Girls Night Out

By:   LJ Goes

"Hey, get together tonight!" My friend reminded me.  I could barely hear her over my son's screaming.  

Ugh, I thought.  I hadn't showered all day.  We just started a new regimen to help with our son's complex adrenal dysfunction and he'd been off all day.  By "off" I mean he hit me a total of 27 times (mostly open hand slaps with a sprinkling of fist poundings, always aiming for the face), we could not successfully redirect him from walking on the counters and touching the stove, and his general disposition was surly.  So, along with a paid helper, I'd spent my day thus far preparing his special food, trying to keep him from launching himself out the kitchen window, burning his toes and landing a left hook to my jaw.

"Uhm...yeah...I don't think it's gonna happen." I mumbled over his piercing screams. My husband looked at me quizzically.  I explained I had a meeting he didn't have to worry, I wasn't going to actually go.  A gesture of mercy ensued and he told me I needed to go. I had to get out even if it was just for a couple hours.  This is why I love this man.  Pure selflessness.  Autism (and a nation folding in on itself) teaches you this, if you let it.  

After rushing through a shower I scooted out the door. On the way my mother phoned to tell me her best friend of 68 years died after her first in a series of several chemo treatments scheduled to treat her liver cancer. Broken words through sobs, "so unexpected...her poor grandbaby...she was going to fly in for a visit in June..."  We shared a good cry and I sat in silence the rest of the way.  Even when dense with sadness I've grown to appreciate silence like breath.  

Upon arrival I was warmly welcomed along with several others toting wine and snacks.   Like veterans heading to the VFW for a fish fry there is no nervous anticipation, no anxiety, just the comfortable acceptance expected when one weathered soldier greets another.  

I know, my friend. I know. It did happen. Come in and rest awhile. 

Unlike most girls nights, ours spans culture, socioeconomic status, race and religion.  The discussion is cerebral but folksy.  We are at ease with one another and there is no small talk.  All of it, every word, is big and meaningful and the right combination may save a child's life.  I know I'm supposed to drink wine and relax but I always bring a notebook and a pen.  I don't want to miss anything.  

No talk of Ashton's abandonment of Demi during her stint in rehab or rejuv or whatever it's called when celebrities can't cope with disappointment.  No yammering on about who wore what to the last big awards show.  

Hey, can you help me with this porphryin test? What's the latest on your son's cerebral folate test? What did the muscle biopsy reveal? Do you think it's mitochondrial dysfunction that's causing the cerebral folate deficiency or is CFD a condition of mito disease in idiopathic autism?  Hey, did anyone read Eric London's chapter on the biopsychosocial model for autism treatment?  Groundbreaking!   How about that study on inflammatory cytokines compromising the integrity of the blood brain barrier?  Did anyone happen to bring a hard copy of the Kennedy Kreiger paper?

When the libations really start flowing we talk about doctors.  Mostly, their incompetence.  We talk about how we all saw our children decline, many of us saw a correlation to their vaccinations, and most of our physicians said we saw nothing.  They told us changing their diet was useless and that after months and months of prodding on our part, an evaluation by a government funded institution known as "early intervention" could point us in the right direction.   Of course, early intervention is where most of us get our first autism diagnosis disguised as "developmental delay".  A bunch of therapists come in and tell you they can't really tell you anything at all, except, your kid is delayed across the board in all categories and he needs therapy.  The doctors echo this sentiment. Our mainstream pediatricians and our government's evaluation facilities partner in the proliferation of the greatest ponzi scheme of our time, the ridiculous theory of Better Diagnosis. While they pat themselves on the back for "catching it early" us moms saw the damage a year ago but kept right on listening and vaccinating; thereby exacerbating our children's mitochondrial disease and wasting precious time that could have been spent treating all the metabolic and methylation issues our children's raped and weakened immune systems could not remedy on their own.  

