The Sting of Thimerosal in Autism

The Sting of Thimerosal in Autism
By James Ottar Grundvig
The Epoch Times
Apr 01, 2006




In the summer of 1980, I worked with a former New York City homicide detective on a construction crew. He had patrolled and survived the drug-infested streets of the South Bronx for two decades. But I remember him not for his toughness, but for something I will never forget: he was hyper-allergic to bees.

A bee sting was more of a death sentence to that ex-policeman than a knife or gunshot wound. If he didn't get immediate medical care after being stung, he would suffocate from the hives that closed his throat and blew up his skin like a strawberry.

I recall that story every day when I see my six-year-old autistic son struggle to make out a word, fail to use the laptop glidepad with his fingers, or stay focused for long stretches of time. Most people do not have life-threatening reactions to the venom in a bee's stinger; so too, most people do not have the immune reactions such as produced autism in my son. But the differences between the rare few whose immune systems are susceptible to bee stings and the children of the autism epidemic are as night and day.

For instance, people who have the genetic flaw that makes them defenseless against bees are numbers that grow at a constant rate with the population.

That, however, cannot be said of the vacccine-thimerosal-autism triangle that began in 1929, when the population of autistic spectrum disorder children (ASD) was zero. Fourteen years after the introduction of thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative then under the trade name Merthiolate) by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, Leo Kanner at John Hopkins Medical Center diagnosed the peculiar behavior associated with autism in eleven kids for the first time. That was 1943. The following year in Switzerland, Hans Asperger identified another subgroup of high-functioning autistic children with Asperger's Syndrome.

Coincidence? Hardly. The circumstantial evidence between the timeline of thimerosal's introduction in vaccines and children having the disorder fourteen years later, and then further amplified by the parallel rise in the quantity of vaccines given and the explosion of the autism epidemic makes it overwhelming. Thimerosal and autism throughout the past century go hand and hand.

For the thirty years after autism was identified, it grew at the constant rate of 1-in-10,000 babies born. Although more prevalent than individuals who were allergic to bee stings, the number of autistic infants only grew if the population did. So when my generation had one or two vaccines in the 1960's, the rate of children having autism stayed the same. That would change, however, not from an increase in population, but due to the growing number of vaccines given to babies, most of which contained thimerosal.

In 1978, the CDC added the triple shot MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) to the growing baby immunization program. Although MMR as a "live-cell" vaccine does not contain thimerosal—because the mercury-based preservative as an antibacterial agent would kill the deactivated virus in the vaccine and thus render it impotent—it started a frightening, irreversible, and detrimental trend: Doctors began giving more vaccines, at younger ages, for many diseases to which babies wouldn't be exposed until later in life (hepatitis B), with the new vaccination protocols all blessed and sanctioned by the CDC. None of the new baby vaccines was backed by a single study on its individual safety; nor was a single study done on the safety of the multiple vaccinations now given.

By the 1980s, my nieces and nephews received 8-9 vaccines when the U.S. resident population was 236 million people. By 1978, the rate of autism had increased four times, going from the previous rate of 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-2,500. Over the next ten years, the autism rate would climb again to 1-in-1,000 in 1991, when the DTP triple shot and hepatitis B were added to the vaccine chart, both of which contained thimerosal.

By the end of 2000, the year when my son was born, the rate mushroomed yet again to 1-in-250. Not only did the population of ASD children grow, so did the total number of vaccines given to babies, including my son, from about ten in 1990 to 22 vaccines or more today. The result of this ill-advised, force-fed mandate has been catastrophic. The rate of children born with ASD has increased again to 1-in-166, or 1-in-150 in many parts of California, Florida, and New Jersey.

In short, the occurrence of autism has increased at a rate of 1,700% over the past twenty years or more than 6,000% over the past thirty years. Meanwhile, the U.S. population during the past twenty years has grown from 236 to 300 million people, or at the rate of 21%. Still, the U.S. government, which has allowed to this very day the continued use of mercury (in infant flu shots) and thereby sanctioned the poisoning of infant's bodies, doesn't get the one underlying fact about autism: ASD children have disastrous reactions to thimerosal.

Once they are contaminated, they cannot excrete heavy metals out of the system.

Like the bee sting that could topple a Goliath or a hardnosed NYPD detective, no amount of thimerosal, no matter how minute, would ever be safe in the bodies of infants predisposed to autism. Trace amounts in susceptible newborns can damage a nervous system at once vulnerable and beginning to develop. But unlike bee stings, there is no serum or medication to reverse the poison. That's because thimerosal is even more insidious—it is a neurotoxin embedded in the brains, organs and tissues in its heavy metals form.

So if the rape of a child is against the law, then why isn't poisoning babies a crime? If an individual chose to poison another person with ricin, rat poison, anthrax, or even mercury from a thermometer, that individual would be sent to jail. So why is the use of thimerosal in 2006 not banned as a toxin in babies?

To answer this question and to see why the immunization mandates were imposed that caused the recent explosion in autism rates, one needs to understand the incestuous relationship between the agencies and institutions that should be protecting our children: the FDA, CDC, and the big pharmaceutical companies. The key to that relationship is greed.

By shielding big pharmaceutical companies from prosecution, by preserving the continued use of thimerosal in vaccines, by passing the financial liability from the perpetrators to the victims and their states, the U.S. Government, from the CDC and the FDA to Congress and the White House, have failed an entire generation of children.

The ugly truth about autism—it's here to stay.