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An announcement was made today by the
law firm of Waters & Kraus, the firm that filed the first
known lawsuit alleging that a mercury preservative in children's
vaccines caused neurological damage to an infant ultimately
diagnosed with autism.
Waters & Kraus is leading a consortium of
ten firms in as many states that are actively prosecuting
cases of this nature (firms listed below).
Andy Waters, the lead attorney in the
cases, announced that his firm is now in possession of a previously
unreleased confidential report authored by Centers for Disease
Control scientists which studied
autism as a potential neurological injury caused
by mercury in children's vaccines.
A different version of the report was made public and has
been cited by the recent Institute of Medicine study as inconclusive
on the issue of whether the mercury-based vaccine preservative
known as thimerosal has contributed to cause a nationwide
epidemic of regressive autism and other neurological disorders
in small children.
The confidential version of the study, however, clearly demonstrated
that an exposure to more than 62.5 micrograms of mercury within
the first three months of life significantly increased a child's
risk of developing autism. Specifically, the study found a
2.48 times increased risk of autism - that is to say, children
with the exposure were more than twice as likely to develop
autism as children not exposed.
In the United States, courts of law have generally held that
a relative increased risk of 2.0 or higher is sufficient to
substantiate that a given exposure causes disease. As but
one example, in the case of Cook v. United States, 545 F.Supp.
306, at 308 (Northern District - California 1982) the Court
stated that, "in a vaccine case, a relative risk greater
than 2.0 establishes that there is a greater than 50% chance
that the injury was caused by the vaccine."
Waters indicated that, in many of the cases his firm has evaluated,
including the case filed in a Texas state court on behalf
of the Counter family, the affected child received more
than 62.5 micrograms of mercury through pediatric
vaccines in the first three months of life.
The confidential report, which was obtained by the SAFEMINDS
support and advocacy group, states:
"As for the exposure evaluated
at 3 months of age, we found increasing risks of 'neurological
developmental disorders' with increasing cumulative exposure
to thimerosal ... within the group of 'developmental disorders'...
for the sub-group called 'specific delays,' and within this
subgroup for the specific disorder 'developmental speech
disorder,' and for 'autism,' 'stuttering' and 'attention
deficit disorder.'"
Waters called the report's contents and
the fact that it was kept
from the public as "shocking, but unfortunately
not surprising, given the political influence of pharmaceutical
companies and the tremendous liability they face if they are
forced to compensate thousands of families for the costs of
care that these children require."
Waters added that "no amount of money can give these
children back the potential that they were born with, and
no amount of money will comfort the parents that watched helplessly
as their children literally just slipped away."
The purpose of the lawsuits his firm is currently prosecuting,
said Waters, is "to bring to the surface the truth on
this issue, a truth that government agencies seem unwilling
to admit, perhaps for fear that parents will stop vaccinating
their children, and to force the companies that profited from
this disastrous mistake to shoulder the responsibility that
so many families now bear on their own, often without even
the aid of health insurance benefits."
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