Retracting the Needle from autism

I'm a bit behind on my pod cast listening and only just recently heard about the retraction of a study proving a correlation between the MMR vaccine and increased cases of autism.

The background story is that Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study in the Lancet (a British medical journal) in 1998 claiming that there was a direct link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Shortly after it was published it became the main political weapon for lobbyists trying to stop vaccinations. In 2004 however the study was scrutinised and they found that the doctor had major biases in his study.
He was infact funded directly by the very lobbyist organisations who wanted the link to be there. He also worked unethically in the involvement of children in this study.

Now 6 years later the Lancet has retracted the study and deem it not peer reviewed. This means that the medical community finally has an opportunity to rectify the superstitions and misinformation a lot of parents make their decisions upon.

I am really exited that this study has been revoked. For vaccinations to have any effect the percentage of the population getting them has to be above 90 percent. This is hard to do when studies like this one, blown out of proportion by the media, makes parents choose not to have their children vaccinated.
The most recent scare surrounding vaccinations was the amount of mercury used as a preservative in them.

The really interesting thing about this preservative is that its not even mercury directly. It has mercury in its structure but only in trace amounts. The product is called Thiomersal and has never been used in MMR vaccines or any other routine vaccines. In several studies it has been proven to be processed by the liver much more easily than mercury itself and there has also been studies shoving that baby and small children are better at excreting it than adults. So in other words the scary consequences of getting a vaccination are about as lethal as eating a regular sized fatty fish (salmon and such).
This ethyl mercury compound has been used in vaccines, skin treatments (creams and so on) and even tattoo inks. It has been phased out of almost all vaccines already and the final few are rarely used and only on adults.

So my point is.

Get your children vaccinated, for their sakes and all the other children around them. Just cut back on fish that week.

                 Make informed choices