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This situation is plagued with illogic and bad judgment. The very same Public Health Service Peabody worked for -- which now includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – along with the American Academy of Pediatrics has urged manufacturers not to put mercury in childhood vaccines. This was in July 1999, and over the next several years mercury was phased out of those vaccines – except, inexplicably, for flu shots. The government in fact greatly expanded flu shot coverage recommendations so that now all pregnant women, nursing mothers and infants over six months old are targeted for the shots. This earlier exposure to mercury has the effect of offsetting the removal from other vaccines; in fact, it moves the timing of the shots forward to a much more vulnerable point in the development of the infant brain and the immune system. Adjusted for weight, fetuses and infants are still getting a substantial portion of the mercury dose that first caused concern.
 
The government originally acted to remove mercury because a Congressionally ordered review found that as more and more shots were added to the infant vaccine schedule during the 1990s, the amount of mercury to which a child could be exposed exceeded the EPA guideline for maximum safe mercury exposure. And because mercury is so dangerous to humans and especially infants – it is the second-deadliest element on Earth – and has caused terrible poisonings all around the world, the idea was a sound one based on the precautionary principle and the well-known medical admonition to "First, do no harm."
 
Precaution has not exactly been in the watchword in the medical industry’s use of mercury. Our book traces its reckless use in medicine and manufacturing for half-a-millennium; doctors treated the skin ravages of syphilis with mercury ointment and vapors after Columbus brought the disease back from the New World in 1494; eventually a much more toxic mercury compound, mercuric chloride, was ingested and injected to try to “cure” syphilis (only the advent of penicillin the 1940s did that). We found a strong pattern of evidence that suggests mercuric chloride interacted with the disease to create the deadliest form of syphilis, called general paralysis of the insane. Doctors never noticed.
 
So it has gone for centuries. Our research strongly suggests that the first cases of autism among children born in the 1930s were connected with exposure to three newly commercialized ethyl mercury compounds: a seed disinfectant, a lumber treatment, and the vaccine preservative thimerosal. (All three were invented and patented by one man, University of Chicago chemist Morris Kharasch, one of the leaders in the development of organic chemistry.)
 
What leads us to this conclusion? We were able to identify seven of the 11 children  described in Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Leo Kanner’s landmark 1943 report (John Trevett, disguised as "Herbert B., was Case 7 in this series); Kanner, the dean of child psychiatrists who wrote the first child psychiatry textbook eight years earlier with no mention of autism, said these children’s behavior differed “markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far.” In his report, he used first names and last initials to mask the children’s identities, but we used clues in the detailed family descriptions to find them. The results clearly point to an environmental trigger in these first cases – specifically, ethyl mercury.
 
 -- Case 2 was the son of a plant pathologist working with fungicides at the federal government’s Beltsville Agriculture Research Center in Maryland, just outside the nation’s capital. His extensive archive shows him working with mercury compounds from the beginning of his career, and contains a pamphlet for the ethyl mercury seed disinfectant Ceresan, a dust that could easily have gotten on his clothes and exposed his pregnant wife or newborn infant. (She had kidney trouble during pregnancy, which can be a sign of mercury poisoning.) The father’s resume shows him working with Ceresan when his son was born.

-- Case 3 was the son of a forestry professor whose research places him in a laboratory where early tests on wood preservation were being conducted with Lignasan, also an ethyl mercury compound.

 -- And Case 7, as we have described, was the pediatrician and vaccine advocate for the Public Health Service. Several others in the first 11 had medical backgrounds that could put them at risk of medicinal mercury exposure.
 
Today John Trevett lives in a group home in Maryland, where we visited him as we prepared our book. He does not speak, but he appears to understand what is said. He is no trouble and seems well-cared for, but it a sad and eerie end for someone whose parents were both doctors and whose mother was a medical pioneer.
 
In our book, we describe this ongoing tragedy of overlooked mercury poisoning in depth and detail. Here, it is important to say that the Public Health Service may be just the latest in a parade of distinguished “experts” and esteemed organizations to miss the clues – even a clue that comes at a terrible price from one of their own pioneering pediatricians.
 
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Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill are co-authors of “The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic,” published in September 2010 by Thomas Dunne Books.