Mercury toxicity and autism are like “mirror images of each other,” according to Dr. Kurt Woeller, an osteopathic physician in Temecula, California who focuses his practice on children on the autistic spectrum.

Woeller believes that a series of childhood vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal is to blame for the rising numbers of autism in the United States.

“My suspicion is that the mother had a toxic mercury load that has filtered to the child, and the mercury-containing vaccine was the straw that broke the camel‘s back," he says.

Thimerosal has been banned in many countries, including Denmark, Great Britain, and Austria, for two decades, but the United States only recently reduced or eliminated thimerosal in vaccines for children 6 and younger. Flu vaccines in the United States still contain thimerosal.

Further, rates of autism increased when the Center for Disease Control added additions to the recommended vaccination program for infants in 1988. In the 1980s, autism rates were estimated at six in 10,000 children. Today, autism rates are one in 150 children, though some say autism affects closer to one in 50 children in some areas.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged that thimerosal can be a neurotoxin, and in 2004 stated that thimerosal-containing vaccines were associated with autism. Nearly 5,000 families have filed lawsuits claiming that childhood vaccinations caused their children‘s autism.

As of 2003, there were 1.5 million autistic U.S. children, and costs for their care is an estimated $90 billion per year.

Ecology Center