By Dan Olmsted

Epidemics are simple, my colleague and co-author Mark Blaxill says. They have beginnings in time and place, they spread in ways that ultimately reveal their origins, and they end when their essence is understood and further cases are prevented.

The autism epidemic is no exception, although the medical-industrial complex wants you to think so, and the mainstream media is only too happy to grant their wish (and scoop up their ad dollars). Autism is a mystery, it's genetic, but many genes, many, many genes and gene-environment interactions and something something about older moms and better awareness and Prozac and maybe freeways and deisel fuel and icky stuff like that.

No! That is not the ticket.

Autism represents a particular kind of environmental injury in susceptible children. It had a precise beginning, in the 1930s when the chemical compound that caused the first cluster, ethyl mercury, was first commercialized. It simmered along as that exposure remained fairly steady for half a century. Then, like a raisin in the sun, it exploded a half century later when one of the commercial uses of ethyl mercury -- as a preservative in multidose childhood vaccines-- was suddenly ramped up.

Other manmade toxins, and other exposures from organic mercury developed in the interval, and the CDC's bloated, too many too soon vaccine schedule, no doubt kicked up the number of cases of early infant brain damage manifesting as the autistic behavioral syndrome. But the inauguration, and later the explosion, of ethyl mercury tracks clearly with the same trajectory as autism -- a real twofer! In a sense it is a challenge-rechallenge situation, the kind of evidence scientists consider proof of causation  but, because it is autism, have to claim is coincidence.

But because it is so simple, and ultimately self-evident, it doesn't take very long to make the case -- just under 15 minutes, actually. This summer, Mark, Teresa Conrick, Natalie Palumbo and I told the first part of the story in a 10 minute video titled, How Mercury Triggered The Age of Autism.



It showed how we went from essentially zero cases before 1930 to the first 11, identified by Leo Kanner in his landmark 1943 medical paper, Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact. Those families' backgrounds, we showed, had an astonishing and otherwise inexplicable link to the new ethyl mercury compounds-- in agriculture via seed disinfectants and lumber preservatives, and in medicine for multidose vials of ethyl mercury-preserved diphtheria toxoid vaccines.

For God's sake, the father of Case 2 was a plant pathologist at North Carolia State whose first paper in his archive there is an experiment with mercury!  The archives contain a notation that he was working with ethyl mercury in 1936 at the same time his son was born. This fact, confirmed by a brochure for the product in his archives, is the smoking gun of the autism epidemic, we've argued.

Now cut to exactly 50 years later. In 1986, Congress approved the Vaccine Injury  Compensation  Act, and despite its helpful sounding name, all hell broke loose -- hell in the form of the autism epidemic. Since then, autism has soared by a factor of 10 or 20 times, as the number of vaccines increased as a result of the liability-free world the act created for the pharmaceutical companies. The amount of mercury kids were getting tripled, and the timing got far more dangerous -- flu shots with mercury for pregnant women, HepB shots for babies within hours of birth.