Vaccines and autism

A new report refutes a common notion that the mercury-based preservative thimerosal once used in children's vaccines causes autism.

That may be hard to believe for many skeptics in Nevada County, which had the lowest state percentage of incoming kindergartners fully immunized in 2006 at 73 percent. That compared to 93 percent statewide, according to an appeal for parents to get their children vaccinated against disease written last April by county Public Health Director Dr. Joseph Iser and local children's health educator Dr. Cynthia Schuetz.

The new report is in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry by Dr. Robert Schechter and Dr. Judith Grether, using data from the California Department of Developmental Services. The doctors conclude, "The DDS data do not show any recent decrease in autism in California, despite the exclusion of more than trace levels of thimerosal from nearly all childhood vaccines" since 2001.

The report said the vaccines normally associated to the alleged thimerosal-autism link were the common DPT for diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus, the Hib vaccine to ward off meningitis and pneumonia, and the Hepatitis B vaccine.

Pediatrician Dr. Sarah Woerner, who practices at Sierra Care Physicians and the Miners Family Health Clinic in Grass Valley, said two of those vaccines are among the three her group of pediatricians recommends for newborns. They include the DPT, Hib and another anti-meningitis and severe pneumonia immunization.

"We get very, very few calls back about side effects now," Woerner said. "Vaccines before had more impurities" that caused headaches and other maladies.

When the alleged link to thimerosal and autism arose in the late 1990s, people were anecdotally making the connection because the autism showed up soon after the vaccines were given to toddlers, Woerner said. However, recent research she has seen does not link vaccines to the alarming rise of autism in California.

The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is receptive to the concerns of parents about the relationship of thimerosal vaccines to autism. But the CDC Web site says a scientific review done by the Institute of Medicine - an arm of the National Academy of Sciences - shows no causal relationship between thimerosal vaccines and autism.

In general, vaccines are "beneficial for health," according to Dr. Dean Blumberg, an associate professor for pediatric diseases at the University of California David Medical Center in Sacramento.

The mainstream medical community embraces immunizations, and Nevada County children who don't get them show up at the medical center when they get sick, Blumberg said in December 2006. His remarks were made in an article about an outbreak of whooping cough among one half of Yuba River Charter School's 250 students were not immunized or had not received the full set of shots.

Yet detractors locally and nationally remain.

At the Sierra Family Health Clinic on the San Juan Ridge, CAO Richard Mantle deals with the most suspicious client base for immunizations in the state's most vaccine-skeptical county.

Mantle said many fears are based on bad science "and people believe what they see on the Internet," no matter how inaccurate. The clinic has been battling vaccine suspicions for years he said.

"There's a large concern in this community with a lot of people who don't get their children immunized because of those fears," said Scott McFarland, executive director at the Miners Family Health Center. "We, the hospital (Sierra Nevada Memorial) and others have been trying to explain it," but the fears subsist, some of it inside the medical community.

In a piece written in March 2006 for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons medical journal, the Institute of Medicine review was refuted. The article said the decrease of autism link to the riddance of mercury in vaccines was overstated and that thimerosal was still given to children in flu vaccines, suggesting that it remains tied to the national rise of autism cases.

The association is a physicians group dedicated to free market medical practices opposed to third-party intervention like private and public health insurance.

The Institute of Medicine's 2004 review was also called a "whitewash" paid for by CDC to cover for the pharmaceutical industry in a 2005 investigative piece about autism and vaccines written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Rolling Stone. Kennedy is an author, environmentalist, son of Robert F. Kennedy who was assassinated in 1968, and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.

Source:www.theunion.com