Vaccines and Autism

There is at present, as many know, a growing movement opposing vaccination, saying that it causes autism. The suspicions may seem well-founded, as many parents with autistic children first noticed symptoms after a round of vaccinations. Dig a little deeper, and you find that in most vaccines, a mercury derivative called thimerosal is used as a preservative. Thimerosal does have some well-established antibacterial and antifungal properties, but the mercury it's derived from also has its own very well-known neurotoxicity. Logic does suggest that autism could easily be linked to a neurotoxin such as mercury, especially in the more sensitive bodies of infants.

Sharing a bit of medical knowledge here, it is crucial that such preservatives be added to multi-dose vials of parenteral (injectable) medications. Such things must be kept sterile, as the body simply does not have built-in defenses against things being injected directly into the blood or muscle. From a financial standpoint, the multi-dose vials are preferred because as anyone who goes to Costco or Sam's Club knows, you save when you buy in bulk. In this case, the savings is most obvious on the packaging. This of course makes it the preference of the insurance companies who pay the healthcare fees, the healthcare providers who order them, and the patients who receive them and pay the co-pays or the entire cost.

And so, considering that it's been used since the 1930's with minimal if any problems, it just seemed to make sense to keep using thimerosal. Yet we have a seemingly growing number of kids with autism.

Autism itself is a poorly understood disease. For my own part, I suspect there might be a few different diseases under the blanket term of autism. No one seems to know what causes it, and it hits some harder than others. It's upsetting to parents, as their child may never be able to live independently and achieve all those dreams they have for them, and for the children who have it and have some function, it's also upsetting. They have a harder time fitting in, and tend to have sensory issues which may prevent them from enjoying many of the same things their peers enjoy.

The thing is though that the link between vaccines and autism has never been established, and is close to being debunked, thanks in large part to a Danish Study. There are many groups who spend their time and efforts looking for flaws in the study, but it looks fairly straightforward to me. I actually rather wish that autism could be attributed to thimerosal, as then we would know and could solve the problem in short order. But so far, the evidence is stacking up against this mercury derivative in childhood vaccinations being the culprit. That being the case, one could easily make the argument that efforts and funding could be better put to use in finding the real culprit than in beating this dead horse.

It is easy to understand however the concern about any form of mercury in any amount being injected into your infant. And you are not alone in this concern. As it turns out, thimerosal is being phased out of childhood vaccines and is now absent from most, if not all, childhood vaccines. I consider this to be good news. While there is no scientific evidence thus far of the chemical causing problems in the small amounts that it's used, that doesn't mean we won't find the evidence later. If you question this however, by all means talk to your healthcare provider to verify that the vaccine your child is being given doesn't contain thimerosal.

In either case, I would say that getting the vaccinations outweighs the possible risks, unless the possible risks are a known allergy or such like. Thimerosal aside, the way a vaccine works is fairly natural. You've heard the phrase that you can't catch the same cold twice? Well, that's essentially what a vaccine does... except that you can skip that rather inconvenient "getting sick" part.

The first vaccine was created by an English physician by the name of Edward Jenner. The vaccine was against smallpox. He had noticed that milkmaids seemed somehow immune to the smallpox epidemics, and this got him thinking. If you remember your nursery rhymes and the like, I'm sure you remember some that talk glowingly of the beautiful complexions of milkmaids. Consider that this was in contrast to the faces of those who had suffered smallpox, which did leave some ugly scars on the faces of its survivors. Further, it was theorized that the protection of smallpox came from the milkmaids' having to suffer cowpox, a relatively mild disease whose victims typically fully recover. It wasn't hard for Jenner to put two and two together.

In an experiment that would have had him arrested in modern society, and perhaps justifiably so, he infected an eight year old boy with cowpox from a milkmaid's fresh, juicy lesions. The boy predictably came down with cowpox, then recovered. A couple months later, he then inoculated the boy with smallpox from a fresh and juicy smallpox lesion. The boy didn't get sick. Turned out the two were similar enough that the body's safeguards against a re-infection of cowpox also protected against smallpox.

And that's more or less the way vaccine works, the very name "vaccine" being a tribute to Jenner's work (vac- referring to a cow in Latin). Smallpox is something that's wiped out entire civilizations, and had an overall fatality rate of 30%. Notice I use the past tense. This is because, thanks to vaccinations, it has been eradicated from the world's population. It still exists, I'm certain, in various freezers around the world "just in case," and with this, there is the potential for it to be used in bioterrorism (think nuclear is scary?). But the point is that you didn't have it, and chances are, no one you know has had it. It's not killing people now. The last case in the US was in 1949, the last in the world having been in the late 1970's.

You can also thank vaccination programs for the fact that Polio (link goes to informative photo gallery) is now more often referred to in the past tense. While not eradicated, it hasn't been seen in the US for decades, and is well on its way to being eradicated.

While it is easy to forget these plagues in today's world, there was a time not that long ago where they were common. Kids with withered limbs from Polio (remember Franklin Roosevelt?), mass graves from the 1918 influenza pandemic... the list goes on. It is good to have legitimate concerns for your children, but it's also important to protect them and remember that ultimately, scientists are on our side.

Sorry about the quality of the video, it's the only one I could find of this clip on YouTube. Before the start of the video, the mother explained to House that she refused on principle to vaccinate her child, also talking about how she only gives the kid her all-natural breast milk as opposed to formula.