any given day. And you exepect us to believe that no one is effected by this? Mercury: bad in sushi, OK in infant vaccines. Makes sense to me.

I can't wait for the bile to surface here (extra credit if you get it) . . .

1. Some immunizations wane over time and adults often experience more severe symptoms than children do. For this reason, all pregnant women are retested for immunity to measles, and given a vaccine if they don't have it.

2. Infants are not immunized for measles until after 15 months. They are at risk from exposures.

3. The most disgusting comment in the article was from a mother who said something to the effect of, "I'm sorry, my child is too important to be put at risk just to protect other people." It was not only ignorant (the main protection is for her child) it was un-self-consciously narcissistic to a degree that is hard to imagine. In addition, it ignores that she is enabling her child becomes an active threat to others should he become infected.

4. This is yet another example of how people would prefer to avoid infinitesimal risks for significant ones solely because they fear the unknown more than the known.

Makes me want to scream. I had a lot of childhood diseases and lived to tell, but if I ask my mother, she just shudders at the idea of going back to living in fear of those childhood diseases.

It doesn't help that some of us parents feel some resentment about being told that our daughters are at risk without a cervical cancer vaccine. That one (Gardisil) strikes me as simple financial maneuvering by Merck and I refused it, even though I have had my children thoroughly vaccinated and thought the whole thimerosol thing was ridiculous right from the start.

Informed father (!)

Point to those studies, please. I have training in epidemiology, read all of the journals, and haven't seen any of them.

MY, I like the Shafer Report, although you have to go through some protocols. Really, just google some of the autism associations, and you will have a plethora of articles. (You haven't done this?!?) I used to save them, and recently I found some of those from a few years' back.

Thanks to following what is effective, our son is doing amazingly well.

It is not just a California phenomenon. I'm in Kentucky and the right-wing talk radio station has an hour of Robert Scott Bell's national alt med radio show every weekend. He's anti-vaccination and talks about it all the time as only radio hosts can. And oddly, for him alt med is a right-wing conservative idea.

3. The most disgusting comment in the article was from a mother who said something to the effect of, "I'm sorry, my child is too important to be put at risk just to protect other people." It was not only ignorant (the main protection is for her child) it was un-self-consciously narcissistic to a degree that is hard to imagine. In addition, it ignores that she is enabling her child becomes an active threat to others should he become infected.
In effect, she has drafted her child as the moral equivalent of a biological suicide bomber. (cough..)

The erythromycin put into infants' eyes is to prevent infection from syphilis, not hepatitis. It's also supposed to be useful against chlamydia, which is quite common but doesn't cause blindness. (I didn't use it on my children since I had neither infection).

One solution to the individual risk/herd immunity issue is to start vaccination at a later age. In Japan they begin at age 2. Infants respond poorly to vaccines anyway, which is why so many repeat doses are required for the vaccines given at 2/4/6 months.

Immunity from the measles vaccine tends to wear off, so the poster who complained about measles in college may very well have been vaccinated. Outbreaks among vaccinated college students living in dorms were quite common until they started requiring re-vaccination. Our generation will probably also need a shot before going into a nursing home...

Also, in the US, our immunization records are "owned" by the doctor who gave the shots, not the parent of the child who received them as in many countries. Many of us really have no idea what we got and when.

The reservoir for pertussis is vaccinated adults who thought they were coming down with a cold, but didn't, then gradually developed a cough that lasted about a month. They don't even realize they are contagious. A booster vaccine for adults is available.

If you have that almost-a-cold and then start coughing, STAY AWAY FROM BABIES! Your doctor might tell you that it's not pertussis because the characteristic "whooping" is unmistakable, but adults don't usually whoops.

Yes, there are public health risks for kids without immunizations, but it seems more likely the risk is to themselves, rather than at large.

just so long as the parents aren't allowed to sue the pediatritian / hospital when the kid dies of measles, or mumps or whatever.

'sides which, i think the threat of death from not being vaccinated is alot easier to quantify that the potential threat of later harm due to a bad diet or lack of exercise.

Informed father, I too await actual information. Before that, you sound like the one parent who took her kid to a measles party, claiming she had all sorts of info "they" wouldn't let the medical community use.

Also, do you know the difference between ethylmercury and methylmercury? That's always a starting point question for people who claim thimerosal caused "childhood syndrome X."

Gene O'Grady wrote:

If you want to do something productive, stop throwing stones at what parents of autistic or autism spectrum (like one of mine) come to believe

Ok, the policy is zero tolerance for ignorance, as long as we're talking about what people have come to believe and not about the people themselves.

There is no reason to ignorantly subject your kids to measles or other diseases because you've heard some myth about autism any more than there is to refuse to get your cancer treated because some faith-healer is working on your emotions.

I don't know why you're bringing up people who don't know about autism hassling the parents of autistic kids. That doesn't have anything to do with this. At so long as we're cutting breaks for ignorance, you wouldn't be able to complain about the teachers who don't know about autism, by that logic, right?

It sounds like you're just playing on emotions to write something sassy in response to my comment.

So I'll reiterate: yes, folks, it is a good idea and will help the country if you go talk to folks about our politics, and it is a stupid waste of time to believe in things like power crystals, fluoride being bad for you, and astrology.

Be real, useful liberals, not deluded flakes.

bcamarda: "Some people forget how awful these diseases were. They are playing with fire."

My former boss, Congresswoman Patsy Mink (D-HI) -- the author of Title IX, died on September 29, 2002 from multiple complications brought on by the chicken pox, which she contracted at age 72 during a site visit to an elementary school on suburban D.C. earlier that same month

This happened even though the varicella vaccine had been available for over a decade at the time of her death. I would argue that Mrs. Mink was never given a choice in the matter, because she was considered too old and at-risk to receive the vaccine herself.

Parents who refuse to innoculate their children against such childhood diseases like measles and chicken pox are inherently selfish, and their behavior borders on criminal negligence. Adults who've never suffered such illnesses in their youth are placed at grave risk. I caught measles from my nephew at age 30, and I was subsequently hospitalized for five days as a result.

I had a conversation with my pediatrician about this last year. He's beeen practicing forever and constantly gets questions about this. He said he had seen a number of parents who suspected the MMR or other vaccines had caused autism in their children and in every single case, the doctor had made "potential autism" notations in his files predating the vaccines. It's human nature to look for a cause.

I wonder how thimerisol came to be used as a preservative in the first place? I've seen it as a preservative in contact lens solutions and other ocular preparations too.

Perhaps pressuring the vaccine manufacturers to come up with a less toxic preservative or a better way to preserve vaccines and ocular preps is a better place to put one's energy than harping on parents.

I mean come on, this is AMERICA. We're supposed to be the best, brightest, and most innovative country on the planet! When did all that get turned into ignorance, greed, and narcissism?

It is my understanding that mercury compounds have been removed from use in vaccines in the U.S. except for the flu vaccine. If you have any doubt about it, you can ask the pediatrician whether they are using single dose or multidose vials of vaccines -- the preservative is only used in multidoses, and in general, even in those has been discontinued.

Also, I think someone made an important point above that is worth restating: many of those who reject vaccines might be persuaded simply to delay them until their child is 2-3 years old, or can put two words together. If it had no other salutary effect, at that point, it would be much more obvious whether the child was autistic. This would relieve some of the anxiety, however unfounded, that vaccines are causing autism, and would probably reduce the overall vehemence of those who reject vaccines. If I were a pediatrician, that's how I would counsel these parents.

I am pro-vaccine, but it has always bothered me that the CDC has adopted a frontloaded vaccine schedule almost solely because it thinks that parents are more likely to be in front of a doctor during the child's first year of life. This is clearly the case with the Hep B vaccine.

