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AN
OFFICIAL study used by the Department of Health to claim that there is no
link between mercury used in National Health Service vaccines and autism in
children is flawed, the author has admitted.
The research, by the
American government's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has
been repeatedly cited by the department and the Public Health Laboratory
Service (PHLS) as evidence that mercury in vaccines is not a cause of
autism. The fact that the research does not stand up to scrutiny will cause
them acute embarrassment.
The CDC study cited by
British officials examined whether there was any link between disorders in
brain development, including autism, and a preservative called thiomersal,
which is almost 50% mercury and is used in some childhood vaccines. It
found no link with autism.
But confidential
minutes of a secret meeting at which the research findings were presented
reveal an admission by the author that many children in the survey were too
young for autism to have been diagnosed.
Extracts from the
minutes, obtained through America's freedom of information act by Elizabeth
Birt, a lawyer and mother of an autistic child, were read out at a public
meeting organised by the Institute of Medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
last week.
The author of the
study, Dr Thomas Verstraeten, from the CDC's national immunisation
programme, is quoted as saying: "One thing is for sure, there is
certainly under-ascertainment of all these [conditions] because some of the
children are just not old enough to be diagnosed."
A professor who has
reviewed the research has also admitted that there were too few children in
the study to pick up all cases of autism.
Regulators in both
America and Europe recommended in July 1999 that mercury should be phased
out of childhood vaccines and last month it emerged that the PHLS is to
conduct a study into the possible adverse effects of mercury in vaccines,
including autism.
There has been a rise
in autism that coincides with the availability of more vaccines containing
mercury, a lowering of the age at which they are given to babies and the
introduction of the combined MMR vaccine, which does not contain mercury.
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