New Study Does Not Support Link Between Vaccines and Autism.

Nov. 10--Beaumont residents Mark and Darla Williford can tell you exactly when their infant daughter stopped making eye contact, learning new words and smiling for the camera.

It was shortly after her first birthday, on the day in November 1995 that Laura received four vaccines. That night, she had a fever and was agitated, common side-effects of vaccination. But the next six months were anything but typical: the girl acted strangely, flipping lights on and off, for example, and she would scream and laugh for no reason.

"It looked like she was going insane," said her dad.

In March 1999, Laura was diagnosed with autism, a devastating neurological disorder marked by jerky, repetitive movements, a lack of language skills and social withdrawal. A month after the diagnosis, Mark Williford found a report about a possible link between autism and childhood vaccines that contained a mercury-based preservative. His daughter's vaccines contained the preservative, called thimerosal; her symptoms matched those of mercury poisoning.

"I remember reading the symptoms and a cold chill went up my spine," Williford recalled. "I said, 'This is what's causing it." "

In Texas and around the world, more and more people are becoming convinced that autism can be caused by the vaccines supposed to protect them. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there's no evidence to support the hypothesis, but thousands of parents have joined a worldwide legal campaign to hold pharmaceutical companies liable for injecting infants with a known toxin.

It might sound like ambulance-chasing lawyers and blame-happy parents except for one thing: Autism's exploding these days and no one knows why.

The explosion, a tripling over the last decade, suggests an environmental component that could be explained by increased mercury exposure associated with a rapid increase in vaccinations during the 1990s. The mercury has now been removed from most vaccines, but concern over a possible link to autism has led to congressional hearings, multimillion-dollar studies, and clusters of class-action lawsuits that one of the lawyers says "could be the biggest thing to come down the litigation pipeline ever."

There also have been declining immunization…