Weekly Wrap: Mercury and the Mystery of the Missing California Kids
By Dan Olmsted
It's a fool's errand to try to determine the real autism rate these days, especially tracking it over time. But a couple of "soft signals" from California make me question the idea that severe or "full syndrome" autism is still soaring on the same trajectory we saw in the 1990s.
The latest CDC figure -- convenient for the memory-challenged like me -- is 1 in 88, from 2008, among children age 8, born in 2000. Handy, yes, but it's 2013, for crying out loud.
Nobody argues there is still plenty of autism abroad in the land, but nobody, I would argue, truly knows the rate, the trend, or the relative level of severity right this very minute beyond a basic order of magnitude and the fact it is catastrophic. As our book (The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic) shows, the CDC is fully capable of manipulating the true increase into or out of existence (see Brick Township, New Jersey).
And nobody can seriously argue that thimerosal -- the kind of organic mercury in multidose vials -- was out of vaccines by the year 2000. It could have been, if the feds had yanked it when they announced their concern and went ducking for cover in July 1999. Instead, they asked manufacturers to implement a gradual phaseout -- and even spurned pharma offers to go directly to mercury-free shots in some cases.
Meanwhile, mercury is still in millions of flu shots now given to all pregnant women and all infants over six months of age.
As we also know, there is a world of difference between full-syndrome autism -- mute, self-injurious and sometimes dangerous children who will never be independent or, most likely, employable -- and Asperger's, with PDD-NOS occupying a middle ground of still-severe injury. The CDC likes to conflate all these categories, and new DSM-V further muddles the issue. But severity on the spectrum does matter, and a great deal, however it is gradated and defined.
So the idea that since mercury was "removed" from vaccines in 1999, "we all know" that the rate of severe autism rate has kept rising -- well, we all don't know that. At least I don't.
That's why this comment from one of AoA's astute commentators, Cherry Sperlin Misra, who lives in India but often visits family in the States, caught my eye this week. Read it, and then I'll share my own version of this observation:
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I feel that the rate of autism has flattened out and is now falling- at least from what I see in California. The law banning the giving of mercury vaccines to children in California came into effect in 2006. Today, in the malls, streets, parks and other public places, it is rare to see an autistic or hyperactive child.
Undoubtedly, this presents a dilemma for the public health personnel. They like to say that "we stopped the mercury and the autism is still increasing", because then people will continue to trust vaccines. On the other hand , if they say that autism is increasing, people may, at long last, become alarmed by that increase, particularly when schools are finding it difficult to manage their budgets because of the large number of autistic kids.
Their solution seems to be to avoid talking about the topic, and most importantly, giving out no data for children born after year 2000.
Here is my today's experience at a school in an upscale neighbourhood in Silicon Valley: This school has three rooms for the special kids. The room for the kids who are about age 5-7 has fewer kids than the other rooms, and the kids do not seem to have severe autism. I was able to speak to the teacher, saying " Excuse me, could I ask you a question?" She gave her assent, so I said, "Can you tell me if the number of younger kids with autism has fallen?"
Her face clouded slightly and she replied, "I really cant talk about that now." I think I will take that reply as a "yes, but we arent supposed to talk about this," but I wonder if anyone here can provide more information.
The other interesting observation is that nearly all the kids must be from homes that eat fish frequently. All or nearly all of the kids are from Southeast Asia or parts of India where fish is eaten frequently. This is a further implication of mercury in fish as causal for autism and it would be likely that these kids may have been vaccinated in countries, such as India, that still use mercury laden vaccines, or they may have been given extra vaccines for visits to their parents' home countries.
I cant state that there was no Caucasian child in that classroom, but while I watched, only Indian and Southeast Asian kids left for home.
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Thanks, Cherry. Now here's my observation. As a result of putting together our recent video, How Mercury Triggered the Age of Autism, and seeing how stark the connection with vaccine-type mercury is in those first cases I've been dipping back into some wonderful sources on mercury and autism.
