My youngest daughter was about a year old when she grabbed a thermometer, bit it, and swallowed the contents. It was a regrettable lapse on our part that left that dangerous object within her reach.

Luckily my wife noticed right away, called me at work, and we rushed to see her pediatrician. The doctor ordered X-rays, which showed the little beads of metal making their way through her intestinal tract. We were very scared and the doctor was baffled, since he wasn’t sure what to do in a case like this.

Mercury is toxic, although that wasn’t known for a long time. It is said that the Chinese emperor who built the Great Wall, in his quest for eternal life, consumed small amounts of this element, and that this diet is what led to his death before he turned fifty. Among the ancient alchemists it was considered a healing element with mystical properties.

At 40 degrees Celsius mercury already starts to evaporate. The way the metal expands with temperature is easy to see in thermometers, and that property is why it is used in those instruments.

As a vapor it is highly harmful. In fact, if mercury vapors reach the brain they can cause serious neurological damage. On top of that, prolonged exposure causes loss of appetite, fatigue, insomnia, changes in behavior, and even in personality. Besides the brain, it can damage the kidneys and lungs. The damage is greater in small children. We are talking about large amounts of mercury, or permanent and prolonged exposure.

Its handling is regulated in many countries around the world. Dentists, for example, used to use a lot of mercury in amalgam fillings, which has been banned in many countries, and since 2009 the WHO has recommended phasing it out worldwide. Today less toxic ceramic materials are preferred. By the way, the amount of mercury in one amalgam filling is thousands of times what there is in a vaccine with thimerosal.

But back to my daughter. The treatment to get rid of the mercury in her body consisted of speeding up its expulsion. The pediatrician recommended certain foods and fiber supplements to get her to pass the toxic stuff. We were watchful and anguished, until one day little silver beads showed up in a crappy diaper :smile:, and calm returned.

What a huge relief! You have no idea what parents go through over anything that happens to their little girl.

Was all the mercury expelled from her system? Unlikely. The X-ray showed a large number of little beads, and it is almost certain that some of the thermometer’s contents were absorbed by my daughter’s body.

But she has developed completely normally over these twelve years. The other day she took part in the Santiago Makerspace summer workshop and learned how to make animated shorts with stop motion. At twelve years old she has never shown any neurological problem.

Autism? Nothing. I’m more autistic than she is ;). My daughter is a calm girl, but very sociable; she goes out bike riding, dances, sings, reads, invents things, draws very well, has a gift for acting, and is the sweetest daughter a father could have.

I mention this because, apart from being proud, I have to tell you that she was also inoculated with vaccines preserved with thimerosal, in accordance with our country’s health programs. Like many children, thousands, or millions around the world. Like me, and probably you too, dear reader.

How much mercury was my daughter exposed to?

So we can make comparisons:

A standard thermometer has about 700 milligrams of mercury, in 0.005 milliliters of volume at room temperature.

A vaccine with thimerosal can have between 10 and 50 micrograms of this substance (which is an organic mercury compound).

700 milligrams of mercury, the amount my daughter swallowed, is 700,000 micrograms of mercury. In other words, my daughter swallowed a portion between 14,000 and 70,000 times what a vaccine with thimerosal contains! (Actually more, because thimerosal is a mercury compound, not pure mercury.)

Would you inject into your daughter’s intestine 14,000 times the amount of mercury in a vaccine? I wouldn’t.

OK, she expelled most of what she swallowed, but how many milligrams stayed in her body? Remember that she also received the standard vaccines every child her age gets.

You got lucky, you’ll tell me. “Thank God!”, someone once told me. And they’re partly right; it’s great that my daughter expelled most of the mercury. But if I believed the whole theory linking autism to thimerosal, I would have to be baffled, or believe that she is the exception that proves the rule.

Mind you, I’m not saying that a single case proves there is no correlation between thimerosal and autism, so I ask you to keep reading calmly.

It was because of this incident with my daughter that I started researching mercury and autism. So I have spent eleven of my daughter’s twelve years reading something about the supposed connections between mercury and autism.

Don’t think I didn’t worry; of course I did. In 2002 this was already an issue. In 2000 there were thousands of lawsuits related to the use of thimerosal in vaccines. By the time my daughter had her accident this was already known, and discussed on the internet, although it had also been refuted, in 1999.

But the myth that thimerosal causes autism persists. In 2011 “The Annals of Pharmacotherapy” published the following:

In 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, described a new autism phenotype called the regressive autism-enterocolitis syndrome triggered by environmental factors such as measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination. The speculative vaccination-autism connection decreased parental confidence in public health vaccination programs and created a public health crisis in England and questions about vaccine safety in North America. After 10 years of controversy and investigation, Dr. Wakefield was found guilty of ethical, medical, and scientific misconduct in the publication of the autism paper. Additional studies showed that the data presented were fraudulent. The alleged autism-vaccine connection is, perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.¹

“The most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.”

And on January 15 my country’s deputies approved a law based on this very hoax. A law that bans the use of thimerosal in vaccines.

But what is thimerosal?

It is an organic compound that contains mercury. It is an antiseptic and antifungal agent. It has been used as a vaccine preservative since 1930. Its use was approved after an incident in 1928, in which 12 of 21 children died after being vaccinated against diphtheria. The vaccines were contaminated with staphylococcus bacteria, because of the poor quality of the preservatives used back then.

At the time, thimerosal was chosen as a vaccine preservative because, unlike other compounds in use, it did not reduce the potency of the vaccine.