Thanks to all here who claim to know our kids better than we do.

As someone pointed upthread, we've spent the Bush years bashing the Repubs for their war on science but when research contradicts what we want to believe, we're as bad as any Repub.

Besides the vaccines-cause-autism clowns, we have the folks who believe that bioengineered food and plants represent a risk we can't take (despite there being not a bit of evidence).

Then we have the people who will not consider nuclear power as an alternative to coal-fired generating plants (despite coal's environmental costs and that nuke plants are far safer than they've ever been).

Whenever someone mentions the phrase "precautionary principle," I know I'm listening to a liberal waging his/her own war on science.

And it really pisses me off.

It's pretty easy to avoid the potential Thimerosal issue in most vaccines these days. We simply opted for the older, multiple course treatment. And alot of the vax makers have stopped using it as a preservative (of course it's still being used in the flu vaccines that are now being pushed for kids as young as 2).

Parents not getting their kids vaccinated simply due to this fear (no downplaying the risk) and who don't take the time to research the issue themselves and seek alternatives are being criminally negligent.

Not to break into the Autism/Vaccination flame-war, but has anyone asked McCain what he thinks about the fluoridation of public water supplies?

And please, please, please, make sure the cameras are on, so that we can all see if he has comments about Preserving Our Precious Bodily Fluids. That would be too good to miss.

I talked to a parent at my daughter's school who did not vaccinate her kids. She was plainly ignorant. She was worried about side effects of vaccines, and also said "We don't have those diseases in the US any more anyway."
Its just plain idiocy.

1. Remove mercury (in any form) from the vaccines unless it can be proven that it is medically required. Shouldn't be hard.
2. Innoculate children prior to commencing school but after the age of 2 unless there is an outbreak of some disease. Do not combine vaccinations. I would think deliberately infecting a very young child with three or four viruses simultaneously would be more likely to harm the child than the mercury.
3. Educate about the need for booster shots for those at risk.
And there should definitely be more research on just what autism is, its causes and how it can, if possible, be treated.

I got myself re-vaccinated for measles and whooping cough so I'd be protected from the idiots who won't get their kids vaccinated.

There is no thimerosal in vaccines for children, and hasn't been for about 7 yrs now. Also, thimerosal-free flu shots are available, though usually reserved for pregnant/nursing women and children. I received one, and my infant received one as well this year. Of course, if thimerosal was related to autism, there should have been a decrease in the rate of new autism cases after it was removed from vaccines, but the rate hasn't declined. I know others who believe vaccinating is bad for their child, but for other, hard to explain perhaps mystical reasons. These are otherwise smart, educated people. I don't understand it. At least I know when my child is sick, it won't be from something I could have prevented but didn't.

Ditto for John McCain's ignorant burbling on the subject a few weeks ago.

Just to note the obvious, but his burbling may be ignorant or it may be calculated. McCain took the side of the issue where the votes are, so I wouldn't rule out the latter.

Actually, there has indeed been a corresponding decrease in autism rates in California, which keeps among the best records of instances autism available. It's quite the buzz among parents of children with autism.

Oh for the love of Pete.

Look: just because a parent is doubtful about the long-term effects of a vaccine that contains mercury--a neurotoxin--and tries their best to evaluate the risk of a much higher exposure to said toxin than was the case in the 60s and 70s vs. the risk of getting measles doesn't make them a conspiracy theorist or a New Age ditz. And frankly, it's insulting to assume they are. (Just as it's insulting to assume, say, everyone in California is a New Age flake.)

Nor is it unreasonable to assume that a vaccination regime that is much more intense than 40 years ago, and (to be boringly repetitive) thereby contains much higher doses of mercury--a neurotoxin, remember?--has *some* effect. Autism? Probably not. Something else? Who can say? Taking thimerosol out of vaccines seems like a Good Thing, no matter the reason.

It also seems not unreasonable to contemplate a parent facing this choice: do I risk giving my child a lifelong, debilitating condition, or increase their risk of (say) measles? This is a terrible choice to have to face, perhaps not fully appreciated by someone who has cats rather than kids. Do we heap scorn on these parents and insult them? Or try to help them?

And finally, consider this recent situation here in Texas: a vaccine, developed by Merck, was purported to decrease the risk of a certain type of cervical cancer. The Governor decided that all girls aged 11 were going to be required to get this vaccine.

Now, there's no question that some parents were against this for religious reasons that were, let's face it, weird. But consider: here's a drug company that was proven to have hidden deadly data concerning one of their other drugs (Vioxx), who have been lobbying state legislatures heavily for requiring this vaccination. Here's an FDA study done under the Bush administration. Here's a Republican governor--Bush's successor--deciding *unilaterally* to require this vaccine. Here's a medication with no longitudinal studies on potential side-effects and risks.

But to object to this situation was to be labeled an idiot or a religious whack job.

Just because I give full and thoughtful consideration to these issues doesn't make me a religious nut, a conspiracy theorist, or a New Age ditz. And frankly, it doesn't help the situation any for other folks--who have no horse in the race (so to speak)--to be so insultingly dismissive of this dilemma.

Informed Father, can you give us any cites to any of the information? I'm not aware of autism rates in California declining over the past seven years.

Doug, for the love of Pete, have you not read the comments of at least three different posters that have explained that thimerosol has not been standard in childhood vaccines for at least 7 years? If you want to defend a position to reject vaccination, it will have to be on some other basis than thimerosol.

Notwithstanding a few uses of the word idiot and other hyperbole, the comments here have been restrained and well-informed.

This is the official word, which has autism rates in California rising as of 2006:

http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/pubs/publication.asp?pubID=198

Barbara, I'm not trying to "defend a position to reject vaccination;" rather I'm pointing out that not all parents who do so are engaging in, as Kevin says, "conspiracy theorizing and New Age ditziness." And I've read a lot more on the topic than "three different posters" here.

Nor did I object to the comments here; I'm objecting to *Kevin Drum's* flip characterization. Which *is*, in fact, a fairly comment component of the debate on this topic.

And finally, with regard to thimerosol, I did not hang my entire objections on thimerosol; that was the point of my mentioning the recent flap here in Texas. I am pleased that California has gotten rid of all thimerosol-preserved vaccines, and that it is no longer being used extensively as a preservative. (I could point out that not all states have done this, and there are still some thimerosol-containing vaccines on the shelf.) That was why I mentioned the recent contretemps here in Texas; facing that kind of thing is enough to give a parent the willies, justifiably so, in my view.

So in short, to dismiss these parents concerns fliply is counter-productive, I believe.

Diana - trying to track down - caught wind of this last summer - still wading through papers.

Thanks, Douglas, for your balanced, sensible responses. As the father of a child with autism, and as one who knows many like my wife and I, we know something that a lot of folks don't. Parents do know their kids. And the medical profession means well, but they are so clueless on so many fronts. Just start with the brain-gut connection.

Many people rightly do not trust the Pharmaceutical industry. Or their CDC lackeys. Some vaccines in some circumstances are legitimate. But for others the evidence is less clear. We are all part of an accelerating and uncontrolled experiment on the long term effects of so many vaccines. That scares me a little.

The case of Hep B vaccines for babies is a case in point, also Gardisol. Live Polio vaccines have only recently become less common; the smallpox vaccine was still used in the US as recently as 25 years ago. Also the whole-bug Pertussis vaccine - famous for bad reactions - was only recently replaced with a less dangerous version. Does anyone recall the swine flu vaccine debacle of ~1975 ?

