Thimerosal Does Not Cause Autism

jamie found an article over at Washington Monthly discussing the recent finding that there is no link between thimerosal and autism. It seems that after the mercury-based vaccine preservative was withdrawn from use in 1999, no drop in autism rates has been observed in a large California study. Here's the Science Daily writeup on the study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Comments

This is established

[Otter]

The link between thimerosal and autism has already been pretty thoroughly disproven. (Link to a blog rather than the paper because 1) it's a good summary and 2) I'm not sure whether the link is freely readable.) Whatever merit this hypothesis had in the past, any future work on it that "activists" manage to force clearly comes at the expense of projects that might be genuinely useful.

Re:They'll just blame something else in vaccines

[tgibbs]

Autism symptoms don't develop at 2 months, the time when the first vaccine is mandated.

Or, heck, even at birth, now that Hep-B shots before leaving the hospital are all the rage.

And you are presenting this in favor of the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism? Seriously?

With "factual analysis" by morons like you backing them up, it's little wonder crap statistical analyses like "this doesn't cause Autism" is the major focus, when spending the money on finding out what *does* cause it would be real science, but that ain't happenin'.

And who told you this? The guys selling "vaccines cause autism" books and quack chelation therapy? I was at the Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last year, and I saw row on row of posters describing work on the causes of autism. Try this: go to PubMed and type "autism" into the search box. There have been some important recent breakthroughs indicating a genetic basis for autism. Identifying the genes is an important step toward figuring out what goes wrong and developing a therapy. What doesn't contribute is investing yet more time and money pursuing the long-rejected notion that mercury or vaccines causes autism.

If you had half a brain cell to rub together, you might also be interested in this article, which has not been refuted by anyone.

Oh wow, an article in the respected scientific journal Rolling Stone. And it has not been refuted by anyone? Not even here? Or here? Or here? Or here?