Attention News/Health/Assignment Editors:
Biomedical treatments are helping children with autism.
Toronto, Aug. 30 /CNW/ - Cindy Zahoruk wondered why her 3 year old son Michael looked so unhealthy. He had dark circles under his eyes, chronic diarrhea, poor muscle tone and a very low energy level. Michael was also diagnosed with autism.
"We addressed his classic autistic symptoms, such as his difficulty communicating and socializing, with traditional treatments such as speech and behaviour therapy, however my husband and I were convinced there was something more to Michael's problem; something at a more complex, biological level" Zahoruk says.
Recent scientific studies have found that many children with autism suffer from severe gastro-intestinal problems, immune system imbalances, metabolic dysfunction, as well as severe vitamin deficiencies. As a result, many parents like Zahoruk are following a multi-disciplined approach to treating autism after witnessing how effective biomedical treatments can be in correcting many of these underlying problems. Zahoruk adds "We had to travel to the U.S. to see doctors specializing in bio-medical treatments for autism. Michael underwent dozens of medical tests followed by conventional and complementary medical treatments, which dramatically reduced many of his autistic symptoms".
Full article available at: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2005/30/c2394.html
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
NAA and Safe Minds Sponsor Workshop to Discuss Environmental Toxins and Autism
Press Release
For Immediate Release: August 31, 2005
The National Autism Association (NAA) And Safe Minds Sponsor Symposium To Lay Groundwork For Autism Research
The Two-Day Workshop United Top Experts To Discuss Environmental Toxins And Autism
Bethesda, MD - National experts in environmental health sciences and neuroscience came together on Thursday and Friday in Bethesda, Maryland to create a "roadmap" for future research on the role of environmental factors in the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental disorders.
NAA and Safe Minds sponsored the event through a generous donation from The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Both parent-led organizations have long advocated for increased research of the relationship between exposures to toxins such as the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal and the development of neurological disorders.
Autism spectrum disorders were the primary focus of this symposium, but the overall objective was to define a research agenda elucidating the mechanisms by which toxicants may induce neural damage in the developing brain and ways to reverse such damage.
NAA and Safe Minds gathered experts together to present the latest research on heavy metal toxicity, biomedical pathways, epidemiology, clinical treatments, and neurotoxicology. NIEHS presented its current investigations in developmental neurotoxicology and a framework for funding the research.
After the presentations, the researchers set out to create a plan to identify the cause, treatments and cure for autism. The creation of this biomedical research roadmap was moderated by Dr. Ken Olden, immediate past director of NIEHS.
Laura Bono, Chairman of NAA, said, "A united focus is needed to bolster environmental research dollars and treatment options for Autism spectrum disorders which now affect 1 in 166 children with 1 in 6 children suffering from some form of developmental disorder. Recent investigations reveal intriguing data suggesting environmental insults combined with genetic vulnerability may be responsible for this devastating epidemic. The symposium was our first real step in developing biomedical research desperately needed for children suffering with autism and in securing NIH funding for support of such efforts."
A number of non-profit autism and advocacy organizations participated in the event along with officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and Congressional staff representatives.
"Autism groups coming together with important political figures, government officials, scientists and NIH researchers marks a historical moment for the autism community and underscores the critical job of helping the children now," said Jo Pike, Executive Director of NAA. NAA and Safe Minds plan to submit the roadmap to NIH and Congress with specific requests for funding the important research.
For the meeting agenda and a full list of presenters at the NIEHS Symposium, visit www.nationalautismassociation.org/niehsagenda.php
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
For Immediate Release: August 31, 2005
The National Autism Association (NAA) And Safe Minds Sponsor Symposium To Lay Groundwork For Autism Research
The Two-Day Workshop United Top Experts To Discuss Environmental Toxins And Autism
Bethesda, MD - National experts in environmental health sciences and neuroscience came together on Thursday and Friday in Bethesda, Maryland to create a "roadmap" for future research on the role of environmental factors in the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental disorders.
NAA and Safe Minds sponsored the event through a generous donation from The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Both parent-led organizations have long advocated for increased research of the relationship between exposures to toxins such as the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal and the development of neurological disorders.
Autism spectrum disorders were the primary focus of this symposium, but the overall objective was to define a research agenda elucidating the mechanisms by which toxicants may induce neural damage in the developing brain and ways to reverse such damage.
NAA and Safe Minds gathered experts together to present the latest research on heavy metal toxicity, biomedical pathways, epidemiology, clinical treatments, and neurotoxicology. NIEHS presented its current investigations in developmental neurotoxicology and a framework for funding the research.
After the presentations, the researchers set out to create a plan to identify the cause, treatments and cure for autism. The creation of this biomedical research roadmap was moderated by Dr. Ken Olden, immediate past director of NIEHS.
Laura Bono, Chairman of NAA, said, "A united focus is needed to bolster environmental research dollars and treatment options for Autism spectrum disorders which now affect 1 in 166 children with 1 in 6 children suffering from some form of developmental disorder. Recent investigations reveal intriguing data suggesting environmental insults combined with genetic vulnerability may be responsible for this devastating epidemic. The symposium was our first real step in developing biomedical research desperately needed for children suffering with autism and in securing NIH funding for support of such efforts."
A number of non-profit autism and advocacy organizations participated in the event along with officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and Congressional staff representatives.
"Autism groups coming together with important political figures, government officials, scientists and NIH researchers marks a historical moment for the autism community and underscores the critical job of helping the children now," said Jo Pike, Executive Director of NAA. NAA and Safe Minds plan to submit the roadmap to NIH and Congress with specific requests for funding the important research.
For the meeting agenda and a full list of presenters at the NIEHS Symposium, visit www.nationalautismassociation.org/niehsagenda.php
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Parents of austisic child ask for privacy
Saturday, August 27, 2005
By Karen Kane, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The family of a 5-year-old autistic boy who died while receiving a controversial medical treatment touted by some as a cure for the disorder is thanking the community for its sympathy but asking for privacy.
Attorney Frank Botta, of Pittsburgh, said Rufia and Mawra Nadama, the parents of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, "are grieving and they need some time."
In an interview with the Post-Gazette on Wednesday, a day after her son died while receiving an intravenous chelation therapy in a Butler County doctor's office, Mawra Nadama said she was not ready to blame the therapy for her son's death and wanted to wait for autopsy results before drawing any conclusions.
Botta said the Nadamas are continuing their wait-and-see approach. Rufia Nadama is a medical doctor.
Read full article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05239/561077.stm
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
By Karen Kane, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The family of a 5-year-old autistic boy who died while receiving a controversial medical treatment touted by some as a cure for the disorder is thanking the community for its sympathy but asking for privacy.
Attorney Frank Botta, of Pittsburgh, said Rufia and Mawra Nadama, the parents of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, "are grieving and they need some time."
In an interview with the Post-Gazette on Wednesday, a day after her son died while receiving an intravenous chelation therapy in a Butler County doctor's office, Mawra Nadama said she was not ready to blame the therapy for her son's death and wanted to wait for autopsy results before drawing any conclusions.
Botta said the Nadamas are continuing their wait-and-see approach. Rufia Nadama is a medical doctor.
Read full article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05239/561077.stm
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Recent Handcuffing Of 5-Year Old Black Girl Was Not A Violation
Recent Handcuffing Of 5-Year Old Black Girl Was Not A Violation
By Mitch Stacy, Associated Press
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - Police officers committed an error of judgment when they handcuffed an unruly kindergartner at school in March but did not violate policy, the department's chief said Thursday.
Chief Chuck Harmon said the two officers who handcuffed the 5-year-old girl were reprimanded for minor errors in handling the situation, which gained worldwide attention when a videotape of the confrontation was released to broadcasters.
But Harmon said the officers were not punished for shackling the child, who had torn up a classroom and hit an assistant principal before the officers arrived.
Read full article at: http://www.blacknews.com/pr/handcuffing101.html
For information and resources on autism, please visit:
www.AutismConcepts.com
By Mitch Stacy, Associated Press
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - Police officers committed an error of judgment when they handcuffed an unruly kindergartner at school in March but did not violate policy, the department's chief said Thursday.
Chief Chuck Harmon said the two officers who handcuffed the 5-year-old girl were reprimanded for minor errors in handling the situation, which gained worldwide attention when a videotape of the confrontation was released to broadcasters.
But Harmon said the officers were not punished for shackling the child, who had torn up a classroom and hit an assistant principal before the officers arrived.
Read full article at: http://www.blacknews.com/pr/handcuffing101.html
For information and resources on autism, please visit:
www.AutismConcepts.com
Friday, August 26, 2005
Gender hormones may lend to social disorder therapies
By WTN News
08/24/05
Madison, Wis. -- Gender politics aside, every biologist knows that men and women truly are different.
Social disorders such as autism constitute one area where those differences come to the fore: around 80 percent of all autism cases, for example, occur in men. Social play behaviors also differ greatly between the sexes - just about everyone agrees that young boys play "rougher" than girls.
Early in human development, critical brain proteins known as steroid receptors lay most of the groundwork for ensuing sexual destinies. The receptors bind to hormones such as testosterone and estrogen and set in motion gender blueprints for a lifetime.
To understand why autistic children have trouble engaging in social interactions, researchers have long observed "rough-and-tumble" play - the propensity to bite, wrestle or pounce - in juvenile rats. Scientists were convinced that testosterone solely dictated the onset of such behavior.
But researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now made the surprising finding that estrogen-and even dopamine, a neurotransmitter-also play critical roles. The work, which appeared online Aug. 16 in the journal Endocrinology, can one day help to diagnose new autism cases and can potentially pave the way for new hormone-based therapeutic approaches that counteract the social difficulties of autism, says senior author Anthony Auger, an assistant professor of psychology.
Read full article at: http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=2159
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
08/24/05
Madison, Wis. -- Gender politics aside, every biologist knows that men and women truly are different.
Social disorders such as autism constitute one area where those differences come to the fore: around 80 percent of all autism cases, for example, occur in men. Social play behaviors also differ greatly between the sexes - just about everyone agrees that young boys play "rougher" than girls.
