When anti-vaccine activists and others argue that the immunizations used to protect children from infectious diseases are risky, they often point to aluminum salts, a product added to many childhood vaccines to increase their effectiveness.
A
new large study from Denmark directly counters those claims. After mining the vaccination and medical records of more than 1.2 million children over a 24-year period, researchers could see no evidence that exposure to aluminum in vaccines led to a statistically significant increase in a child’s risk of developing any of a wide variety of conditions that can be diagnosed in childhood, including asthma and autism.
None of the 50 conditions the group looked at — broadly categorized as relating to autoimmune diseases, allergy, and neurodevelopmental disorders — occurred at statistically higher levels than would be expected, ruling out moderate or substantially increased risk from exposure to aluminum in vaccines, a finding senior author Anders Hviid described as “quite striking.”
