Based on earlier and yet-to-be published studies establishing differences in the immune systems of autistic children from children without the disorder, Pessah looked for clues to those discrepancies.

He focused on a type of cell called a dendritic cell, which is responsible for marshalling the body's response to invaders such as bacteria, viruses or other antigens such as vaccine ingredients.

"They take up those foreign substances and process them," he said. "Once they do that, they migrate to the lymph nodes to present their information to the other immune cells, which can activate a global immune response."

For his research, Pessah used a mouse strain not particularly sensitive to mercury or other heavy metals, and introduced concentrations of thimerosal comparable to those attained in childhood vaccinations that contain the preservative.

"What we found was rather unexpected," he said. "In fact, the dendritic cells seemed to be extremely sensitive to the effects of thimerosal."

Specifically, the thimerosal disrupted the normal biological signals that take place in cells, Pessah said. At lower concentrations, the signal disruption caused an inflammatory response; at higher concentrations it caused cell death.

"One could imagine that as concentrations of thimerosal vary in the organisms, you could get a plethora of unwanted or uncontrolled effects," Pessah said.

And those effects could vary depending on the organism's genetic background, he said.

Many children diagnosed with autism experience immunological problems including gut disorders, allergies and frequent infections.

"We now understand one of the ways in which thimerosal could adversely impact the immune system," Pessah said. "We have a target that provides a framework for now studying this in autistic children."

Pessah, who directs the Children's Center for Environmental Health and Disease Prevention at UC Davis, hopes now to determine whether dendritic cells from children with autism are particularly sensitive to the effects of thimerosal, various forms of mercury and other environmental toxicants.

The UC Davis study is not likely to settle the matter, but it does indicate that the preservative may leave the immune system vulnerable in susceptible groups.

www.autisticsociety.org...
Despite drug company studies from 70 years ago that concluded mercury-containing serum was not fit for cattle or dogs, and with all the huge, expensive federal agencies to protect us from just such a mistake -- the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine -- not one had taken the time to total up how much thimerosal and mercury had been added to the average child's intake with the new increased immunization schedule.

In essence, it was a grade-school math problem, but the nation's medical elite hadn't done it. The answer was about 120 times the amount allowed by the EPA for daily mercury exposure.

www.generationrescue.org...
The mercury received in a vaccine is no greater than in a can of tuna. Eating a can of tuna has certainly never caused autism.
This myth has received a lot of publicity because it offers an analogy anyone can understand and makes the mercury-autism connection appear trivial.

We can start by comparing a 200-pound male adult consuming tuna with the infant who receives a single vaccine on their first day of birth (since day-old infants don't eat tuna). On the first day of birth an infant receives the Hep B vaccine with about 25 micrograms of ethlymercury - this does approximate the 30 micrograms of methlymercury in an average can of tuna. Since the average infant weighs about 7 pounds, the weight equivalent number of cans of tuna for an adult would be 28 cans. (The adult male weighs 28x more than the infant.)

If you take those 28 cans of tuna and distill it down to mercury content, you would have 840 micrograms of mercury (30 micrograms per can). Keep in mind that the stomach successfully absorbs and excretes about 90% of any mercury ingested through food, leaving only about 10% of the mercury to be absorbed into the bloodstream. Since the mercury in vaccines is injected directly into the bloodstream where 100% of it can be absorbed by the organs, you would need an additional 252 cans of tuna to get the equivalent amount of mercury into the bloodstream for a total of 280 cans of tuna and 8,400 micrograms of methlymercury.

Also, remember that a developing brain is far more sensitive to toxins than an adult brain. Current estimates say mercury is 5-10x more toxic for a developing brain. We'll use the low end of that range, so multiply the 280 cans of tuna by 5 and you get 1,400 cans of tuna.

So, receiving the Hep B vaccine with Thimerosal on the first day of birth is the equivalent of a 200-pound adult male consuming 1,400 cans of tuna in a single day. One final adjustment: the adult male in the analogy needs to have no capacity to excrete mercury. As Boyd Haley, Ph.D. notes, "it is very well known that infants do not produce significant levels of bile or have adult renal capacity for several months after birth. Bilary transport is the major biochemical route by which mercury is removed from the body, and infants cannot do this very well."

So, a 200-pound male who consumes 1,400 cans of tuna in a single day and has their ability to excrete mercury severely diminished is the same as a day-old infant receiving the Hep B vaccine. Now the analogy is fair.

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Maybe not, but it was stunning that Julia Inion, the first autistic Amish person I could find, turned out to be adopted -- from another country, no less. It also was surprising that Stacey-jean launched unbidden into vaccines, because the Amish have a religious exemption from vaccination and presumably would not have given it much thought

Why bother looking for them among the Amish? Because they could hold clues to the cause of autism.

The first half-dozen articles in this ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism examined the initial studies and early accounts of the disorder, first identified by Kanner among 11 U.S. children born starting in 1931.

If Kanner was correct -- if autism was new and increasingly prevalent -- something must have happened in the 1930s to trigger those first autistic cases. Genetic disorders do not begin suddenly or increase dramatically in prevalence in a short period of time.

That is why it is worth looking for autistic Amish -- to test reasoning against reality. Largely cut off for hundreds of years from American culture and scientific progress, the Amish might have had less exposure to some new factor triggering autism in the rest of population.

Surprising, but no one seems to have looked.

First he looked to the Amish community in Pennsylvania and found a family doctor in Lancaster, who had treated thousands of Amish patients over a quarter-century, who said he has never seen an Amish person with autism, according to Age of Autism: A glimpse of the Amish on June 2, 2005.