Early in human development, critical brain proteins known as steroid receptors lay most of the groundwork for ensuing sexual destinies. The receptors bind to hormones such as testosterone and estrogen and set in motion gender blueprints for a lifetime.
To understand why autistic children have trouble engaging in social interactions, researchers have long observed "rough-and-tumble" play - the propensity to bite, wrestle or pounce - in juvenile rats. Scientists were convinced that testosterone solely dictated the onset of such behavior.
But researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now made the surprising finding that estrogen-and even dopamine, a neurotransmitter-also play critical roles. The work, which appeared online Aug. 16 in the journal Endocrinology, can one day help to diagnose new autism cases and can potentially pave the way for new hormone-based therapeutic approaches that counteract the social difficulties of autism, says senior author Anthony Auger, an assistant professor of psychology.
Read full article at: http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=2159
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Foundation Launches Database To Link Thimerosal And Autism
Orlando, Fla. - The Alexis Foundation launched a national database to research the connection between thimerosal and autism. This nonprofit organization, which was founded by parents with autistic children and related disabilities, is using information in the database to explain why some children received more doses of thimerosal than others.
Thimerosal, which contains 49.6 percent ethylmercury, is believed to be the cause of autism. Ethylmercury is a highly toxic neurotoxin. The symptoms of autism and the symptoms of mercury poisoning are identical.
Prior to 1986, children received a total maximum dose of 100 micrograms of ethylmercury in the first two years of life. By 1991, this dose was up to 246 micrograms of ethylmercury in the first two years of life, an increase of 147 percent. This increase came from the introduction of the Haemophilus Influenza Type B (Hib) and the Hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccines. Both vaccines contain thimerosal.
Despite its known neurotoxicity and its use in children, thimerosal has not been tested for safety. The Mercury-Free Act of 2004 introduced by U.S. Representatives Dave Weldon, MD (R-FL) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) would reduce human exposure to mercury through vaccines. It has yet to pass.
The Alexis Foundation is asking for assistance of families living with autism to forward their child's vaccine information to help research the link between autism and thimerosal. The foundation will use this information to find out if mistakes were made during the manufacturing process and to determine if incorrect amounts of thimerosal were combined in childhood vaccines. This database could also show if thimerosal is currently being used as a preservative in childhood vaccines.
For additional information and to input vaccine information please visit http://www.alexisfoundation.org/ or e-mail admin@alexidsfoundation.org.
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Thimerosal, which contains 49.6 percent ethylmercury, is believed to be the cause of autism. Ethylmercury is a highly toxic neurotoxin. The symptoms of autism and the symptoms of mercury poisoning are identical.
Prior to 1986, children received a total maximum dose of 100 micrograms of ethylmercury in the first two years of life. By 1991, this dose was up to 246 micrograms of ethylmercury in the first two years of life, an increase of 147 percent. This increase came from the introduction of the Haemophilus Influenza Type B (Hib) and the Hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccines. Both vaccines contain thimerosal.
Despite its known neurotoxicity and its use in children, thimerosal has not been tested for safety. The Mercury-Free Act of 2004 introduced by U.S. Representatives Dave Weldon, MD (R-FL) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) would reduce human exposure to mercury through vaccines. It has yet to pass.
The Alexis Foundation is asking for assistance of families living with autism to forward their child's vaccine information to help research the link between autism and thimerosal. The foundation will use this information to find out if mistakes were made during the manufacturing process and to determine if incorrect amounts of thimerosal were combined in childhood vaccines. This database could also show if thimerosal is currently being used as a preservative in childhood vaccines.
For additional information and to input vaccine information please visit http://www.alexisfoundation.org/ or e-mail admin@alexidsfoundation.org.
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Bridging Autism's Distance
Parents are turning to alternative interventions such as metal-stripping drugs, antioxidants and special diets to help their children, but experts say the costly approaches are unproven.
Anne Hart
912.652.0374
When your son flaps his arms repetitively, walks in circles on tiptoes, rocks back and forth, doesn't make eye contact or say a word at 20 months old, it's hard to listen to pediatricians who tell you to be patient.
Or to specialists who say there's no medical treatment except intensive behavioral therapy; then, as the child grows older, psychiatric drugs.
That's why many parents of children with autism, a complex developmental disorder that impairs ability to communicate and socialize, are sinking big bucks in alternative, sometimes risky, unproven medical treatments. They say such interventions are saving their children.
Full article available at:
http://www.savannahnow.com/stories/082005/3236229.shtml
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Anne Hart
912.652.0374
When your son flaps his arms repetitively, walks in circles on tiptoes, rocks back and forth, doesn't make eye contact or say a word at 20 months old, it's hard to listen to pediatricians who tell you to be patient.
Or to specialists who say there's no medical treatment except intensive behavioral therapy; then, as the child grows older, psychiatric drugs.
That's why many parents of children with autism, a complex developmental disorder that impairs ability to communicate and socialize, are sinking big bucks in alternative, sometimes risky, unproven medical treatments. They say such interventions are saving their children.
Full article available at:
http://www.savannahnow.com/stories/082005/3236229.shtml
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Chelation therapy has critics, champions
Reports of success have caused a surge in the use to treat autistic children Friday, August 26, 2005
By Virginia Linn, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
For autism scientists, the growing popularity of chelation therapy is reopening a heated and frustrating debate on the origins of the condition.
Chelation (pronounced key-LAY-shun) has been used for decades to detoxify people with dangerous levels of heavy metals. With the standard treatment, a synthetic amino acid called EDTA latches onto heavy metals so they can be excreted with the urine.
Since the late 1990s, chelation has emerged as a treatment to address metal toxicity in autism patients.
Read full article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05238/560376.stm
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
By Virginia Linn, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
For autism scientists, the growing popularity of chelation therapy is reopening a heated and frustrating debate on the origins of the condition.
Chelation (pronounced key-LAY-shun) has been used for decades to detoxify people with dangerous levels of heavy metals. With the standard treatment, a synthetic amino acid called EDTA latches onto heavy metals so they can be excreted with the urine.
Since the late 1990s, chelation has emerged as a treatment to address metal toxicity in autism patients.
Read full article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05238/560376.stm
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Autistic boy dies during controversial treatment
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
By Karen Kane and Virginia Linn, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A 5-year-old Monroeville boy died this week during a medical treatment that's being touted by some as a cure for autism.
The autistic boy died while receiving chelation -- an intravenous injection of a synthetic amino acid known as EDTA, for ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the practice only to treat heavy metal (such as lead) poisoning. The treatment is becoming increasingly popular, though still controversial, for autism.
Police are investigating the boy's death, which occurred Tuesday morning in the office of Dr. Roy Kerry in Portersville. Kerry did not return calls today.
Read full article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05236/559444.stm
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
By Karen Kane and Virginia Linn, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A 5-year-old Monroeville boy died this week during a medical treatment that's being touted by some as a cure for autism.
The autistic boy died while receiving chelation -- an intravenous injection of a synthetic amino acid known as EDTA, for ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the practice only to treat heavy metal (such as lead) poisoning. The treatment is becoming increasingly popular, though still controversial, for autism.
Police are investigating the boy's death, which occurred Tuesday morning in the office of Dr. Roy Kerry in Portersville. Kerry did not return calls today.
Read full article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05236/559444.stm
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
August 24 DC Protest - Why Are Atypical Drug Users Mad?
We now know that atypical antipsychotics are responsible for a high incidence of diabetes, stroke, endocrine, cardiac problems and movement disorders. In recent years, drug makers have been forced to admit to misleading the FDA, physicians, and consumers about the deadly side effects of these drugs. But they are still routinely prescribed to patients of all ages, including children and the elderly.
April 12, 2005 The New York Times reported that the FDA will now require Black Box warnings about the increased risk of death on the labels of some of the most aggressively marketed, hence widely prescribed drugs such as Zyprexa (Eli Lilly) Risperdal (Johnson &Johnson) Abilify (Bristol-Myers Squibb), Clozril(Novartis), Geodon (Pfizer).
On July 24, 2004, the Miami Herald reported that the maker of Risperdal "has acknowledged misleading doctors and other healthcare providers about the safety of the product, minimizing potentially deadly side effects."
"Risperdal is the leading drug used to combat schizophrenia and other types of psychotic disorders, earning Janssen about $2.1 billion in annual sales, "the Herald wrote, "The drug was first marketed about eight years ago, and is prescribed to more than 10 million people worldwide."
The worst part of this tragedy, is that atypicals are not even effective. One review of 52 studies involving 12,649 patients published in the December 2000 British Journal of Psychiatry reported: "There is no clear evidence that the atypical antipsychotics are more effective or better tolerated than conventional antipsychotics."
While the health and drug control agencies of Japan and Great Britain issued warnings against the drug Zyprexa in 2002, the FDA continued to allow its sale and distribution until September 2003, before it finally required a warning label on the drug.
The FDA made all atypicals carry the same warning label even though the risk of diabetes with Zyprexa was 37% higher than with the other atypicals.
In February 2004, the American Diabetes Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity published a joint statement confirming the association between Zyprexa and diabetes.
An independent researcher, Dr David Healy, studied FDA raw data on Zyprexa and concluded that it was among "the deadliest drugs ever to gain FDA approval."
Yet, despite all the warnings of adverse affects and lack of effectiveness, atypicals are being prescribed for patients in record numbers including children. On April 25, 2005, the Ohio Columbus Dispatch reported an investigation of state Medicaid records that found 18 newborn to 3 years-old babies in Ohio had been prescribed antipsychotic drugs in July 2004.
According to CBS.marketwatch.com on February 7, 2005, atypical Zyprexa, earned Eli Lilly $4.4 billion in 2004. A considerable amount when compared to Lilly's $13 billion total net sales in 2004. The global giant also produces other psychiatric drugs such as Prozac, Strattera, and Symbyax.
In 2003, Zyprexa became Lilly's top seller with worldwide sales of over $4 billion. According to The New York Times, 70% of the Zyprexa purchased in the US in 2003 was paid for by government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
The state of New York's $4-billion-a-year bill for drugs covered by Medicaid is the biggest in the nation. In the first 10 months of 2003, the state spent $205 million on Zyprexa alone, far more than for any other one drug.
