This is an excert from the book I am currently reading "Making Sense of Autistic Spectrum Disorders":
Mercury: Red Alert or Red Herring?
Mercury is a metal that is liquid at room temperature (its chemical symbol, Hg, comes from its Latin name, hydrargyrum, which means "liquid silver"). The level of toxicity from mercury varies tremendously depending on its exact chemical form. A decades-long epidemic of neurologic damage in the populace living along the shores of Minamata Bay, Japan, was traced to the dumping of methyl mercury (one atom of mercury plus one atom of carbon) into the bay by a local factory. Today, coal-fired power plants and other forms of industrial pollution rain methyl mercury down on the landscape. Methyl mercury that lands in the water is taken up by micro-organisms, which are consumed by plankton, which in turn are consumed by herbivorous fish. Mercury becomes concentrated as it moves up the food chain; the higher up the food chain an animal is, the more mercury in its system. At the top of the aquatic food chain are the largest predators, with the highest mercury concentration of all: tuna, swordfish, and shark. The concentration of methyl mercury in these fish has led to warnings from the FDA to limit their consumption, especially by children and pregnant women.
Since the 1930's, ethyl mercury (one atom of mercury plus two atoms of carbon) has been used as an ingredient in thimerosal, a preservative added to vaccines. Back in the 1930's, products were not required to meet the safety standards that are in force today. As safety standards rose, thimerosal was simply grandfathered in as a commonly used compound. In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Public Health Service recommended removing thimerosal from immunizations as a precautionsary measure. There were then, and there are now, no studies to establish safety limits for ethyl mercury; rather, the AAP and PHS based their recommendation on the published safety standards for methyl mercury . However, methyl and ethyl mercury are about as differect as carbon monoxide (one atome of crbon plus one atom of oxygen) and carbon dioxide (one atom of carbon plus two atoms of oxygen); carbon monoxide will kill you in a couple of minutes while carbon dioxide is part of the air we breathe, and an ingredient in carbonated beverages. There are equally significant differences between methyl and ethyl mercury. Nonetheless, in the absence of safety data for ethyl mercury, the AAP and PHS did the prudent thing, which was to recommend that thimerosal be removed from childhood vaccines. This ws effectiely accomplished by 2001, with the exception of the influenza vaccine and neonatal hepatitis B.
In the wake of the AAP recommendation and the government's decision, however, the public assumed that if thimerosal was coming out of immunizations, there must be a problem with it. This fear crystallized in 2001 with the publication of a paper by S. Bernard and colleagues asserting that ASD represented a form of mercury poisoning --although classical mercury poisoning and ASD actually look very little alike.
As with Wakefield's 1998 paper (which as been discredited and several lawsuits have come about because of it - my words) implicating the MMR vaccine, researchers have responded to public concerns over thimerosal through broad-scale epidemiologic research. To date, properly conducted studies looking at hundreds of thousands of children have found no association between thimerosal and the prevalence of ASD. Most of there were retrospective studies comparing the prevalence of ASD in specific birth cohorts of children with the calculated dose of thimerosal recieved by children in that cohort. Since thimerosal was removed from nearly all U.S. vaccines in 2001, the obvious question is: Has the prevalence of ASD gone down? The answer, of course, is no. The prevalence of ASD in the United States continues to rise, even though exposure to thimerosal is negligible. ...the biggest jump in cases of ASD occurred in 1992 (which is when the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, began to require the reporting of autism by the states) and onward, right after thimerosal was removed. The same phenomenon--continued increase in the prevalence of ASD despite removal of thimerosal--has been reported in Canada, Denmark, and Sweden. It's hard to reconcile (this information) with the claims that thimerosal causes ASD.
~pages 96-100, Chapter 4 "Speculative Causes of ASD, and the Autism "Explosion", from "Making Sense of Autistic Spectrum Disorders" by James Copland,M.D.
Ms. Jones not all the cases of lung cancer are caused by cigarettes but that doesn't prove cigerettes don't cause lung cancer. And not all smokers get lung cancer.
I'm not the sort of person that is going to believe anything until I do research from credible sources. After reading about Wakefield and his profiting from spreading misformation about what he considers to be a cause of autism, I find him to be extremely untrustworthy.