The use of thimerosol was wrong to begin with, and the 7 year number quoted so often is incorrect. Thimerosol is still used in some vaccines, and was used in many others for long after it was 'banned,' as manufacturers were allowed to use up their stockpiles of the old vaccines. Is it any wonder people don't trust them?

Quarantining a drug-resistant-TB patient is a reasonable public health response to a clear and present danger. But the State's right to force everyone to be injected with imperfectly proven complex bio-chemical cocktails is not so clear. As happens whenever personal freedom conflicts with ostensible public welfare, the moral case for compulsory vaccination is not so clear. If a society cannot bring itself to ban hand guns, how could it justify compulsory vaccinations?

I'd just like to point out that the Wikipedia entry for ethylmercury (the form used in vaccines) states that "the toxicity of ethylmercury is not well studied, but exposure standards based on methylmercury (such as those currently recommended by the EPA) are not demonstrated to be equivalent for ethylmercury."

That, I think, should give one pause rather than pontificating that the dangers of ethylmercury are non-existent or so small as to be inconsequential.

Not advocating that parents not immunize their children. I am advocating that vaccine makers use some other preservative rather than a known neurotoxin.

Informed father: Search for Schechter, R. and Grether, J. Continuing Increases in Autism Reported to Calfornia's Developmental Services System: Mecury in Retrograde. "Conclusion: The DDS data do not show any recent decrease in autism in California despite the exclusion of more than trace levels of thimerosal from nearly all childhood vaccines. The DDS data do not support the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal during childhood is a primary cause of autism."

Tlaloc: You stated that "in some cases the disease would be extinct except for the fact that they live on through the vaccinations. . ." Other than smallpox, name a disease that the US health system routinely provides vaccinations for that is extinct outside of the laboratory. Please. If you can't, I think you are spreading dangerous misinformation.

In other news, Surgeons sometimes cut people. And it Hurts!

The point isn't that vaccines are safe. The point is they are safer than the alternative.

*

If a society cannot bring itself to ban hand guns, how could it justify compulsory vaccinations?

Wow, talk about your staggering non sequiturs!

It sounds like there are a lot of know it all opinionated judgemental goons out there. I can go on about lots of government approved practices that are or have been unhealthy to the general public. Injecting mercury into human beings just doesn't make me feel comfortable. We eat live stock treated with anti biotics and hormones. Drink milk that has it's nutrition cooked out of it all approved and even demanded by government agencies. I buy veggies, meat and raw milk from small farms who are either bio-dynamic or organic. I pay more but I trust the people who raise it. Why should I trust the medical industry who sells so many drugs to doctors and the public? Why are there so many cessarians-sections? Oh but if I don't immunize my kid with mercury, I'm an idiot? Maybe I am an idiot but I don't trust food from factory farms and I don't like hospitals that are medical factories either. And my kid was born at home with a mid-wife. He was breast fed till he was 3 and is bigger and smarter and healthier than most his age. I'm a farmer,carpenter,bartender and artist not a scientist but when it comes to mainstream medicine and farming I have to follow my gut and say no to vaccines for my kid. It's not an easy decision and I'm aware there is too much info out there that is not proven but mercury in my kid? No thanks.

I would rather have the empire go broke by supporting the autism/thimerosal quackery than by destroying country after country.

Informed Father: Thanks for not answering the question you were originally asked, to either put up , with some evidence, or shut up.

Instead, you blathered further, told an uninformed whopper of a lie which you have been spreading around like-minded conspiracy thinkers, and have now been called out on that lie by "anoregonreader."

Informed Father, respectfully (this last time): STFU. And stop endangering children while you're at it.

Oh, and do you take your kid(s) to measles parties?

As I said in my blog, if California, or my similarly nutty state of Texas, had any brains, we'd have CPS visiting some houses.

I had the same reaction to RFK Jr. Even wrote an article about it; remember that Salon.com hyped his piece. It always amazes me that the health food nuts bring up the unpasteurized milk issue. They forget that there was a serious reason for introducing treatment of raw milk, namely the fact that it spread tuberculosis. TB killed people by the thousands in very unpleasant ways, attacking organ systems anywhere in the body. Nowadays it is possible to have a few certified raw milk producers simply because there aren't very many of them and it is possible for the health department to step in and shot them down each time they have an outbreak of brucellosis or some other nasty pathogen.

Yes, there is pretty good proof that mercury has nothing to do with autism; there is, however, a recent study linking autism to increased age in the father.

I wonder if the real link in autism is to a slightly paranoid trait in the parent; this would be consistent with the observed data, namely that a substantial number of parents of autistic children buy into the mercury story in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. I don't think you see this sort of thing in, for example, parents of children born with heart defects. It is also consistent with the existence of a definable neurological condition in parent and child. The fact that paranoid or otherwise schizophrenic children have a statistical genetic linkage to other family mental health issues is a given; perhaps autism has some genetic linkage to other forms of mental disorders that tend to present in more florid ways than the lack of connection seen in autism.

Yes, it must be the parents' fault. Hundred of thousands of us.

My understanding is that thimerosal is being phased out of vaccines in the US and Europe. That makes your rant here a bit of a dead letter.

Once mercury compounds are removed from vaccines, perhaps we may learn the actual source of the shockingly high autism rates.

However, calling parents conspiracy theorists and New Age ditz's because they are frightened and confused about unknown catastrophic risks to their children is profoundly unhelpful, and kind of creepy.

And by the way:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/05/autism.vaccines.ap/

"Government health officials have conceded that childhood vaccines worsened a rare, underlying disorder that ultimately led to autism-like symptoms in a Georgia girl"

I'm always surprised in these internet debates that another possible reason for the front-loading of vaccines never comes up: the likelihood that the child's parents will change or even lose their health insurance and not be able to get the next dose in the series.

The "vaccine connection" I've heard that potentially makes some sense has nothing to do with thimerosal or any other additive. It's a theory that since autism is a neurological disease, it's possible that the vaccine itself could make a case of autism worse; in other words, a kid who might have been mildly autistic or Asperger's ends up much more damaged because their system overreacts to the vaccine.

Given that I've seen some adult autistics talk about how careful they have to be about getting any vaccine booster because it puts them down for a few days, that's the one thing that maybe makes some sense. Some people are more sensitive to vaccines than others, but that's no reason to endanger the majority of the population who isn't.

Informed Father: You're not supposed to be posting here until you actually supply the evidence MY and I asked for.

So, I'll say it nonpolitely this time: STFU.

Mere mortal: A conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory. Doesn't matter whether fear, seeking your 15 minutes of fame, greed, or whatever, drives it.

Let's look at fear, specifically. Does the fact that a lot of people were afraid, after 9/11, just ify conspiracy theories that Mossad blew up the WTC? Or George W. Bush? No. Nor does it justify people still believing Iraq has WMD to this day, just shuffled off to Syria or whatever.

How many thimerosol conspiracy theorists voted for Ron Paul or Lyndon LaRouche? This seems to be related somehow. That said, I must have missed a vaccination somehow, but I got Chicken Pox in my early 20's and all I can express is a Homer Simpson, "Wow". Pock marks (before I knew what it was and not to scratch), sustained high fevers, missing two weeks of work, taking baking soda baths to try to relieve the itching, and 400mg of Benadryl a day , holy crap, don't go there if you don't need to. There is no wonder that elderly or compromised individuals can DIE from this (like Donald from Hawaii mentions in his post).

SocraticGadfly: Informed Father: You're not supposed to be posting here until you actually supply the evidence MY and I asked for.

Congratulations on your new job as moderator. You may keep it longer if you keep your discourse at least as civil as those you're moderating.

Mere mortal: A conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory.