The state of California spent over $500 million on the Atypicals Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroqual in 2003.
In a New York Times Article entitled Leading Drugs for Psychosis Come Under New Scrutiny, Erica Goode reports a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs which found that Zyprexa cost the VA $3,000 to $9,000 more per patient each year than conventional drugs, with no benefit to symptoms, side effects or overall quality of life.
Today, a month's supply of Zyprexa is 10-30 times more expensive than a month's supply of a conventional antipsychotic, according to Leonard Roy Frank, author of Zyprexa: A Prescription for Diabetes, Disease and Early Death, in the August 2005 Edition of Street Spirit.
Its rather ironic, that in the same year that the FDA got around to forcing the company to warn of the drug's link to diabetes, Lilly's second most profitable line of products was drugs used to treat diabetes, which grossed $2.51 billion in 2003.
The profits from the sale of these drugs are not being spent on research and development, they in large part go for marketing and salaries for top executives. A report by the non-profit group Families USA, showed that in 2001, former CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Charles Heimbold Jr, received $74,890,918, not counting his $76,095,611 worth of unexercised stock options, and the chairman of Wyeth raked in $40,521,011, plus $40,629,459 in stock options.
Eli Lilly is currently under fire from the FDA, state attorneys general, doctors, and consumers, with complaints about Zyprexa.
On August 3, 2005, Reuter's News reported that Lilly had received a subpoena from the Florida attorney general's office seeking documents on Medicaid-related sales of Zyprexa and Lilly's marketing of the drug.
In a regulatory filing, the drug maker said it had received the subpoena in June 2005 from the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and said it was possible that other Lilly products could become subject to the investigation and that the investigation could lead to criminal charges, fines or penalties against the company.
The Florida investigation comes amid a continuing investigation by the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania into the company's marketing and promotion of Zyprexa and Prozac in that state. That investigation was initiated in March 2004.
In another turn of events in June 2005, Lilly agreed to pay $690 million to settle lawsuits filed by approximately 8000 Zyprexa patients who alleged they had not been warned the drug might increase the risk of diabetes.
"More than 2,500 other claimants refused to participate in the settlement, presumably in the belief that the amount received by each claimant, $62,500 on average, was insufficient compensation for the pain and suffering Zyprexa caused them," according to Leonard Roy Frank, author of Zyprexa: A Prescription for Diabetes, Disease and Early Death, August 2005 edition of Street Spirit.
One of the litigants, Ellen Liversridge, who's son died at age 39 due to the adverse affects of Zyprexa, states, "both the FDA and Lilly fought putting a warning on the label, but thorough articles on the front pages of the Baltimore Sun, Wall St. Journal, and New York Times so embarrassed the FDA that they finally gave in to warnings."
"Rob was a peaceful, funny, brilliant man who battled manic depression with grace and dignity," said hismother, "he deserved the best."
She tells how her son "gained almost 100 pounds on Zyprexa, back before there was a warning on the label."
"Rob felt "funny" one Sunday morning," Ellen relates,"but his symptoms weren't psychiatric and, to mysorrow, I didn't take him to the ER."
"By Tuesday," she said, "he had fallen into a coma from which he never came out." Rob remained in a coma for four days and "died Saturday, October 5, 2002, of profound hyperglycemia."
"Rob didn't deserve to be killed by a drug carrying a lethal bomb that we knew nothing about" Ellen said,"He didn't deserve to become another Eli Lilly statistic."
"And we, his family, don't deserve to carry the pain that never goes away," she added.
Ellen will be the DC protest, "I have a strong sense of justice as well as retribution," she said, "I plan to use these things in whatever way I can, in his memory."
Deceptive Marketing & Promotion
Award winning journalist Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, investigated the industry's marketing strategy of the atypicals and found biased reviews and deceptive reporting to be prominent in the promotion of the drugs. Via the Freedom of Information Act he gained access to FDA raw data on the drug trials and learned that the FDA's review of the trials did not support industry claims that the atypicals were safer or more effective than existing generic drugs.
Marcia Angell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also a physician, former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and the author of the book, The Truth About the Drug Companies.
According to Marcia the industry is "primarily a marketing machine" to sell drugs of dubious benefit and uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. "Most of its marketing efforts are focused on influencing doctors, since they must write the prescriptions," she noted.
And its obviously working. A study released in August 2004, noted that 41% of prescriptions for 765,423 people over age 65 were for psychotropic medications.(L Curtis et al), Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol164, pp 1621-1625 (2004). Even though a recent analysis by the FDA noted that elderly patients using Zyprexa had "a higher chance for death than patients who did not take the medicine," and older persons have suffered strokes when taking Risperdal.
A May, 2004 report by the New York Times, explained how drug companies were using new strategies to capture the Medicaid and Medicare markets that involved a "focus on a much smaller group of customers: state officials who oversee treatment for many people with serious mental illness. Those patients -- in mental hospitals, at mental health clinics and on Medicaid -- make states among the largest buyers of anti-psychotic drugs," the report noted.
Prime examples of this trend, include Ohio Mental Health Director, Michael Hogan, and California Director, Stephen Mayberg. Both control mental health services in their respective states, and both are members of a Janssen advisory board.
Hogan has proven to be so useful that Eli Lilly has given him a "Lifetime Achievement Award." In granting the award it was noted that Hogan had given over 75 presentations at conferences and according to ace records researcher, Sue Weibert, every conference she tracked down that featured Hogan, was sponsored by drug companies, and the group that organized the conference solicited money from pharma to pay the keynote speaker.
The particular scheme has become so blatant, that it is finally being investigated. On June 10, 2005, Senators Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus issued a Press Release that said they have asked a number of large drug makers to explain a marketing practice where the companies give money to state governments and other organizations in the form of grants.
A request was sent to the following drug makers: Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, Eisai, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Schering-Plough Corporation, Hoffman-LaRoche, Forest Pharmaceuticals, Abbott Laboratories, Genentech, Biogen Idec, Genzyme Corporation, Chiron Corporation, Serono, and TAP Pharmaceutical Products.
The Senators said their inquiry is based on reports that some companies have awarded these grants to health care providers as inducements to prescribe medications the companies produce. In other cases, such grants to state agencies may have prompted those agencies to develop programs leading to over-medication of patients at the expense of patient health or to unnecessary expense for taxpayers.
"We need to know how this behind-the-scenes funneling of money is influencing decision makers," Grassley said, "The decisions result in the government spending billions of dollars on drugs. The tactics look aggressive, and the response on behalf of the public needs to be just as vigorous."
In addition to influencing and corrupting state officials, drug makers have infiltrated the nation's health care facilities and gained influence over prescribing physicians who engage in the practice of over-medicating patients.
For instance, they have set up schemes to funnel profits through senior citizens in nursing homes. Researcher have found that 75% of long-term care elderly residents receive psychotropic medications. (DFisk et al), Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol 163, pp 2716-2724 (2003).
Child advocates say kids are being over-medicated in state run foster care systems. The children go into the system neurologically normal but leave neurologically damaged, Austin psychologist and author, John Breeding said.
"Children are not just placed on one drug. Typically, they're placed on two or three or we've seen literally up to 17 different drugs for the same child in foster care," he reports.
In 2001, The Miami Herald published a series of stories about the common use of Risperdal among children in state care. Child-welfare advocates said the drug routinely was being used by foster care providers.
In April 2001, Broward lawyer and child advocate Andrea Moore told Florida Department of Children & Families administrators that a large number of children in foster care were being given Risperdal -- an antipsychotic drug a UCLA child psychiatrist describes as among the "big guns'' of psychiatric medications.
At that time, Florida officials confirmed that thousands of children, including toddlers, were being prescribed psychiatric drugs, from Ritalin to powerful drugs like Risperdal and Haldol.
''I had clients who were displaying severe side effects, and I tried to alert the Department of Children & Families both as to the local problem and the growing national concern about a range of psychotropic medications, Risperdal and other antipsychotics in particular,'' said Coral Springs attorney and children's advocate Andrea Moore.
A prime example of bribing doctors in state institutions was unearthed in Massachusetts where doctors were found to have changed the medication of four patients for non-medical reasons. A Boston Globe article published on November 10, 2003 reported that the patients were switched to the atypical Risperdal, without consent or medical necessity, to make them eligible for a drug trial sponsored by drug company Janssen, maker of Risperdal.
When other staff members complained, a state agencyinvestigated the matter and the drug trial wasstopped. All state hospital doctors were required to undergo re-certification in the ethics of medical research and the facility's director, Dr Douglas Hughes, resigned after it was revealed that he had received $30,000 in speaker's fees from Janssen in 2003.
The current prices for a month's supply of the top 3 antipsychotics are: Risperdal $342; Seroquel $414; and Zyprexa $572
Because these drugs are the most expensive on the market, and are so often paid for by the government, the rampant over-prescribing of these medications is bankrupting state Medicaid programs all over the country. (for reports on Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and more information go to http://www.ahrp.org/)
According to the May 8, 2005 issue of Lab Business Week, a new analysis by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reveals that Medicaid is now the largest single payer of mental health services, exceeding private insurance, Medicare, or other state and local spending. The report notes that one out of every $5 spent on mental health care now goes for psychotropic drugs.
Pennsylvania Under Fire
In addition to an investigation by the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania into Eli Lilly's marketing and promotion of Zyprexa and Prozac in that state, two former state investigators are diligently working to expose the industry's corruption of state institutions.
According to former investigator turned whistleblower, Allan Jones, PA taxpayers are saddled with an expensive drug treatment model known as PennMap, for the treatment of mentally ill persons in state care.
"This model is part of a large pharmaceutical marketing scheme designed to infiltrate institutions and influence treatment practices," he explains, "Pennsylvania is paying tens of millions of dollars for patented drugs that have no proven advantage over cheaper generic drugs."
As part of the overall scheme, on July 27, 2001, Tom Ridge appointed Gerald Radke, an Eli Lilly Marketing Director, to head the PA Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. With Radke at the helm, PA Medicaid funded sales of Lilly's Zyprexa rose from approximately $26.5 million in 2000 to $34.2 million in 2001, and reached $39.2 million in 2003. In state hospitals, hundreds of patients had their medications switched in the absence of medical need or indication, to comply with administrative decisions.
