Thimerosal - turning your infants into the Mad Hatter

The Mad Hatter was, let's face it, mad. As a hatter, no less. But why was that? Many people don't remember that in the time of Lewis Carroll, hats were made with felt treated with mercury. As a result of long-term mercury poisoning, many hatters of that time did, in fact, go mad.

It's fairly intuitively obvious that a very young child doesn't have a well-developed immune system. In fact, that's why infants who don't breast-feed get sick all the time. (Mother's milk transmits immunities from the mother to the child, so breast-fed babies are better off.)

Why, then, do we inflict more than 21 shots of various diseases into an infant's system before they reach 15 months of age? In theory, it's to help them resist virulent diseases later in life. But what no one in America seems trained to pay attention to are the additives and preservatives we use in vaccines.

Preservatives?

Yeah, preservatives. Like food, vaccines are natural, sometimes living substances and prone to degrading. As such, the pharmaceutical companies preserve them. In the 1930s, a particular preservative called thimerosal gained prevalence, and was used for nearly 60 years before the government banned it.

Why was it banned? Simple: it was almost half mercury. In tiny doses, like the 7 shots spread over a year that infants got in the '80s, it had almost no noticable effect. Today, with infants getting three times that amount, scientists worried that perhaps something might be wrong.

Got a guess as to what they thought?

(Much of this Autism and Vaccines information drawn from the article "Deadly Immunity" by Robert F. Kennedy.)

Thimerosal: one explanation of the Autism and Vaccines link.

Thimerosal is a mercury-containing organic compound. Since the 1930s, it has been widely used as a preservative in a number of biological and drug products, including many vaccines, to help prevent potentially life threatening contamination with harmful microbes. Thimerosal, which is approximately 50% mercury by weight, has been one of the most widely used preservatives in vaccines. The allergic responses to thimerosal that are described in the clinical literature manifest themselves primarily in the form of delayed-type local hypersensitivity reactions, including redness and swelling at the injection site. Such reactions are usually mild and last only a few days. No one recognized a larger issue.

Then, in 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the Simpsonwood conference center in Georgia; a meting convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the FDA, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur.

The results?

The federal officials and industry representatives assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten claimed.

The result? The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to produce a new study that radically downplayed the dangers of thimerosal. It gave Verstraeten's findings to a private company, freeing it from the dangers of being published under the Freedom of Information act. Verstraeten himself was offered a lucrative position at GlaxoSmithKline, and reworked his own data, burying any implication of the connection between autism and vaccines.

The Truth is Out There (somewhere in a 200+ page document).

The Simpsonwood transcript (linke above), contains startling insight into the concerns of the scientists present:

"I am really concerned that we have taken off like a boat going down one arm of the mangrove swamp at high speed, when in fact there was not enough discussion really early on about which was the boat should go at all. And I really want to risk offending everyone in the room by saying that perhaps this study should not have been done at all, because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted, and we have all reached this point now where we are left hanging, even though I hear the majority of consultants say to the Board that they are not convinced there is a causality direct link between Thimerosal and various neurological outcomes...I know how we handle it from here is extremely problematic. The ACIP is going to depend on comments from this group in order to move forward into policy, and I have been advised that whatever I say should not move into the policy area because that is not the point of this meeting. But nonetheless, we know from many experiences in history that the pure scientist has done research because of pure science...what we have here is people who have, for every best reason in the world, pursued a direction of research. But [this] is not the point at which the research results have to be handled, and even if this committee decides that there is no association and that information gets out, the work that has been done and, through the Freedom of Information [Act], [it] will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. And I am very concerned about that as I suspect it already too late to do anything regardless of any professional body and what they say."

In 2005, Senator Dan Burton (R-Indiana) reported, after a three-year investigation, "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."

So what's the other side of the coin?

As a result of all of the well-concealed political hubbub, thimerosal is no longer used as a preservative except in a very few vaccines (though flu shots are nearly all thimerosal-laden!), and hasn't been since between 2002 and 2005, depending on which source you ask. Based on the observation that autism rates have continued to climb since 2005, many people are of the opinion that thimerosal cannot be the cause of the rise in autism. Nonetheless, as recently as March 2008, a study linking autism-like behavior and the U.S. vaccine schedule in monkeys has provided solid evidence that some link between autism and vaccines still exists.