They include David Kirby's seminal Evidence of Harm, Generation Rescue's excellent Web presentation, putchildrenfirst.org, and my own conversations with longtime advocates like the estimable Beth Clay, who worked with Dan Burton and Liz Burt on the mercury-and-autism hearings back in, oh, 2000 or so, the last year for which we have an autism rate.
All this reminded me of something I was told in late 2010 when I attended an autism conference in Long Beach. Such events are wonderful occasions for, among other things, the range of people I get to talk to. I end up with business cards, slips of paper, things to ponder. I try to file it all away, but sometimes I lose track of an interesting thread for a while.
Here are my notes from October 9, 2010:
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-- talked with [deleted -- a local autism mom and treatment advocate]. she told me she has a friend who has taught kindergarten for like 40 years, and 20 to 25 years ago started noticing that kids had trouble holding a pencil. she said [deleted] observed the same thing as a nanny in recent years. fine motor skills problem, not failure of parents to "prep" their kids.
-- she said the younger kids "are milder overall," although there continue to be one or two very damaged children who seem to have severe failure to thrive. she said they don't see headbanging, and instead of arm flapping they now see finger flicking.
-- this is interesting -- she said they see 6 and 7 year olds with autism and the milder group of one-and-one-half to two year olds, but no kids in between. "we don't have 3-4-5 year olds," she said. i don't know what that means ...
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So, to summarize my note, kids started to have problems a couple of decades ago. Check.
Then came the full-on autism epidemic - headbanging, arm-flapping, and the rest. Check.
Then, as of 2010, there were still 6 and 7 year olds (born 2003-4) with typical autism.
Finally -- "this is interesting" -- this parent and advocate observed a virtual absence of 3 to 5 year olds with autism in late 2010.
Two and a half years later, those kids would now be "about" in the 5 to 7 age range -- the ones whose absence Cherry was observing in a California school just this week.
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After the conference, I shared my notes with my co-author, Mark Blaxill, and basically forgot them. Finally -- a few days before Cherry's comment this week, as it happened -- a lightbulb went off, and it was the same one dangling above Cherry's head: California banned mercury in shots for pregnant women and infants in 2006. The ban has not stuck -- like other states that enacted such early bans, the health department has declared emergencies and snuck "the gentle bacteriostat," the harmless kind of organic mercury, thimerosal, ethyl mercury, back in.
But for a time, thimerosal was not allowed in vaccines given to pregnant women or kids. It took effect in 2006 and seems to have been firmly in place in 2007-08. From the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency Physicians' Bulletin dated October 2007:
In bold type: "California law prohibits the administration of influenza vaccine which contains more than 1 mcg of mercury (in the vaccine preservative thimerosal) per 0.5 mL of vaccine to pregnant women and children under 3 years old.
"There is thimerosal free flu vaccine available for children aged six months through 35 months and for women who are pregnant. See Table 1 for dosages and thimerosal content."
In recent years in California, as in many states that originally banned mercury following the 1999 national phaseout, thimerosal appears to have snuck back in. But in 2006-8, it looks to me like thimerosal would have well and truly been out of vaccines in California, no longer in Hep B, DTaP, and HIB at the CDC's request, banned statewide in flu shots for pregnant woman and for infants up to 3 years of age.
This leads to a hypothesis-generating question: Did changes in exposure to organic mercury from vaccines in California since 1999 coincide with changes in the rate or severity of autism? In particular, did changes in thimerosal in flu vaccine coincide with in the rate or severity of autism?
This is a Question, people! Like, Where are the autistic Amish? I'd welcome crowd-sourcing comments of all kinds, including those who think that hard data makes this iintriguing but ultimately meaningless. But as Darwin said, "Speculation is the basis for all good and original observation."
Now, I am sure that the autism rate in California is still ghastly and getting ghastlier; one researcher-parent has told me he sees no sign whatsoever of a lessening of rate or severity in California. That's the hard data; but what Cherry and I independently collected is what I'd call a "soft signal," the kind of thing that makes you wonder what is really going on -- You've got your basic autism epidemic, validated in California beyond dispute; then, maybe, you've got a gap where some front-line people are picking up virtually no cases, then you've got more cases again, mostly on the milder side.
