Thimerasol taken in itself is one thing..see Dr.Spritzer,McGill....Grier and Dr.Baskin... Baylor....but put it in context with Lilly cheif Sydney Taurel a Morrocon native, barely a citizen 8 yrs or so getting appointed to the Homeland Advisory Board, ....this, after he incredibly sent Vote for Bush pleas in the company's annual report!...before the last Presidential election...Along with this on the Lilly board Kenny Lay and at one time George Bush senior sat!...Parlay that with the fact that Lilly's lobbiests couldn't get a bill through Kennedy's commitee forgiving vaccine makers of sins....The law mysteriously and dubiously explained was slipped through the Home Land Security Bill....Read Lilly's remarkable headlines on their drugs...a drug with a black box warning is tauted as the best thing since Kellogs cornflakes......take all this together and you have a pattern!

Frankly, you're conceding far too much to the anti-vaccine crowd. There is absolutely no reliable evidence that thimerosal or combination MMR or whatever the anti-vaccine target of choice is this month contributes to autism.

On the other hand, there are a number of opportunity costs of varying degree attendant with yet more calls to study this phantom. There are both real costs in performing such studies, and the bigger fear of seeing people abandon routine vaccination as we wait a decade or two for more studies that don't find a causal connection but also cannot definitively rule one out (you will never be able to construct a study that satisfies these people -- witness the groups still convinced that breast implants cause their diseases/conditions).

To Brian Carnell: if Thimerosol really IS harmless, then why don't we let the legal system decide the fact, rather than having the manufacturer try to hide behind Congress' skirts from the legal system? (Of course, that's a ridiculous question -- we all know that Congressmen who have received large campaign contributions from the potential defendant are more reliable in their judgement than any silly old jury.)

By the way, Glenn Reynolds has been responding to me on this subject by waving in my face the fact that Bendectin turned out to be harmless despite the testimony of eight scientific witnesses with "impressive credentials" (to quote the US Supreme Court) that it wasn't -- without his ever mentioning that the Court ruled that their testimony was inadmissible because it hadn't been peer-reviewed, and that this naturally means that any testimony a jury hears that Thimerosol is dangerous WILL have been peer-reviewed. So I repeat: why is its manufacturer trying to use Congress to hide from the legal system?

To Bruce Moomaw: The last place I or any thinking person would want to see this issue decided is in a court of law, where a jury of well-meaning but untrained peers would decide an issue of utmost importance to our society.

I, for one, would not want a panel of beauticians, retired mechanics, stockbrokers, journalists, advertising account executives, grocery store clerks, English professors, firefighters, welfare recipients, college students or clerics to determine any corporation's guilt (or innocence) on matters in which they have no expertise.

If the addition of mercury to vaccines caused evil results to our most innocent population, let scientists prove it first.

While I'm agnostic on this particular issue, I keep in mind that vaccines have provided safe and healthy lives to far more children than the doses are accused of harming.

As for settling scientific questions in court, need I say anything more than "breast implant"? Despite years of study and dozens of reports, implants have proven safe by researchers. Tell that to the companies bankrupted by lawsuits.

I don't want to see the world thrust back into the 18th century by the legal profession.

Just to give you some idea of how bad things are: I am a physician working in Dallas, and I've already been approached by 2 lawyers who want to pursue these bogus "thimerosal - autism" claims with class-action suits. Ten years ago , I was approached by another lawyer who wanted to be the "breast implant lawyer of Dallas" (believe me, that's quite a big project in our city). He was quite upset when I told him there's no evidence to support such a link.

The deal is - in a court of law, the plaintiff is supposed to show that there is a 51% likelihood that the defendant's actions were the "proximate cause" of the plaintiff's damages. There is simply no science to support such a link (just like there was none in the breast implant cases).
Unfortunately, juries frequently choose to ignore the law, and judges are reluctant to overthrow their verdicts. That is the problem, and there's no way (agreeable to the trial lawyers) to change that fact.

Evidently Mr. Mierzejewski overlooked my statement that any scientific expert witnesses in such trials must now have had their work peer-reviewed, by a 1993 order of the Supreme Court. That is, to be allowed to testify to juries at all, scientists must have significant evidence on the subject.

And the trouble with limiting examination of the safety of drugs (or anything else) entirely to regulatory boards is, of course, that the regulators are appointed by politicians whose campaign contributions have in turn been largely provided by the businesses that are supposed to be regulated. Which is precisely why that little codicil forbidding lawsuits against the makers of Thimerosol (but not of any other drug) was quietly slipped into a wholly unconnected bill. (In this connection, it's also interesting that -- as "60 Minutes" pointed out earlier this year -- Reagan's first head of the FDA, immediately after cutting corners left and right in standard procedure to get aspartame approved despite significant evidence that it causes brain damage, took a job with its manufacturer.) There's no way to change THAT brute political fact, either -- which is why it's disastrously unwise to deprive juries of the opportunity to consider issues of complex fact in this area, just as in possible economic crimes or in any other legal area.

Bruce,

Peer review publication is not a high hurdle to clear. For example: Andrew Wakefield has had his articles on an MMR/autism connection published in multiple peer reviewed journals, including the Lancet, thereby satisfying the Supreme Court's standard. Just because there are articles which refute his claims doesn't mean he couldn't get his opinion before the trier of fact.