In 2003, there was a total of $139 million in public spending on just two classes of drugs, SSRI antidepressants and atypical antipsychotics. "A large portion of these dollars were spent to maintain children on these drugs," Allen reports, "despite the fact that they have not been proven effective in children and the FDA has not approved them for use in children."
"My best effort at correlating dollars spent with deaths from drug side effects suggests that people may be dying from side effects from the schizophrenia drugs alone at the rate of at least one death for each one million dollars spent on these drugs," Allen said."The actual numbers may reflect a much higher death rate," he added.
On July 1, 2004, another former PA investigator, Dr Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard psychiatrist/screenwriter-turned-activist, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, filed suit against six major pharmaceutical companies after discovering that PA children and adults were being abused and defiled by excessive psychiatric drugs and hazardous psychiatric inpatient environments.
People are being drugged for profit in state institutions in PA. While PennMap was being implemented, Stefan was a psychiatric consultant for the Department of Health and Human Services, in charge of the mental health programs and found that some patients were on as many as five neuroleptic psychiatric drugs at the same time.
Stefan also discovered corrupt financial relationships between PA politicians and pharmaceutical representatives, fraudulent medication billings to the government, and that four children and one adult died while under the state's care, after they were prescribed lethal combinations of anti-psychotic drugs under the PennMap model.
According to Stefan, the new generation of antipsychotics substantially increase the risk of obesity, diabetes type II, hypertension, cardiovascular complications, heart attacks and stroke. The drug makers had this information and "simply ignored the problem," he said.
"So, what we have now is a drug, Zyprexa, whose massive revenues and promotion are based upon faulty disclosures by the manufacturer, Eli Lilly," Stefan advises, "the drug causes both a severe metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular problems at the same time that it continues to cause neurological side-effects like its older 'typical' antipsychotics."
It does have a decided advantage for Lilly, Stefan contends, "It is far more expensive, dose per dose, than a comparable 'generic' antipsychotic." A dose of haloperidol might sell for 6 pennies while Zyprexa might sell for over 6 dollars per pill, he said.
Stefan, is also Board certified in adult, adolescent, geriatric and addiction psychiatry and he and Allen Jones will both be attending the DC protest.
Unreported Trials and Studies
Based on the results of a six-week clinical trial sponsored by Lilly, the FDA granted the company approval to manufacture and distribute Zyprexa in September of 1996 for the treatment of adult schizophrenics. The trial leading up to approval involved 2,500 people, and two-thirds of the participants didn't even complete the trial.
Among those who stuck it out, 22% of the Zyprexa subjects suffered a "serious" adverse effect, compared to 18% in the group taking Haldol, according to Leonard Roy Frank, author of Zyprexa: A Prescription for Diabetes, Disease and Early Death, August 2005 Edition of Street Spirit.
same year, FDA data obtained by Robert Whitaker, under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed Zyprexa's adverse effects to include: cardiac abnormalities and hypotension 10% to 15%; Parkinson-like motor impairment 11.7%; unbearable restlessness (akathisia) 7.3%; and acute weight gain (50%) increasing the risk of diabetes.
The data also disclosed a participant drop-out rate during 6-week clinical trials of 65%. In a one year trial, the drop out rate rose to 83%.
reviewers found an average weight gain of almost one pound a week for subjects during the six-week trial, and a 26 pound increase for Zyprexa patients who remained in the trial for a year. Other side effects included shaking, spasms, sedation, diabetic complications, rapid heartbeat, restlessness, constipation, seizures, liver problems, white blood cell disorders, decreased blood pressure; and neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which is potentially fatal.
There were also 20 deaths, including 12 suicides, in the Zyprexa group. "Shockingly, these deaths went unreported in the scientific literature," Leonard Frank said, "The death cover-ups also took place in reporting trial results of several other atypicals during the 1990s."
In his book, Mad In America, Robert Whitaker, reported that one in every 145 subjects who entered the trials for Zyprexa, Risperdal, Seroquel, and Serdolect had died.
Despite these severe known side effects, children between the ages of 6 to 11 were recruited for a clinical trial conducted at the University of California Los Angeles soon after Zyprexa was approved for adults. The children were not schizophrenic, but were diagnosed with other disorders. According to the published report on the research, all of the children experienced adverse effects and none were helped. The study was terminated less than 6 weeks after it began. Yet to this day, doctors continue to regularly prescribe atypicals to children even though they have never been FDA approved for treatment of any illness with children.
In 2002, P Murali Doraiswamy, the chief of biological psychiatry at Duke University, conducted a review of adverse events reported to the FDA by Zyprexa patients and found:
Of the 289 cases of diabetes linked to Zyprexa, 225 were newly diagnosed cases. One hundred patients developed ketosis (a serious complication of diabetes), and 22 people developed pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas, which is a life-threatening condition. There were 23 deaths, including that of a 15-year-old adolescent who died of necrotizing pancreatitis. Pharmacotherapy, July 2002.
Persons on atypicals have been found to commit suicide at rates two to five times more frequently than schizophrenics in general. According to Bob Whitaker, "researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the introduction of the atypical antipsychotics, the death rate among people with schizophrenia has doubled."
In an interview this month with Street Spirit, he said, "They have done death rates of people treated with standard neuroleptics and then they compare that with death rates of people treated with atypical antipsychotics, and it doubles. It doubles! It didn'treduce harm. In fact, in their seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died."
The industry routinely hides negative results of studies. "We do not know the results of the clinical trials they sponsor-only those they choose to make public, which tend to be the most favorable findings," Marcia Angell advises.
The problem with the FDA is the fact that it is practically owned by the industry that it is supposed to regulate. In recent years, nearly half of the agency's $400 million annual budget has been paid for by drug companies. This arrangement stems from a 1992 agreement, made partly at the urging of AIDS activists, that the FDA would speed up approvals in exchange for "user fees" from industry, according to the May-June 2005 issue of Mother Jones Magazine.
According to the September 9, 2004 Washington Post, because of the industry's pattern of hiding research that shows adverse affects, medical journals are taking matters into their own hands. The Post reported that a dozen editors of prestigious medical journals jointly announced they will refuse to publish drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies unless the studies are registered in a public database from the outset -- a step designed to ferret out unpublished studies that find medications to be ineffective or dangerous.
The initiative creates a potent incentive for companies to register their drug trials and to give physicians and the public a window on unfavorable studies that companies routinely suppress, the Post wrote. The new requirement calls on companies to register their trials well before anyone knows whether a study will turn out positive.
Journal of the American Medical Association, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of Medicine and several otherinternational publications have signed on to , and their editors hope that more will join in, the WSJ reported.
Pringleepringle05@yahoo.com
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent MediaTV and an investigative journalist focused on exposinggovernment corruption)
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
April 12, 2005 The New York Times reported that the FDA will now require Black Box warnings about the increased risk of death on the labels of some of the most aggressively marketed, hence widely prescribed drugs such as Zyprexa (Eli Lilly) Risperdal (Johnson &Johnson) Abilify (Bristol-Myers Squibb), Clozril(Novartis), Geodon (Pfizer).
On July 24, 2004, the Miami Herald reported that the maker of Risperdal "has acknowledged misleading doctors and other healthcare providers about the safety of the product, minimizing potentially deadly side effects."
"Risperdal is the leading drug used to combat schizophrenia and other types of psychotic disorders, earning Janssen about $2.1 billion in annual sales, "the Herald wrote, "The drug was first marketed about eight years ago, and is prescribed to more than 10 million people worldwide."
The worst part of this tragedy, is that atypicals are not even effective. One review of 52 studies involving 12,649 patients published in the December 2000 British Journal of Psychiatry reported: "There is no clear evidence that the atypical antipsychotics are more effective or better tolerated than conventional antipsychotics."
While the health and drug control agencies of Japan and Great Britain issued warnings against the drug Zyprexa in 2002, the FDA continued to allow its sale and distribution until September 2003, before it finally required a warning label on the drug.
The FDA made all atypicals carry the same warning label even though the risk of diabetes with Zyprexa was 37% higher than with the other atypicals.
In February 2004, the American Diabetes Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity published a joint statement confirming the association between Zyprexa and diabetes.
An independent researcher, Dr David Healy, studied FDA raw data on Zyprexa and concluded that it was among "the deadliest drugs ever to gain FDA approval."
Yet, despite all the warnings of adverse affects and lack of effectiveness, atypicals are being prescribed for patients in record numbers including children. On April 25, 2005, the Ohio Columbus Dispatch reported an investigation of state Medicaid records that found 18 newborn to 3 years-old babies in Ohio had been prescribed antipsychotic drugs in July 2004.
According to CBS.marketwatch.com on February 7, 2005, atypical Zyprexa, earned Eli Lilly $4.4 billion in 2004. A considerable amount when compared to Lilly's $13 billion total net sales in 2004. The global giant also produces other psychiatric drugs such as Prozac, Strattera, and Symbyax.
In 2003, Zyprexa became Lilly's top seller with worldwide sales of over $4 billion. According to The New York Times, 70% of the Zyprexa purchased in the US in 2003 was paid for by government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
The state of New York's $4-billion-a-year bill for drugs covered by Medicaid is the biggest in the nation. In the first 10 months of 2003, the state spent $205 million on Zyprexa alone, far more than for any other one drug.
The state of California spent over $500 million on the Atypicals Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroqual in 2003.
In a New York Times Article entitled Leading Drugs for Psychosis Come Under New Scrutiny, Erica Goode reports a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs which found that Zyprexa cost the VA $3,000 to $9,000 more per patient each year than conventional drugs, with no benefit to symptoms, side effects or overall quality of life.
Today, a month's supply of Zyprexa is 10-30 times more expensive than a month's supply of a conventional antipsychotic, according to Leonard Roy Frank, author of Zyprexa: A Prescription for Diabetes, Disease and Early Death, in the August 2005 Edition of Street Spirit.