Except that blaming thimerosal for increased autism rates is not necessarily a conspiracy theory. Uninformed, unfounded, disproved, yes, but not necessarily a conspiracy theory.

Surely you have better arguments than throwing around non-applicable deprecating terms.

Informed father: My son with mild autism reflects, chapter and verse, the type of autism (Pervasive Developmental Disorder) associated with thimerosal

SocraticGadfly: Informed Father ... stop endangering children while you're at it.

Since he claims that his son's autism may have been caused or exacerbated by thimerosal, and thimerosal has been removed from vaccines in the US, how exactly is he endangering kids? By advising parents not to use the Wayback Machine before getting their kids vaccinated?

Your rants, vulgarity, and illogical accusations don't exactly make you a poster boy for the rational, objective approach.

As a clinical neuroscientist who sees children on a daily basis who have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I can say with absolute certainty that there are multiple pathways to ASD symptoms. Some of my patients have had traumatic injury, a few have had hypoxic injuries, some have genetic disorders, and others have had brain infections. ASD is a very broadly defined syndrome and no cause has been shown to account for more than a few percent of the total number of people diagnosed.

It is important to remember that the US is not the only place where children get immunizations or where the incidence of ASD has been increasing. I am not an epidemiologist and I haven't read all the studies out there, but there just doesn't seem to be any evidence to support any connection between immunizations and autism. As for the recent court case, most parents I have spoken to have misinterpreted the findings. In that case, the child's autism was secondary to a mitochondrial disorder. It is well established that infections can exacerbate the symptoms due to these disorders, and if the infection doesn't come from a vaccine, it will likely come from another source. At any rate, if one has a mitochondrial disorder, autism is likely to be the least of one's problems.

Since he claims that his son's autism may have been caused or exacerbated by thimerosal, and thimerosal has been removed from vaccines in the US, how exactly is he endangering kids?

Because kids can die from measles and other preventable diseases if parents don't get their kids vaccinated because they're afraid that vaccines cause autism. People who spread the theory that vaccines cause autism with nothing to back them up are fearmongers and they are causing actual harm to the public health.

Informed father has been asked several times to back up his statements, and several of his statements (like his claim that autism cases in California have gone down when they've actually increased) have been flat-out wrong. Why is it impolite for people to ask him to put up or shut up when he claims to have "facts" that he will not provide?

My brother-in-law's kid got whooping cough because of this nonsense. But just to be clear, that was 12 years ago in New York State. This particular anti-immunization nonsense is not peculiar to California.

We have forgotten what life was like before vaccines. I'm just reading a biography of Lord Palmerston, British politician under Victoria. His father, being up with the science, had his kids done with the precursor to vaccination, which was infection. He infected them with smallpox, knowing that the death rate was 5%, because the alternative - uncontrolled exposure - was more dangerous still. He lost one daughter and thought he'd come out ahead. Parents have to accept that they can minimize risk but not eliminate it.

It's worth remembering that some vaccines don't work all that well (chicken pox in particular -- 70% was the effectiveness I heard from our doctor), so even kids who were vaccinated can get the disease. My kids were both vaccinated, but the older (age 5 at the time) came down with chicken pox anyway. His brother didn't.

I've got enough of a science background that I came down strongly on the pro-vaccination front for my kids, and argued for vaccination on many a parenting board. (I'm allergic to thimerosal, though, and am relieved to see it gone.) However, I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who did not vaccinate their infants. Now that the reality of risk from illness to a child has hit a little more, many of them have vaccinated by now. But I am a little sympathetic to where they were coming from. The way childbirth is treated in our country is deeply insane in many ways, and after months of hearing ridiculous stuff from the medical establishment you're maybe not in a very trusting frame of mind.

Also, it is just HARD and somehow counterintuitive to subject those tiny, fragile babies to shot after shot (often followed by their feeling lousy). The modern American vaccination schedule suggests TWENTY-SIX shots by the time the kid is 18 months old (getting this from Google & CDC). It would be even more if you broke the combo shots up into individual doses.

In any case, getting a shot for a four- to seven-year-old is possibly worse than for a baby (and leads to more doctor-hatred), so I'm glad my kids got most of theirs over with earlier.

May I speak as a school nurse responsible for enforcing vaccine laws?

I am constantly amazed at how little parents--both those who have chosen to vaccinate and those who have chosen not to--know about vaccines and the diseases they are designed to prevent. Education needs to start, at the very least, in their doctors' offices. I strike a deal with parents who are truly frightened and reluctant to vaccinate: learn how the specific disease is spread, how devastating (or not) the disease is, and what information is out there about the vaccines in question. I have a problem enforcing some of them (Hep A? Really? Have to have it to get into school here), and no problem beating a drum about others (ever seen someone with tetanus?). I would like to see a two-tier vaccination schedule: required and recommended. Chicken pox, as a rule, is an easy disease to deal with in early childhood, but by adolescence can be devastating. Change the vaccination schedule.

I think that if pharmaceutical companies weren't dealing with their richly deserved reputations for cooking data, people might feel less suspicious of the safety of vaccines.

monoglot, your recommendations make so much sense you know of course they will never be accepted!

Seriously, the pharma companies overreach so much that conspiracy theories are probably a natural reaction, and further, the CDC has adopted a somewhat pro-pharma approach in endorsing vaccines, and mandatory vaccines (which it can only recommend, not require) because it wants pharma companies to engage in vaccine research, and feels like it has a duty to "reward" those that successfully market vaccine products. This is not necessarily an evil policy, but it is probably not a well-balanced one because, as you say, some vaccines are more important than others, but vaccine oppositionists tend to focus more on vaccines as a class rather than weighing the costs and benefits of each vaccine. But then, so does the CDC and states that mandate vaccines for school age children.

FYI: There are probably good reasons to mandate Hep A, because the U.S. now has so many immigrants traveling back and forth from countries where Hep A is an issue, and we occasionally travel to such countries as well.

Mnemosyne: Because kids can die from measles and other preventable diseases if parents don't get their kids vaccinated because they're afraid that vaccines cause autism.

"Informed father" specifically referred to thimerasol, not vaccines per se. Since (except for flu shots) vaccines in the US no longer have thimerasol, that's not an impediment to getting childhood immunizations these days.

Kevin, I like your blog, but you are way off on this one. As the father of an autistic son, I cannot express enough contempt for people like "socratic gadfly" who bring their abusive tendencies refined in political debates to a debate like this. Walk a few blocks in the shoes of the parent of an autistic child and you'll pipe down. Take a look in the mirror if you can, not a pretty sight.

For the people jumping Douglas Moran and Julie in Portland, I want to re-emphasize that our children receive many more vaccinations than we did and at earlier ages. School nurse and others emphasize single vaccine arguments, but ignore the issue of the combination and the issue of giving major shots to tiny babies who are rapidly developing. Developmental biology is one of the least understood areas of biology, but the principle that a disrupted developmental pathway can have serious long term effects is not novel and is an important principle counseling caution in the face of uncertainty. Hippocrates said: "First do no harm," but the CDC says "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead." On the do-no-harm principle, don't start the big shots until the child is 3 or 4 after the child has passed through the rapid development stages of infancy and toddlerhood and has a somewhat mature immune system.

To the guy reporting on the pediatrician who sees "autism risk" in his chart for each complainer, have you ever heard of defensive medicine? Is not seeding the file with such a statement something a "prudent" defensive physician might say when he wants to use up his stock of thimerosol-preserved vaccines? By the way, thimerosol is not in new shipments of vaccines, but is on doctor's shelves because there has been no recall.

