draggonlaady

I'm way behind on my reading, as usual. This article is from Newsweek, published in February 2009. It's a fairly decent explanation of the whole MMR/thimerosal/autism thing. Some key points:

1: MMR (Measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine does NOT contain thimerosol
2: Thimerosal does contain mercury, and had been used in vaccines since the 1930's. The U.S. Public Health Service made a statement urging a change in preservative because even though there are "no data or evidence of any harm" from thimerosal, children's cumulative exposure to mercury from vaccines "exceeds one of the federal safety guidelines" for mercury. This is mostly because the number of vaccines recommended has increased steadily as new vaccines are developed and approved.
3: The initial study claiming to find a connection between MMR and autism had nothing to do with thimerosal; there are 2 separate issues that people keep mashing into one. (NEITHER of which has been shown in further study to have a correlation with autism.)
4: The initial MMR/autism study included only 12 children.
5: In 2002, a Royal Free (UK) study of 473 children had found no difference in the rates of autism between those who had received the MMR and those who had not. Scientists in Finland, studying 2 million children, reached the same conclusion in a 2000 paper. So did scientists at Boston University, studying the medical records of 3 million children, in 2001. In 2004 a study of the medical records of 14,000 children in Britain found that the more thimerosal the children had been exposed to through vaccines, the less likely they were to have neurological problems.