Its rather ironic, that in the same year that the FDA got around to forcing the company to warn of the drug's link to diabetes, Lilly's second most profitable line of products was drugs used to treat diabetes, which grossed $2.51 billion in 2003.
The profits from the sale of these drugs are not being spent on research and development, they in large part go for marketing and salaries for top executives. A report by the non-profit group Families USA, showed that in 2001, former CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Charles Heimbold Jr, received $74,890,918, not counting his $76,095,611 worth of unexercised stock options, and the chairman of Wyeth raked in $40,521,011, plus $40,629,459 in stock options.
Eli Lilly is currently under fire from the FDA, state attorneys general, doctors, and consumers, with complaints about Zyprexa.
On August 3, 2005, Reuter's News reported that Lilly had received a subpoena from the Florida attorney general's office seeking documents on Medicaid-related sales of Zyprexa and Lilly's marketing of the drug.
In a regulatory filing, the drug maker said it had received the subpoena in June 2005 from the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and said it was possible that other Lilly products could become subject to the investigation and that the investigation could lead to criminal charges, fines or penalties against the company.
The Florida investigation comes amid a continuing investigation by the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania into the company's marketing and promotion of Zyprexa and Prozac in that state. That investigation was initiated in March 2004.
In another turn of events in June 2005, Lilly agreed to pay $690 million to settle lawsuits filed by approximately 8000 Zyprexa patients who alleged they had not been warned the drug might increase the risk of diabetes.
"More than 2,500 other claimants refused to participate in the settlement, presumably in the belief that the amount received by each claimant, $62,500 on average, was insufficient compensation for the pain and suffering Zyprexa caused them," according to Leonard Roy Frank, author of Zyprexa: A Prescription for Diabetes, Disease and Early Death, August 2005 edition of Street Spirit.
One of the litigants, Ellen Liversridge, who's son died at age 39 due to the adverse affects of Zyprexa, states, "both the FDA and Lilly fought putting a warning on the label, but thorough articles on the front pages of the Baltimore Sun, Wall St. Journal, and New York Times so embarrassed the FDA that they finally gave in to warnings."
"Rob was a peaceful, funny, brilliant man who battled manic depression with grace and dignity," said hismother, "he deserved the best."
She tells how her son "gained almost 100 pounds on Zyprexa, back before there was a warning on the label."
"Rob felt "funny" one Sunday morning," Ellen relates,"but his symptoms weren't psychiatric and, to mysorrow, I didn't take him to the ER."
"By Tuesday," she said, "he had fallen into a coma from which he never came out." Rob remained in a coma for four days and "died Saturday, October 5, 2002, of profound hyperglycemia."
"Rob didn't deserve to be killed by a drug carrying a lethal bomb that we knew nothing about" Ellen said,"He didn't deserve to become another Eli Lilly statistic."
"And we, his family, don't deserve to carry the pain that never goes away," she added.
Ellen will be the DC protest, "I have a strong sense of justice as well as retribution," she said, "I plan to use these things in whatever way I can, in his memory."
Deceptive Marketing & Promotion
Award winning journalist Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, investigated the industry's marketing strategy of the atypicals and found biased reviews and deceptive reporting to be prominent in the promotion of the drugs. Via the Freedom of Information Act he gained access to FDA raw data on the drug trials and learned that the FDA's review of the trials did not support industry claims that the atypicals were safer or more effective than existing generic drugs.
Marcia Angell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also a physician, former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and the author of the book, The Truth About the Drug Companies.
According to Marcia the industry is "primarily a marketing machine" to sell drugs of dubious benefit and uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. "Most of its marketing efforts are focused on influencing doctors, since they must write the prescriptions," she noted.
And its obviously working. A study released in August 2004, noted that 41% of prescriptions for 765,423 people over age 65 were for psychotropic medications.(L Curtis et al), Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol164, pp 1621-1625 (2004). Even though a recent analysis by the FDA noted that elderly patients using Zyprexa had "a higher chance for death than patients who did not take the medicine," and older persons have suffered strokes when taking Risperdal.
A May, 2004 report by the New York Times, explained how drug companies were using new strategies to capture the Medicaid and Medicare markets that involved a "focus on a much smaller group of customers: state officials who oversee treatment for many people with serious mental illness. Those patients -- in mental hospitals, at mental health clinics and on Medicaid -- make states among the largest buyers of anti-psychotic drugs," the report noted.
Prime examples of this trend, include Ohio Mental Health Director, Michael Hogan, and California Director, Stephen Mayberg. Both control mental health services in their respective states, and both are members of a Janssen advisory board.
Hogan has proven to be so useful that Eli Lilly has given him a "Lifetime Achievement Award." In granting the award it was noted that Hogan had given over 75 presentations at conferences and according to ace records researcher, Sue Weibert, every conference she tracked down that featured Hogan, was sponsored by drug companies, and the group that organized the conference solicited money from pharma to pay the keynote speaker.
The particular scheme has become so blatant, that it is finally being investigated. On June 10, 2005, Senators Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus issued a Press Release that said they have asked a number of large drug makers to explain a marketing practice where the companies give money to state governments and other organizations in the form of grants.
A request was sent to the following drug makers: Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, Eisai, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Schering-Plough Corporation, Hoffman-LaRoche, Forest Pharmaceuticals, Abbott Laboratories, Genentech, Biogen Idec, Genzyme Corporation, Chiron Corporation, Serono, and TAP Pharmaceutical Products.
The Senators said their inquiry is based on reports that some companies have awarded these grants to health care providers as inducements to prescribe medications the companies produce. In other cases, such grants to state agencies may have prompted those agencies to develop programs leading to over-medication of patients at the expense of patient health or to unnecessary expense for taxpayers.
"We need to know how this behind-the-scenes funneling of money is influencing decision makers," Grassley said, "The decisions result in the government spending billions of dollars on drugs. The tactics look aggressive, and the response on behalf of the public needs to be just as vigorous."
In addition to influencing and corrupting state officials, drug makers have infiltrated the nation's health care facilities and gained influence over prescribing physicians who engage in the practice of over-medicating patients.
For instance, they have set up schemes to funnel profits through senior citizens in nursing homes. Researcher have found that 75% of long-term care elderly residents receive psychotropic medications. (DFisk et al), Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol 163, pp 2716-2724 (2003).
Child advocates say kids are being over-medicated in state run foster care systems. The children go into the system neurologically normal but leave neurologically damaged, Austin psychologist and author, John Breeding said.
"Children are not just placed on one drug. Typically, they're placed on two or three or we've seen literally up to 17 different drugs for the same child in foster care," he reports.
In 2001, The Miami Herald published a series of stories about the common use of Risperdal among children in state care. Child-welfare advocates said the drug routinely was being used by foster care providers.
In April 2001, Broward lawyer and child advocate Andrea Moore told Florida Department of Children & Families administrators that a large number of children in foster care were being given Risperdal -- an antipsychotic drug a UCLA child psychiatrist describes as among the "big guns'' of psychiatric medications.
At that time, Florida officials confirmed that thousands of children, including toddlers, were being prescribed psychiatric drugs, from Ritalin to powerful drugs like Risperdal and Haldol.
''I had clients who were displaying severe side effects, and I tried to alert the Department of Children & Families both as to the local problem and the growing national concern about a range of psychotropic medications, Risperdal and other antipsychotics in particular,'' said Coral Springs attorney and children's advocate Andrea Moore.
A prime example of bribing doctors in state institutions was unearthed in Massachusetts where doctors were found to have changed the medication of four patients for non-medical reasons. A Boston Globe article published on November 10, 2003 reported that the patients were switched to the atypical Risperdal, without consent or medical necessity, to make them eligible for a drug trial sponsored by drug company Janssen, maker of Risperdal.
When other staff members complained, a state agencyinvestigated the matter and the drug trial wasstopped. All state hospital doctors were required to undergo re-certification in the ethics of medical research and the facility's director, Dr Douglas Hughes, resigned after it was revealed that he had received $30,000 in speaker's fees from Janssen in 2003.
The current prices for a month's supply of the top 3 antipsychotics are: Risperdal $342; Seroquel $414; and Zyprexa $572
Because these drugs are the most expensive on the market, and are so often paid for by the government, the rampant over-prescribing of these medications is bankrupting state Medicaid programs all over the country. (for reports on Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and more information go to http://www.ahrp.org/)
According to the May 8, 2005 issue of Lab Business Week, a new analysis by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reveals that Medicaid is now the largest single payer of mental health services, exceeding private insurance, Medicare, or other state and local spending. The report notes that one out of every $5 spent on mental health care now goes for psychotropic drugs.
Pennsylvania Under Fire
In addition to an investigation by the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania into Eli Lilly's marketing and promotion of Zyprexa and Prozac in that state, two former state investigators are diligently working to expose the industry's corruption of state institutions.
According to former investigator turned whistleblower, Allan Jones, PA taxpayers are saddled with an expensive drug treatment model known as PennMap, for the treatment of mentally ill persons in state care.
"This model is part of a large pharmaceutical marketing scheme designed to infiltrate institutions and influence treatment practices," he explains, "Pennsylvania is paying tens of millions of dollars for patented drugs that have no proven advantage over cheaper generic drugs."
As part of the overall scheme, on July 27, 2001, Tom Ridge appointed Gerald Radke, an Eli Lilly Marketing Director, to head the PA Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. With Radke at the helm, PA Medicaid funded sales of Lilly's Zyprexa rose from approximately $26.5 million in 2000 to $34.2 million in 2001, and reached $39.2 million in 2003. In state hospitals, hundreds of patients had their medications switched in the absence of medical need or indication, to comply with administrative decisions.
In 2003, there was a total of $139 million in public spending on just two classes of drugs, SSRI antidepressants and atypical antipsychotics. "A large portion of these dollars were spent to maintain children on these drugs," Allen reports, "despite the fact that they have not been proven effective in children and the FDA has not approved them for use in children."
"My best effort at correlating dollars spent with deaths from drug side effects suggests that people may be dying from side effects from the schizophrenia drugs alone at the rate of at least one death for each one million dollars spent on these drugs," Allen said."The actual numbers may reflect a much higher death rate," he added.