I'm sorry that those of you believe the "herd's" needs should always and everywhere prevail over individual interests feel such contempt for the concerns of parents of autistic children. But I think you know that every vaccination has an error rate, so applying vaccination theory like it is an always-and-everywhere truth just doesn't cut it. Issues like this require striking a balance between the interests of the public (the "herd") and the interests of the individual. Indifference to the risk of lifetime harm to a child in order to provide some marginal protection to adults is a truly disgusting mental attitude, but is all too well represented in this blog, and I fear in the minds of doctors and public health professionals. Get a little humility going in your confidence in vaccination absolutes, and your public health based arguments will not be so readily tuned out.

Ty, the people quoted in the article were referring by and large to their refusal to vaccinate school age children. What's the developmental excuse for that?

Second, there is NO REQUIREMENT for you to vaccinate your children UNLESS you want them to be in close proximity to other people's children. There may well be children who are, as you say, especially likely to have adverse reactions to vaccines. If we could identify such children, that would be ideal. In the meantime, I agree that each parent has to make something like an informed decision, but what bothers me, and probably others, is that these parents do not seem to accept that a decision not to vaccinate might carry some inconvenience to the parent -- like no admission to daycare. Instead, they are purely free riders who want the advantage of their decision (no vaccine related adverse events) while still freely imposing the externalities on others (risks to infants too young to be vaccinated or others for whom immunity does not exist for one reason or another). I don't like it that others are spreading misinformaiton, but this is the real problem.

In Japan they don't start immunizing their children until they reach 2 1/2 years old. The incidence of autism in Japan is significantly less than that of the US.

Now the question remains, Is it the mercury and/or the formaldehyde in the vaccines as a preservative that causes the higher incidence? I don't know. What I can tell you, quite factually, is that a new born or infant's liver is much less able to metabolize and safely break down & store formaldehyde &/or mercury than a 2 1/2 year old's liver can.

Some have suggested this is a relationship between the volume of body mass/blood to liver size of infants vs 2 1/2 year olds. Some have suggested that a 2 1/2 year old liver has a better metabolic capacity to deal with mercury &/or formaldehyde.

For my own purposes, I have no problem waiting till 2 1/2 years to immunize. But to blindly suggest that adding known toxins and carcinogens to a newborns system has no ill effects is just plain stupid. Scream all you want about the need to inoculate newborns & infants, but you are still advocating a physiological point that has a risk of serious damage to a very important organ.

kindness, this is going to be my last comment, though I find this topic really fascinating. I am not a scientist, but people have studied this issue because they do take seriously (at least in the last decade) the potential risks of preservatives and possible carcinogens in infants. So nobody has "blindly" suggested anything.

There are more vaccines and most children get one or more of them. This is true. But the difficulty I have with assumptions that it must be vaccine related is that there are other developments that have accompanied the rise in autism: dramatic fall off in the rate and duration of breast feeding; dramatic rise of other apparently puzzling syndromes in young children, such as allergies and asthma that are increasingly being associated with complex environmental causes. And that's before you get to theories of intergenerational epigenetic causes -- like, maybe heavy metal exposure of your father is now manifesting itself in some weird neurological defect in your kid.

Those who see vaccines as the culprit appear to me to be closed to the possibility that the causes of ASD including autism are subtle, multifaceted and possibly uncontrollable as a practical matter. This grasp for certainty is understandable but it's probably incorrect, and it has the potential to undermine other serious goals, like reducing the burden of infectious diseases.

Barbara,

You said much but you never addressed what I said. I said a newborn or an infant's liver is not up to the task of dealing with metabolizing mercuric compounds nor formaldehyde. I never suggested that no one should be immunized. I simply pointed out that other societies that do immunize their children at a later stage of development do have a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller incidence of autism in their children.

Please read these posts before you preach. I am not your enemy, but you ain't making any friends acting as holy as you are.

Amen, kindness. The lying isn't even that clever. Infants do not have the capacity to deal with these toxins injected into them.

And how dare that RFK, Jr. expose those secret meetings, in Year 2000, between the Pharmaceutical giants and the government! Who ever heard of such a thing?

kindness, you have provided no data whatsoever, and like many of the above posters, you don't exactly pinpoint whether, with respect to newborns, it's (1) the preservative compounds or (2) the vaccines themselves that are the issue, and what age group you feel is unable to metabolize the vaccines. I don't know the answer, I'm just raising the issue, because the MMR is the vaccine that is most associated by parents of autistic children with onset of autism, and it isn't given until 15 months of age at the earliest.

There are many reasons to account for differential rates of diagnosis of autism in other countries, including misdiagnosis and underdiagnosis in other cultures (which just might have greater tolerance for ASD and not view its milder forms as a disorder at all). I am going to go out on a limb and say that the rate of diagnosis of mental illness and disorders of all types is much higher in the U.S. than in other countries, with the possible exception of schizophrenia, which has fewer subjectively differential symptoms.

If you read all of my comments you would see that I am hardly holier than thou on this issue. It just bugs me to see so much effort directed at a theory that has been mostly undermined, when, pretty clearly, there is something at work. Misdirected effort doesn't get at the answer sooner.

California Sierra foothill towns are packed with home-schoolers who also opt out of the whole immunization thing. These are the same folks who pulled my geologist friend aside at the beginning of her quarry tour to tell her, "It would be easier if you just skipped the age of the rocks" portion of her presentation for the kids.

Imagine all those six-thousand year-old fossels!

Nobody made it into my daughter's kindergarten class without a complete immunization card, and I'd raise a massive stink if they did.

My son - the one with autism brought on by the thimerosal - we tested his titers for kindergarten. They were off the charts. So there was no need to re-vaccinate.

Honestly, does no one on this thread who buys the Official Party Line actually not know anyone with a child with ASD? Do you really expect the hundreds of thousand of us to believe we don't know our own kids?

And do your own homework. Deal with the protocols for the Shafer Report. Go to some of the Ausism Society web sites, where there are 1,500+ rigorous research articles. Go ahead. You won't become autistic for doing that. And take a guess at what happens to untenured professors who fail to tote the Official Party Line? That's well documented as well.

RFL, Jr lost a lot of credibility with me when I heard him on NPR saying that, what with all the hydrogen available in plain old water, why was the Bush admin supporting projects to extract it from oil and coal?

Don't you have anything better to do Barbara? Honestly, you have issues. Thankfully I'm happy and don't need your consent.

I pointed out basic stuff, ie - a newborn's liver can't metabolize things and handle toxins in the same capacity and manner an older child's liver can and I further point to a large society (Japan) where they do wait to immunize and (horrors) the incidence of autism is significantly less there than here.

And what do you do? You become a major Concern Troll. You bring up crap that I never even mentioned. Then you suggest I'm furthering a "theory" I never have.

It is a physiological fact that a newborn or an infant doesn't have the same liver function as an older child. That isn't a theory, that's a fact. BTW - I have had post graduate biology. You don't like that fact? Too bad. For the third time (apparently some are more boneheaded than others) I think having children wait till they are 2 1/2 years of age to get vaccines would still protect the children and the public at large.

Is that so hard to get Barbara? Damn, get off your soap box (and I'm being very kind by saying it like that).

Attention smart people: Mercury is not a "toxin."
That will be all.

As informed father has stated by his own son's example, it's the MMR that appears to parents to be the vaccine correlated with the onset of autism in young children. Newborns don't get the MMR, that's why I asked about metabolism in older infants. I assumed you might know the answer, which I would be happy to know as well. And thimerosol has been taken out of vaccines.

Barbara: Your points about parents of school age children resisting vaccination and the many environmental hazards that may be affecting children are worth careful consideration, and are not inconsistent with the core concern of Kindness, myself and others over the recklessness of ramping up the administration of vaccines and other strong medicines to developmentally immature infants and toddlers. It is far from a complete response on at least two points. First, saying many things could contribute to autism is not a rebuttal to the argument that batteries of vaccinations in combination present uncertainties that counsel caution.

