Dose of danger dressed up as protector

WOULD you like your flu vaccine with mercury or without? Anyone familiar with a toxic metal would not hesitate in their answer. But it’s not a question that anyone will be asked this winter.

How about your child’s immunisations? Would you like a preservative-free vaccine - or one which contains a substance which a US government’s medical adviser says has a "biologically plausible" link to autism?

This is the thimerosal debate. In the US, a it is huge storm involving congressmen, medics, some £30 billion in lawsuits and a cover-up which has left Washington mystified. But in the UK, the storm has yet to break.

Thimerosal is not new. It has been used since the Thirties to kill any bacteria in vaccines - but by hugely controversial means. Its toxic power is drawn from its main ingredient: mercury, second only to plutonium as the most toxic element.

Once injected in the body, thimerosal breaks down into ethyl mercury - a substance liable to bind with body protein and, most ominously, brain tissue. Once lodged in the body, mercury traces are exceptionally difficult to remove.

Worse, mercury is a proven neurotoxin - that is, even small doses have been linked to brain defects including fibromyalgia, lupus and depression. It has not taken US lawyers long to extend this trail to autism.

Other scientific studies have found that mercury placed next to brain tissue leads to deformities associated with Alzheimer’s disease. This is the substance which the government believes is safe to put in flu vaccines.

There must be a good reason for this, is the immediate response. But this is the most staggering part of the debate. Mercury is not needed in these vaccines - indeed, mercury-free jabs are available across the NHS now. So why is no-one being told?

This is being treated as a scandal in the US, where the House of Representatives has set up a committee to investigate the issue. Suspicion has been fuelled by the behaviour of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the supreme decision-making body on vaccines. It decided to phase out mercury in three years ago. The FDA has adopted a somewhat contradictory attitude. "Lead, cadmium, and mercury are examples of elements that are toxic when present at relatively low levels," it advises chemists. But this is the same FDA which approves the intravenous injection of such mercury in infants and pensioners.

It does not take a medical expert to spot something amiss. Mercury is a neurotoxin - no-one disputes that. Its use in child vaccines was greatly increased during the Nineties - a decade where autism spiralled. Mercury in the brain induces deformities common to Alzheimer’s. Might the two be related?

The House of Representatives committee has produced two booklets of evidence pointing to the danger of mercury in medicine. Meanwhile, the lawyers, scenting a tobacco-style payout, have produced their own facts. The US government has laid down what a "safe limit" of mercury for infants. The committee found that the vaccination programme could leave children with 41 times more mercury than that laid down by this limit - a key finding which fuelled calls for its abolition from medicine.

This safe limit is based on studies of 900 children born in 1987 in the Faroe Islands whose mothers had eaten mercury-contaminated whale meat. When they grew up, these children had slower reaction times and diminished attention spans.

The amount of mercury in their umbilical cord blood was minute - 0.1 micrograms per kilo. But even this trace of was enough to trigger a set of neurological conditions commonly associated with autism.

Mercury is, after all, strong enough for the amount in a thermometer to pollute a small lake. So how can any amount be considered safe? This is the conclusion of Dan Burton, a congressman and the chairman of the special committee, who asked that all mercury-containing vaccines be discontinued, given that mercury-free substitutes are now available.

"To ignore an avoidable risk and to put 8,000 children a day in harm’s way is not only inhumane, it may be criminal," he said in a report to George Bush, the US president.

The Department of Health does not use the term "avoidable risk". It simply says its committee for safety of medicines (CSM) has reviewed the issue and "concluded that the risk- benefit balance of thimerosal-containing vaccines remains overwhelmingly positive". This is a trick statement. The CSM, it says, believes that a mercury vaccine is safer than no vaccine at all. This is true - but is a mercury-free vaccine safer than a thimerosal-based vaccine? There is no answer on this point.

But the choice facing Britain is between a complete portfolio of mercury-free vaccinations - including three out of the seven flu jabs being made public this winter - or those still using thimerosal. The question is why GPs are not advising patients that one vaccine contains mercury and the other does not.

The latest statement was made last month by Lord Hunt, a health minister, who said the CSM has its findings backed up by the Institute of Medicine (IoM) in the US.

He said: "The IoM published a detailed review of the evidence relating to possible neurotoxicity of thimerosal in vaccines in October 2001. The IoM findings were consistent with the CSM conclusions."

Lord Hunt is not telling the whole story. This was the same IoM report which said the link between thimerosal and autism is "biologically plausible" - and that the mercury may well kill enough brain cells to scramble children’s thinking.

Dr Marie McCormick, who chaired the IoM expert panel, advised parents to ask doctors for mercury-free vaccines if they are available. Wise advice - available from absolutely no-one in Britain.

The Department of Health says that the IoM report "concluded that the evidence did not support a causal association between thimerosal contained in vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders."

Here, for the second time, is a slightly misleading statement. No evidence? Compare this to the FDA’s summary of the same IoM report into thimerosal safety.

"It concluded that the evidence is inadequate to either accept or reject a causal relationship between thimerosal exposure to childhood vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders of autism," it said.

It is, in other words, a grey area. Mercury may lead to autism; it may not - we don’t have the evidence to accept or reject this. We just don’t know.

So why is the Department of Health not admitting this doubt? It may be connected to the 200 lawsuits which were filed, claiming a total of £30 billion on behalf of parents of autistic children. This was seen off by the US government when it passed the anti-terrorist homeland security bill last month - guaranteeing Eli Lilly & Co, a former maker of thimerosal, protection from multi-million-dollar lawsuits.

What had this to do with terrorism? Not very much - but it is a sign of how seriously the link between thimerosal and autism is being taken in the United States. The Department of Health is falling increasingly victim to the compensation culture.

There is one final aspect to the IoM report which is not being reproduced in the UK. It urged that "full consideration be given to removing thimerosal from any biological product to which infants, children and pregnant women are exposed".

The Scottish Parliament has the power to ban all mercury from vaccines now. Health is devolved, the vaccines are available and GPs have the freedom to order what they want. It can be an example of Holyrood using its smaller size to innovate.

The medical evidence is mounting. One study suggests it is hypersensitivity to thimerosal, not necessarily mercury poisoning, which triggers autism. A new study into mercury and Alzheimer’s is expected later this year.

In the mean time, being injected with traces of ethyl mercury is a risk that no-one in Britain needs to take. The latest, mercury-free vaccines are freely available on the NHS - for those who know how to ask for them by name. Sooner or later, the government will tell us about it.