On July 1, 2004, another former PA investigator, Dr Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard psychiatrist/screenwriter-turned-activist, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, filed suit against six major pharmaceutical companies after discovering that PA children and adults were being abused and defiled by excessive psychiatric drugs and hazardous psychiatric inpatient environments.
People are being drugged for profit in state institutions in PA. While PennMap was being implemented, Stefan was a psychiatric consultant for the Department of Health and Human Services, in charge of the mental health programs and found that some patients were on as many as five neuroleptic psychiatric drugs at the same time.
Stefan also discovered corrupt financial relationships between PA politicians and pharmaceutical representatives, fraudulent medication billings to the government, and that four children and one adult died while under the state's care, after they were prescribed lethal combinations of anti-psychotic drugs under the PennMap model.
According to Stefan, the new generation of antipsychotics substantially increase the risk of obesity, diabetes type II, hypertension, cardiovascular complications, heart attacks and stroke. The drug makers had this information and "simply ignored the problem," he said.
"So, what we have now is a drug, Zyprexa, whose massive revenues and promotion are based upon faulty disclosures by the manufacturer, Eli Lilly," Stefan advises, "the drug causes both a severe metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular problems at the same time that it continues to cause neurological side-effects like its older 'typical' antipsychotics."
It does have a decided advantage for Lilly, Stefan contends, "It is far more expensive, dose per dose, than a comparable 'generic' antipsychotic." A dose of haloperidol might sell for 6 pennies while Zyprexa might sell for over 6 dollars per pill, he said.
Stefan, is also Board certified in adult, adolescent, geriatric and addiction psychiatry and he and Allen Jones will both be attending the DC protest.
Unreported Trials and Studies
Based on the results of a six-week clinical trial sponsored by Lilly, the FDA granted the company approval to manufacture and distribute Zyprexa in September of 1996 for the treatment of adult schizophrenics. The trial leading up to approval involved 2,500 people, and two-thirds of the participants didn't even complete the trial.
Among those who stuck it out, 22% of the Zyprexa subjects suffered a "serious" adverse effect, compared to 18% in the group taking Haldol, according to Leonard Roy Frank, author of Zyprexa: A Prescription for Diabetes, Disease and Early Death, August 2005 Edition of Street Spirit.
same year, FDA data obtained by Robert Whitaker, under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed Zyprexa's adverse effects to include: cardiac abnormalities and hypotension 10% to 15%; Parkinson-like motor impairment 11.7%; unbearable restlessness (akathisia) 7.3%; and acute weight gain (50%) increasing the risk of diabetes.
The data also disclosed a participant drop-out rate during 6-week clinical trials of 65%. In a one year trial, the drop out rate rose to 83%.
reviewers found an average weight gain of almost one pound a week for subjects during the six-week trial, and a 26 pound increase for Zyprexa patients who remained in the trial for a year. Other side effects included shaking, spasms, sedation, diabetic complications, rapid heartbeat, restlessness, constipation, seizures, liver problems, white blood cell disorders, decreased blood pressure; and neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which is potentially fatal.
There were also 20 deaths, including 12 suicides, in the Zyprexa group. "Shockingly, these deaths went unreported in the scientific literature," Leonard Frank said, "The death cover-ups also took place in reporting trial results of several other atypicals during the 1990s."
In his book, Mad In America, Robert Whitaker, reported that one in every 145 subjects who entered the trials for Zyprexa, Risperdal, Seroquel, and Serdolect had died.
Despite these severe known side effects, children between the ages of 6 to 11 were recruited for a clinical trial conducted at the University of California Los Angeles soon after Zyprexa was approved for adults. The children were not schizophrenic, but were diagnosed with other disorders. According to the published report on the research, all of the children experienced adverse effects and none were helped. The study was terminated less than 6 weeks after it began. Yet to this day, doctors continue to regularly prescribe atypicals to children even though they have never been FDA approved for treatment of any illness with children.
In 2002, P Murali Doraiswamy, the chief of biological psychiatry at Duke University, conducted a review of adverse events reported to the FDA by Zyprexa patients and found:
Of the 289 cases of diabetes linked to Zyprexa, 225 were newly diagnosed cases. One hundred patients developed ketosis (a serious complication of diabetes), and 22 people developed pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas, which is a life-threatening condition. There were 23 deaths, including that of a 15-year-old adolescent who died of necrotizing pancreatitis. Pharmacotherapy, July 2002.
Persons on atypicals have been found to commit suicide at rates two to five times more frequently than schizophrenics in general. According to Bob Whitaker, "researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the introduction of the atypical antipsychotics, the death rate among people with schizophrenia has doubled."
In an interview this month with Street Spirit, he said, "They have done death rates of people treated with standard neuroleptics and then they compare that with death rates of people treated with atypical antipsychotics, and it doubles. It doubles! It didn'treduce harm. In fact, in their seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died."
The industry routinely hides negative results of studies. "We do not know the results of the clinical trials they sponsor-only those they choose to make public, which tend to be the most favorable findings," Marcia Angell advises.
The problem with the FDA is the fact that it is practically owned by the industry that it is supposed to regulate. In recent years, nearly half of the agency's $400 million annual budget has been paid for by drug companies. This arrangement stems from a 1992 agreement, made partly at the urging of AIDS activists, that the FDA would speed up approvals in exchange for "user fees" from industry, according to the May-June 2005 issue of Mother Jones Magazine.
According to the September 9, 2004 Washington Post, because of the industry's pattern of hiding research that shows adverse affects, medical journals are taking matters into their own hands. The Post reported that a dozen editors of prestigious medical journals jointly announced they will refuse to publish drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies unless the studies are registered in a public database from the outset -- a step designed to ferret out unpublished studies that find medications to be ineffective or dangerous.
The initiative creates a potent incentive for companies to register their drug trials and to give physicians and the public a window on unfavorable studies that companies routinely suppress, the Post wrote. The new requirement calls on companies to register their trials well before anyone knows whether a study will turn out positive.
Journal of the American Medical Association, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of Medicine and several otherinternational publications have signed on to , and their editors hope that more will join in, the WSJ reported.
Pringleepringle05@yahoo.com
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent MediaTV and an investigative journalist focused on exposinggovernment corruption)
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
August 24 DC Protest – Vaccine-Autism Activists Join In
Activist attending the 3 day protest in Washington DC this month have one thing in common. They want to raise awareness of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has knowingly injured Americans with dangerous products to increase profits and the nation's regulatory agencies have aided and abetted them.
Since the discovery in recent years of cover-ups by the FDA and drug makers, involving injuries caused by drugs such as Prozac and Vioxx, the similar pattern of cover-ups of injuries caused by the nation's vaccine program should come as no surprise.
During the 1990s, as the number of vaccines on the Federal Immunization Schedule nearly tripled, and vaccination rates soared to nearly 95% for five year olds, the number of kids diagnosed with autism and other neurological disorders skyrocketed.
And, there is only one commonality in all the injured children - they received vaccines that contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.
Vaccines are the only product whose use is mandated in all 50 states, requiring children to be vaccinated before entering day care facilities and schools. According to a 1999 report by the General Accounting Office, an estimated 12 million vaccinations are given to children each year in the US.
During the 1990s, some 40 million children were vaccinated. Since the government literally forced children to be vaccinated with thimerosal for decades, it now has an obligation to find a cure for the epidemic of autism and other related disorders and to hold the vaccine-makers financially responsible for the damage caused by their products.
The country is in the midst of the worst man-made epidemic in history. Twenty years ago, autism only affected one in 10,000 children. However, the Autism Autoimmunity Project reports that the disorder strikes 1 in 150 (or 1 in 68 families) today.
In dealing with this epidemic, the first order of business has to be to find a way to force the government to ban thimerosal in all vaccines. Most unsuspecting people do not realize that thimerosal is still contained in some products, such as flu vaccines.
In addition, even though thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines in the US, drug companies are still knowingly injecting thimerosal into millions of children all over the world each year. The global market for vaccines is still a gold mine. For instance, UNICEF, the World Health Organization's parent body, buys 40% of all vaccines used in developing countries, and Merck is its sole supplier. Merck makes Recombivax HB, a Hepatitis B vaccine that contains thimerosal. Eli Lilly invented thimerosal, and it has licensing agreements with drug companies in 40 countries that make the product.
The EPA recommends ingesting no more than 0.1 micrograms of mercury, and the FDA recommends no more than 0.4 micrograms per day for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and small children, which amounts to a recommendation that they eat no more than 12 ounces of tuna per week, because the EPA says, "mercury consumed by a pregnant or nursing woman or by a young child can harm the developing brain and nervous system."
Yet the government still recommends that children aged 6 to 23 months and pregnant women get the flu vaccine with its 25 micrograms of mercury which amounts to 250 times the safety limit for mercury intake set by the EPA for fish-eaters.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, while approving new vaccines and adding them to the childhood immunization schedule, the government agencies responsible for drug safety, failed to add up the cumulative amounts of mercury that a child would receive in shots during one doctor visit, or over the course of the full vaccine schedule.
In 1999, while conducting a review of all mercury containing products, the regulatory agencies finally got around to looking at vaccines and discovered that the mercury being injected into children through vaccines vastly exceeded the guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Professor Lynn Adams, of Radford University, a speech-language pathologist who specializes in autism, said that in 1999, a study determined that the average child received 33 doses of 10 different vaccines by the age 5.
By 1999, the FDA definitely knew about the accumulative dangers of thimerosal to our children. We know this because the staff for Rep Dan Burton (R-Ill) obtained an internal FDA e-mail written on June 29, 1999, by former FDA scientist Peter Patriarca, that specifically discussed the dangers when offering a"pros and cons" assessment of a statement on thimerosal about to be released by the FDA, and listed the questions and accusations that would inevitably be lodged against the FDA after its release. He said people are bound to question:
(1) FDA being `asleep at the switch' for decades, by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products. (2) various advisory bodies aggressive recommendations for use. (3) the dose of ethyl mercury was not generated by `rocket science': conversion of the % of thimerosal to actual ug [micrograms] of mercury involves 9th grade algebra. (4) What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? (5) Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations while rapidly expanding the childhood immunization schedule?
