Is she anti-vax?  

I think thimerosol has been eliminated from most childhood vaccines.  However, I guess it's still in some flu vaccines.

Thimerosol in vaccines has been linked to autism.  Thimersol has also been removed from many vaccines.

However, the MMR vaccine has been linked to autism, even though the MMR has NEVER contained thimerosol.  The mechanism there is thought to be related to an underlying gut problem, and some children who developed autism symptoms after receiving the MMR improved after eliminating gluten and casein from their diets.

in this becoming a news story (note that the decision came down Nov. 9, but only after Kirby sounded off at HuffPo the other day did the mainstream media pick it up.  The blogosphere works both for ill and for good, I guess...

For an interesting rebuttal to Kirby, check out Orec, blogging at Respectful Insolence.

One point Orec makes is that the burden of proof is SO low in a vaccine-harm case.  It's not "medical certainty," it's not even "beyond a reasonable doubt," it's "better than even odds."  In other words, if your case is credible enough that there's a better than 50/50 chance that the vaccine caused harm, you win the case.

I personally will eat my hat if vaccines were the cause of my own daughter's autism!!

(OK, I've got quite the opinion here.  But that's what blogs are for, eh?)

Kirby is not an unbiased blogger here - this is his whole livelihood - he wrote the book that first got really broad national attention to the vaccine camp.

An interesting aspect of Mt disease in autism is that, with ASD, the mitochondrial disease seems to be milder than in "classic" cases of Mt disorder.

One of the most common flaws in epidemiologic studies is called information bias, and one very common form of information bias comes up when the diseased population is tested more thoroughly than the healthy comparison population.  You cannot compare two groups unless you are very certain you looking at a healthy but otherwise comparable population in exactly the same way.  Information bias can completely invalidate a study, and the description above is exactly what they teach you to look out for in intro epidemiology class.

What this article tells me is that if you start with an actual diagnosis of mitochondrial disease (and since it is inherited it would be frequently diagnosed in infants), you probably do not see elevated rates of autism.  But if you start with autism, you pick up minor mitochondrial disorders (I can't even figure out if it's actual disease) that would not otherwise be detected, because nobody was looking for it.  So no conclusion can be drawn from the apparent association.

had terrible seizures as a reaction to Pertusis.

this was after me deferring his vaccines until he was 18 months old. imagine my horror after having deferred, to have that happen.

while i have not ever felt that vaccines cause autism, i certainly do am NOT going to let people tell me that i must blindly trust my government OR the pharma industry with my child's life. i research everything and never did like the idea of putting multiple diseases into my child starting at 2 months of age. i wanted him to be older and robust and i wanted to know him and his personality.

his first round was fine. his second around the doc was pressuring me to give him both DPT and MMR at the same time. i refused, as those two are the most highly reactive. one nurse at an emergency room visit for an unrelated illness even called social services on me for following my own gut on when to vaccinate my child.

and then, when i finally let him have one of the big ones, DPT, he had seizures - first, febrile ones, then more, FOUR days later, with no fever present.

so i yanked him back off all vaccines for another couple of years. he is finally getting caught up on everything to get ready for kindergarten, but interestingly enough - he does not have to have a lot of them now, because he is past the age of concern? i am not sure i understand it all, the scheduling.

this is one of those fine line things as parents. you want to protect your child and the greater public with the medical advancements we have in the form of vaccines. but you also get treated like an idiot for asking questions, get poo-poo'd and treated as an alarmist when you are hesitant to just follow some rule book by rote.

...and then you have complete horror that the bad crap happened anyway, no matter how hard you tried and fought. and the suck feeling of your child going through hell ending up being a validation of your gut the whole time.

to prevent some very scary diseases.  Every doc I know thinks it's crazy to "play it safe" by not protecting your child from gruesome forms of death (not to get too graphic!).

We've talked here before about how the people who choose not to vaccinate their children are really reaping the benefits from those of us who do vaccinate, which makes an outbreak of a deadly disease less likely.  So the risk is transferred, some would say unfairly.

Individual components of the vaccines probably aren't being tested further because we've massively tested entire vaccine formulations.  If the vaccine doesn't test positive, it's ingredients won't test positive either.  

But there are so many things in an infant's environment we've never tested.  Maybe one environmental trigger - assuming there are some - is exposure to an ingredient found in certain brands of hand lotion.  Or perfume.  Or furniture polish.  How about the flame retardant treatment on sleepwear, or stain resistant carpeting?  Sunscreen?  Or perhaps prenatal exposure to a dye found in certain brands of lipstick.  And everybody's worried about pthallates and other plastics these days, so let's include that as well.

Of course it could still be something in the natural environment - autism rates are climbing, but it's not a new disease.  Maybe an allergic reaction to a species of mold, or a common and otherwise harmless virus.  Or a microbe.  Or (in light of the hygene hypothesis) the absence of a microbe that would help the immune system develop better.  

Then there's the usual dietary suspects.  Low omega 3 levels, artificial sweeteners, grain-fed beef, etc.  Exposure could be prenatal or via breastmilk.  Though to be fair we should also consider the ingredients in infant formula.  Or maybe it's just the stimuli our infants are exposed to in the modern world that affects the way their brains develop.  

I imagine there's probably evidence for or against a bunch of these random ideas.  My point is that the list is nearly infinite, and we have more data on vaccines than anything else.  Huge numbers of researchers have spent years or decades on the vaccine hypothesis, and most have moved on - failure is a real career killer.