For months now, a mantra of the thimerosal defenders has been as follows: “Mercury was removed from vaccines years ago, and we have not seen a drop in autism rates.”
It looks like they might have to find a new slogan.
Freshly reported numbers out of California show that new cases entering that state’s disability system (children who are three-to-four years old and newly diagnosed with autism) have indeed dropped since 2002, marking the first decline in new autism cases since California began tracking the mysterious disorder.
It’s not easy to see where Kirby gets his figures (he says “fresh numbers out of California”), but Cain uses the same California DDS that Kirby presumably used (except that Cain actually provides a link), to produce the following table:
It looks to me as though autism is rising slightly, not falling as Kirby claims. Citizen Cain comments:
As you can see, caseload in the 3-5 year old group increased during every quarter, at a fairly constant rate, even as exposure to mercury in vaccines was decreasing. Completely the opposite of the picture portrayed by Kirby! Moreover, caseload over this period increased by 38 percent among 3-5 year olds, but by only 34 percent among 6-9 year olds, although even by mid-2005 nearly all of the children in this category were born prior to 1999. If the thimerosal-autism theory were correct, caseloads should have been increasing faster in the 6-9 year old category, in which there has been essentially no change in thimerosal exposure, than among the 3-5 year old category, in which thimerosal exposure has plummeted.
So, if we’re going to trust the California data, it’s pretty clearly telling us that removing thimerosal from infant vaccines isn’t an effective way to reduce autism.
What Kirby is on about is anyone’s guess.
Cain ends with the hope that Kirby will now correct the record. Ha, I see that like me, he likes to end with a joke.