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California and a few other exceptions aside, the national uptake of the pediatric flu shot layered in quite neatly just as the other mercury-containing shots were phasing out. This chart from Put Children First paints it visually:
Even back in 2006, the first year of the California ban, I was writing about how "Mercury Creeps Back In" to baby shots through flu vaccinations: "New calculations suggest children today can be exposed to more than half the mercury that was in vaccines in the 1990s, even though manufacturers began phasing it out in the 1990s.
"Adjusted for a child's body weight at the time of the shots, there's virtually no reduction at all, according to this analysis."
Those who are connoisseurs of connecting dots, please note I didn't have a clue "what that means" when I first heard about this puzzling absence of autism cases in California in 2010, and neither did the woman in Long Beach who was telling me about it. The observation just sat there for nearly three years, and was not concocted to try to connect a decrease in mercury in vaccines with a decrease in autism. It was just people talking, which is the kind of thing that ought to scare the daylights out of the vaccine injury deniers. They hate when that happens.
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They've hated it for a long time, and they hate it even more these days. Just take a look at the shrieks and howls this week on Slate and Discover following Bobby Kennedy's assertion that mercury-containing vaccines cause autism. He's a conspiracy nut! The dim bulb that shows why dynasties must be busted up like oil trusts! The anti-science Satan of our day!
In the face of strong evidence that mercury triggered the initial rise of the Age of Autism in the 1930s, and the epidemic surge in cases around the world beginning in 1988, pediatricians, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, public health figures, and their mainstream media enablers and apologists continue to barricade the doors, hunker down, and hope the evidence goes away.
Instead, it keeps piling up higher and deeper, as does the damage wrought on children worldwide, 84 million of whom wordwide continue to receive mercury-containing vaccines every year, according to the World Health Organization.
As Mark Blaxill says, facts cluster around a good hypothesis, and the mercury hypothesis has only gained strength since it was supposedly "debunked."
As we've demonstrated, the first cases of autism reported in the medical literature in 1943 -- all born in the 1930s -- can be linked to the first commercial uses of ethyl mercury that began then, in seed disinfectants, lumber preservatives and, yes, vaccines (click on "How Mercury Triggered the Age of Autism" elsewhere on this page for the nine-minute video version).
Then there's the small matter of the CDC's own Generation Zero study that found a 7-to-11 times greater risk of autism in children with high doses of thimerosal in the first few months of life.
None of this absolves anything else about vaccines, or other sources of organic mercury like fish (as Cherry proposes) from playing a major role in the autism epidemic. No. But mercury is the key clue to autism as an environmental, and a vaccine-induced, and a thimerosal-triggered, whole body disorder.
Present at the creation and going strong long after any sane person would have removed it, at whatever cost, it is Exhibit A as to the lengths the denialists will go to protect their profits and their reputations, no matter who gets crushed along the way.
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Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.
Researchers from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that pregnant women exposed to high levels of diesel particulates or mercury were twice as likely to have an autistic child compared with peers in low-pollution areas. The findings, published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, are from the largest U.S. study to examine the ties between air pollution and autism.
So now we know that mercury from air pollution is bad and causes autism but
mercury from vaccines is the good mercury and is aok. Autism puzzle finally solved. I feel so relieved.
Posted by: Richard | June 18, 2013 at 08:42 PM
To Birgit Calhoun, Please do contact me on this topic. It would be very nice to do a more careful survey of the schools. It was explained to me that all or most of the elementary schools have one group/room for the handicapped kids of age 5-6 or 5-7 (not sure) After that the older kids are bused to one central school. I somewhat doubt , as one contributor has suggested, that the kids are warehoused somewhere else. For one thing, it is fairly common for parents of 5-6 year olds to be in denial about the severity of their child's handicap, and for another, the school which I saw was handling the children quite well, so I doubt that many parents would be looking for an alternative. In the two rooms for the older children, there are plenty of fairly severe cases. I would be particularly interested in the situation in schools with largely Caucasian populations, because that could shed more light on the effect of mercury in fish on the autism situation in California.
