http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-autism8jan08,1,800256.story?coll=la-headlines-california

Since there was no explanation of exactly who paid for the study, it would be a good guess, and more than likely, that it was paid for, sponsored or promoted by the drug companies that are still putting the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, a neurotoxin, in vaccines for children.

It would certainly behoove them to be behind such a study in order to place the blame on something other than mercury for the cause of autism...even if the State of California claims to have produced the study.

The article starts out stating: The prevalence of autism in California children continued to rise after many vaccine manufacturers started to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in 1999...

"Started to remove thimerosal..."  It did not say thimerosal has been removed from ALL childhood vaccines.

The study was published in Archives of General Psychiatry, but no article title was given or the date of publication.

The article went on to say: "If mercury exposure in vaccines was a major cause of autism, then the number of ... affected kids should have diminished once they were no longer exposed to thimerosal," said Dr. Robert Schechter, lead author of the study and a medical officer at the state Department of Public Health. "That is not what we found."

Anyone who knows diddly-squat about mercury, knows that mercury either injected into or ingested by living, breathing creatures does them no good...and that's probably the understatement of this young century.

That does not mean that there are not other contributing factors to autism...such as preservatives in food, what the farm animals we eat are fed and injected with, toxins in the air we breath, or a thousand other possible causes.

The article went on to say: In a commentary accompanying the study in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Eric Fombonne called the data "a clear and unambiguous test."

"Parents of autistic children should be reassured that autism in their child did not occur through immunizations," wrote Fombonne, a psychiatrist at Montreal Children's Hospital who was not involved in this study.

Clear and unambiguous. Oh, really?

Although Fombonne had advised pharmaceutical companies in the past, he claims to have never received research funding from them. 

Still one has to be suspicious about such an unequivocal, emphatic statement.  I wonder what he'd be saying it if he had an autistic child.

Disagreeing with Fombonne is the National Autism Association.  In a statement they said,  "... some children still might be exposed to mercury through either flu shots or trace amounts in other vaccines...(and) some vaccines containing thimerosal had expiration dates as late as 2005 and might have been used up to that point."

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