Second, individual vaccines are sometimes of little real value because they prevent diseases that are not that serious, and do not materially improve the health of the "herd" because the vaccine provides less immunity than simply having and getting over the disease. Chicken pox is a prime example. It is an annoying but not life threatening disease for children, and creates a strong lifetime immunity. By contrast the chicken pox vaccine provides a weaker immunity and requires continued boosters into adulthood. If those are missed, adults are at risk of the disease when it is far more serious. Here the "cure" seems to be little better than the disease. Many of us who had the traditional "childhood" diseases such as measles are not sure whether the "herd" is better off with vaccines, especially if the vaccines, alone or in combination, substantial risks for developmentally immature infants.

I would note also two points concerning schooling issues. First, I have the suspicion that mandatory vaccination is often motivated by non-medical motives. The passage of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Act in the mid-80s has led to the major ramping up of vaccinations, and has made vaccines a big business, and also corresponds in time with the period of the autism epidemic. Marginal vaccinations such as chicken pox appear to help big pharma make money and may possibly increase school attendance, but may have little real benefit either to the "herd" or the individual.

Ty,

Since you are at least polite, I will respond. The issue of the cost/benefit of individual vaccinations was discussed above by, among others, a school nurse, which I basically agreed with, so I'm not going to argue this point. On the issue of chicken pox, what I found out when I discussed this with my pediatrician who does not really wholeheartedly agree that it makes sense to immunize for CP either, is that there are numerous children who take steroids for asthma, primarily, and others who have immunological deficits who are at grave risk if they get the disease, so much so that some of them can't even be immunized. Yes, I found it annoying to have to get the imperfect CP vaccination specifically for their benefit knowing that when my children are older they would be at increased risk for a disease that would be relatively minor if they got it when they were young.

If you also read my previous comments, you will find that I agree that the CDC is reflexively pro-pharma on the issue of endorsing mandatory vaccines, because it wants to encourage drug makers to continue vaccine research and feels it has a duty to support them by creating a market for approved vaccine products (though it drew the line at Gardasil). This is not a well-balanced position, particularly when there are substantial costs borne by pediatricians and parents in getting vaccinated. It doesn't make sense if the disease is not a serious or common one. The CDC's usual justification is the reverse of its position on CP, which is that immunizing the child will reach populations at risk for diseases, such as Hep B, that don't normally have the resources to get immunized as adults (prostitutes and drug abusers and those who have lived or travel frequently in the Far East, where Hep B is endemic).

It's by no means an ideal world. There are clearly documented adverse effects to some vaccines and that's why the Vaccine Compensation Board exists. But unless someone can show a scientifically valid relationship between vaccinations, individually or cumulatively, and autism or some other marker of vaccine injury, I don't see a lot of change in the CDC's approach. And that doesn't get to my underlying point, which is that there are a lot of serious and chronic conditions that are on the rise and continuing to investigate thimerosol after it has been discontinued doesn't make a lot of sense.

Barbara, you totally misrepresented me. The pre-1998 thimerosal-laden MMR is one culprit - but that's the point where the kids are put over the edge, having been repeatedly injected with 300 times - each time - well in advance of the MMR, which takes place at about one year. Since my second son was born New Year's Eve 1997-98, he was spared the thimerosal, and he is normally developing. There are obviously other factors - genetic predisposition, prenatal insult associated with toxins. But there is really no debating within the Autism Community the role of thimerosal. Really, don't take my word for it. And remember: 300 times the amount of mercury any adult should have on a given day - into infants, who have no way to detox.
Mercury in tuna = bad; but somehow mercury in infant vaccines = not a problem. Uh-huh.

But there is really no debating within the Autism Community the role of thimerosal.

And therein lies both your problem and the potential path to enlightment, should you choose to travel it.

"Potential path to enlightenment" yup. Maybe you should look at those autism web sites, and see for yourself the number of rigorous research articles that actually do exist. No, I'm not going to do the work for you. I already have four full-time jobs (career; husand; father; father of a son with autism) How many families do you know with a child with autism? Might you consider we know something you don't? Naaaaa.

"Potential path to enlightenment": for those of us who have kids on the spectrum, you could walk through the deepest part of this thread and not get our ankles wet.

"Potential path to enlightenment": Not believing the medical establishment's cluelessness, so the $150,000-odd we have spent in the past nine years on our son has really paid off. We get the whole "leaky gut" syndrome, the gluten-free, casein-free diet; the chelation (done naturally, over the course of five years); the Auditory Integration Training (AIT); the visual-conceptual therapies; the cranial-sacral therapies, the Stanley Greenspan, MD, "floor time," using Kelly Dorfman, etc. Instead of believing the clueless doctors who said, "I don't want to give you too much hope" (that's a direct quote), we did the things that work. And now they say, "Whoa - a miracle story." No, we just didn't buy the official party line and did what seemed to work.

And it did.

Don't believe the Official Party Line's lies.

BTDT, before we had our daughter immunized.

Then, as now, I find the cause/effect claims vis a vis autism unsubsantiated and given a proper risk assessment, favor immunization against known health risks. Hoping for a West Nile vaccine some day.

I'm truly sorry for you and your son but when above you write "My son - the one with autism brought on by the thimerosal" you're stating a "fact" you cannot know and will never know. That you'll never know what happened is certainly the source of endless frustration, with which I certainly sympathize.

But let's be completely honest. You came here spoiling for a fight, convinced as you are of your particular truth. First post:

I can't wait for the bile to surface here (extra credit if you get it) . . .

In ten years, long after the themerisol thing has been put to bed, will we be any closer to an answer? How much time and energy will have been wasted?

After reading Informed Father's tale of treatments and costs, I had to wonder whether the doctor's providing treatments actually checked to see if the underlying problem existed. For example, did you get a blood test to determine mercury levels in his son before beginning chelation? Did you see an allergist to determine your son's actual sensitivity to gluten or milk-based products before beginning the gluten-free/casein-free diet? All these treatments suggest an underlying problem, but the DAN doctor's never assess that. A further question for Informed Father is what sort of measure you used to track improvements in his son's behavior? Did you use a checklist and monitor (count) specific behaviors? Did you get follow-up neuropsychological assessments to document improvements in behavior and cognitive skills? I often explain to parents that it is easy to see improvements in the short term, but long-term documentation shows little change. Especially when taking into account that the parents have often just spent thousands of dollars (in cash) for a treatment.

I do wish that people would quit with the thimerosal issue, though. There is no evidence that it has caused autism. In meta-analyes and multi-national studies, the reult is always that there is no link. Further, there is no mechanism to explain why males are diagnosed with ASD at 4 times the rate of females, if they are vaccinated at the same rate.

Please, look at this abstract. This study needs to be replicated and done in a multi-center prospective design, but it certainly suggests that infants are able to process out the mercury from vaccines.

Pediatrics. 2008 Feb;121(2):e208-14.

Mercury levels in newborns and infants after receipt of thimerosal-containing vaccines.
Pichichero ME, Gentile A, Giglio N, Umido V, Clarkson T, Cernichiari E, Zareba G, Gotelli C, Gotelli M, Yan L, Treanor J.

