i've just started to write about what i've been hesitant to on my blog. my daughter (youngest of 3)is the one who had a severe reaction to the vaccine. i will leave it at that for now.

Yes, this is a confusing issue. However, unfortunately, it looks like the same story is involved with the thought leaders as with other meidcation issues: pharma-sponsored shills with credectials assure us there is no problem, yet the science is lousy.
January 2008 had a published study and press coverage: google: "mercury from vaccines disappears quickly." Researcher Pichichero is on the pharma payroll.

Here is what caught my eye abt the study: the idea was to say that since thimerosal disappears from the body (as measured in blood) quickly, it can't reasonably be suspected to pose a threat.

However, I think we all know that the suspected physiological problem with mercury, as with ALL dangers from heavy metals, is that it is lipophilic (goes to the fat in the body), and our brain is mostly fat (myelin covering of brain neurons, plus other fat).

So, the optimal way to detect the extent that a heavy metal might be in the body would be to test the level in body fat. So in this most recent January study, why was that not done? I don't know. For one, obviously, it is easier to lab-test blood and urine. But if that is only marginally relevant, then why bother? Pichichero actually published a nearly identical study a few years earlier.

Other easily-discovered research concerning ethyl mercury in the body (the kind of mercury used i nimmunization) indicate that ethyl Hg lingers in the body fat 3 times longer than it lingers in blood or urine.

Why not look for the length of time that this ethyl Hg linger in the fat? Why look in the blood or urine, or feces? To me, that is either bad science, lazy science, or a distraction tactic.

That study, in Pediatrics 2008 Feb, was a good part of the the basis for a similarly dated policy from AA Pediatrics (oh, BTW: the AAP website has an "honor role" to honor donors and supporters: guess who populates the $25,000 and above category?).

I was 'on-board' with the idea that immunizations have no connection. I was not on the side with the conspiracy theorists, luddites, ufo witnesses, and hollywood philanthropists. Now, after I came across this lousy piece of research, and this pattern is emerging yet again, I just don't know.

With AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLL the MANY things that kids today come in contact with that could be causing the rise in Autism (think heating up PLASTIC baby bottles, the chemical fumes that comes from so many household fixtures such as synthetic carpet that your children play on, chemical paints -yes now without lead but still with many other chemicals-, the foam in thier mattress... etc. And every single day there are new chemicals dsicovered by the chemical companies and new uses are found with them.
There are in fact sooo many chemicals invented each year AND PUT TO USE that the FDA and other regulatory agencies don't stand a chance to thoroughly test and scritinize them all for safety. These chemicals simply get put to work SILENTLY in the every day goods we use and unless you're a purist like say my sister who: even gets her milk in glass bottles to escape exposure to the slight mingling of plastic molicules with her milk,
and who rips up the carpet in her new house even though she has a very ugly wood floor underneath it to remove the carpet that would otherwise be OFF GASSING into the air in her house
who only feeds her children free range meat, eggs and milk that comes from PEOPLE SHE KNOWS PERSOANLY and with 100% certainty aren't using antibiotics and hormones in thier animals, and only eats oragnic.
she also has gone so far as to put numerous coats of non-toxic paints on all her walls to cover up the old paint and keep it from OFF GASING into her house as well, And she also only uses stainless steal pans and rarely eats out of cans to avoid exposure to aluminum....
And of course she has had her normal metal fillings removed and replaced with I believe porecelain ones to protect herself from the mercury in the fillings (which suppossedly is safe).

Well unless you can live your life like that you are bound to be exposing yourself to hundreds of thousands if not millions of chemicals that the human body was not designed (has nto yet evolved) to deal with.

.... yeah that is a lot to do to avoid exposure to ALL the things (chemicals) that *might* be the reason why autism has been rising and cancer and all that. It's certainly not something I could manage, but then again I don't have small children to think of. And she also is against getting her kids vaccinated which I guess is okay to do here is the USA since you're kid most likely is never gonna be exposed to and get small pox or measles etc. But if enough people stop vaccinating thier kids that might change in the future and I *think* it might be worse to watch a generation loose a bunch of kids to a small pox outbreak than to risk the slight chance of autism... but I really don't see that many people stopping vaccinations, so I guess it's still a safe choice to make in this country.

In anycase my point is that I do not understand why people have put all thier focus on vaccinations being THE culprit when there is an endless sea of potentialy toxic chemicals that surround us even in our very homes. I haven't followed the issue much and I don't know much about autism except that it is an illness that presents itself in childhood... perhaps around the time when kids are getting vaccinations? If that is the case I can see how people could draw the association between the two but that doesn't mean it is the correct association. If Vaccinations do play a role in autism I think they do not play the only role. It may be that they are (the murcury in them is) the straw that breaks the camels back, AFTER a kid has already been put at risk from simply living in a modern world where we never think twice, and barely think once about just how many un-naturual and potentialy toxic and harmful chemicals are put to use in the products we use to build and clean our homes, clean and clothe our bodies, store and cook our food and everything else that we do.

Kids and babies are much more sensitve to certain chemicals and are more easily harmed by them, so even things that have been stamped with the approval of the FDA as safe might still hurt babies and children. I know the FDA certainly does not test chemicals on kids, so the only way we find these things out is after a chemical has been on the market for awhile and after it has hurt a lot of kids. Maybe Vaccinations are the problem but I really think they are not the sole cause for the rise in autism. We've got to look at other possible causes as well, IMO that's the smartest way to approach this problem.

