Articles labeled: thimerosal

Despite the lack of scientific studies linking vaccines and autism, the government has agreed to a settlement in the case of Hannah Poling, whose parents had sued believing that vaccines administered to Hannah caused her autism. Advocates are jumping all over the ruling, claiming it to be the proof they previously lacked. Government officials, however, are cautioning parents from jumping to conclusions:

“Let me be very clear that the government has made absolutely no statement indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism,” Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday. “That is a complete mischaracterization of the findings of the case and a complete mischaracterization of any of the science that we have at our disposal today.”

Given that the details of the case have been sealed by court order, what is certain is that there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

Hannah’s father, Dr. Jon Poling, was a neurology resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the time, and she underwent an intensive series of tests that found a disorder in her mitochondria, the energy factories of the cells.

Such disorders are uncommon, their effects can be significant but varied, and the problems associated with them can show up immediately or lie dormant for years.

There are two theories about what happened to Hannah, said her mother, Terry Poling. The first is that she had an underlying mitochondrial disorder that vaccinations aggravated. The second is that vaccinations caused this disorder.

“The government chose to believe the first theory,” Ms. Poling said, but added, “We don’t know that she had an underlying disorder.”

A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine today indicates that researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have found a genetic link to autism that may affect approximately 1 percent of people with the disorder, putting scientists one step closer to discovering the cause of this condition that appears in 1 out of every 150 children as well as further damaging the case of those that point to external causes such as thimerosal.

Background Autism spectrum disorder is a heritable developmental disorder in which chromosomal abnormalities are thought to play a role.

Methods As a first component of a genomewide association study of families from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE), we used two novel algorithms to search for recurrent copy-number variations in genotype data from 751 multiplex families with autism. Specific recurrent de novo events were further evaluated in clinical-testing data from Children’s Hospital Boston and in a large population study in Iceland.

Results Among the AGRE families, we observed five instances of a de novo deletion of 593 kb on chromosome 16p11.2. Using comparative genomic hybridization, we observed the identical deletion in 5 of 512 children referred to Children’s Hospital Boston for developmental delay, mental retardation, or suspected autism spectrum disorder, as well as in 3 of 299 persons with autism in an Icelandic population; the deletion was also carried by 2 of 18,834 unscreened Icelandic control subjects. The reciprocal duplication of this region occurred in 7 affected persons in AGRE families and 4 of the 512 children from Children’s Hospital Boston. The duplication also appeared to be a high-penetrance risk factor.

Conclusions We have identified a novel, recurrent microdeletion and a reciprocal microduplication that carry substantial susceptibility to autism and appear to account for approximately 1% of cases. We did not identify other regions with similar aggregations of large de novo mutations.

For quite some time, a large number of people have pointed their finger at thimerosal, a mercury based preservative in vaccines, as the primary culprit in the rise in autism cases throughout the United States despite the lack of scientific evidence. A new study may put that causality case even further back — a recent report shows that autism cases in California are still on the rise, despite the ban of thimerosal several years ago:

Researchers from the state Department of Public Health found the autism rate in children rose continuously during the 12-year study period from 1995 to 2007. The preservative thimerosal hasn’t been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, but is used in some flu shots.

Doctors say the latest study adds to existing evidence refuting a link between thimerosal exposure and autism risk and should reassure parents that the disorder is not caused by vaccinations. If there was a risk, they said, autism rates should have dropped between 2004 and 2007.

The findings show “no evidence of mercury poisoning in autism” since there was no decline in autism rates even after the elimination of thimerosal, said Dr. Eric Fombonne, an autism researcher at Montreal Children’s Hospital who had no role in the research.

Thimerosal doesn’t cause brain damage, so unqualified voices against thimersal really need to find another bandwagon to hop on and stop making unscienfic and false conclusions based on false pretenses and incompetent theories. Just stop it already. Simplying believing that it causes brain damage doesn’t make it so:

In the most recent study funded by the CDC, researchers evaluated more than 1,000 kids between the ages of 7 and 10 who were exposed to various levels of thimerosal as babies.

Researchers tested the children extensively, assessing the children in 42 different areas of neurological functioning and making almost 400 different statistical comparisons. They found that for the vast majority of tests, children with high levels of thimerosal exposure performed equally well compared to children with low exposure levels, indicating that thimerosal has no effect on brain development.