Is that this 'debate' always comes with a neat package of 3 million other things we need to eradicate from the world such as GM food, walking around without bike helmets, teens driving cars, all fat everywhere, 2nd hand smoke, 3rd hand smoke, cellphones and on and on and on.

Jenny McCarthy now claims her kid's been cured of autism after changing diet and receiving anti-fungal treatments:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=20672

Autism is on the rise; mercury is on the decline; any bonehead can see there is no connection. Parents should look at other causes.

No doubt I will be accused of being an arrogant scientist, but here goes... Which of the following sentences makes sense to you?

"Cosmologists have found several planets rotating around stars quite a distance from earth, but parents disagree."

"Geologists have found that plate tectonics underlies the formation of mountains and the occurrence of earthquakes, but parents disagree."

"Medical scientists have found that thimerosal and vaccines have nothing to do with autism, but parents disagree."

This was a trick question. All 3 statements are nonsensical.

*That's* why rationalists call parents who campaign to ban vaccines the "mercury militia". Right or wrong, it's out of frustration with the lunacy of it all.

(As an aside, I'm a biomedical scientist and new parent. My son has been having *all* of his vaccines on schedule.)

This whole thing reminds me of the power lines/cancer scare from 15 years ago. Nobody could find a real connection, and eventually the whole thing died out. Now we have (rightfully) despondent parents looking for someone to blame. Vaccines can cause a variety of undesirable effects, but autism is simply not one of them. And exactly what does the CDC stand to gain by protecting pharmaceutical companies if thimerisol did cause autism? If there is a government agency I could trust (if I couldn't figure out the science myself), it would be the CDC. Read about the early days of the HIV epidemic, if you need any more proof. They're the only thing standing between us and a host of public health disasters.

As a parent of a young child who has just finished most of those inoculations, I struggled with this issue. I don't care what all the lab-coat folks say -- injecting mercury into a small child is nuts. That being said, the inoculations were for very serious diseases. We chose to have the injections at the older end of the age ranges suggested for them so as to maximize the age and SIZE of the child.

We also chose to not have the flu shot since it was mercury based. Flu is a bad disease but not at the same level as the really bad actors that we inoculate against.

I'm not angry...but you had better believe I take this decision very seriously. There is a lot at stake.

But, very seriously, injecting mercury into a small child is straight crazy. Why are we even having this discussion?

Following the "published" link to the New England Journal of Medicine, it clearly states "(We did not assess autism-spectrum disorders.)"

All the press I've seen about this is finding zero connection between thimerosol and neurological disorders which are NOT autism. The article in the NY Times that covered this said that the autism study was due to be published next year.

That said, I don't believe there will be a link found.

I've followed this issue for going on 16+ years (our Asperger Syndrome son's age) and do have some ability to parse the findings and evaluate the associations.

My sincere, fierce, protective, mother-grizzly parental feeling is that NOT to vaccinate is by FAR the worse risk. I'm actually much more upset at parents who put their kids AND THEIR COMMUNITIES at risk of these PERFECTLY PREVENTABLE CHILDHOOD DISEASES.

Autistic kids, in my humble, first-hand view, are the canaries in the coal mine, vis-a-vis in utero/neo-natal pesticide exposure and exposure to those kinds of environmental "wounds" as it were. Thimerosal is the least of our worries in my opinion - and, from what I understand, thimerosal has been removed from most childhood vaccines as of the 1997 FDA Modernization Act. (see http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm#t1).

Get your kids vaccinated, and work to ban pesticides and these faux estrogens from plastic, instead of beating your heads against the very sturdy, very data-supported wall that says thimerosal is not the boogeyman, no matter how much we need a boogeyman when it comes to our autistic kids.

Those of you who long for the pre-vaccine days are welcome to nail up chicken bones around your children's bedrooms. To help ward off the evil spirits.

But what's troubling for me in this maelstrom of emotional accusations and technical arguments about statistics is that both sides seem so utterly disdainful of the other. The fearful parents are dubbed a "mercury militia." The scientists on the other side are likened to Philip Morris lab rats discovering that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer. When discussion around children's health gets this nasty and inflammatory, aren't we losing sight of what's really at stake?

Daily in Salon we see crappy science propounded by the Broadsheet "Militia". Any science that supports women is uncritically touted. Any science that supports men is uncritically bashed.

You did it again today with your "wimmins are depressed, menz aint" science article.

The key is the word "uncritical."

Never, never do the Broadsheet militia use their powers of journalism to get first person interviews.

What does the Salon reader get? Nasty and inflammatory discussions, generated by the Broadsheet militia, instead of thoughtful, enlightening articles and discussions of gender issues.

You do men and women and children NO GOOD. You do feminism no good.

So called feminist, heal yourself first.

I don't know where people got the idea that scientists are all bought and paid for by industry. There are a lot of scientists worldwide working for non-profits organizations and governments and educational institutions. And a lot of people have looked for the causes of autism, yet nobody has found a correlation between autism and thimerosal. This is either the biggest coverup in history (it would have to involve thousands of scientists), or there is nothing to find. If a scientist was able to find the cause of autism, especially if it was something simple to fix like a chemical preservative in vaccines, he/she would probably get a nobel prize, and would definitely be remembered by history as a hero.

Regardless, there is no excuse not to vaccinate a healthy child. Thimerosal vaccinations are widely available (California has banned thimerosal entirely in most childhood vaccines). Any parent who refuses to vaccinate, assuming that their child will be safe becaue all of the other kids are vaccinated, is both selfish and a fool. There are other parents thinking the same thing, and your child is very likely to be exposed to diseases that would be prevented by widespread immunization.

Sometimes the truth is counter-intuitive. It seems so simple: Children get vaccinations, then they show signs of autism. There must be a connection, right? It's like having a cluster of cancer's in a small community. It must be caused by the water, because that's all they have in common. But sometimes a cluster is just a coincidence, and sometimes when B happens after A it isn't because B is caused by A.