Streptococcal infection and exacerbations of childhood tics and obsessive-compulsive symptoms: a prospective blinded cohort study.
and other aspects should also be considered in the analysis, such as the hypoferritinemy reported as associated with tics (I have a link, but the manuscript is in spanish)
Now, with the different viral/immune/nutritional aspects that seems related to tics, why then more clinical aspects are not properly included in these studies? To quantify only tics by presence but no grade or proper diagnostic or concomitant clinical findings makes very difficult the comparison in only statistics terms

Wow, we all seem to agree on further investigation into tics!

“I said thimerosal exposure in the 90s is a good proxy of vaccination load. I think this is obvious, although I haven’t proved it.”

This would only work with this dataset if they tracked the details of the full vaccine load of the infants in both the study and control groups. From what I can tell, they focused specifically on Thimerosal exposure which wouldn’t include gathering the appropriate information on non-Thimerosal containing vaccines—and I’m not under the illusion that all vaccines in the 90’s contained it. Additionally, the recommended vaccine load from a disease perspective is higher than that of the 90’s as well since several new multi-disease vaccines have been added to the schedule. I think it would be difficult to seperate the noise especially given the relatively small sample set.

One other weakness of the study was that they did not study Thimerosal exposure after 7 months of age. This is a tough call since their justification is reasonable from the relative dose perspective (of course it makes the assumption that damage is correlated with linearly increasing dose, something that isn’t always true), but it ignores the risk that timed exposure during vulnerable periods of development might have a negative impact.

I think so too. I forget where I read it, but I thought that the CDC was moving ahead with studies on tics.

If memory serves, it was from a Kirby post about the CDC where he mentioned the Thompson follow-on study. They mention going forward with studying Tics (and I thought there was another possible positive outcome from Thompson), but they don’t mention going forward with autism.

Additionally, the results did find a correlation with Tics (as did Verstraeten) which should not be casually dismissed because it is a neurological problem, so Thimerosal certainly isn’t vindicated from evidence of neurological harm.

Well, the reason they singled out tics is because it had indeed showed up before in other studies. The positive associations (and negative ones) from the study could easily be explained as random noise, including the association with Tics. The number of such associations was 19. The number expected by random change I estimated at 18.9. Paraphrasing what Orac said about this, “it’s as if statistics works.”

I think it’s prudent to confirm it, though.

The results only apply to:
1) A healthy population of infants (since many illnesses were excluded)
2) Exposure to Thimerosal, not vaccines in general (as per the study methodology)

Additionally, the results did find a correlation with Tics (as did Verstraeten) which should not be casually dismissed because it is a neurological problem, so Thimerosal certainly isn’t vindicated from evidence of neurological harm.

I notice you also threw in “along with other studies”. On this point I also disagree. Johnson et al. 2007 is the only widely published study of it’s type that I’m aware of to test Thimerosal exposure in children.

There is a scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause autism. Although there are a few dissenters out there, this scientific consensus is now sufficiently broad to relegate notions about some causal link between vaccines and autism to the lexicon of urban mythology.

Either that, or I have been swept into some kind of temporal vortex, and this is not 2008, but the late 1990s.

“On one side we have evidence, which, even if every single piece was 99.99% rubbish (which it clearly isn’t) would still be better that what is on the other side, which is – as you say – anecdotes.”

That’s where your assumption is incorrect. Patterns of anecdotal evidence are still considered evidence, just of a different level.

I’m not stating it’s all rubish at all, just very weak and limited in its applicability to the problem.

“The simple fact that thiomersal is not in vaccines and yet autism cases keep rising kills that one.”

Let’s be specific then: 1) Early Thimerosal exposure has not been eliminated, nor do we have accurate data on it’s schedule of removal. 2) Data on Autism prevalence is highly disputed, so I can’t see how you draw any firm conclusions. 3) Adverse Event reporting from vaccines is not very rigourous 4) Toxicity of Thimerosal has not been determined. There are many metals and chemicals that have been shown to be toxic in very small amounts or even at different times of exposure.

All of these factors limit the conclusions you can draw.

You also seem to forget that the extensive Cochrane review of MMR concluded that safety studies were inadequate, so how can you conclude that all of the safety investigation has been completed? You seem to be going against the scientific consensus. You’ll find the same conclusion on the flu vaccine (which also happens to contain Thimerosal).

At the risk of repeating myself, the weaknesses of all of the epidemiology studies are well documented and centre around lack of power to detect issues in subsets of the population, and the general use of poor data full of unaddressed confounds.