According to Autism Speaks, an advocacy group, autism incidences have increased 10-17% every year for the past decade. Boys are more than four times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with the disorder. All three presidential candidates in the 2008 election have agreed with Bernadine Healy, the former head of the National Institute of Health, that the connection between vaccinations and autism be studied in a properly controlled, double-blind experiment. Healy accuses her colleagues of not wanting "to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large by scaring people."

In her best-selling memoir "Louder than Words" actress and model Jenny McCarthy, wife of actor Jim Carrey, tells a compelling story of her attempts to rescue her son from autism with a regimen of vitamins and minerals and a diet free of gluten, yeast, and wheat. Talk About Curing Autism (TACA), the group that McCarthy recently became national spokeswoman for, makes the reality clear: "Recovery is like a car accident, where some individuals may die and some receive different wounds, " said TACA founder Lisa Ackerman, "you can't be cured, but you can recover through treatment and time to heal."

Autism and vaccine schedules seem to have an intuitively-obvious connection. In the '80s, U.S. kids were given 10 vaccines by age 5. Today's kids are on a strict schedule for no fewer than 36 vaccinations by age 2. Connect that with the fact that the number of children diagnosed with autism has grown 10% every year for the past decade. Jim Carrey, who believes that his wife's son was 'vaccine-damaged', said of the situation: "With billions of pharmaceutical dollars, could it be possible that the vaccine program is becoming more of a profit engine then a means of prevention?"

On May 20, '08, the University of Pittsburgh declared that autism and vaccines recommended by the CDC and the AAP have been linked in experiments performed on monkeys. The article I found (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/107993.php) declares "Safety studies of medicines are typically conducted in monkeys prior to use in humans, yet such basic research on the current childhood vaccination regimen has never before been done."

One of the theories linking vaccines and autism is the presence in many vaccines of a mercury-based preservative called "thimerosal". Mercury has long been known to cause mental disorders - in fact, the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland fame was Mad because of mercury poisoning. The CDC demanded in 1998 that the drug companies stop producing vaccines with thimerosal in them, but never demanded that they destroy or stop using their existing stock. Though the last reported thimerosal-laden vaccine usage was way back in 2007, some companies may well still be using vaccines with thimerosal in them.

Even today, Google News shows article after article in which children who developed autism spontaneously after receiving their vaccines had high levels of mercury in their systems. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but that's a connection between autism and vaccines that's hard to ignore.