When one of my friends discovered her son exhibited several characteristics of the bowel disease that Andy Wakefield lost his license for discovering, she was told by her physician that she was mistaken.   How can a mother be mistaken about bowel obstructions, bowel disease, infected excrement and the resultant neurological illness she observes in her child?  Not only does she live it, but she's flown all over the country seeing the only research physicians capable of diagnosing it.  She has study after study test after test to PROVE his illness.  Her mainstream pediatrician and his remarkable ego told her she needed to "go to church" to figure out her problem.  She did.  She went to the church of higher thinking, the church of research physicians who listen to parents and treat real medical symptoms.  Then she came back to enlighten her doctor so he might help her child and countless other patients that suffer as her son does.  It was an act of good will on her part. 

Go to church, he says. 

We all have a good laugh at the expense of my friend's doctor and his "scientist friends".  Their remarkable egos.  Their thoughtless comments.  They are--well, they're idiots.  Puppets.  Fools.  Every last one of them.  And, criminals, really--when you think about it.  Every single doctor who refuses to listen to a parent after that parent reports a reaction to a vaccine needs to be held accountable.  It is my belief this will soon happen.  The thing about my mom friends and I is, we are very smart.  Our families, our babies, have been harmed.  Our precious innocent children. We are not going away.  We are women.  We talk...and talk, and talk and talk. But, we don't talk about Jenny, Andy Wakefield, or even mercury anymore.  We talk about macrophages, auto-immune-mediated tissue damage, IgG, IgA and IgM immunoglobulins in neuroglial cells.  We talk about disturbances in the homeostasis of the human body.  We talk about chronic illness in our children and it's iatrogenic causes.  

We are amused by Nancy Snyderman, Marc Seigel, Paul Offit, Seth Mnookin and their tragic confederates who will be studied by Macolm Gladwell.  They'll  soon take their place in history along side executors of Christians and Holocaust denialists.  Once hailed as heroes, they will be mocked and disgraced for their arrogance and ignorance. It's not that we haven't tried!  Lord knows, we have tried! Representatives of the highest casts in autism research have done everything in their power to educate our doctors, our congress, the public. Their sage tutelage falls on the deaf but powerful and extravagantly perfumed ears of the Sadducees. If their science is too compelling, their case too strong, they are destroyed. Merck and their buddies descend upon our learned and honest researchers like a pack of wolves.  They take away licenses, destroy reputations, disembowel practices.  We, the moms, laugh.  Do you really think that is going to stop the truth?  Do you really think we don't see?  I tried explaining to my son that Dr. Wakefield's paper was fraudulent but it didn't stop his violent diarrhea and painful bowel disease as I'd hoped.  I also ordered him to stop having vaccine encephalopathy when my doctor said it couldn't happen because it was so "rare".  Gosh darn if his little head didn't swell even bigger.  

Sometimes ya just can't teach stupid no matter how hard you try.  No matter.  The moms have arrived.  We are in every neighborhood.  And WE. are. taking. OVER. 

The Beginning. lj goes

Olmsted and Blaxill discuss The Age of Autism on Fox Business

Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill on Fox Business talking to Imus about their book, The Age of Autism.

Is Autism Man Made?



Is There a Vaccine-Autism Link?



Update: I have just learned that these videos are being blocked in the UK. Instead of Dan and Mark, they read, "This video contains content from FOX News Network, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds". Yet Brits CAN watch the other videos on the Fox Business You Tube Channel. Just like Andrew Wakefield's book... BANNED across the pond!

Apparently not only are the Queen's subjects not allowed to speak truth to power, they are not allowed to hear anyone else do it either. They can't have mum's thinking for themselves, now can they?

Confirmation of this is welcome from our friends across the pond.

Rediscovering “Donald T.”: John Donvan and Caren Zucker Steal a Story

Last Tuesday, John Donvan and Caren Zucker wrote a beautiful article for The Atlantic, entitled, “Autism’s First Child”, accompanied by a video packet that ran on Good Morning America and followed by a lengthy interview on NPR, about the first patient ever diagnosed with autism.  Donald Triplett.  These intrepid reporters, share how they searched and found this man who had been lost to history, and share with the world what a successful life he turned out to have.  Donald was raised in a small town, by parents who stuck by him despite the recommendation of professionals to institutionalize him, and alongside neighbors who loved, accepted and supported him.  He went to college, joined a fraternity, worked at a bank, drives a car and plays golf.  It is a story that, as a mother of an 8 year old boy with autism, gives me hope.

