Sadly, the science is going to get taken over by commerce, and it’ll turn into ‘How much money can we make?’ or ‘Is it cost effective for this intervention?’, ultimately resulting in people with autism being cash cows (very much like they are now, with ‘miracle cure’ quackery for sale to every desperate, ignorant and vulnerable parent, unaware that they could be potentially killing their child), making the few rich at the expense of the many.

1. I have an ASD/C, and I did not have MMR – neither have I had a BCG. Polio, Mumps and Measles were routinely given at school on coloured sugarlumps – that’s what I’ve had. Plus the odd tetanus jab. Why am I autistic if I have not had an autism inducing vaccine? ‘cos vaxx does not cause autism! In fact, a Cochrane study in the UK (of around 2000 people) found a lower percentage of autism cases in those that had MMR than in those that didn’t. So go figure.
2. There are 26 genes (so far) implicated in ASD/C
3. There is an obvious brain structure difference in ASD/C
4. One of the world’s leading experts on autism has been able to identify autism traits in non-autistic parents of kids with autism (http://www.molecularautism.com/content/1/1/10)
5. The ‘rat model’ of autism uses VPA to induce brain lesions in rats, and mothers using VPA relatively recently prior to conception or during the first trimester have a significantly high risk of producing a child with an ASD/C
6. Apart from chemical insult (5), brain injury during pregnancy or during birth could result in an ASD/C

What we don’t know (yet) is what the difference is between insult/injury related ASD/C and inherited ASD/C, apart from the specific genetic markers that would not be present in insult/injury related conditions unless an insult makes specific changes in the various chromosomic sites that implicate an ASD/C, which I find highly unlikely.

Re: thimerosal sensitivity

Good point to make. There are some people who have an allergy to thimerosal, a real reaction. That is a good reason to avoid it for those with the allergy.

Firstly, vaccines do not contain elemental mercury; they contain a compound, thiomersal, of which mercury is one constituent.

Note that many contact lens saline solutions also contain thimerasol as a preservative. Some people, including me, seem to be sensitive to it, so they also sell solutions without it.

Also, a saline solution is a solution of salt in water. Salt is also “toxic”, in that ingesting too much can kill you. So when you are shaking some salt on your French fries, you are introducing a “toxin” to your food.

When I got too lazy to use the special character?

Minor correction, thimerosal does not prevent degradation of efficacy of a vaccine. It prevents the growth of bacteria and fungi that may contaminate the vaccine and cause significant health issues. This is an issue with multi-dose vials of a vaccine, where the seal may be punctured multiple times and increase the risk of a contaminant being introduced into the remaining vaccine.

With the exception of some formulations of the flu vaccine, childhood vaccines no longer have anti-bacterial/anti-fungal preservatives, since they have moved to single-dose formulations. Multi-dose vials of vaccine (some flu vaccines and vaccines that are not part of the childhood schedule) still contain thimerosal.

Thanks for the shoutout.

@rgdaniel

I just wanted to address your question here, since some people may not go to antiantivax.flurf.net and read the info there. First off, the SafeMINDS ad was misleading through imagery (a syringe surrounded by puddles of elemental mercury, a landfill next to a pregnant woman, etc.) and statements (e.g., saying that flu vaccines can’t be thrown away in a landfill because of the mercury, when the truth is that they can’t be thrown away in a landfill because they are medical waste…it’s a bit more complex than that, but that alone should suffice). Others, like Orac and Elyse (at Skepchick) have addressed the ad in more detail.

Now, on to thimerosal. As someone mentioned above, thimerosal is not the same as elemental mercury. It is not the same as the mercury compounds commonly found in the environment, primarily methylmercury. Thimerosal contains about 50% ethylmercury, so a flu shot, with 50 mcg (that’s micrograms) thimerosal has around 25 mcg ethylmercury. Furthermore, ethylmercury has a half-life of days, unlike methylmercury, which has a half-life of weeks. That means there is less chance of any of it building up in your system.

For example, a can of white tuna contains about 69 mcg of methylmercury (compared to the 25 mcg of eHg in a TCV flu vaccine). MeHg has about a 95% absorption rate when ingested, so you end up getting around 65-66 mcg in your system. Suppose you get the flu shot and the same day eat a can of tuna. After a week, the amount of eHg in your system will be around 12.5 mcg. The amount of MeHg (which also happens to be more toxic than eHg) will be somewhere around (and I’m estimating here) 39 mcg. After two weeks, eHg is down to about 6.25 mcg, while MeHg is around 23.4 mcg. My numbers may be a bit off, since I’m not a chemist, biologist or any similar -ist, but this should get the point across.

Now, you won’t be getting another flu shot for about a year, most likely. But, if you enjoy your seafood, you will be getting more mercury in the form of MeHg several times (more from larger fish like tuna or swordfish than from smaller fish).

That should illustrate how it clears from the body compared to other forms. There have also been a number of studies looking at a variety of neurological outcomes between those who received a full schedule of thimerosal-containing vaccines compared to partial or no TCVs (back when the childhood schedule had a lot more TCVs than the current schedule with only some flu vaccines containing thimerosal). The studies found no significant differences between groups.

Shorter version: a little bit of thimerosal to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in a vaccine does not have toxic effects on humans and is eliminated from the body pretty quickly. And, according to the MSDS for thimerosal, the LD50 (dose at which 50% of the population will die from the substance) ranges from 30 mg/kg to 98 mg/kg (i.e., over 1000 times more than in a flu vaccine at the low end of the range), depending on the method of administration and the model used.

Shortest version: the dose makes the poison.

So the assumption the vaccine is “as safe” because it lacks thiomersal needs to be demonstrated, it may have deteriorated in storage and be less effective. Less effective means more people suffer from the disease they should have been protected from.

Of course they replace the thiomersal with other preservatives, but you now have to ask are these preservatives as safe and as effective as thiomersal? Thiomersal was a cheap and effective preservative, and as Martin points out there is no evidence of harm from it, so it is also safe. The antivaxers have thus forced us to abandon a useful ingredient on the basis of “it contains mercury”. As widely pointed out, less mercury than most Tuna sandwiches.

In practice the result is probably only that it has pushed up the cost of the vaccines (forced change of ingredient, switch to single dose, shorter shelf life etc), but that only affects poor people, and poor people have little say in how the world works, so I guess no one minds if they die needlessly so we can all be safe in the knowledge we’ve made a negligible reduction in our mercury exposure.