Whooping cough jab with thimerosal autism link still used in the UK

Main Category: Autism
Article Date: 15 Mar 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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UK babies are still being given whooping cough jabs which contain the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, according to research carried out by the USA Institute of Medicine.

Many countries stopped using vaccines which contain thimerosal many years ago. The UK must be on of few developed countries that continues to use it. The USA withdrew them five years ago, as did Japan, Sweden, Australia and Spain.

In the UK both types of vaccines are available on the NHS, the ones that contain thimerosal and the thimerosal-free ones.

Many years ago the UK authorities promised to phase out thimerosal in 1999. The NHS is still obviously using it. In fact, the NHS is buying vaccines that contain thimerosal by the bucket-load - literally millions of them from Aventis.

Why? The reason is most probably cost - thimerosal-free vaccines cost twice as much as vaccines that contain thimerosal.

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