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Mercury in Vaccines and Autism: The Surprising Link

Book review: ‘The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Manmade Epidemic’

By Ottar Grundvighttp://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/44616/In

autumn 2008, I visited an old friend and business associate at his cabin outside Oslo, Norway. He was recovering from a yearlong trial in which he lost his ability to speak, use his fingers, and think clearly. His vibrant, busy life slowed to a crawl. What caused a healthy, middle-aged man to suffer harm so rapidly?

Taking up Henry Thoreau’s advice of going back to nature, he had outfitted the cabin for year-round living and drilled a new well. As he drank water from the well, he unwittingly poisoned his brain. An investigation into the cause of his sudden fall in mental health and leaden fatigue found that the boring machine had drilled through a thin band of mercury. The dust from the heavy metal contaminated the water and almost killed him.

In reading the seminal and terrific new book, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, the story of my friend and my son, Fridrik, who was diagnosed with autism in 2003, resonated with me—in part, because too many vaccines given too early had injured my son. Many of those vaccines contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. So the explosive idea at the core of this revelatory tome is

that as a modern society, we have been poisoning our children’s brains and bodies through the over-reliance and misapplication of medicine—specifically mercury. It wedges a stone in my heart.

The four-hundred-year rise of the modern world and its great population expansion through advances of the Industrial Age has come back to haunt us in unsuspecting ways too real and too widespread to ignore. And the book, at 364 pages, is too good to put down.

The Misuse of Mercury in MedicineWhat the authors Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill initially set out to do was research the origins of mercury and how it related to autism. But they found that the source was

impossible to pin down.

The six they spent investigating the overlapping histories of mercury use in medicine took them down myriad paths and turned up some amazing facts. The search of how mercury impacted human health guided them back centuries before the 1943 discovery of autism by Leo Kanner, who initially diagnosed 11 children with the disorder.

It was research into seven of those families’ histories that got the authors’ blood pumping and became the foundation of the book. They seeded the book with so many fascinating details—such as the mercury content found in beluga whale teeth, which skyrocketed in the past half century, indicating the spike in its presence in the water. There’s also

information about mercury as medicine, from teething powders and body creams, to calomel lotion and the toxic “Van Swieten’s liquor,†which was supposed to treat Mozart’s syphilis, but ended up killing within months.

Although the book has some declarative statements like the one above, the authors resisted the tendency to speculate; on occasion they presented scenarios. After reading the book, there’s no denying that the

American government cannot explain why there’s been a spike in the autism rates since the late 1970s. It’s easier to claim that there’s no epidemic and hold the line against the status quo by injecting babies with more vaccines than any on nation on earth.

Did Mercury Cause the Autism Epidemic?Dan Olmstead is a career journalist having worked for USA Today, UPI and, since 2005, the www.ageofautism.com website. Mark Blaxill is a managing partner at 3LP, an advisory firm focused on patent transaction. He is the father of an autistic child, and has an affinity for data and numbers.

With so many scientific and medical failures, with so many unintended consequences bleeding out of the misapplied, misused, and abused medical

treatments for mercury the past half millennium, why is mercury still being used in vaccine production?

It’s a question that needs to be answered. Authors Olmsted and Blaxill take a giant step in that direction.

Not only did they locate and meet T., Case 1 of Kanner’s autistic

children, now 77 years old and “recovered†from autism, but perhaps more importantly, they established a timeline relating the use of thimerosal in vaccines in 1928 and Kanner’s diagnoses of autism in 1943.

Kanner discredited earlier theoretical causes on insanity and syphilis in Native Americans in the early 1920s. Second, those victims, who were poisoned by other forms of mercury-medicine treatments, had distinctive traits different from the autistic eleven, who were diagnosed twenty years later, all of whom were born after 1930. Thimerosal was used in the production of vaccines prior to any of those children receiving their first vaccines.

Time and again, chapter after chapter, “The Age of Autism†makes it clear that there were no autistic children prior to 1930; that autism was a new disorder separate from all previous, known, other forms of mental illness; and that many of them, such as schizophrenia, were believed to be created by mercury poisoning.

Where has the government been in all of this? Protecting the vaccine makers, chirping the frivolous claim that “autism has always been there,

just its definition has broaden.†If all the skeptics were persuaded to

read this book, perhaps they will finally admit that not all forms, practices, and medicines developed by empirical science through the ages

have done no harm, when it’s clear that they have left a long, painful debris trail on human history.

The book’s epilogue delves into the great catastrophe waiting for us ominously on the horizon. Government inaction on autism will all but guarantee that bleak future for the victims and their families. It will also stifle the American economy with an enormous and unnecessary drain to care for these children deep into adulthood.

Ottar Grundvig is the father of an autistic child. He lives and works in New York City.Lin WesselsSam's MAMA(Mom on A Mission for Autism) "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)