Posted by: Cherry Sperlin Misra | June 17, 2013 at 02:49 AM
I have noticed this in our district too, a town of approx. 20000. Under age 10 - 11 there is only one severe case of autism and that child is Asian and I'm not sure where he was born. Still lots of ADHD, aspbergers and PDD-NOS but all verbal.
Posted by: Greta | June 16, 2013 at 11:18 PM
The CDC's recent survey had the greatest increase in autism diagnosis in children age 14-17, but the highest rates were in children age 10-13 (Can't help noting another report that groups children in age ranges, no year-to-year analysis. Does anyone know if the CDC's survey data is available for such analysis?).
From what I see in my small circle though it's the 14-17 year group that is more severely impacted. My belief is that the "better diagnosis" that people were claiming was going on way back then didn't come until after the prevalence of injury in that age group really added to the greater awareness.
I don't spend as much time now with children younger than my daughters' peers, but I do not see the same degree of learning disabilities, though I hear quite a lot about parents using special diets, dealing with allergies in particular. I know of a few younger children talked about as possibly being "on the spectrum" though they have not seemed as severe to me as my daughter was at their age. (I have to note my daughter did far worse after Kindergarten vaccine boosters. That's another exposure that complicates prevalence tracking, I think.)
Perhaps in support of what you are noting, I do not know of any children born between 2003-2008 where I live (also in California) with an ASD diagnosis.
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | June 16, 2013 at 03:31 PM
Dan:
A few thoughts...I am on the Board of Education in my town and I get reports on special education on a regular basis. The bulk of our ASD kids are 12 years or older.
There are no severe ASD kids younger than 11.
Now this is one small school district in one Westchester County, NY. However, I have heard BOE members report the same thing in their districts.
Also, may I ask Eileen Nicole Simon to email me? I need to ask her some questions about the research she found.
Posted by: Louis Conte | June 16, 2013 at 11:27 AM
Garbo makes a great point about the more severe kids being tucked away elsewhere - i.e. to specialized campuses. That is the practice in our area, with one autism-only school and another one recently acquired, soon to be up and running. I believe this is where you would find your answer as to whether the younger kids (less mercury-damaged kids) are less severely autistic. ALthough the school administrators are quick to repeat the mantra that this is only due to the miracle (!) of earlier diagnosing and improved early intervention -- especially if they also play a role in providing these services.
My 14 yr old son attends an autism-only school that serves all the kids in our region whose needs cannot be met in the local public schools (a nice way of saying it is a dumping ground for the most difficult cases). I can tell you this much, as a casual observer for the past three years watching these kids (aged 5-22) in the parking lot every day, the younger kids do not have the abnormal gait, the flapping, the distant stare that the older kids do. The younger kids are more engaged and 'with it', have more speech, although many seem to have serious seizure disorders (thank you, aluminum). And just last week I was talking with a para in the parking lot, a very bright young woman who used to work in my son's classroom but whom I hadn't seen for quite some time. She told me she had been moved to a classroom for the much younger kids. I asked if she liked it and she replied, "Yeah, well, it's really different. They are much higher functioning, so we mostly are doing regular school work all day." Kind of says it all, don't you think?
Posted by: a mom | June 16, 2013 at 10:13 AM
I looked at the rate of special needs children in public schools in the USA, and yes, there was definitely a decline when they briefly lowered the mercury, which was proof to me that mercury is the main culprit. Since measles has an affinity for the hypothalamus, as well as mercury, I think this is why measles takes out those with mercury toxicity. I know 3 kids with schizencephaly, which is suppose to be very rare. All are the same age. This tells me a lot. I have also noticed similar symptoms among same-age groups, telling me that yes, there is no doubt whatsoever that the vaccines are a main player. But, we also have way too many toxins that are allowed in our foods and cleaning supplies. The government has failed us in many ways. And so has mainstream medical, treating most chronic conditions as if they are not treatable. Shame, shame, shame.
Posted by: Heidi N | June 15, 2013 at 09:20 PM
2 cents regarding the schools in California. Here in L.A. at least, the kids may be missing because they've just been moved somewhere else. I don't know how it works in other districts.
