Autism, mercury, and politics by Robert Kennedy Jr.

By Robert Kennedy Jr. July 1, 2005

MOUNTING EVIDENCE suggests that Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in children's vaccines, may be responsible for the exponential growth of autism, attention deficit disorder, speech delays, and other childhood neurological disorders now epidemic in the United States.

Prior to 1989, American infants generally received three vaccinations (polio, measles-mumps-rubella, and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis). In the early 1990s, public health officials dramatically increased the number of Thimerosal-containing vaccinations without considering the cumulative impact of the mercury load on developing brains.

In a 1991 memo, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccination programs, warned his bosses that 6-month-old children administered the shots on schedule would suffer mercury exposures 87 times the government safety standards. He recommended that Thimerosal be discontinued and complained that the US Food and Drug Administration, which has a notoriously close relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, could not be counted on to take appropriate action as its European counterparts had. Merck ignored Hilleman's warning, and for eight years government officials added seven more shots for children containing Thimerosal.

Full article available at:

http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=ukhl8lbab.0.hsij6lbab.faomd6n6.949&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boston.com%2Fnews%2Fglobe%2Feditorial_opinion%2Foped%2Farticles%2F2005%2F07%2F01%2Fautism_mercury_and_politics%2F

For more information and resources on autism, go to: http://www.autismconcepts.com/.

The Age of Autism: Dismaying 'Times'

The Age of Autism: Dismaying 'Times'
By Dan Olmsted
United Press International
Published July 6, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Who knew the longest word in the English language would be the best one to explain what is wrong with a newspaper article?

The word is related to establishment bias, and the newspaper in question is none other than The New York Times.

June 25, the paper that sold us on WMDs in Iraq and virtually convicted Wen Ho Lee as a spy for the Chinese, weighed in with a front-page story on whether vaccines cause autism.

Preposterous, the Times concluded, without dirtying its white-gloved hands by actually having to say so. All the right people agree, and the Times quoted them to persuasive effect. The headline said it all: "On Autism's Cause, It's Parents vs. Research."

Those whose eyewitness experience convinces them otherwise were cast as hysterical, homicidal scientific illiterates who talk to God through elderly gentlemen and lock children in saunas in their crazed attempts to make money.

The right kind of people, apparently, do not include thousands of parents of autistic children, or thousands of Amish, almost all of whom do not vaccinate their children and do not seem to suffer much autism.

The parents say they have watched their children descend into autism after receiving vaccinations. Doctors who treat the mostly unvaccinated Amish say they have seen every other kind of disorder, but almost no autism.

Who cares, when you have "medical experts" and peer-reviewed "scientific studies" galore? These people are credentialed, for Heaven's sake. They teach at the schools and work at the agencies that count. They hew to the scientific method. They are top-drawer -- and they say autism is not caused by vaccines.

Why, then, does the intellectual version of trailer trash -- untutored parents, the frightfully out-of-its-depth "lay press," people without the right degrees, the right pedigrees, the right publications, the right to an opinion -- keep intruding on this turf?

Because the matter is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as the Times has portrayed it. Absent, for example, were any of the studies that do point a finger at vaccines and the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. Also missing were the critiques of the science the Times relied on, critiques that may be wrong but are certainly worth hearing.

Dismissed were all of the alternative treatments many parents say vastly improved their children's condition. As the Times noted, no studies confirm that assertion, but why not? Why not study them urgently and, if it is discovered that removing mercury from autistic kids' systems really has some effect, what are the implications of that?

Nor was there an acknowledgement that, although the experts maintain there is no link, they have never -- never -- studied the most obvious population: the unvaccinated. All they would need to do is count the number of unvaccinated children with autism and compare that ratio to the rest of society.

If the experts had done this, that issue could have been taken off the table by now. Instead, the real debate is stuck at the starting gate. Health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say they do not even know if autism has increased in the past decade, although they have had 10 years to figure it out.

I am sure the Times will be very sorry if it finds its editors were in error about the subject and condescending to the parents of autistic children. We can see the Editor's Note now, modeled on "The Times and Wen Ho Lee":

Headlined "The Times, Vaccines and Autism," the editors admit "that our dismissal of the theory was premature and relied too heavily on epidemiological studies that proved to be flawed and that we did not review independently. Worse, we undervalued the eyewitness accounts of parents who watched their children disappear into autism after vaccinations."

The worst part is the Times probably will make the same mistake again on some other important issue -- unless it fixes its fatal flaw of comfortable certainty, otherwise known as arrogance or, in the terminology of the Greek tragedy this is, hubris.

Offering alms to the autistic in two or three years really will not suffice. The New York Times -- plus ABC, NBC and many others, for that matter -- needs to join the rest of us who are thinking for ourselves and grappling with whether vaccines -- the greatest public-health achievement of all time -- inadvertently triggered a disaster for a minority of families.

Getting back to our original theme, the problem with the Times is establishmentarianism, "the doctrine of supporting the social or political establishment," as wordreference.com describes it. Those who diss that establishment encounter another layer of rejection: antidisestablishmentarianism. At last, a practical use for that word!

Until the simple question of what causes autism is clearly established, a lot of people touched by the condition just will not shut up, whether that distresses the enforcers of the longest word in the English language or not.

