Dane- There are a few compelling reasons for the accelerated dosing of the vaccines. The biggest reason is the increased contact that infants have to each other and the world in the form of entering day care earlier. Also, they accelerated dosing is done to insure that infants stay on a schedule and don't miss a vaccine as the further they stretch out the more likely a dose will be missed.

tvchic- I hope they put your children on synrgis to help prevent the RSV and more importantly i hope you have one of the better insurers that cover synrgis with either just the MDO visit copay or a 15 dollar copay.

To those pharmaceutical company bashing. I have my problems with them (spending twice as much on marketing than on R and D along with reinventing the wheel by making the 8th different stomach acid treatment well that is basically it) but on the whole they do a damn good job at producing life saving drugs. Take synrgis a drug that has been on the market less than a decade and it has already saved 10 to 100s of thousands of infant lives in the US alone. Of course the drug companies want there drugs to receive FDA approval as the cost to bring a drug on to the market is half billion dollars or more. Yes, sometimes a serious side effect is not discovered until after it hits the market. The current system is to blame for delays as much as pharmaceutical companies. They don't want their customer to dies you know.

The biggest problem with these vaccinations is their own success. No one sees 12 year old cripples from polio or disfigured 8 year olds from the measles. No one notices that cemantaries from the 40's and earlier that used to be filled with children 12 and under while they now have almost no one in that age group.

Thiomersal does contain mercury in the form of the organomercury Ethyl mercurate sodiam and is about 50 percent of the weight. Most of the causes of mercury poisoning comes from the form methal mercurates. In the 90's the FDA and WHO came up with guidelines about expose levels of mercury based on the form methal mercurates exposure and used that as a baseline for the ethyl form despite ethyl being slightly safer. The shots that contained Thimoersal still where below the level of exposure of the FDA and WHO for those under six months old.

The reason thiomersal was used in immunizations was to preserve the active ingredients to prevent staph injections that killed several people in the infancy of vaccination. To this day it is still the best preservative to keep the efficiency of the vaccine and to prevent septic and fungal infections. Without thimersal multi dose vaccines become much more dangerous meaning most vaccines today are single dose which cost more. It is nice in theory to say that no cost is unreasonable to protect children but in the real world cost comes in to play not just in money but in more shots being required there for more chance of a shot being missed. It is important to remember that these shots are not just used in the first world but in the most poverty and diseases ravaged areas of India and sub sarian Africa.

The rate of autism diagnoses has not dropped at all after the removal of thiomersal around 2001. There is just no evidence at all suggesting that autism is caused by mercury or mercury based products. But, what is important to realize is that thimersal was just the easy target for the Luddites woo masters. There real goal is to end the use of vaccines period as they blame vaccines themselves for causing diseases. If you just go to there sites you will see more than ample evidence of this. This is why they are still protesting the vaccines despite thimersal being removed close to a decade ago. Many of them do not believe in the germ theory of medicine or modern medicine but is some cross of fold and new age nonsense. Jenny Mccarthy for instances is a crystal child or some other form of new age nonsense that makes even Scientology look sane.