Kids over 3 are referred to LAUSD for evals and PreK services provided at LAUSD campuses, then re-evaluated at time of K entry and are "offered" school placements based on their needs. There are particular campuses which offer higher level of services in-house. During PreK services, our daughter (2003 cohort whose symptoms are balance/motor/speech related, more akin to nearly imperceptible cerebral palsy) was offered services and PreK placement at one of these somewhat distant schools that would have offered speech, PT, OT, etc. including a well-appointed OT gym and more experienced therapists, as part of the school day. We were freaked out by the severity of the other kids at the school, and chose to stay in our local preschool but then had to drive to the various LAUSD schools for services. At the time of IEP re-evaluation for K entry, in order to continue receiving services at our home elementary school (highly-rated, close to our home), we first had to be offered (and reject as inappropriate) placement at one of these other campuses. Our basically NT daughter was offered a spot in a classroom that consisted of 5 non-verbal autistic boys, which we declined. (This would have been summer/fall of 2007.).
The point I want to get across is that here in LAUSD there are systems in place whereby the more severe cases, whether wheelchair-bound MD/CP kids or ASD, are steered to particular campuses, with the inducement that bus transportation is provided and that services are in-house and often 1:3 or 1:1, so the parents have one-stop shopping. By comparison, our home school has therapists who come in once or twice a week for half-hour sessions of speech or whatever, usually in groups. Basically not much. There are no separate classrooms for special needs kids, and no kids currently with 1:1 aides. There are Aspie/HFASD/ OCD kids I know at our school from birth cohorts 2001-2003 who have had to leave school for various reasons; some are home-schooling and some have been placed in private schools specializing in ASD (Bridges, Village Glen Schools). I know of 2 families who had arrived at school with 1:1 aides back in 2006/2007 but left the school by the end of 1st grade for other campuses. I am not sure if the district is paying for the tuition, or where in the school district budget that would show up.
So, there are many reasons why more severe kids might seem to have "disappeared"; it may be there really are fewer of them and/or the younger kids are experiencing less severe symptoms (fine motor, twitching, etc), but it also could be the more noticeable cases are warehoused on certain campuses out of sight of the general district, or they are being home-schooled or sent to private specialty schools, but there aren't enough resources to give to the "less severe" kids so they are sent to the regular campuses where teachers with no special training are having to deal with them in regular classrooms.
Another way to track changes might be the budgets for the (state-funded via office of developmental disabilities) 21 statewide Regional Centers where kids are referred up until age 3 for evaluations and services. This system is separate from the school district; in more recent years (I hear tell) they have been pressured to drop ("graduate") clients due to ever-increasing numbers and shrinking budgets, even in instances where the case worker thought the child still needed services.
So like everything else, it's complicated. A while back LA Times was on a tear about vax rates and published the compliance rates at various schools in LAUSD. I always thought that might be useful info to cross-reference with special ed budgets.
Posted by: Garbo | June 15, 2013 at 05:46 PM
You know, there are hundreds of scholarly articles which talk about allergy to thimerosal. Some of them talk about how this allergy has waxed and waned over the years. What caused the increases and declines? What has been the effect of repeatedly injecting children with a substance they're increasingly allergic to? Well, if you don't want to know the answer, stop asking the question. That's what NACDG did.
"For example, patch test reactions to thimerosal, a mercuric derivative of thiosalicyclic acid, have been shown to be of little clinical relevance in active dermatitis in both adults and children. Although a recent, 15-year meta-analysis found thimerosal, which is commonly used as a preservative in vaccines, to be the second most common allergen, the North American Contact Dermatitis Group (NACDG) and some tertiary centers, however, have determined this chemical to be very unlikely to cause contact allergy. So these groups removed it from their standard screening panels. Regardless of this, manufacturers have begun using alternative preservatives in vaccines and other products. In fact, thimerosal is no longer found in any vaccines recommended for children under 7 years except for the inactivated influenza vaccine"
http://www.pncb.org/ptistore/resource/online_docs/pc_derm/16.pdf
Posted by: Carol | June 15, 2013 at 01:52 PM
In 2007 the FDA licensed TWINRIX, the Hep A and B combination. The four dose option is age 0, 7, 21 to 30 days, followed by a dose at 12 months. In Oregon, the teachers I have talked to, never noticed a decline in autism. In fact they say lately (anectdotal) that every kindergarten is worse than the last. In Oregon, the Hep A and the Hep B are "mandated" on school forms. I would have to guess that means that they are receiving this combo at birth in Oregon!