But the problem is that it is not their story, the whole story, and the most newsworthy part of the story.

You see, in 1943, Leo Kanner, a Johns Hopkins Child Psychologist, wrote a paper in which he described a rare disorder he found in 11 children.  The disorder became known as “Autism” and Kanner referred to the first case he found as “Donald T.”, a boy who was indeed lost to history.  And it was intrepid journalistic investigating that found that Donald was still alive and living well in Mississippi.  But it wasn’t ABC’s Donvan and Zucker who found him in 2010.  It was a UPI’s Dan Olmsted who found him in 2005.

That year, Olmsted began a series for UPI called, “The Age of Autism”, which investigated the relationship between vaccines and autism.   While reading Kanner’s paper to look for clues to any toxic exposures or physical symptoms the first children with autism may have had, Olmsted discovered that Kanner’s patient zero lived in an area where a water soluble form of mercury was first used in forestry.  Potentially clinically significant as mercury was the component in vaccines suspected by many of being a causal factor in autism.  So Dan Olmsted decided to try to find Donald T.  And he found him living a full life in Mississippi. 

While Kanner’s other cases had poor outcomes, Donald did not.  It turns out Donald received a medical treatment that Kanner never recorded when, as a boy, he fell victim to crippling juvenile arthritis. Donald was treated with gold salts and his brother reported that as a result, Donald not only recovered from the arthritis, but "The proclivity to excitability and extreme nervousness had all but cleared up”. 

Donald began to recover from “autism”.

This is highly relevant to the autism debate because gold has an extreme affinity for mercury and pulls it from the body.  It is also significant because arthritis links his “nervous disorder” to his autoimmune disorder.  It is historical evidence that the claims that parents have been making, that their children with autism had regressed after their mercury containing vaccines, and that treating them for their autoimmune symptoms makes their “autism” better, are on the money.

In 2005 Dan Olmsted published a series of articles on Donald, the most explosive being, “The Age of Autism: Case 1 Revisited”, which poured gasoline on the fiery debate on whether or not autism is a result of medical poisoning and is treatable. 

Everyone in the debate has known about Donald T. for five years, and although Olmsted did not publish his full name, it was known by many.  Googling – “Donald T.” autism – returns more than 8,000 pages.

Olmsted wrote the “Age of Autism” series until 2007, when he left UPI and started a blog called, “Age of Autism”, where thousands a day come to comment and debate.

This past Tuesday, Olmsted published a book, written with autism parent Mark Blaxill, called “The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic”.  Chapter 6 is where you will find Donald Triplett, who decided to come out of his self-imposed anonymity to be interviewed in May of 2009 by Olmsted and Blaxill to expand on the public understanding of his story for the book.

As an autism blogger whose commentary on the initial Age of Autism series eventually became an installment in the series itself, I was given an advanced copy last May.  I was so floored by the book that I built them the web site for it, gratis.

Galley copies also went to The Atlantic, NPR and ABC, but the outlets didn’t tell Olmsted’s story, instead they carried Donvan and Zucker’s puff piece.  Given that Donvan is a correspondent on Nightline, that Zucker is a producer for ABC in New York as well as an autism parent, and that this team has been reporting on autism for over a decade, it is impossible to fathom that they would not have known about the book (and Olmsted’s reporting) if a little autism blogger, tucked away on the coast of Maine, had one in her hands last spring.

So imagine my shock as I watched the video of Donvan and Zucker entitled, “Finding Donald”, where they describe the process of tracking down who “Donald T.” actually was, pronounce to the world that Kanner’s first autism case was sill alive, write extensively about his life, and fail to mention that he is evidence that blanket government health care mandates and FDA corruption and/or incompetence may be causing widespread neurological and immune system damage to more than one percent of children in this country.

Donvan/Zucker hit three major outlets with their Donald T. revelation at the same time that the book Olmsted has been researching for six years hit the shelves.  Olmsted, his reporting, his book and Donald’s connection to the mercury/autoimmunity aspects of autism, which Donvan and Zucker even touched on in their article, are never mentioned. 

