The story of autism continues to grab our attention. In July this year, finally, a paper in the Lancet acknowledged what we all knew for years to be the case; that we are in the middle of an epidemic of autism. Professor Gilian Baird and her team looked at all 56,000 children aged 9 or 10 in the South Thames area, and found that 1 in 86 of them suffered from autism or autistic spectrum disorder - and of course most of them boys (1). So that's one major hurdle overcome; at least we can now agree that, as doctors say, "there's a lot of it about" - about 20 times more than the historical rate, in fact. Yet a Comment in the same issue still says that "it is reasonable to attribute the recent surge in the prevalence" to improved ascertainment. Bernard Rimland. founder of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, and inspiration for the DAN! movement (Defeat AutismNow) refuted this one six years ago, in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine for one (2), and in a number of other writings. It was already clear six years ago that autism incidence rates had paralleled the roll-out of the vaccination programmes in the USA and the UK, and clear too that there was a probable link to the thiomersal/thimerosal mercury-based preservative used in many vaccines. It would be remarkable, after all, if something as demonstratedly toxic as mercury could be given to people with rapidly developing nervous systems without risk of harm. Heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium and lead are like radiation in that there is no such thing as a threshold below which they are safe; and mercury in particular is a danger because it is possibly the most toxic of these metals, and we keep pumping it out into the environment still. And then giving it by injection to the most vulnerable members of the community. You would think it was, in Dick Cheney's immortal words, "a no-brainer".

A further step towards a proof of the mercury hypothesis came this year as well, when the brothers Geier published evidence that removing thiomersal from vaccines in California (which effectively happened in 2003) had led, not yet to a reduction in the number of cases, but to a slowing down of the increase in numbers (3). This has been evident for the past two years, possibly three, and the speculation is that 2006 may show the big drop, as those born just in time not to receive mercury in their vaccine reach 3-4 years old, which is peak diagnosis time. It looks as though we are also getting close to understanding the biochemical mechanism that predisposes to developing autism - or mechanisms, since there are clearly several. What is most interesting, and which struck me forcibly at the last DAN Conference in Seattle last month, is how much the field of autism is starting to overlap with disorders such as chronic fatigue and multiple chemical sensitivity. In fact there are researchers (a broad term these days, which in this field especially includes many parents, and merges gradually into bloggers - all of which I regard as a valuable step forward) who think that autism and CFS have more or less identical triggers, and which you get is simply determined by the age - and so the phase of neurodevelopment - at exposure. Genomic testing enables us to examine the genetic makeup of an individual, and to tell what forms of a particular enzyme or other protein their cells will produce; while there is much still to learn, already this new field is starting to reveal a cluster of biochemical reactions, predominantly in and around the methylation cycle, which are crucial for so many aspects of health - and which are vulnerable to toxins such as heavy metals. A minor variation in your genes in this area might be of no significance whatsoever - until you are exposed, at the age of a few weeks only, to a toxic dose of mercury, which you can't get rid of, and which then prevents your whole nervous system from developing normally- A theme that I expect we will return to in this column in the future.

Baird G, Simonoff E, Pickles A, et al. Prevalence of disorders of the autism spectrum in a population cohort of children in South Thames: the Special Needs and Autism Project (SNAP).
Lancet 2006; 368: 210-215.

Rimland B., The Autism Epidemic, Vaccinations, and Mercury. J Nutr Euv Med 2000; 10: 261- 266.

Geier DA, Geier MR. Early Downward Trends in Neurodevelopmental Disorders Following Removal of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines.
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 2006; 11: 8-13

Our thanks to the Alternative Magazine for allowing us to reproduce this article.