For five years now, I have heard teachers say, that this is the worst 7th grade I ever had, the worst 8th grade I ever had, until I predict the next year they say the worst 9th grade I ever had, etc. They are about to age out of high school now. Wasn't it about 2008 that annual flu shots were recommended for everyone age 6 months to age dead?
Posted by: Cynthia Cournoyer | June 15, 2013 at 01:36 PM
I am a California resident. My husband and I always look for the young ones at Seaworld, the San Diego Zoo and we don't see them. My daughter was in the clinical trials for STX209 and went to LA frequently. I asked one of the doctors that was in charge of the clinical trials if he had seen a drop in the number of young children with Autism. He said it only looked like the numbers were dropping because they were so good now at early intervention. I almost threw up.
Posted by: Maureen | June 15, 2013 at 01:14 PM
I have always wondered about this. My 15 year old daughter attends an autism treatment center that treats people from 18 months up to adults. The oldest person there is 19 and there is a VERY noticable difference in the severity of the older kids. It is painfully obvious when attedning holiday performances where the younger kids sing and dance in unison and tell jokes while the older kids are mostly nonverbal with little to no eye contact. I remember speaking with an ABA provider about 5 years ago who had been to the Middle East and noted that the kids they were treating there looked like the kids did in the US in the 90s. In other words, the kids they were treating in the US at the same time seemed less affected. Not sure how that fits in but it always stuck with me.
Posted by: JulieC | June 15, 2013 at 10:18 AM
It would be interesting and perhaps helpful to know how many pregnant women get the flu vaccine with thimerosal and the same for babies and toddlers in any give year. No doubt this will never be known.
Also, I thought many vaccines were processed withmercury and then it was filtered out--still leaving trace amounts.
Maurine
Posted by: Maurine Meleck | June 15, 2013 at 10:09 AM
It must be admitted that autism is the result of damage within the brain. This damage is not initially widespread, but prevents normal acquisition of language and maturation of language circuits in the cerebral cortex.
Autism is associated with many etiologic factors. Some of these are clearly the result of toxic injury. Prenatal exposure to alcohol and valproic acid (Depakote) are associated with cases of autism. Genetic enzyme disorders like phenylketonuria (PKU) and adenylosuccinase deficiency likewise have been reported as causes of autism. These and other genetic disorders lead to production of abnormal toxic metabolites.
Mercury and lead, like alcohol and toxic substances like methyl bromide, are known to cause symmetric bilateral injury of brainstem centers. Most prominently affected are auditory nuclei in the midbrain. Loss of the ability to comprehend spoken language has been reported in several cases of traumatic injury of these nuclei (the inferior colliculi).
Symmetric bilateral damage of brainstem auditory nuclei following asphyxia at birth was first reported in 1959. The reason for anoxic and toxic injury of auditory centers is that they receive greater blood flow than any other region of the brain. See the seminal paper by Seymour Kety at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804882/?tool=pubmed
In the 1930s another medical mistake came into popular practice, clamping the umbilical cord at birth to obtain placental blood for transfusions. Until the mid 1980s, textbooks of obstetrics all taught that the cord should not be clamped until pulsations in it had ceased. Pulsations are evidence that circulation has not completely transferred from the placenta to the lungs. If the cord is clamped before the first breath, a period of asphyxia will result, sufficient to cause injury to brainstem auditory centers.
The Amish do not clamp the cord at birth. This in addition to their refusal of vaccinations should be considered as possible reasons for low autism rates.
