A Look at Autism

by Brandon Linker | Feb 20, 2016

Autism and Vaccines

Today, we’re going to talk about Autism. I’d venture the guess that most people in today’s society have heard of autism or have a basic understanding what it is, but this wasn’t always so. Today however, due to social media and the hotly debated subject of vaccines, virtually everyone knows about or has heard of autism.

Incidence of autism was relatively rare (depending on how you look at it) before the 1990s with only 1 in every 2325 children born identified as being autistic. But in the early 90s the incidence of autism suddenly exploded with 1 in 500 US children developing autism. Today, 20 years later, 1 in 150 infants are born with some sort of brain development disorder. That’s a 600% increase, and other countries are experiencing a similar problem. Objectors claim that the raise in autism is only due to increased public awareness of autism, and that is why it is being diagnosed so frequently, but there’s one major flaw in this reasoning. During this time when so many were rejecting the notion of an autism spike, the criteria for the diagnosis of the disease was becoming considerably more stringent, not less. In the beginning, a child only had to meet two criteria to be labeled autistic. Eventually, to declare a child autistic, doctors had to verify a number of findings and identify at least 6 of the 12 symptoms. The point is, with strict new guidelines for identifying the disease, the number of diagnosed cases should not have skyrocketed, instead we should have seen a significant drop off if “public awareness” was the sole cause.

Early on, researchers recognized this increase in autism, but were unable to explain exactly why. It was concluded that there must be some sort of genetic link. If someone in your family had one autistic child, then the risk was 50 times greater that the family would have more. But there was a flaw in this logic. Geneticists quickly pointed out that gentic diseases don’t just suddenly appear in such enormous numbers and increase so drastically over a 30 year period of time. This is when several independent researchers began to examine the relationship between the explosion of the autism and the major changes to the vaccine schedule. The amount of vaccines a child received in 1976 was 11. That increased by 3x by 1996. After further research they started focusing on a substance called thimerosal that had been used as a preservative in most vaccines since the 1930s.

Thimerosal is made up of approximately 50% ethylmercury which is an organic form of the toxic element mercury. The EPA has set safe limits for exposure to many substances. Studies told us at the time that children were getting 111.3 micrograms of mercury from vaccines within the first 6 months of life. That totalled up to be 36 times the limit set by the EPA. This is critical because up until age 2 the brain is undergoing its most rapid period of growth and development. We know that mercury is bad for children because what are the foods that doctors tell us not to eat when we are pregnant. Various fish and shrimp due to high amounts of mercury found in their meat. It’s considered extremely toxic to the brain and heart especially for a baby or small child.

If that weren’t enough, vaccines commonly contain another brain-toxic substance that is now getting a lot more attention: aluminum. Aluminum is thought to play a major role in most of the neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Regardless, much is still left to be uncovered about the relationship of these two toxic metals and their interaction with the brain. It doesn’t help that the vaccine are a multibillion dollar industry and the pharmaceutical companies are the heaviest lobbiers on capitol hill, so don’t hold your breath that we’ll get the bottom of this anytime soon.

In closing, it’s tough to deny a raise in autism rates. Just as many people are panicking due to climate change, a number of people are equally as concerned about the raise in autism. The search for what is causing this is of vital importance. Something in our water, food, medical care, or environment is causing mental illness at such a high rate, frankly I’m amazed it is not on the news every single night. The best advice I can recommend is start paying attention to and educating yourself on what ingredients are going into your food. Take a look at what medications you are taking and ask your prescribing physician if there are natural and effective alternatives to those medications. And of course, do some further research on vaccinations and look at both sides of the argument.