Department of Microbiology/Immunology, Pediatrics, and Medicine, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14642, USA. michael_pichichero@urmc.rochester.edu

OBJECTIVES: Thimerosal is a mercurial preservative that was widely used in multidose vaccine vials in the United States and Europe until 2001 and continues to be used in many countries throughout the world. We conducted a pharmacokinetic study to assess blood levels and elimination of ethyl mercury after vaccination of infants with thimerosal-containing vaccines. METHODS: Blood, stool, and urine samples were obtained before vaccination and 12 hours to 30 days after vaccination from 216 healthy children: 72 newborns (group 1), 72 infants aged 2 months (group 2), and 72 infants aged 6 months (group 3). Total mercury levels were measured by atomic absorption. Blood mercury pharmacokinetics were calculated by pooling the data on the group and were based on a 1-compartment first-order pharmacokinetics model. RESULTS: For groups 1, 2, and 3, respectively, (1) mean +/- SD weights were 3.4 +/- 0.4, 5.1 +/- 0.6, and 7.7 +/- 1.1 kg; (2) maximal mean +/- SD blood mercury levels were 5.0 +/- 1.3, 3.6 +/- 1.5, and 2.8 +/- 0.9 ng/mL occurring at 0.5 to 1 day after vaccination; (3) maximal mean +/- SD stool mercury levels were 19.1 +/- 11.8, 37.0 +/- 27.4, and 44.3 +/- 23.9 ng/g occurring on day 5 after vaccination for all groups; and (4) urine mercury levels were mostly nondetectable. The blood mercury half-life was calculated to be 3.7 days and returned to prevaccination levels by day 30. CONCLUSIONS: The blood half-life of intramuscular ethyl mercury from thimerosal in vaccines in infants is substantially shorter than that of oral methyl mercury in adults. Increased mercury levels were detected in stools after vaccination, suggesting that the gastrointestinal tract is involved in ethyl mercury elimination. Because of the differing pharmacokinetics of ethyl and methyl mercury, exposure guidelines based on oral methyl mercury in adults may not be accurate for risk assessments in children who receive thimerosal-containing vaccines.

Barbara: These posts take on a life of their own and I appreciate your nuanced views on the CDC. Indeed I had not noticed them in previous posts, but you were not the object of my ire. My concern was more at the contemptuousness that I read in posts criticizing parents of autistic children, of which I am one.

Your point that CDC feels compelled to support vaccine research and so, apparently, rubber stamps any new vaccine that comes down the pike is beyond troubling. To me the rapid increase in vaccinations is a giant, uncontrolled natural "experiment," with emphasis on the word uncontrolled. Led by the CDC, we have ramped up the vaccinations in combination, introducing strong medicines into children under circumstances where combined, cumulative effects of multiple insults to the bodies of children are not and cannot be traced. Under these circumstances it is easy for public health professionals to intone that there is "no evidence" that this or that is harmful. In this post the "no evidence" intonations refer mainly to thimerosol, but the truth is that changes in the vaccine regime have been so rapid that the cumulative effects will probably not ever be known. But a "no evidence" point based on the possibility of numerous causes is not the same thing as a "no evidence" point that comes down to a statement that translates "I am an authority figure on this topic, and I have have not seen any evidence (ie studies) that satisfies me that the views of those who disagree with me are worthy of my expert consideration." No expert system is perfect, however, and every expert frame of reference has limitations and blind spots.

From what I have seen as a more or less involuntary observer of the controversy (if I did not have an autistic son I wouldn't follow the issue at all) is that most "no evidence" statements of the latter type are made in the context of rejecting the findings or opinions of someone the speaker disagrees with or disapproves of. The "no evidence" speaker is an authority figure, or views himself as one because he or she has superior or privileged access to a subset of all data on a subject that the speaker views as authoritative. This speaker therefore views himself as entitled to control what information is entitled to the label "evidence." In my view, persons who make arguments of this type suffer from a bias, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, usually unconscious, arising from the fact that they are simultaneously (i) participants in a controversy and (i) referees of the evidentiary standards applicable to the controversy. In this situation there is no "controversy" from the expert's perspective, only the necessity of defending the citadel of expert knowledge from uninformed views of the non-expert (usually unwashed) masses responding to rumor and misguided emotions.

The above issue is important to vaccine policy because there is a tendency to regard the views of vaccine scientists as dispositive of the public policy issue. However, just as war is too important to leave to the generals, public health is too important be left entirely to the CDC and big pharma. For example, "anon" was nice enough to post an abstract that he reads as showing that "infants are able to process mercury from vaccines." I don't doubt the truth of that statement, but I don't think it follows that mercury is not potentially harmful to the child. To the contrary, the abstract says the half life the mercury's presence in the child's system is 3.7 days and returns to pre-vaccination levels in 30 days. Sorry, but as a parent in putative democracy I don't find much comfort in those statements. What happens in the 3.7 days while the serum mercury levels are dropping from the full dose to the "half" dose? What about the rest of the 30 days the mercury is present in the infant's system? We have all heard the phrase "mad as a hatter" but how many of us know that the phrase arises from the high rates of madness suffered by 19th century hatters who used mercury in their hat making and shaping process? Mercury is a known neurotoxin. What public health rationale supports injecting a known neurotoxin into a 7 to 25 pound infant, or even into an adult? I think I read "anon" to be saying that thimerosol was not that bad, but I doubt he would inject it into his own child if he thought about it in advance. As "evidence" the abstract is not proof by itself that thimerosol causes autism, but it is powerful evidence from a public policy perspective that it should never have been in vaccines and other shots in the first place. Oops!

"Kindness" and I support the bottom line point that injecting vaccines into very young children presents serious risk and uncertainty. "Kindness" presents a causal hypothesis that infant livers are not efficient before 2 1/2 years. I have read and heard that the "blood-brain" barrier is undeveloped before 24 months, meaning that the 3.7 day half life of mercury in an infant's bloodstream has substantial serum contact with the infant's rapidly developing brain during that period. I can't imagine any public health rationale that supports insulting the infant's body in this manner. The thimerosol is out but the vaccine flood continues.

I think the defenders of public health expert knowledge on this post and elsewhere would reply to me that no one really intended to insult the brains and neurosystems of infants, and autism is not, in any event, not proven to be a side effect of doing so. We will be back to the "no evidence" point at that moment, but isn't the failure to anticipate the problem a key point from a public health policy perspective? The plea here is for a less confident, more cautious, policy that gives more explicit recognition the potentiality for unintended consequences, especially where novel combinations of vaccines and other medicines are involved. I don't know if thimerasol or vaccines or anything else "caused" my son's autism, but the proposition is unassailable that every medicine has unanticipated side effects. I don't think it should shock anyone that a novel scientific program such as this nation has undertaken with the ramping up of vaccines has had an error rate on the population as a whole. The public health establishment needs to become much more transparent and humble in its policies and to be less quick to condemn those of us who feel like we are on the wrong side of the error rate of a flawed scientific program.

A more humble policy cannot begin soon enough. The CDC recently announced it wants to start giving annual flu shots beginning at 6 month olds to create some marginal benefits to adults. I'm sorry, but that's just wrong.

Finally, I want to respond to Kevin Drum and all of those who criticize Robert Kennedy Jr. I have read some of the CDC transcripts that he has brought to light, and would note to those who are unfamiliar with them that there was much advocacy in those transcripts of suppression of studies suggesting that thimerosal and vaccines were implicated in autism. Some of this advocacy took the form of keeping evidence away from trial lawyers. I bring this up simply to remind all of us that the doctors of the CDC, big pharma and others have economic interests too, and everyone needs to recognize that the flood of vaccines is a big business. Criticize FRK Jr. all you want, but he has brough important "evidence" to light and I applaud him.