It raises the question, why would these news outlets make an end around “The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic”, and try to bury this book?

Please catch my next article.  I tell the world about a talented new singer I have discovered.  She goes by the name of… get this…“Lady GaGa”.

Update:

NYT and WaPo publish fawning articles on The Atlantic piece.  Both NYT and WaPo also got advanced copies of The Age of Autism.

Update: Olmsted and Blaxill discuss the book on Fox Business:

Is Autism Man Made?



Is There a Vaccine-Autism Link?

Age of Autism Book On Sale Today

Age of Autism Released.



Read it.

Today is September 14, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Manmade Epidemic is at book stores and available on line--we need your help.

Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill's groundbreaking book, The Age of Autism, traces the autism epidemic by examining the first diagnosed cases of autism. Dan and Mark's detailed research is impeccable and their conclusions are stunning. Their book will revolutionize the way people think about autism and children's health.

We need this book to make a big splash with the American public and you can help. Here is what we need you to do:

* Buy the book here (if you haven't already).
* Have your friends and relatives buy the book. Book purchases will drive up the book's ratings, create media interest and educate people on what happened to our children.
* Forward this e-mail to your friends in the autism community - just click on the "Forward to a Friend" button at the bottom.
* Arrange a book signing for the authors in your community. Contact Becky Estepp.
* Sign up for to receive Age of Autism action alerts here.

We must create change for all suffering with autism. Spread the word and join The Age of Autism revolution. Please help this book become a national best seller by forwarding the announcement below, and future advisories, to the media as well as family and friends.

Thank you!

For more information visit: Age of Autism Book Website

AAP Has To Search For Autism Parents Who Support Vaccination

The PR department of the American Academy of Pediatrics, concerned with all the bad press that vaccines are getting since Jenny hit the talk shows and Eli hit prime time, have put out a call to find parents who can counter the message of parents like be who believe that vaccines triggered their child's regression into autism.

From: Susan Martin (ssmartin@aap.org)
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 2:29 PM
To: SPOKESPERSONS@LISTSERV.AAP.ORG
Subject: parent spokespersons

Hello,

As part of our ongoing response to media stories regarding autism and vaccines, the AAP communications department is compiling a list of parents who support the AAP and are available for interviews. We are looking for two types of parents who could serve as spokespersons:

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorders who support immunization and who do not believe there is any link between their child’s vaccines and his or her autism.

Parents of children who suffered a vaccine-preventable illness. This could be a parent who declined immunization, whose child became ill before a vaccine was available, or whose child was ineligible for immunization.

We are asking for your help identifying parents who would be good spokespersons. They do not need to be expert public speakers. They just need to be open with their story and interested in speaking out on the issue. We will contact candidates in advance to conduct pre-interviews, to offer guidance on talking to reporters and to obtain a signed waiver giving us permission to release their name.

If a parent were placed on our list, we would offer their name and contact information to select media. We hope to build a list of parents from a wide range of geographical areas.

As the Jenny McCarthy and “Eli Stone” stories illustrate, this issue is likely to recur in the national and local media. The AAP is committed to doing all we can to counter such erroneous reports with factual information supported by scientific evidence and AAP recommendations.

The anti-vaccine groups often have emotional family stories on their side. The ability to offer a reporter an interview with a similarly compelling parent who is sympathetic to the AAP’s goals is a powerful tool for our media relations program.

Please contact me if you have any questions or to suggest a parent to interview.

Thank you,

Susan Stevens Martin
Director, Division of Media Relations
American Academy of Pediatrics
847.434.7131

The outspoken JB Handley of Generation Rescue responds to the architect of this manufactured PR blitz (while it is still in the manufacturing stage) by calling attention to the fact that while she needs head hunters to find her parents to make vaccination look appealing, all you have to do to find parents who can tell the story of the destruction that vaccination has brought into their family is to swing a dead cat.