The fact is that the FDA and CDC knew children were being poisoned and they kept the information hidden and allowed it to continue. "Because the FDA chose not to recall thimerosal-containing vaccines in 1999," the April 2003, House Committee on Government Reform report concludes, "in addition to all of those already injured, 8,000 children a day continued to be placed at risk for overdose for at least an additional two years."
There's also no doubt that the drug companies knew of the dangers more than 30 years ago. In 1972, Lilly received an article that confirmed that thimerosal had caused 6 deaths when too much of it had been used, which said: "The symptoms and clinical course of the 6 patients suggests subacute mercury poisoning."
In an October 12, 1979 memo, Merck scientists discussed the "potential problem" of having mercury in its flu and meningococcal vaccines, as well as the Hepatitis B vaccine that was under development and asked: "Should a program of replacement be initiated now to guard against any spontaneous rally to avoid its (thimerosal) use in injectables?"
Last fall, the LA Times released a 1991 internal memo from Merck, that proves the company knew back then that the overuse of mercury in vaccines posed a dangerous health threat to children. The memo noted that 6-month-old children who received their shots on schedule would get a mercury dose up to 87 times higher than guidelines for the maximum daily consumption of mercury from fish.
Using state by state statistics produced by the Department of Education, to compare the increase in cases of autism over a 12-year period between 1992-93 and 2003-04, reveals horrendous results. In Ohio, in 1992-93 there were only 22 cases of autism, in 2003-04 there were 5146 cases. In Illinois, there were only 5 cases twelve years ago, while there were 6005 in 2003-04. Mississippi had no cases of autism 12 years ago, but had 622 in 2003-04. Wisconsin had 18 cases in 1992-93 and 3259 in 2003-04.
We are on the verge of the biggest welfare disaster that his country has ever seen. Eighty percent of the autistic children in the US are under the age of 17. In a few short years, the states will be forced to provide support for an overwhelming number of disabled adults. "The costs will be in the trillions,"according to Ann Dachel, a special education teacher and the mother of a boy with autism and a daughter who developed epilepsy after receiving a Hepatitis B vaccine.
On February 15, 2005, the GAO, released a report titled, "Special Education Children With Autism," that revealed that the number of children ages 6 through 21 diagnosed with autism who receiving special ed services has increased by more than 500% over the past 10 years, from under 20,000 in 1993 to almost 120,000 in 2002.
The cost of educating this number of autistic kids will be enormous. The Department of Education spends about $53 billion a year on K-12 education. If it provides $60,000 per year to educate each of the currently identified school-age autistic children nationwide, the price tag will be over $7 billion ayear, or about 13% of the Department's entire budget. And by the end of each year, the cost will be even higher due to the increased number of autistic kids entering the system each year.
In the absence of a cure and drug company accountability, local tax payers will be forced to carry the life-long load of educating and caring for a generation of injured people and state and local taxes will go through the roof.
The CDC and FDA policy decisions regarding vaccine approval and safety recommendations are made through physician advisory panels whose members often have financial relationships with the very same drug companies that they are supposed to regulate.
For example, during a congressional hearing on potential conflicts of interests at the FDA, it was revealed that 60% of the advisory board members who voted to approve the poisonous rotavirus vaccine had financial ties to the drug companies manufacturing the vaccine. The committee also discovered that half of the CDC members had ties to the rotavirus makers.
If parents are expected to trust the government'sapproval process, they have a right to know that thevaccines they are forced to inject into their childrenhave been approved based on the best scientific adviceavailable, without the undue influence of pharma moneybeing funneled to scientists, politicians, andofficials within the regulatory agencies.
Evelyn Pringle
mailto:Pringleepringle05@yahoo.com
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent MediaTV and an investigative journalist focused on exposingcorruption in government)
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Since the discovery in recent years of cover-ups by the FDA and drug makers, involving injuries caused by drugs such as Prozac and Vioxx, the similar pattern of cover-ups of injuries caused by the nation's vaccine program should come as no surprise.
During the 1990s, as the number of vaccines on the Federal Immunization Schedule nearly tripled, and vaccination rates soared to nearly 95% for five year olds, the number of kids diagnosed with autism and other neurological disorders skyrocketed.
And, there is only one commonality in all the injured children - they received vaccines that contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.
Vaccines are the only product whose use is mandated in all 50 states, requiring children to be vaccinated before entering day care facilities and schools. According to a 1999 report by the General Accounting Office, an estimated 12 million vaccinations are given to children each year in the US.
During the 1990s, some 40 million children were vaccinated. Since the government literally forced children to be vaccinated with thimerosal for decades, it now has an obligation to find a cure for the epidemic of autism and other related disorders and to hold the vaccine-makers financially responsible for the damage caused by their products.
The country is in the midst of the worst man-made epidemic in history. Twenty years ago, autism only affected one in 10,000 children. However, the Autism Autoimmunity Project reports that the disorder strikes 1 in 150 (or 1 in 68 families) today.
In dealing with this epidemic, the first order of business has to be to find a way to force the government to ban thimerosal in all vaccines. Most unsuspecting people do not realize that thimerosal is still contained in some products, such as flu vaccines.
In addition, even though thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines in the US, drug companies are still knowingly injecting thimerosal into millions of children all over the world each year. The global market for vaccines is still a gold mine. For instance, UNICEF, the World Health Organization's parent body, buys 40% of all vaccines used in developing countries, and Merck is its sole supplier. Merck makes Recombivax HB, a Hepatitis B vaccine that contains thimerosal. Eli Lilly invented thimerosal, and it has licensing agreements with drug companies in 40 countries that make the product.
The EPA recommends ingesting no more than 0.1 micrograms of mercury, and the FDA recommends no more than 0.4 micrograms per day for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and small children, which amounts to a recommendation that they eat no more than 12 ounces of tuna per week, because the EPA says, "mercury consumed by a pregnant or nursing woman or by a young child can harm the developing brain and nervous system."
Yet the government still recommends that children aged 6 to 23 months and pregnant women get the flu vaccine with its 25 micrograms of mercury which amounts to 250 times the safety limit for mercury intake set by the EPA for fish-eaters.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, while approving new vaccines and adding them to the childhood immunization schedule, the government agencies responsible for drug safety, failed to add up the cumulative amounts of mercury that a child would receive in shots during one doctor visit, or over the course of the full vaccine schedule.
In 1999, while conducting a review of all mercury containing products, the regulatory agencies finally got around to looking at vaccines and discovered that the mercury being injected into children through vaccines vastly exceeded the guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Professor Lynn Adams, of Radford University, a speech-language pathologist who specializes in autism, said that in 1999, a study determined that the average child received 33 doses of 10 different vaccines by the age 5.
By 1999, the FDA definitely knew about the accumulative dangers of thimerosal to our children. We know this because the staff for Rep Dan Burton (R-Ill) obtained an internal FDA e-mail written on June 29, 1999, by former FDA scientist Peter Patriarca, that specifically discussed the dangers when offering a"pros and cons" assessment of a statement on thimerosal about to be released by the FDA, and listed the questions and accusations that would inevitably be lodged against the FDA after its release. He said people are bound to question:
(1) FDA being `asleep at the switch' for decades, by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products. (2) various advisory bodies aggressive recommendations for use. (3) the dose of ethyl mercury was not generated by `rocket science': conversion of the % of thimerosal to actual ug [micrograms] of mercury involves 9th grade algebra. (4) What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? (5) Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations while rapidly expanding the childhood immunization schedule?
The fact is that the FDA and CDC knew children were being poisoned and they kept the information hidden and allowed it to continue. "Because the FDA chose not to recall thimerosal-containing vaccines in 1999," the April 2003, House Committee on Government Reform report concludes, "in addition to all of those already injured, 8,000 children a day continued to be placed at risk for overdose for at least an additional two years."
There's also no doubt that the drug companies knew of the dangers more than 30 years ago. In 1972, Lilly received an article that confirmed that thimerosal had caused 6 deaths when too much of it had been used, which said: "The symptoms and clinical course of the 6 patients suggests subacute mercury poisoning."
In an October 12, 1979 memo, Merck scientists discussed the "potential problem" of having mercury in its flu and meningococcal vaccines, as well as the Hepatitis B vaccine that was under development and asked: "Should a program of replacement be initiated now to guard against any spontaneous rally to avoid its (thimerosal) use in injectables?"
Last fall, the LA Times released a 1991 internal memo from Merck, that proves the company knew back then that the overuse of mercury in vaccines posed a dangerous health threat to children. The memo noted that 6-month-old children who received their shots on schedule would get a mercury dose up to 87 times higher than guidelines for the maximum daily consumption of mercury from fish.
Using state by state statistics produced by the Department of Education, to compare the increase in cases of autism over a 12-year period between 1992-93 and 2003-04, reveals horrendous results. In Ohio, in 1992-93 there were only 22 cases of autism, in 2003-04 there were 5146 cases. In Illinois, there were only 5 cases twelve years ago, while there were 6005 in 2003-04. Mississippi had no cases of autism 12 years ago, but had 622 in 2003-04. Wisconsin had 18 cases in 1992-93 and 3259 in 2003-04.
We are on the verge of the biggest welfare disaster that his country has ever seen. Eighty percent of the autistic children in the US are under the age of 17. In a few short years, the states will be forced to provide support for an overwhelming number of disabled adults. "The costs will be in the trillions,"according to Ann Dachel, a special education teacher and the mother of a boy with autism and a daughter who developed epilepsy after receiving a Hepatitis B vaccine.
On February 15, 2005, the GAO, released a report titled, "Special Education Children With Autism," that revealed that the number of children ages 6 through 21 diagnosed with autism who receiving special ed services has increased by more than 500% over the past 10 years, from under 20,000 in 1993 to almost 120,000 in 2002.
The cost of educating this number of autistic kids will be enormous. The Department of Education spends about $53 billion a year on K-12 education. If it provides $60,000 per year to educate each of the currently identified school-age autistic children nationwide, the price tag will be over $7 billion ayear, or about 13% of the Department's entire budget. And by the end of each year, the cost will be even higher due to the increased number of autistic kids entering the system each year.
