Science News story-- Risky DNA, Autism studies yield fresh genetic leads

[Guest guest]

This was in my husband's latest Science News magazine that we just got in the mail.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20080112/fob1.asp

It's pretty much all of the SOS. I told my husband that unless I see the other side of this story presented fairly in their publication, he won't be reading any more Science News magazines in my home, paid for by us.

The email I sent them just now in response reads:

The contention that autism cannot be caused by thimerosal in vaccines, because it has been removed from them and the rates of autism in California have not decreased with that removal, would be comforting except for one very uncomfortable fact. Thimerosal has not, actually, been removed from the vaccines that children are receiving. I recently did a bit of research into the question of thimerosal content in flu vaccines. While the information I was able to obtain was limited, the convoluted answers that I received were enlightening in and of themselves.

http://www.wideopenwest.com/~r_nemeth/clinic_timeline.htm

CNN claims to have obtained an answer to this question

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/10/31/flu.hm.flu.shot/index.html

and they say that only six percent of individual doses of flu shots for this season are `mercury free'. If one is to presume that the rest have levels of thimerosal that could be of concern, then, eight long years after the Department of Health and Human Services said that thimerosal should and would be removed from vaccines, the vast majority of flu vaccines in the US still contain the mercury preservative.

The article has a great deal to say about the influence of genes on the development of autism. I am not surprised that genes would affect the development of this devastating condition--they have some affect on how each and every one of us reacts to each and every thing we are exposed to in our environment.

The incidence of autism in all of it's forms has skyrocketed in recent decades—even the CDC no longer denies this. What the article fails to address is that it is impossible to explain such a ballooning in incidence simply by looking at genetic factors, and not environment as well. If I remember my high school biology correctly, genes are combined, male and female, and passed on from one generation to the next, which means that the process of change in populations is a slow one that can occur only with the passage of many generations. This spike in autism that has parents so concerned right now, however, has occurred in the space of a decade and a half. Such swift change is not possible only via the natural recombination of genes that occurs when two parents have sex. It is obvious that some kind of damage is being done to the genetic makeup, or simply damage to the organism. In this case, that organism being all too often a human child, such as the one that McCarron, the former pathologist in Illinois, suffocated with a plastic bag because she felt responsible for having had the child vaccinated.

[Guest guest]

> In this case, that> organism being all too often a human child, such as the one that > McCarron, the former pathologist in Illinois, suffocated with a plastic> bag because she felt responsible for having had the child vaccinated.>

Aaargh. It should've read '..suffocated with a plastic bag before attempting suicide because she felt responsible..'

I just get really flustered and distraught when I think about it..