As has now become the norm in this country, rather than taking responsibility for bad practices, dangerous policies and harmful products, the AAP adopts the corporate model of 'why fix the problem when a PR campaign is so much cheaper and easier!'

I wonder how hard Ms. Martin would have to look to find parents who not only had a sympathetic story to tell about why everyone should vaccinate, but to find parents like those of us who have spent thousands of (unpaid) hours on trying to get their vaccine message out. Because those of us with autistic, vaccine injured children who have become active activists are kind of everywhere. We can't leave home too often to give interviews, and writing is our best tool, but we are everywhere.

I am reproducing Handley's article in full, and I will add this to his comments:

Dear Ms. Martin,

You and the AAP need to realize that continuing on the course of denying your blinding love affair with vaccines combined with the permanent damage to our kids health from over vaccinating them (both of which are readily apparent to anyone with eyes) is destroying your credibility very quickly.

Conversations on the playground between mothers about their children's health is not, "Well the AAP says vaccines are safe, thank goodness. I am going to stop by today and get a flu shot for Johnny". They are about your conflicts of interest, your failure to take the questions asked by parents seriously, and "I am not going back to Dr. Smith because he yelled at me when i asked him if getting 4 shots at once was safe for my three month old baby. Do you know of a pediatrician who is OK with not vaccinating on schedule or at all?"

No one disagrees that viral infections suck, but no one on the playground knows any children who have died or suffered long term problems from getting a viral infection. Sadly, most of those mom's saw what happened to little Jimmy with their own eyes. He looked completely normal to them last month, and now, after being vaccinated and getting a little sick right after, Jimmy can't come to the playground any more because he is in therapy and will be for the rest of his childhood. And many of them have sat and cried at the kitchen table with Jimmy's mom who thought she was doing the right thing when she gave him all his shots, and doesn't understand why her pediatrician keeps saying that they could have nothing to do with his autism. Isn't it as obvious to him as it is to her and everyone else who knew Jimmy before?

Please, stop playing PR games and face the problem. Too many vaccines, too close together, not tested in combination, given to soon, to children who have no medical history and are not screened in advance to see if they have a healthy enough immune system to handle the vaccines, is adding up to tens of thousands of children with life long health problems and developmental disabilities.

The AAP has over estimated what children could handle and it is time to roll back the vaccine program and put common sense safety measures in place.

And Please... Please... stop your pediatricians from sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring vaccine reactions in children. Unexplained fevers and crying for three months is not something that just happens. Years of constipation and bowel problems cannot be explained away with, "some kids are just like that". The answers that my pediatricians gave me when I raised these concerns with them about my child were malpractice and they were fed to them by you.

After Chandler was diagnosed and I went back into my ped with all my research and tried to get him to read the safety and risk information on the actual package insert on the first vaccine my child reacted to. Although he was nice about it, he told me he didn't have time to read what I had to give him because he could barely keep up with all that you had to give him. When I asked him, 'who do i talk to about this then', he said, 'Talk to the AAP, I go by their direction'.

But you don't listen to me. Who cares if I raise reasonable and important questions about the shoddy research you use to promote vaccine safety and can offer you video tapes of my son before and after his 18 month vaccination/autistic regression, right?



After all, I am just another "scientifically illiterate" and "desperate" parent looking for someone to blame for my son's autism.

(Wait a minute, so if the public is supposed to dismiss autism parents stories about vaccine triggering their children's regression because those parents are emotional and not scientific experts, then shouldn't the public also be dismissing the stories of the parents that you are planning on trotting out because their tragedy has made them emotional and they are not scientific experts? Are people supposed to be listening to parents anecdotal stories or not... I am confused...)

I stopped listing to you when you stopped listening to me. Parents are asking questions, lots and lots of parents. If you stop listening to those questions, and pass on giving real answers, not thinly veiled BS flackery, but truthful and earnest answers, they are all going to stop listening to you too.

Admit that there is a problem and fix it. Any other faux solution, like this stupid PR move, is just throwing your time and money, and many children, down a black hole.

Sincerely,
Ginger Taylor, M.S.
AdventuresInAutism.com

AAP WAGS THE DOG: FIND US SOME SICK KIDS PRONTO!