So almost all of us who were vaccinated from 1930 until now owe our lives to thimerosal. Otherwise, vaccines would have been the leading killers of children of all time.

The thimerosal controversy appears after Wakefield’s paper is published, along with a speculation by Redwood and Bernard² based on the similarity between mercury poisoning and the symptoms of certain forms of autism. Time and again it has been proven that thimerosal is harmless if used in the correct doses.

In 2007, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine said the following:

The idea that thimerosal caused autism has given rise to a cottage industry of charlatans offering false hope, in part in the form of mercury-chelating agents. In August 2005, a 5-year-old autistic boy died of an arrhythmia caused by the injection of the chelating agent EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid). Even though the notion that thimerosal causes autism has already been ruled out by a good number of excellent epidemiological studies, about 10,000 autistic children in the United States receive mercury chelators every year.

The terrible thing about this whole idea that thimerosal causes autism is that parents are poisoning their children with dangerous chelators, like EDTA, which can damage the kidneys. All because of the ignorance bred by this horrible, stupid theory!

This fear has also been used by pseudoscientific charlatans to spread their ideas and profit by deceiving anguished parents. As Robert Goldberg denounces in his book “Tabloid Medicine - How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit”.

Just as the certainty of climate change is backed by the publication of thousands of scientific papers, the evidence ruling out a link between vaccines and autism is backed by more than 1,000 scientific papers.

Like the study by John R. Hughes, “A review of recent reports on autism: 1000 studies published in 2007”, which you can read from this link on the site DesafiandoAlAutismo.org.

I’ll take the chance to quote that site, which has guidance for parents and people interested in this syndrome:

It has been argued that the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine (MMR) or thimerosal (a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines), or both, were responsible for an epidemic of autism. As far as MMR is concerned, epidemiological research has been consistently negative with respect to that claim (Rutter, 2008), the decisive evidence being that in Japan, when MMR was withdrawn entirely, there was no effect on the overall rise in the rate of autism diagnoses (Honda et al. 2005). The situation with thimerosal is a bit more complicated, in that there is no doubt that mercury is a proven neurotoxin. However, the same kinds of epidemiological research have also failed to show that this led to an epidemic of autism. In particular, the withdrawal of thimerosal from vaccines across Scandinavia, at a time when its use continued in the rest of the world, offers convincing evidence against the ‘Epidemic’³.

To sum up: for a while the hypothesis was that MMR vaccines or thimerosal caused an epidemic of autism, but when the compound was withdrawn in certain countries, the rate of increase of autism did not change; everything stayed the same, in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Japan. The supposed epidemic did not go away when the compound was taken out of circulation.

By the way, we are joining those countries. Great!, some will say. The funny part is that deputy Juan Luis Castro boasted about this “feat” and presented it as a great innovation by our country. Sorry, deputy, the Scandinavian countries and Japan did it first, without all the fanfare⁴.

But it’s not as good as it looks, because replacing thimerosal raises the cost of vaccination plans as much as 6 or 7 times. In 2009, the US government decided to promote mass vaccination to prevent H1N1, or swine flu. Some 120 million doses were needed, but it was decided that thimerosal would not be used as a preservative. That decision meant only 16 million doses could be acquired. (Well, in any case, we know that H1N1 was not as catastrophic as suspected; in fact, the common flu still kills more people.)

Chile has decided, by law, to squander 6 times more money on vaccination programs, all based on a myth, pseudoscientific speculation and barefaced deceptions by doctors who were found guilty.

But our legislators say this was a serious, informed, even innovative decision. Vaccines!

PS:

Here is a funnier argument (against the idea of not vaccinating children):

Look at this chart, which shows the growth in the number of children with autism per 1,000 children, from 1996 to 2007 (the time of the supposed epidemic) in the United States:

Compare it with this chart, which shows a correlation between autism and organic food sales

Does this chart prove that the rise of organic food causes autism?⁵

Of course not; correlation does not imply causation. And yet this is the argument of those who link thimerosal to autism.

On the precautionary principle.

Taken from Wikipedia:

“The precautionary principle is a concept that supports adopting protective measures when there are well-founded suspicions that certain products or technologies create a serious risk to public health or the environment, but without yet having definitive scientific proof of that risk”.

This principle has been argued in favor of no longer using vaccines.

This principle reminds me a lot of the discussion we had about “the morning-after pill”, because it was argued that this pill could be abortive, and so, on the basis of the precautionary principle, the distribution of this contraceptive should have been banned.

Another problem is that they forget this principle has to come with a cost-benefit analysis. The same thing that happened in the United States with the vaccine supply could happen to us. It could also raise the suspicion of who benefits from this measure; the suspicion could arise that those who sell the other vaccines, the ones without thimerosal, are happy with it. But what worries me more is that we are wasting resources on the basis of this principle, when the degree of uncertainty is far too low; I even suspect it is lower than in the case of “the morning-after pill”.

Causes of autism.

At present science has no absolute certainty about the causes of autism. It is a broad-spectrum syndrome that shows up in different forms. The most likely cause would be related to genetics. You can read something about it, although it is a 2011 article, in “Progress in understanding autism” on the Desafiando al autismo site.

One of the latest books with up-to-date information on the autism spectrum was published by Temple Grandin: “The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum”. The remarkable thing is that Temple Grandin is autistic; she learned to speak at age five and went on to earn a PhD in animal science. She published her autobiography, “Thinking in Pictures, My Life with Autism”, which was even made into a movie.

Notes