In the absence of a cure and drug company accountability, local tax payers will be forced to carry the life-long load of educating and caring for a generation of injured people and state and local taxes will go through the roof.
The CDC and FDA policy decisions regarding vaccine approval and safety recommendations are made through physician advisory panels whose members often have financial relationships with the very same drug companies that they are supposed to regulate.
For example, during a congressional hearing on potential conflicts of interests at the FDA, it was revealed that 60% of the advisory board members who voted to approve the poisonous rotavirus vaccine had financial ties to the drug companies manufacturing the vaccine. The committee also discovered that half of the CDC members had ties to the rotavirus makers.
If parents are expected to trust the government'sapproval process, they have a right to know that thevaccines they are forced to inject into their childrenhave been approved based on the best scientific adviceavailable, without the undue influence of pharma moneybeing funneled to scientists, politicians, andofficials within the regulatory agencies.
Evelyn Pringle
mailto:Pringleepringle05@yahoo.com
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent MediaTV and an investigative journalist focused on exposingcorruption in government)
For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
New Study Shows ‘Compelling Evidence’ of Major Intestinal Immune Disease In Children With Autism
Thoughtful House scientists and collaborators confirm link between autism and new inflammatory bowel disease
From an organization webpage editorial. http://thoughtfulhouse.org/editorials.php
Austin, Texas – In a study that provides further clues to understanding the origins of autism, scientists and physicians from Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, supply considerable evidence of a new inflammatory bowel disease in children with autism. The study will be published this month in the European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at http://thoughtfulhouse.org/pub_06.htm.
The team studied 178 children undergoing intestinal investigation for gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea and abdominal pain. More than 140 of these children also had autism, most having regressed after normal early development. The children with autism had an increased rate of swelling of the intestinal lymph glands (lymphoid nodular hyperplasia) – a feature of viral infections and immunodeficiency diseases such as AIDS.
Additionally, the children with autism experienced associated inflammation of the intestinal lining, while the children examined in the study without autism did not. The degree of swelling of the intestinal lymph glands was also more severe in children with autism compared with developmentally normal children.
“The results of this study give us additional clues on understanding what is going on in the gut and how it may lead to the brain disorder,” says Dr. Andrew Wakefield, Executive Director of Thoughtful House and the lead author on the paper. “We are working on the idea that what starts in the intestine can be severely disruptive to normal brain development.”
The paper dispels the common misconception that the presence of swollen lymph glands is a normal finding in children.
“When we compare the intestinal findings in children with and without autism in a systematic way, the differences become obvious,” says Dr. Wakefield, “Colonoscopies are not performed on normal children, but on children with gastrointestinal symptoms, so it is not possible to state that this is a normal finding.
The findings of this new study add to the clear evidence of a novel and treatable disease of the intestinal immune system in children with developmental disorders. These are medical diseases which should be treated as such. Children are suffering needlessly and this has got to change.”
The presence and severity of the swollen lymph glands was not influenced by exclusion diets that some children were on, suggesting that food allergy or intolerance was not the cause. The fact that these children also have abnormal immune systems and the resemblance of the disease to the intestinal findings in some patients with HIV infection suggests the disease may be associated with a smoldering viral infection.
“This study, in combination with previous work, raises the possibility that treating bowel disease may alleviate some of the symptoms of autism itself,” says Dr. Wakefield. “This is something Thoughtful House will be putting to test in the near future.”
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
From an organization webpage editorial. http://thoughtfulhouse.org/editorials.php
Austin, Texas – In a study that provides further clues to understanding the origins of autism, scientists and physicians from Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, supply considerable evidence of a new inflammatory bowel disease in children with autism. The study will be published this month in the European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at http://thoughtfulhouse.org/pub_06.htm.
The team studied 178 children undergoing intestinal investigation for gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea and abdominal pain. More than 140 of these children also had autism, most having regressed after normal early development. The children with autism had an increased rate of swelling of the intestinal lymph glands (lymphoid nodular hyperplasia) – a feature of viral infections and immunodeficiency diseases such as AIDS.
Additionally, the children with autism experienced associated inflammation of the intestinal lining, while the children examined in the study without autism did not. The degree of swelling of the intestinal lymph glands was also more severe in children with autism compared with developmentally normal children.
“The results of this study give us additional clues on understanding what is going on in the gut and how it may lead to the brain disorder,” says Dr. Andrew Wakefield, Executive Director of Thoughtful House and the lead author on the paper. “We are working on the idea that what starts in the intestine can be severely disruptive to normal brain development.”
The paper dispels the common misconception that the presence of swollen lymph glands is a normal finding in children.
“When we compare the intestinal findings in children with and without autism in a systematic way, the differences become obvious,” says Dr. Wakefield, “Colonoscopies are not performed on normal children, but on children with gastrointestinal symptoms, so it is not possible to state that this is a normal finding.
The findings of this new study add to the clear evidence of a novel and treatable disease of the intestinal immune system in children with developmental disorders. These are medical diseases which should be treated as such. Children are suffering needlessly and this has got to change.”
The presence and severity of the swollen lymph glands was not influenced by exclusion diets that some children were on, suggesting that food allergy or intolerance was not the cause. The fact that these children also have abnormal immune systems and the resemblance of the disease to the intestinal findings in some patients with HIV infection suggests the disease may be associated with a smoldering viral infection.
“This study, in combination with previous work, raises the possibility that treating bowel disease may alleviate some of the symptoms of autism itself,” says Dr. Wakefield. “This is something Thoughtful House will be putting to test in the near future.”
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Mercury and Tuna: U.S. Advice Leaves Lots of Questions
Balancing Interests, Agencies Issue Guidance at Odds With
EPA Risk Assessment
A Schoolboy's Sudden Setback
By Peter Waldman
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
August 1, 2005; Page A1
SAN FRANCISCO -- One by one, Matthew Davis's fifth-grade teachers went around the table describing the 10-year-old boy. He wasn't focused in class and often missed assignments, they said. He labored at basic addition. He could barely write a simple sentence.
"Our jaws dropped," says his mother, Joan Elan Davis, describing a teachers' meeting she had requested in late 2003, when her son abruptly lost interest in homework. Matthew had always excelled in school. In the fourth grade, he had written and illustrated a series of stories about a superhero named Dog Man.
Read full article at:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB112268169016100484-INjgoNklaB4mpunZXSGaaaAm5,00.html
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
EPA Risk Assessment
A Schoolboy's Sudden Setback
By Peter Waldman
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
August 1, 2005; Page A1
SAN FRANCISCO -- One by one, Matthew Davis's fifth-grade teachers went around the table describing the 10-year-old boy. He wasn't focused in class and often missed assignments, they said. He labored at basic addition. He could barely write a simple sentence.
"Our jaws dropped," says his mother, Joan Elan Davis, describing a teachers' meeting she had requested in late 2003, when her son abruptly lost interest in homework. Matthew had always excelled in school. In the fourth grade, he had written and illustrated a series of stories about a superhero named Dog Man.
Read full article at:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB112268169016100484-INjgoNklaB4mpunZXSGaaaAm5,00.html
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
New UW study documents autistic regression
By Julie Davidow
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter
...Experts have recognized autistic regression for at least a decade, but they've previously relied on parents' recollections of a child's backslide.
Now, a new study from the University of Washington documents regression using videotapes of children's behavior during their first and second birthday parties.
Read entire article at:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/234906_autism02.html
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter
...Experts have recognized autistic regression for at least a decade, but they've previously relied on parents' recollections of a child's backslide.
Now, a new study from the University of Washington documents regression using videotapes of children's behavior during their first and second birthday parties.
Read entire article at:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/234906_autism02.html
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Ruling supports autistic student, District told to pay for specialized care
By Kevin Vaughan,
Rocky Mountain News
July 15, 2005
A ruling requiring a Northern Colorado school district to pay for an autistic student's stay at a specialized Boston treatment center - a bill that's at $200,000 and growing - could set a dangerous precedent, harming thousands of students in an effort to help a handful of youngsters, administrators say. The Thompson School District in Larimer County was ordered earlier this month to reimburse the family of 10-year-old Luke Perkins for his stay at Boston Higashi School, where he has lived with other autistic students since Jan. 12, 2004.
Read full article at:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_3928350,00.html
Read a response from Luke's father:
Speakout: Special ed reimbursement will pay off in end
By Dr. Jeffrey D. Perkins,
Special to the News
July 31, 2005
I feel that many people, the editors of the News included, are forming opinions based on incomplete and faulty information regarding the recent decision about education reimbursement for my son, Luke Perkins ("When is special ed bill too high?" July 26 editorial, and "Ruling supports autistic student/District told to pay for specialized care," July 15).
First, the News editorial, as well as many of the other stories in the press, imply that our concern as Luke's parents centered around Luke not making enough progress at Berthoud Elementary. In fact, Luke was regressing at an alarming rate, both educationally and behaviorally.
Full article available at:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_3964803,00.htm
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Rocky Mountain News
July 15, 2005
A ruling requiring a Northern Colorado school district to pay for an autistic student's stay at a specialized Boston treatment center - a bill that's at $200,000 and growing - could set a dangerous precedent, harming thousands of students in an effort to help a handful of youngsters, administrators say. The Thompson School District in Larimer County was ordered earlier this month to reimburse the family of 10-year-old Luke Perkins for his stay at Boston Higashi School, where he has lived with other autistic students since Jan. 12, 2004.
Read full article at:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_3928350,00.html
Read a response from Luke's father:
Speakout: Special ed reimbursement will pay off in end
By Dr. Jeffrey D. Perkins,
Special to the News
July 31, 2005
I feel that many people, the editors of the News included, are forming opinions based on incomplete and faulty information regarding the recent decision about education reimbursement for my son, Luke Perkins ("When is special ed bill too high?" July 26 editorial, and "Ruling supports autistic student/District told to pay for specialized care," July 15).
First, the News editorial, as well as many of the other stories in the press, imply that our concern as Luke's parents centered around Luke not making enough progress at Berthoud Elementary. In fact, Luke was regressing at an alarming rate, both educationally and behaviorally.
Full article available at:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_3964803,00.htm
For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