American Academy of Pediatricians email reveals panic and new low in “media planning.” (Full email at end of post.)

By J.B. Handley

Dear Ms. Martin:

I understand you are the Director of Media Relations for the American Academy of Pediatrics. I read your email of February 13th to medical practitioners (that I have included below in its entirety) describing a nationwide search for parents that, in your words, fit one of two profiles. First:

“Parents of children with autism spectrum disorders who support immunization and who do not believe there is any link between their child’s vaccines and his or her autism.”

Second:

“Parents of children who suffered a vaccine-preventable illness. This could be a parent who declined immunization, whose child became ill before a vaccine was available, or whose child was ineligible for immunization.”

Apparently, you are trying to establish connections with these families because:

“The anti-vaccine groups often have emotional family stories on their side. The ability to offer a reporter an interview with a similarly compelling parent who is sympathetic to the AAP’s goals is a powerful tool for our media relations program.”

It sounds like you have a system in place to prepare these parents to meet the media, according to your email:

“We will contact candidates in advance to conduct pre-interviews, to offer guidance on talking to reporters and to obtain a signed waiver giving us permission to release their name.”

As the father of an autistic child and the leader of a national autism organization, I found myself sitting at my desk, my chin nearly hitting the floor, in stunned astonishment as I read your email. Where, exactly, has the AAP’s humanity and moral compass gone?

Ms. Martin, let me give you a little insight into my world. If I wanted to find parents who had autistic children and who believed their child’s autism was impacted by vaccines, I wouldn’t need to email the nation’s pediatricians hoping I might find one or two. I could just open my window and yell, because these parents are everywhere in my neighborhood and town! Worse, our numbers continue to grow.

You see, not a day goes by without Generation Rescue receiving an email from a new parent who watched their child decline following a vaccination appointment with their pediatrician. While you search for the handful of parents with autistic children who may support immunizations, we can’t respond to emails fast enough from the thousands we hear from who feel vaccines contributed to their child’s autism. You may think our organizations have some sort of well-orchestrated system for having “emotional family stories” teed up for reporters. What’s actually true is that within a phone call or two, any reporter worth their salt could find parents anywhere in the country who feel exactly like I do.

And, that gets us right back to the problem with your organization as many of us see it. When Generation Rescue rented a booth at your national convention 2 years ago, we were stunned by how many AAP members came to our booth, quietly mentioned that they supported what we were doing, and encouraged us to keep fighting for the kids.

Let me repeat that: Hundreds of your members congratulated my organization for fighting for the kids!

Meanwhile, employees of the AAP like yourself have your head in the sand:

Where is the media story of the AAP sounding the alarm that the prevalence of autism continues to rise?

Where is the media story of the AAP digging into the growing number of stories of children recovering from autism?

Where is the AAP when parents return to the pediatrician and explain to the doctors they trust that their child disappeared after receiving multiple vaccines?

Where is the AAP to help protect our kids from a growing, devastating epidemic of Autism, ADHD, PDD-NOS, asthma, food allergies, learning disorders, and other autoimmune issues?

You are nowhere.

You are looking for the needle in the haystack parent with the autistic child who supports vaccines.

You are looking for the parent with the illness to exploit to scare the masses.

What you should be looking for, Ms. Martin, is your own soul, which you seem to have lost somewhere along the way. Worse, particularly if you are a parent yourself, you also seem to have lost the ability to listen to the parents and to put the needs of our kids first.

Shame on you, Ms. Martin, for planning such blatant manipulation of the media.

Shame on you for being part of an organization that has done nothing to respond to the growing epidemic of autism.

Shame on you and your organization for never exploring the growing body of stories of recovered children.

With deep disappointment and disgust,

JB Handley
Co-Founder
Generation Rescue

JB Handley is Co-Founder of Generation Rescue and Editor at Large for Age of Autism.

The Rescue Post is now Age of Autism

The Rescue Post has joined forces with Dan Olmsted of UPI's The Age of Autism fame, to become AgeOfAutism.com

Put them on your favorites list because they will surely be a force to be reckoned with.