Article at: http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050706-033143-7347r

For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.

CODEX Threat to Supplement Market

Rome, July 4, 2005: “The struggle has just begun.” With these words, one dietary supplement activist expressed the outrage and resolve that dietary supplement activists present at the Codex Commission meeting feel about the Commission’s limiting of the international dietary supplement market to supplement products restricted by safety factors as if they were toxic chemicals.

Read full article at: http://www.healthliesexposed.com/articles/article_2005_07_1_3933.shtml
Read related articles at: http://www.citizens.org/priorities/codex/romeupdate.cfm

For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.

Vaccine tie to autism gains new supporters

07.03.2005
By Carla McClain
Arizona Daily Star

The decade-long debate over what has caused this country's frightening spike of childhood autism once again is exploding.

Behind the ongoing tragedy is the face of Lucas Taube, a Marana 3-year-old whose once-joyful, bright, noisy little self vanished into a strange world of silence and isolation - just weeks after getting four vaccinations in one day.

Full article available at:http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/82522.php

For more information and resources on autism, go to:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.

Study: New model may better predict outcomes for children with autism and autistic spectrum disorders

Public release date: 5-Jul-2005
Contact: John Ascenzi
Ascenzi@email.chop.edu
267-426-6055
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Classification tool may better describe autism-related disorders, help evaluate treatments

A new classification tool may allow healthcare professionals treating children with autism and autism-related disorders to more systematically sort out the combination of traits in the condition, and to better predict how children may improve over time. If the model holds up to further study, it may also allow researchers to gauge the effectiveness of different autism treatments.

Developmental pediatrician James Coplan, M.D., reports on a study of 91 children he saw between 1997 and 2002 at the Regional Autism Center of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Most patients were pre-schoolers or of elementary school age, and predominantly boys. The study appears in the July 2005 issue of Pediatrics.

The children in the study had autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), a group of neurodevelopmental disorders of impaired social communication. Those disorders include classic autism, pervasive developmental disorder and Asperger's syndrome. Dr. Coplan studied the relationship among three variables: the severity of the disorder (called atypicality), general intelligence (measured as IQ or developmental quotient) and time.

"These disorders are dynamic and change over time," says Dr. Coplan. "Although they are traditionally classified into mutually exclusive diagnostic boxes, they tend to blend into each other, and this model provides a way to look continuously at ASD, as the symptoms occur and develop along the autistic spectrum, and as the symptoms change over time."

Some children have severe autistic symptoms but high intelligence; others have mild symptoms and mental retardation, or combinations in between, he added. In explaining the model to parents, he sometimes draws an analogy to weight and height. Just as each individual can have a different combination of weight and stature, someone can have an individual combination of intelligence and degree of autism.

One central finding of the study, said Dr. Coplan, is that children in the normal range of intelligence (an IQ of 70 or above) show significant improvement in their ASD symptoms over time. "We can offer the hopeful message to parents that many children with ASD will improve as part of the natural course of the condition," he said. This finding reinforced impressions by Dr. Coplan and many previous researchers about clinical outcomes for children with ASD.

Dr. Coplan cautions that although the model has predictive value for clinical outcomes when looking at average outcomes for groups of children, it will not necessarily predict a course for each individual patient. Rather it would provide a "roadmap" on which to plot a child's progress over time.

The model still must be confirmed in larger studies of populations of children with ASD, not just in a sample from one clinic, according to Dr. Coplan.

If larger studies validate the model, he adds, it may become a benchmark to help researchers evaluate the effectiveness of particular ASD treatments. "Many currently popular therapies may be capitalizing on the natural history of ASD, and claiming such improvement on their own behalf," he writes in the paper. If patients improved more than would be anticipated from the model's outline of the natural course of ASD alone, that might provide evidence for a treatment's success.

Additionally, the model might shed light into causes of ASD, as yet unknown. Children with ASD from different causes may follow different developmental paths," says Dr. Coplan, and studying those patterns may help researchers to better identify causes for the diseases.

Dr. Coplan has since left Children's Hospital to establish a private practice, Neurodevelopmental Pediatrics of the Main Line, in Rosemont, Pa. Dr. Coplan's co-author was Abbas F. Jawad, Ph.D., of the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The Regional Autism Center at Children's Hospital houses a large interdisciplinary program for the diagnosis and treatment of children with ASD.

###
About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country, ranking second in National Institutes of Health funding. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 430-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents.
For more information, visit www.chop.edu.

For more information and resources on autism, go to:

http://www.autismconcepts.com/.

Study questions extent of autism in the U.S.

05 Jul 2005
Source: Reuters
By Andrew Stern

CHICAGO, July 5 (Reuters) - Government figures which have been cited to prove that autism is rapidly increasing in the United States are not reliable and thus unsuitable for tracking the disorder, a study said on Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of Education figures, based on the number of children receiving special education assistance, have internal "anomalies" and are in conflict with a number of studies on the prevalence of the condition, said the report from Portland State University in Oregon.

"Basically we don't know what the true prevalence of autism is in this country," the study's author, physician James Laidler, said in an interview.

Full article available at:

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N04730058.htm

For more information and resources on autism, go to:

http://www.autismconcepts.com/.