KOMU's Ashley Reynolds and her team have been working on the series for the past six months including one local doctor passionate about the topic. In our last installment of the series, Dr. Boyd Haley made serious allegations of a pharmaceutical industry conspiracy to hide the risks of the preservative thimerosal in vaccines. His studies claim autistics have mercury poisoning from thimerosal.

"As a pediatrician I think one of the most important things we can do right after providing clean drinking water is childhood vaccines. I think the data..looking at the data dispassionately says vaccines is not where the problem is," said Dr. Judith Miles.

Dr. Judith Miles of the Thompson Center, one of the best clinics in the nation for families dealing with autism, received a copy of Dr. Haley's studies and offered her response to them. Based upon her facial reaction, it was easy to see Miles emphatically disagreed with the claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism.

"There are two kinds of science in the world. It is very easy to put together should, plausible, sounds like a good story [but] that doesn't make it true," she said.

Dr. Miles had never read through Dr. Haley's study before reading it for KOMU, and after reading it her opinion didn't change.

"We have really gotten to the point where there have literally been scores of thoughtful studies, well-controlled studies and it really doesn't look like the small amounts of mercury in routine childhood vaccines cause autism," Dr. Miles explained.

In fact, Miles did a study of her own. She conducted the research by surveying families. In her study she refers to the Rhogam vaccine, which doctors give most pregnant women at 28 weeks, and its link to children with autism.

"What we found with our study, which was very simple, that there was no increase in the percentage of families who had a child with autism who go thimerosal during their pregnancy," she explained.

Her findings add to the evidence that there is no link between autism and mercury in vaccines.

"That is one more piece of evidence that should reassure parents that it wasn't anything that they were involved in doing to their child that cause that.

"Despite funds coming from Johnson and Johnson, a maker of the Rhogam vaccine, Miles argues the study is unbiased.

"They did not see the results before they were published. They had no interest or request of any sort of insight onto anything that I was doing," she argued. "Their only requirement was if they paid to do the research study, then it had to be published. So it was a very rewarding experience."

Miles believes it's not mercury but genetics that plays a factor in causing autism.

"With 15 percent of children, we can actually come up with a specific gene. When I started doing this we were at four percent. So over the last 15 years many more disorders have been described and we can test for and describe that is what the cause is."

If you've missed any part of our series you can always explore the links in this story, including a link to the "Combating Autism from Within" blog.