Mrr, you have to be careful when you refer to "children who become autistic." About 20 to 30 percent of autistic children begin to develop language at about the age of 12 months or so, in that they will say a few words like mama, dada, ball, dog, bottle, etc.   Then they will stop using language over the next few months, and will lose social skills as well. It looks like they were normal and healthy and then became autistic.

But if you talk to the parents of these children, you will generally find that there was something different about them much earlier: they tended not to cuddle, not to try to make social contact, not to have the reciprocal emotional interactions that are so important to five and six and seven-month-old babies, etc. I've talked to many parents of these children who had this "autism regression syndrome" and who then had a non-autistic child. Almost invariably, they are amazed at all the things their younger baby does that their older child never did. Those children did not become autistic; they were autistic from birth, but didn't manifest some of the more obvious aspects of their autism until they were a little older. (There are a number of other rare developmental disorders, such as Rett syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, etc., that demonstrate this delayed onset, even though the condition has a clear genetic cause.) If you just look at the loss of language, though, it's easy to be convinced that the MMR vaccine the child got at 12 months of age was the "cause."

But I know I'm not going to convince anyone whose mind is already made up...

One more thing, for those who tend only to skim threads like this. The standard children's vaccines being used today do not contain thimerosal (the mercury-based preservative). So even if you are convinced that mercury causes autism, please don't avoid immunizing your child because of that belief.

Aloha,
Mark