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When pregnant women eat foods or take medicines that contain mercury, the mercury can be transferred to the developing fetus through the placenta. Infants can be exposed to mercury through foods, including breast milk, or medicines. Developing fetuses and young children are believed to be more susceptible to mercury exposure than adults because mercury can interfere with the developing nervous system. Guidelines for safe exposure to methylmercury, based on the analysis of cases where people were accidentally exposed to toxic levels of mercury, have been developed by three federal agencies1. Although the three agencies’ guidelines are each slightly different, each leaves a large margin for safety, and exposure to amounts that exceed these guidelines does not mean that the individual has been exposed to toxic levels of mercury. Additionally, it should be noted that, some studies show that ethylmercury (the kind to which thimerosal is metabolized) may be less toxic than methylmercury (the...

Thimerosal is a compound that is 49.6% mercury by weight. Although it is not used in all vaccines (for example, it is not used in measles-mumps-rubella or chickenpox vaccines), it has been part of the manufacture of many vaccines since the 1930s. Thimerosal has been used: to kill the bacteria that make the vaccine itself (e.g., whole cell pertussis vaccine) to kill bacteria that might enter the vaccine during the production process (e.g., influenza vaccine) as a preservative to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination of vaccines during their clinical use. In this case, thimerosal is added at the end of the production process either to the liquid vaccine itself or — in the case of dry powder vaccines — to the liquid used to dilute the vaccine Unless used as a preservative, thimerosal contributes little to the final concentration of thimerosal in vaccine (at most 2 to 3 micrograms of thimerosal per milliliter of vaccine), so the chief concern ha...