Posted by: Eileen Nicole Simon | June 15, 2013 at 09:58 AM
Heres another who couldn't sleep at night god bless The Whistle Blowers bring them out..
The Lead Vaccine Developer Comes Clean So She Can “Sleep At Night”: Gardasil and Cervarix Don’t Work, Are Dangerous, and Weren’t Tested
http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/2013/06/14/the-lead-vaccine-developer-comes-clean-so-she-can-sleep-at-night-gardasil-and-cervarix-dont-work-are-dangerous-and-werent-tested/
Posted by: IAngus Files | June 15, 2013 at 08:26 AM
Well I hope the nutters are stopped as I don't think any of them are capable of stopping themselves..
I seen this during the week for patches rather than vaccines
TEDGlobal: Future vaccines could be delivered via patch
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22882446#
Posted by: IAngus Files | June 15, 2013 at 08:23 AM
I have always wondered why the DSM-V has changed its parameters. The points in your article might be the reason why. The new version was necessary in order to blur the picture.
I have never been a conspiracy theorist. But I am starting to become one. The removal of mercury in its various versions from drugstore shelves was always done very quietly. Teething powder was taken off the market and there was no peep from newspapers in those days. I remember when Calamine lotion still had mercury in it. It retained the pink color; but the mercury is gone. And then there were the little bottles of Mercurochrome and Merthiolate. They can't be found on drugstore shelves. These things were all actually recalled and all without any notice in the press. Ely Lilly even sold the rights to Merthiolate around that time. This is interesting because in those days there was much greater governmental vigilance. There was still something called Civil Service. I am not sure who exactly got rid of it. But all of a sudden it is gone, I think.
Schwarzenegger signed the law to remove Thimerosal from flu shots. People were not wanting to vaccinate their kids with it being used.
I distinctly remember the reason why it was put back in. There was a supposed shortage of flu-vaccines because of filth in a British vaccine manufacturing plant. It took months to clean it up. (Was that just a pretext?) That made it "necessary" to use Thimerosal again. Simultaneously the need for flu shots was promoted everywhere to the point of ridiculousness, and the people who are so in favor of fluoride are also so in favor of Flu shots. This propaganda machine is very impressive. Also the incidence of Alzheimers has risen quite bit.
I am so glad that I can say this here in AoA. I get only eye-rolling when I talk about the dangers of mercury.
Could you tell me where in Silicon Valley this school is? I live there. I can check in other schools and see if there is a similar lack easing of autism for those years mentioned.
Posted by: Birgit Calhoun | June 15, 2013 at 08:17 AM
Dan-O, this is an important footnote to your video, "How Mercury Triggered the Age of Autism." Detecting and reporting a possible wobble in California autism rates following the "removal" of mercury in mandated childhood vaccines, and before mercury was re-introduced in flu shots, strengthens the take-away message: Don't get a flu shot containing mercury, especially if you are pregnant.
Hopefully, we are seeing the beginning of the end of this disaster, the Age of Autism. Other removals must follow, including the removal the Hepatitis B birthday shot, the MMR triple cocktail, the Gardasil mandate, and the “removal” of those responsible for the cover-up. We will not forget you.
Posted by: Dan E. Burns | June 15, 2013 at 08:03 AM
"As our book (The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic) shows, the CDC is fully capable of manipulating the true increase into or out of existence (see Brick Township, New Jersey) ... and ... "nobody can seriously argue that thimerosal -- the kind of organic mercury in multidose vials -- was out of vaccines by the year 200"
As long as the statistical data remains firmly under the control of those public agencies most responsible for approving and recommending childhood vaccines .. which makes that critical data unavailable for independent review .. we will never be certain the data those agencies do release is anything other than "self-serving" b.s.
What is desperately needed is someone on the "inside" .. such as .. whistle-blowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon .. who had access to critical data .. and .. found a way to introduce that data into the only court that matters .. the court of public opinion.
It must be very difficult to lay one's head on the pillow every night .. knowing there just might be a whistle-blower who can bring the entire travesty to an end .. INSTANTLY .. BY THE CLICK OF A KEY.
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | June 15, 2013 at 06:39 AM