Rain Mouse?

One of the favorite (and few) studies that the autism-equals-thimerosal-toxicity crowd likes to hang their hopes on is one by Dr. Mady Hornig and colleagues. This 2004 study, Neurotoxic effects of postnatal thimerosal are mouse strain dependent , doesn't say a thing that can be applied to autism. In spite of the media quotes that said it did.

Autism Diva doesn't know how anyone could turn this into something that supports autism-is-caused-by-thimerosal. It was funded by Safe Minds (S.A.F.E.M.I.N.D.S) and the UCD MIND institute. The strangest, even wacky, thing about this study is that stuff that is not in the published study at all is discussed so that it seems like it is part of it.

You can read about it in, "Evidence of No Shame". A couple of times in David Kirby's book he tells of Mady Hornig and her presentation with photos of mice who sort of absent mindedly chewed through their cage-mates' skulls.

"... putting up a photo of two mice. "He has groomed through the skull, and eventually destroys his partner," Hornig said. Every parent of an autistic kid in the room could be seen grimacing in dark recognition of such destructive behavior."(page 312)

You can watch a video of Mady Hornig, MD giving a talk about her mice on safeminds.org. She doesn't show slides of the killer mice on that video , but she does refer to them.

The fact that some people thought that this bizarre behavior from the mice was similar to autistic behavior is really weird. Because actually, as far as Autism Diva knows, no autistic person has ever groomed another person to excess, and certainly not to such an extent that the groomed person ended up maimed or dead.

The self-inflicted injuries in autism seem to come at least partly from the fact that some autistics don't always feel pain in the normal way, it can also be an emotional reaction to extreme frustration, overstimulation or understimulation. Autistics report different reasons for self-injury, and self-injury is not only found in autism.

At any rate, one can assume that Hornig's mice had a different reason for being self-injurious than autistic humans do, because the Hornig mice had different brain changes than autistics do and more obviously, the mice aren't human.

The Details of the Study

The Columbia study was supposed to mimic, in mice, the exposure that human infants and toddlers had had to thimerosal in their vaccinations. Hornig, et al., injected baby mice on days on which the mice brains pass particular milestones of development. Those were supposed to match the developmental milestones one would expect a human brain to also pass on the days that children get vaccinated.

But, there is a major flaw in this. The study didn't account for the fact that the shots are given to babies several months apart and the thimerosal leaves their systems in between shots. The researcher did not account for or explain that the mice were getting chronic exposure because they were getting shots of thimerosal every 2 days. (4 doses over 9 days, or about one shot every other day). Human babies didn't get thimerosal injected into them every other day over the whole developmental period represented by the mice developmental period. Human babies didn't get chronic exposure to thimerosal in vaccines.

They used 3 strains of mice and gave some of each group injections of thimerosal and left some without thimerosal, they found no statistically signifcant differences in their behavior.

They were looking at a few behavioral measurements. One was a curiosity measurement, and one was how much they ran around and explored. Also, there were measurements on how much "stereotypical behavior" they engaged in. That would be a repetetive up-and-down or side-to-side movement. They called a side-to-side movement an "XY plane stereotypy" and an up-and-down movement was called a "Z plane stereotypy". The mice that were later found to have changes in their brains are called "SJL Thim mice".

This is what the study says about them:
"Within strains, SJL Thim mice had fewer total episodes of
XY and Z plane stereotypy behaviors, with significant
main drug effects rearing counts in SJL Thim mice (F¼5.332,
P¼0.0232), without sex effect (Figure 2a)."

Regarding their coordination, "..no thimerosal-related differences were observed in rotarod performance between or within strains on accelerating rod (20 rpm)." Scarcely evidence of ataxia as is seen in "acrodynia".

Autism is usually defined as having these distinguishing features:
1) problems with social interaction;
2) problems with communication; and
3) restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped behavior, interests, and activities.

Did Dr. Hornig and colleagues find these features in the "SJL Thim" mice?

No.

They didn't try to measure communication, or social interaction, they did measure stereotyped behavior, and the SJL Thim mice had less of it, than any of the other mice.

Hornig et al., only discussed three dissected mouse brains. This is not many mice to use for a sample. They found statistically significant differences in those mice brains, but none of them match what is found in the brains of autisics.

While the Hornig group could have cut up all the mice brains and assayed the different parts of those brains for mercury content - they didn't.

The mice that chewed through the skull of their cage mates while grooming don't appear to be anywhere in the scientific literature, this behavior gets no mention in this study.

As to whether or not there can be an animal model of autism at all - that is debatable.


Autism Diva's biggest disappointment with the Hornig study is that they didn't take some of the mercury damaged mice and "cure" them (fix their brains) with Dr. Buttar's chelation cream, or with the DAN! chelation protocol, or Andy Cutler's chelation protocol.

(edited for clarity, July 16, 2005)

Autism Diva
Not impressed