For you lurkers in here who get to experience the best of DU's own anti-vaccination crusaders, here is a great blog article that will put some things in perspective and provide you with some history to the "debate".

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=9

But in quite a different way.

These threads go back and forth so much it seems people really miss the proverbial "forrest for the trees", i.e., the children who are or are not getting vaccinated against a host of very real, very serious diseases. Every medical intervention carries with it a risk, vaccines are not immune to that fact. Instead of dedicating so much time to scaring nit picking arguments and tossing around insults, why don't we take a look for a second at the FDA numbers in that link you posted?

There are 6 vaccines listed that have a thimerosal content of 0.01%, which is an extremely small amount, but relatively high in comparison to others listed on the chart. Very scary. Fortunately for those of you concerned about mercury in your child's vaccines, 3 of them are not included in the current recommended childhood vaccinations, and the other 3 are in certain brands of the influenza vaccine and there is a thimerisol free option. While we are at it, lets take a look at the other recommended childhood vaccines:

DTaP: Thimerosal free options
IPV: Thimerosal free
HepA: Thimerosal free
HepB: Thimerosal free options
MMR: Thimerosal free
Varicella: Thimerosal free
HiB: Thimerosal free
Pneumococcal: Thimerosal free

How about the adolescent vaccines?
Meningococcal: Thimerosal free options
TdaP: Thimerosal free

Please note the fact the MMR vaccine contains no thimerosal, and in fact has never contained thimerosal. The initial study done by Wakefield linking MMR to autism, which got so much press, has subsequently been shown to be invalid from both a statistical power and research perspective. The majority of authors on that study have since stated there is no link between MMR and autism (Murch SH, Anthony A, Cassen DH, et al. (2004) Retraction of an interpretation. Lancet, 363: 750.) Further, there have quite a few very well done population studies that have failed to show any link between thimerosal and autism. Here are a few of them:

Madsen KM, Lauritsen MB, Pedersen CB, Thorsen P, Plesner A, Andersen PH, and Mortensen PB (2003). Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence from Danish Population-Based Data. Pediatrics 112: 604-6.

Verstraeten T, Davis RL, DeStefano F, Lieu TA, Rhodes PH, Black SB, Shinefield H, and Chen RT (2003). Safety of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A Two-Phased Study of Computerized Health Maintenance Organization Databases. Pediatrics 112(5): 1039-48.

Parker SK, Schwartz B, Todd J, and Pickering LK (2004). Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Autistic Spectrum Disorder: A Critical Review of Published Original Data. Pediatrics, 114 93-804.


As you can see if you look at the facts, not an editorial, there is no reason not to have your child vaccinated because of a fear of mercury exposure. Even if you buy into all the fear mongering about trace amounts of thimerisol, you can always CHOOSE TO HAVE YOUR CHILD VACCINATED WITH COMPLETELY THIMEROSAL FREE VACCINES.

To mzmolly and others, please find another excuse to propagate your agenda.

If you are a new parent and reading this, there is no reason not to vaccinate your child because of concerns about thimerosal or mercury.

So here goes my first attempt at internet blogging...be as gentle as your conscious allows you to be.


As a DU lurker I have remained silent (at least in this forum) on the multitude of issues that have brought us to the current crisis we face in the United States concerning health care. My chosen user name identifies me directly as a physician, and one of "allopathy" (a label I do not necessarily agree with), which in turn may make it hard for some people to read this entry, and hopeful the others that will follow it, objectively. While these writings will be, and should be taken as, editorials, and therefore objectivity may not of the utmost concern, I believe it is important when engaging in any argument or conversation that you know where the other party is coming from, as all of our past experiences flavor, influence, and indeed sometimes cloud the judgments we make on a daily basis.

What has prompted me to write is a recent article published in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Claims, Errors, and Compensation Payments in Medical Malpractice Litigation." by Studdert, DM et.al (2006;354:2024-2033). The issue of medical malpractice is one that is often tossed around while discussing the current health care crisis and the process of tort reform. The authors end conclusion is essentially that frivolous malpractice suits only account for 13%-16% of administrative costs of malpractice legal action, and they seem to imply that as physicians, my colleagues and I are misdirected in our anger against frivolous malpractice claims. This implication is endemic in the converstions I have with my friends who also happen to be lawyers.

Let me be the first to admit that physicians, at least on a political level, do seem to overstate the impact of frivolous lawsuits on our current liability crisis, specifically those with large payouts. The malpractice insurance industry and MSM also do their fair share to propagate this feeling. Physicians are constantly assaulted with reports of high payout lawsuits in insurance negations, professional journals, society meetings, and the evening news.

The author's data gets to the real problem of medical malpractice, at least from a physician's perspective, and it presents an opportunity for those of you not in the medical professions to get an incite into the frustration we feel with malpractice cases. I generally accept the definition of medical malpractice as "an act or omission by a health care provider which deviates from accepted standards of practice in the medical community and which causes injury to the patient." (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_malpr... ). First, just a few numbers from the study to bring me to my point:

-Of the cases reviewed, 37% of the cases reviewed did not involve error, but of these 28% were paid an average of $313,205.
-This prompted researches to conclude the current malpractice systems was "right" 73% of the time.

For physicians lawsuits are not longer a possibility, but a reality. They are things we think about every day. We sometimes make medical decisions, although many will not admit it, not because we think it is the right thing to do, but because we know it may protect us from a possible future lawsuit. As an example, in the field of obstrectics the forceps delivery is becoming a lost art due to fear of litigation.

The author of this study was later quoted as saying about the 73% statistic "That's far from a perfect record, but it's not bad..." Not bad? Is this a joke? How many of you would re-hire a plumber or electrician that got it right 73% of the time? How about a doctor that got it right 73% of the time? How about those of you who own firearms? Would you purchase a weapon that was reliable 73% of time time or buy ammunition that would fire 3 out of 4 times? Why is it that the authors, and the legal system of a whole, are accepting of this number? I expect the answer is money, as despite the fact that 1/4 of malpractice cases that went to trial were found to be free of medical error, there was still a payout both to the plaintiff and the lawyer representing them.

Go back to the first bullet point and look at that number: "$313,205". That is a relatively small amount in the context of medical malpractice, but this number is why I feel physicians should be angry about the medical malpractice system in this country. There is no incentive for people not to sue their doctors, and more importantly, there is no reason for an attorney not to take a malpractice case to trial. Even if they are wrong, and the physician was completely in the right, they still have a chance of a 6 figure payout. This is the source of my frustration: Despite doing everything right, making no errors in patient management, we still get sued and loose. Medicine does not have all the answers, and is as much an incomplete art as it is an incomplete science. Yet for some reason, when something goes wrong and there is a bad outcome, it is the fault of the physician.

In physician circles being the target of a lawsuit is a joke. It happens to everyone, and it has come to mean nothing. Frivolous lawsuits have turned what used to be a legitimate method of physician regulation into ego bruising, personally painful experience that ends up being professionally just an annoyance. Doctors that have judegments against them in malpractice claims are not bad doctors, and bad doctors are not stopped by those judgements.

The health care crisis in this country is do to many factors caused by many different factions, and medcial malpractice is just one of those factors. Until everyone, physicians included, start to deal with the depth of these issues on all sides, and stop pointing fingers, this crisis will contine.