Dan Olmsted Is Back

... and calling out the CDC's shenanigans on The Rescue Post.

If you have not already made The Rescue Post a part of your regular blog reading, time to grab the feed.

Thank You Dan Olmsted

Dan Olmsted began writing his Age of Autism series more than two years ago, and in it he has brought to our attention some of the most fascinating and compelling aspects of the thimerosal/autism story. He has done much of the medical investigating that the CDC should have done, but didn't, and found that the links between autism and thimerosal go back to the first case of autism ever recorded.

If the CDC had any sense they would take their "transgender beauty pageant" budget and instead hire Dan to do their investigating for them. But then again if the CDC had any sense, none of us would be here now, would we.

One of the most significant things that I feel that Dan's work has done is show just how much the CDC et. al. does NOT want to properly investigate this. Dan's revelations, which repeatedly garnered, "Holy Crap!" reactions from autism parents, were met with a collective yawn from health officials. The fact that Julie Gerberding could make statements like, "CDC recognizes that parents want answers. We share their frustration at not having more answers about the causes and possible cure.", while failing to follow up on all that Dan has brought to the topic, is proof positive that CDC does not want to know what is going on in autism. If Julie wanted answers, Dan would not have not had to spend two plus years writing this series. The CDC would have taken his info and run with it and they would have found patient zero long before Dan did.

Dan Olmsted has proved Julie Gerberding a liar.

I am sad to see the series go, but thrilled that Dan is still on the trail. The Age of Autism series should be published in one volume and be required reading for everyone in the autism world. Evelyn Pringle was dead on when she called him, "Autism's Dick Tracy". Some smart publisher needs to give this guy a bucket of cash and send him back out. There is no telling what this hound can sniff out.

Thank you Dan for looking out for our kids.

Update:
More on Dan:

Wade at Injecting Sense
Kim Stagliano at Kim Stagliano
Lisa Blakemore-Brown at Thimerosal Thoughts

The Age of Autism: The Last Word

What tha??? Restructuring??

The Age of Autism: The last word
Published: July 18, 2007 at 12:47
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor

WASHINGTON, July 18 (UPI) -- This is my 113th and final Age of Autism column. United Press International, which has been the hospitable home for this series, is restructuring, and I'm off to adventures as yet unknown -- although I intend to keep my focus on autism and related issues.

Why? Because it is the story of a lifetime.

"Autism is currently, in our view, the most important and the fastest-evolving disorder in all of medical science and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future," says Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Columbia University's school of medicine.

Most mainstream experts believe autism is a genetic disorder that's "increasing" only because of more sophisticated diagnoses. But based on my own reporting, I think autism is soaring due to environmental factors -- in the sense of something coming from the outside in -- and that genes play a mostly secondary role, perhaps creating a susceptibility to toxic exposures in certain children. As the saying goes: Genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.

So to me, the issues autism raises -- about the health and well-being of this and future generations, about the role that planetary pollution, chemical inventions and medical interventions may have inadvertently played in triggering it -- are so fundamental that by looking at autism, we're looking very deeply into the kind of world we want to inhabit and our children to inherit.

It is impossible to summarize all the issues I've raised in my columns, but to me, four stand out:

-- The first question I asked when I started looking at autism in late 2004 was this: What is the autism rate among never-vaccinated American children? Vaccines are the leading "environmental" suspect for many families of autistic children. So I was stunned to learn that such a study had never been done, given that it could quickly lay to rest concerns that public health authorities say are dangerously undermining confidence in childhood immunizations.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., introduced -- and just reintroduced -- a bill to force the Department of Health and Human Services to do just that (generously crediting this column for finding enough never-vaccinated children to show that such a study is indeed feasible). She calls it "common sense," and it is an example of ordinary people -- through their representatives -- telling the experts they want better answers, and fast.

Recently, such a study was in fact done with private funds. It was a $200,000 telephone survey commissioned by the advocacy group Generation Rescue that, as limited as it is scientifically, suggested a disturbing trend: Higher rates of autism in vaccinated vs. never-vaccinated U.S. children, along with similar ratios for other neurodevelopmental disorders like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

I reported the same possible association in the Amish community. That's been criticized as inherently unscientific and undercut by the fact that Amish genes may differ from the rest of us and that increasingly, the Amish do receive at least some vaccinations.