To which the obvious retort is: in that case, why SHOULDN'T his views get a legal hearing? (At this point I'll hand over the debate, though, since Mark Kleiman has reiterated all my points with more corroborative detail. Our central point is simply that government regulatory boards cannot be anywhere near entirely trusted, for the reasons I've described.)

Unfortunately, juries frequently choose to ignore the law, and judges are reluctant to overthrow their verdicts. That is the problem, and there's no way (agreeable to the trial lawyers) to change that fact.

You do trust, however, congressman to make these decisions, and they're not any more qualified; if anything, less, as their chance of having scientific or statistical training is no doubt smaller than the public at large.

This isn't about whether there's a connection to autism; it's about a anti-democratic distrust of the legal system.

I'm a single dad of a autistic child who is seeking compensation due to the fact, he is mercury poisoned from vaccines.
The
PfeifferTreatmentCenter,http://www.hriptc.org/booklet.html
has a book called "Metallothionein and Autism".
This will answer many of your questions in regards to autism due to mercury.
I pull mercury from my sons body every other weekend. I have been doing this for a year and a half. He has never ate fish, and i have had him on purified water since he was born.
He is ten years old.
You watch Dr. Baskin's testimony and then do the math of where all of this mercury in my son's body came from.
Mercury inbeds its self deep into the bone, muscle and fatty tissue. My son's body was not able to handle the high mercury content during vaccinations and his body shut down Metallothionein production causing his body to retain mercury, it turn the mercury as placed into tissues and such, in order to rid of it in some way. Unfortunately, the brain is a good absorbent of toxins, especially mercury as it will cross the blood brain barrier.
There needs to be proof of autism and thimerosal? I have it.
All I need is my day in court!
I am a parent researcher and I keep my son alive through supplementation and therapies as he has almost died before I was able to begin therapy to remove mercury from his body.
1500 articles on Pubmed to reveal how bad thimerosal is to the human body.
We all know of the dangers of lead and lead paint. Kids eating lead paint peelings in the past.
Why is it so hard to grasp the same for mercury, which in clinical evaluations, is more toxic and more damaging to brain neurons than lead?
The parents of these damaged mercury poisoned children are not out to "get rich" with these law suits, they are trying to STOP this abuse in the medical community and get adequate compensation for their kids so their kids will not end up on the streets after the parents die.
Some of the parents are gonna fund projects with the money to help all of the kids, not only their own child, to find a way to heal these affected children due to mercury poisoning.
I am one of them.
We are not going to be mislead as the parents of Down Syndrome children were. We are not gonna allow our funding to be used to find a test to allow a mother to abort a autistic child if they desire not to have one. The Down Syndrome parents wanted research for a cure, they gave them a test instead.
It is heart breaking what goes on in this country to the disabled.
If you are born into a disability, no insurance company will cover you. You can go for government assistance, but it is limited, hard to get and does not pay for the things that you REALLY need.
Private funding help is limited.
Autistic children are not born, they are made. If I knew mercury was in the vaccines, I would have NEVER considered vaccinating my child, bottom line!
The vaccine program in this country needs to be gutted and re-established.
There are too many families out there that are loosing EVERYTHING to care for their child due to the government medical health agencies not having the knowledge to use a calculator in order to figure out that kids were receiving more mercury than the EPA deemed safe for a adult human body.
We, the parents of autistic children, are paying for their mistakes!
There's no reason to debate if mercury causes autism, it;s just a matter of gathering up the info. as Dr. Baskin did in his recent testimony.
It's always been there, the truth.
It's just am matter of people realizing that "the world is not flat, it is round" kind of thing.
Mercury is the 21st century's downfall in the health of humanity.

Gary

To all those who believe that vaccines are innocent in regards to our children. Fact number one: All vaccines to date have in there history caused the very diseases that they were ment to protect against. Not in all cases of course. Many wild strains seem to appear after vaccines have been given.
Perhaps you could offer another way that this rise in numbers could be explained? We all know that genes play some roll but we must remember that chemicals can cause abberations. Morris Kharasch himself said thimerosal was toxic. If it were bound, As Lilly claimed it would have been rendered harmless as a preservative.
When your child recieves the MMR you are given a paper from the CDC that says adverse reactions include change in behavior. And could you please tell me what other drug that the FDA has asked be removed that wasn't proven to be dangerous or have caused a problem? This whole problem hit quickly and due to the timelines of diagnoses it was 8 years before this hit it's highest rates.
A 1 in 10,000 ratio was the rule with vaccines. Now the injury rate is 1 in 250 for children. 1 in 1,000 for Smallpox in adults. There is a problem here and the only shared situations are the vaccines themselves. We have two years to wait to see if it was the thimerosal that led they way. Remember that only our military people have reported Gulf War Syndrome. We gave our people the most vaccines. All these darn coincidence as the pharmecutical companies claim are getting out of hand.

Why do I see many new studies that show that thimerosal is a player in the rise of Autism. So why does everyone keep bringing up the Danish study? The rates in Denmark are much less than other thimerosal using western countries.
Why did Denmark ban thimerosal in the first place in 1992? What concerns drove this action way before our government even began looking into this?
I still have a bottle of merthiolate that contains 50% thimerosal and it states in the warnings : May cause severe mercury poisoning. Let's see if I have this right. Mercury is toxic in any form. If I get to much on my skin it will cause mercury poisoning. If I inhale too much it can cause mercury poisoning, If I eat too much fish that contains mercury I can be mercury poisoned. But if it is injected directly into my blood stream it is not going to cause a thing???????
HELLO would others please add to the obvious.