Ty -

What you call arrogance, I call science. You are putting forth "common sense" arguments and explanations to issues that are best dealt with scientifically. Without wanting to appear "arrogant" I want to make it clear that this is not about your child. It is not about Big Pharma. It is not about the US. This is a world-wide phenomenon and it is being studied by medical scientists from around the world. I would hope you would recognize the value of letting medical scientists evaluate the results of studies and determine what constitutes "evidence" in the same way one would let a car mechanic decide what symptoms were relevant to determine what is wrong with your car.

The US is a wealthy country and can afford to drop thimerosal from our vaccines and we have. Poorer nations can't and haven't. The public health risk is greater from the "childhood diseases" than any "common sense" link between mercury and autism. The issue of multiple vaccines in a single visit is similar. We are a wealthy country and can get to a doctor several times a year. Not every country is like that. We have centuries of data describing the effect of these diseases on children and adults. Would you have us go back to that based on your "common sense" that what we are doing must be the cause of autism?

I can assure you that the medical community is sympathetic to your concerns. None of us want to harm the children we work with and all of us want to understand what is happening. I get frustrated when I see a patient in my clinic who has recently spent thousands of dollars getting hyperbaric oxygen treatments and telling me how helpful it was for about 2 months. My frustration, however, is with the physicians doing the treatments, not the parents. They know there is no scientific basis for what they are doing, nor for most of the treatments one finds out there for autism. However, it is easy to prey upon parent's of autistic children because they are desperate and often misinformed.

You keep mentioning mercury as a neurotoxin, but haven't mentioned the toxicity level for mercury. Nor have you discussed other sources of mecury (environmental) and how much mercury infants get through breast milk. You haven't discussed the differences between "mercury" and ethylmercury (from thimeresol) as a toxin. You can't just assume it is bad and be done. Same is true of multiple vaccines. If you want to add to the discussion, you need to cite "evidence" of the autoimmune response and neurodevelopment, not just say it is "bad" and shouldn't be done.

Anon: Thanks for replying. Time pressure this morning prevents a full response, but I will try to post a more complete response later today. I double checked my post and I never called any doctor, scientist, of public health official "arrogant." I certainly suggested there is an absence of humility in vaccine policy. To me this absence of humility becomes important at the point in the process where a vaccine mandate is issued. This is where the rubber hits the road. it's not just science at that point but a mandate to schools and parents. Parents are not obligated to vaccinate their children, but just about every school and day care requires presentation of a vaccination record as a condition of admission. My bottom line (for purposes of this discussion) is that vaccination starts too soon because there is simply too little understanding of the developmental biology of infants. That is, indeed, a "common sense" point, but I am happy to take the position that expert science that cannot explain itself in a common sense way at the point of the public health mandate is at best incomplete and not sufficiently transparent. Every system has an error or failure rate and I'm not willing to go with "trust us, we're the experts."

Ty -

I will grant that the absence of humility is different than the presence of arrogance. I apologize for the misinterpretation. By way of explaining what you see, I would like to add that the majority of physician I know and work with are quite humble and fully realize they don't know enough about the complexity of the human body or the disorder that they treat. However, at the end of the day a decision is needed either by the patients/parents or by policy makers. At that point I (and most of my colleagues) do what I believe to be correct and the best possible solution given the circumstances and we stick with that solution until we can find a better one. This may look arrogant and it may seem like I am dismissing others objections, but I am always re-evaluating my position and if anyone can provide convincing evidence I will gladly accept it.

With regard to this specific topic, infant and early childhood vaccinations, medical science knows very well what happens when the population does not get vaccinated. These facts are not in dispute within the medical community. We know that very bad things happen with immunization. You are saying that how we go about immunizing is wrong and I am willing to consider that possibility, but you need more than just "I think" to move this discussion further. I am not an expert in public health and I am not an epidemiologist, so I defer to them on this. They say that this is the best way to get as many people immunized as possible to protect public health. I do think that, as a wealthy nation with a relative well developed transportation system we have the ability to spread the vaccines out over more visits, but that is not true in every country in the world. In fact, I have patients that drive three hours each way to see me in clinic because there are no other specialists in the area. That is less true of general practitioners, but if you live in a rural county, it can be a haul to pack up the kids and take them to the doctor 3 or 4 times a year just for a vaccine. They may just decide to skip some and not get vaccinated. That is the fundamental problem with what you suggest. It is only worth the risk if you have sufficient evidence that the current system is "in fact" harmful.

Before it is reasonable to make changes to the immunization system, we need to determine why autism, but not epilepsy, mental retardation, or neuromuscular disorders, etc., are increasing at such a high rate. What makes autism so different? How can we balance the multiple risks involved? That can't be determined until we understand those risks.

I have great sympathy for the parents of children with ASD, and would love to be able to offer them more than I can, but the simple answer is that we don't know enough about the disorder to make a judgment about the risks. Only more research, large-scale epidemiological studies, multi-center prospective studies, detailed case reports, etc. will solve this problem.

Oops:

"We know that very bad things happen with immunization."

Should be: "We know that very bad things happen without immunization."

A Freudian Slip, perhaps.

Yes, anon, and if there were a pill at the end of the study, the pharmaceutical industry would fund it in a nanosecond.

Because we never bought the Official Party Line, our son with autism has a real shot at a meaningful adult life. No thanks to the medical establishment. Hundreds of thousands of us parents fully grasp this, and are creating "miracle stories" daily. Because we know something you won't grasp.

Here is where we run into problems. Not buying the "Party Line" is not a useful concept. I see children get better every and I have nothing to do with it. It is indeed a miracle, but the treatments have nothing to do with it. They just get better. It happens in cancer, it happens with colds, it can happen with autism.

It has been pointed out by others in different contexts, but hope is not a strategy.

Tell me about your kids, anon.

Not buying the party line is what worked for my son. See my earlier post on the strategies that worked, where the medical establishment doesn't have Clue One.

(We get the whole "leaky gut" syndrome, the gluten-free, casein-free diet; the chelation (done naturally, over the course of five years); the Auditory Integration Training (AIT); the visual-conceptual therapies; the cranial-sacral therapies, the Stanley Greenspan, MD, "floor time," using Kelly Dorfman, etc)

- not hope -that have brought about this "miracle story"' it's no miracle, really, it's understanding the nature of autism is related to gastro-instestinal and auto-immune issues.

Anon and Max: I noticed this post has gone into the March archives so it's getting ready to vanish into the ether. Anon, you are a physician apparently and you definitely have to operate within the protocols of the profession. I just advocate caution with the youngest infants because I believe the risks are significant and scientific knowledge less than complete. I think the volume of vaccinations is a question and at least some are of marginal benefit at best. Chicken pox is my example, because I understand it creates a marginal immunity to a disease that is not that bad, but I'm no physician or scientist. I'm certainly not arguing that vaccination programs against smallpox, polio, etc. were not beneficial. Indeed, in the case of smallpox, it's very success has created a terrorism risk which is beyond ironic. I doubt though that annual flu shots beginning at 6 months will eradicate the flu, and object to creating risks to small children in the name of protecting adults. Too much vaccine policy comes down to economic benefits in the form of better school attendance and less absenteeism at work by parents, as opposed to purely medical and scientifically defensible benefits that have been appropriately balanced against the risks of the disease itself. Moreover, I suspect that the vaccine approval process has a narrow focus on the evidence generated by the vaccine maker, but no one is tempering the approval process with some assessment of the limits and uncertainties of scientific knowledge. That's not your job, but I hope you will keep a skeptical eye on the issue.

Max, I guess you are the informed father of earlier posts, and it sounds like floor time, etc have worked for you. We have made good progress too, but my 12 year old son's progress on empathy, generalization and what I might call understanding of the correspondence of words and things remains problematic, but we're working on it. I hope your son continues to progress.