Yes the modern marvels of technology are great but I think there is a price to pay. I don't see how it is that people just don't get that the rise in all these diseases is probably not due to one certain thing but due to hundreds of thousands of chemicals barraging our bodies daily. Sure some are more harmful than others but certainly even the less harmful ones can be having just as bad of effects as the well known really harmful ones when you take into account just how much of them we consume and are exposed to without even knowing it.
Really I am suprised at just how well we are doing as a species when you consider how many nasty substances we have created for our own consumption and use. It's really gross when you think about even just the chemicals that we add to the food we eat to make it fluffy and white and have a shelf life of ten years. There really is just a sea of nasty stuff that surrounds us in the developed world... we just don't know much about it unless we make an effort to educate ourselves.

In anycase I hope that they can find a way to take the murcury out of vaccinations even if they say it is safe. IMO it is really strange that we even use murcury in things that we plan to put in our body, no matter that it isn't in the "form" that is suppossedly the only harmful form... it's like how we used to use lead in pipes...it's just counter intuitive but I guess us humans aren't always as smart as we think we are.

The first time I heard about this correlation between autism and vaccines, I was told by someone that KPFA had reported that my son's generation was the one exposed to the excess mercury preservative, while my daughter who is five years younger than him was not exposed to it.
My son didn't develop autism, but two people who I knew who had babies around the time I had him had children who just plain stopped developing. I talked to one of them who was pre-med at the school I was attending, and she told me that the doctors did not have any diagnosis for him, not autism, or really anything else, which is why she was going into medicine, so she could see if she could figure it out.
Autism presents symptoms such as exreme agitation and repetitive movements, as well as an inability to make eye contact or smile at people. This woman's son was calm, had beautiful, bright eyes he would look right into your with, and smile happily. He wasn't learning to stand, talk or feed himself when I knew these people 17 years ago.
Although Philip has criticised Montel Williams, he had a show in which he interviewed a mother whose child had this affliction, and she described how her son displayed none of the agitated affects of typical autism, and how she had disagreed that this was the same thing. Her son did overcome this affliction after a few years, I believe.
My opinion is that doctors started labeling this iatrogenic illness autism as a cop-out.
OK. More lay-person opinon based on anicdotal evidence. I met a guy who had taken PCP when he was a teenager, and was taken to a mental hospital when he started to destroy things in his room. The doctors immedately put him on psychiatric drugs, which combined with the PCP to create a gel-mold over his brain, thus putting him into a 5-year state of total inability to communicate with the outside world. After 5 years of just sitting there, the condition subsided and he was his "normal" self again. This just strikes such a correlation in my mind, because the mercury-related disorder is also said to effect the brain casing. It seems like the same disorder, albeit caused by different mishandling of chemicals by doctors.

I agree with katielou that all the plastics in our lives really creeps me out. I try to use glass whenever I can and we took the carpet out of our house the first year we moved here. We really are bombarded with chemicals. In our food, our air, our dirt (in which we grow the food). We have no idea, really, what we're doing.

KatieLou82, you make an excellent point about the risk of a reaction to vaccines vs. the risk of developing the diseases the vaccines are designed to prevent.

The only way to tell for certain that a particular vaccine causes autism would be to get a huge representative sample of babies, match them for gender, location, socioeconomic status, family health history, weight, etc., randomly assign one baby in each matched pair to receive the vaccine of interest (and no other vaccine), and follow the babies for several years to see whether there is a higher incidence of autism in the vaccinated babies than in the non-vaccinated babies. For what should be very obvious reasons, this study could never be done.

I dunno Gerbil, I think that maybe this sort of study could be done if a bunch of researchers simply took the time to do some outreach to people who were *otherwise already* going to have thier kids vaccinated or not have them vaccinated. Yeah it wouldn't be double blind because the parents would know if thier kid got the vaccinations or not, but I highly doubt even if you told your child that they had been given the vaccinations that it would cause he child to behave any differently... what I mean is I don't think autism is something that a kid would pretend to have or even could fathom to pretend to have at such young ages as a response to being vaccinated... nor do I think thier knowing they weren't vaccinated would keep them from becoming autistic if they were going to end up that way.
I think this sort of study could be done considering how many people are now choosing to not have thier kids vaccinated. It's simply be a matter of finding them. That way the researchers themselves aren;t really doing any harm or putting the kid at risk anymore than they would have been if not enrolled in the study.

I think many parents are battling back to the various toxins as they become known, and not just focusing on the autism conundrum. The Reusable Bags website sells non-PVC bottles and non-lead lunch bags. Parents are seeking to buy food locally. And Canada is beating back its chemical industry to ban PVC plastic bottles for young children.

An anecdote on autism - I was a speech and language pathologist in the early seventies and worked with one boy with severe autism. When I came back into the field in the mid-nineties, I was faced with five boys with Aspergers Syndrome, two boys with selective mutism, and one girl with autism on my caseload. Times had surely changed and I saw the increasing numbers with my own eyes.

KatieLou--if you were not going to do a true experiment with random assignation, you would need to do a case-control study, which might prove even more difficult (though probably more ethical). Each already-going-be-vaccinated child would have to be matched for a number of different factors to a child in the not-already-going-to-be-vaccinated group, to reduce the possibility that some other factor is responsible for autism. Also, even in a case-control study, you would need an extraordinarily large sample because the base rate of autism is very low to begin with. Although the children would not be likely to fake autistic symptoms, whoever would be assessing them would need to be blind with respect to their vaccination status, as there isn't a lab test for autism and the assessors' observations could be clouded by knowing whether the child had been vaccinated.

But that clinical description sounds more like Guillain-Barre syndrome or other acute neuro pathology. It's well-known that GBS can occur after a vaccination.