Disclaimer: Generation Rescue provided the information on this page and feel that they are the most reliable source of information on this topic.
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There is a lot of conflict around whether mercury causes autism.

GenerationRescue.org - 'Empowering parents with truth to help their children heal'

:* RescueChronicle.blogspot.com - 'The Rescue Chronicle: Autism, Mercury, Vaccines, Truth' (blog by founders of Generation Rescue)

Generation Rescue is a parent-founded, parent-funded, and parent-led organization. Our mission is to share the truth with parents about the cause of their child’s developmental disabilities so they can focus on treatment.

Generation Rescue believes that childhood neurological disorders such as autism, Asperger's, ADHD/ADD, speech delay, sensory integration disorder, and many other developmental delays are all misdiagnoses for mercury poisoning.

When you know cause, you can focus on cure.Thousands of parents are curing their children by removing the mercury from their children's bodies. We want you, the parent, to know the truth.

Mercury Poisoning: Labels (next page)

Old Paradigm: "Mercury may or may not be one of the causes of autism. Once you have autism, it is life long. Autism is genetic. Treatment is behavioral therapy with a psychologist or social worker. Prognosis for recovery is poor."

New Paradigm: "Mercury causes mercury poisoning, which has been mislabeled as autism. Mercury poisoning can be resolved by removing the mercury. Mercury poisoning is an issue of toxicology. Treatment is the removal of mercury through a process called chelation. Prognosis for recovery is very good."

The most commonly used label in this website is "autism" because most articles and reports use the word autism to describe the current epidemic of mercury-induced neurodevelopmental disorders. For the sake of simplicity, we have often defaulted to using the word autism, too. A more appropriate term, we believe, is mercury-poisoned children.

Autism is not a disease. There is no medical test for autism. We often say a child "has autism" implying it is something someone "acquires" or "catches" or "is born with". Autism is simply a label for a range of observed behaviors. These behaviors are typically assessed and diagnosed by a psychologist using the DSM-IV criteria which identifies 12 groups of abnormal behaviors. A child exhibiting any 6 of these behaviors results in a diagnosis of autism. This diagnostic process means that two children exhibiting the opposite six criteria would both be considered autistic. It is also entirely plausible that a single child diagnosed separately by five psychologists could receive five separate diagnoses like autism, Asperger's, ADHD, PDD-NOS, and a developmental delay. It is an imperfect and subjective process that results in a description of symptoms, not cause.

That many autistic children seem to share physiological manifestations like food allergies, gastrointestinal distress, suppressed immune systems, recurrent ear infections, yeast overgrowth or candida, gross and fine motor delays, sensory processing distortions in hearing, sight, and touch, sleep disturbances, and impaired detoxification pathways has not been publicized, noted, or considered by the vast majority of professionals involved with diagnosing autism. You almost never read about these common physical symptoms when researching autism. Practically every child has them, but they have either gone undetected, are viewed as coincidence, or somehow considered part of the mysterious, unknown "disease". Again, autism is currently solely a diagnosis of observed behaviors. There is no medical test to "confirm" it or underlying cause ascertained.

None of these observations change the underlying fact that autism and mercury poisoning have identical symptom profiles. They are one in the same thing. The current paradigm for thinking about these mercury-poisoned children is broken and unhelpful. "Autism" will always be a mystery without a cure. The search for the "Autism gene", so far fruitless, will be endless. How can you have a gene for a "disease" that does not exist? When you know the cause, you can focus on cure. When you begin to think of autism as a misdiagnosis for a mercury-poisoned state, things start to make more sense. All of the physical symptoms and behaviors are explained by the presence of mercury. Curing autism is a miracle; curing mercury poisoning is a medical procedure.

It would also be erroneous to say that mercury "causes" autism. The notion of cause, once again, implies that autism is something different from mercury poisoning. By saying mercury causes autism, it is again implying that you "have" autism, that your fate has been decided, that you will have a disease for life, whatever the cause. Instead, what is true is that mercury causes mercury poisoning. A mercury-poisoned state can be addressed medically. Children greatly or fully resolve their symptoms when the mercury is removed from their bodies and brains. Toxicologists have successfully treated people with mercury poisoning for decades.

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In 2004, the Institute of Medicine at the National Academies published the results of their review of more than 200 scientific studies (available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10997.html), and concluded "that the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing (mercury) vaccines and autism," a view held by most of the international scientific community. The National Academies serve the public by bringing together committees of experts in all areas of scientific and technological endeavor. These experts give their time for free to address critical national issues and to give advice to the federal government and to the public. In addition, The World Health Organization also maintains that "there is no evidence supporting a causal association between neurobehavioural disorders and thiomersal-containing (mercury) vaccines."

All of us aim to find a cure for autism. Any treatment must stand the rigors of critical review, evaluation, and indendent verification.