All true, but intriguing nonetheless. I also found a family medical practice in Chicago called Homefirst that has thousands of never-vaccinated children as patients. According to its medical director, Mayer Eisenstein, he's aware of only one case of autism and one case of asthma among those kids -- not the 1 in 150 and 1 in 10 that are the national averages for those disorders -- and he has the medical records to prove it.

I wrote about that in 2005, yet when I met again with Mayer in Chicago last week, he told me not one public health official or medical association has contacted him to express any interest. Nor has any other journalist -- not a one.

-- That brings me to my second theme. I am sorry to say my colleagues in the mainstream journalistic community have, in the main, done a lousy job covering this issue. They, of course, would disagree -- two were quoted (anonymously!) in the Columbia Journalism Review saying, "Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions."

Actually, my mind is made up about only one thing: Both vaccinations and autism are so important that definitive, independent research needs to be done yesterday -- and the fact that it hasn't should be making more journalists suspicious.

I think Big Media's performance on this issue is on a dismal par with its record leading up to the Iraq war, when for the most part it failed to probe deeply into the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and the assertions about Saddam Hussein's link to al-Qaida. And it's bad for the same reasons -- excessive reliance on "authorities" with obvious conflicts of interest; uncritical enlistment in the "war on terror" and "the war on disease" without considering collateral damage or adverse events; a stenographic and superficial approach to covering the news, and an at-least-semiconscious fear of professional reprisal.

In the case of Iraq, that fear included being cut off -- like my exemplary fellow ex-Unipresser Helen Thomas -- from precious "inside sources" in the government; in the case of autism, fear of alienating advertisers lurks silently in the background.

To see how squeamish and slow-on-the-uptake the media can be in the face of an urgent health crisis, look no further than the early days of AIDS, as chronicled in Randy Shilts' "And the Band Played On."

-- Another angle I explored intensively involved a group of families in Olympia, Wash., who noticed their children regressing into autism after getting four live-virus vaccines -- mumps, measles, rubella (MMR) and chickenpox -- at an early age and in close temporal proximity. These cases seemed to have little or nothing to do with the mercury preservative in other vaccines, called thimerosal, that many parents blame for autism (it was phased out of most routine immunizations starting in 1999).

That raises an ominous prospect: The still-rising autism rate might be related to some other aspect of the immunization schedule as well -- timing, age, total load or other ingredients. (I didn't invent that idea; the head of an expert panel mandated by Congress expressed it to me in an interview -- and again, her comments were largely ignored.)

One focus of that seven-part Pox series last year was a case of autism following a small clinical trial of a new vaccine called ProQuad, which contains the live-but-weakened MMR and chickenpox viruses in one shot. The chickenpox virus in ProQuad is about 10 times the amount in the standalone chickenpox shot, a boost needed to overcome "interference" among the four viruses (and a possible sign of trouble right there). Manufacturer Merck says the vaccine is safe and not related to autism.

Earlier this year the company announced it was suspending production of ProQuad -- barely a year after its introduction -- because supplies of chickenpox vaccine had run unexpectedly low. The company, however, will keep producing its other products containing chickenpox virus: the standalone chickenpox shot and a new vaccine for shingles.

A Merck spokesman told me the suspension of ProQuad had nothing to do with any safety concerns, that it had been selling well and would be reintroduced as soon as chickenpox vaccine supplies were replenished. As I've written before, I found Merck to be quite accessible and forthcoming when I asked questions about this issue -- much more so than the Food and Drug Administration, in fact.

So I take Merck at its word. But -- in the spirit of trust-but-verify -- I'll be watching for the return of ProQuad.

-- The Age of Autism columns that may mean the most over time (IMHO, of course) are about the first cases of autism, reported in 1943 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore among 11 children born in the United States in the 1930s.

With crucial observations from Mark Blaxill of the advocacy group SafeMinds, I've suggested a pattern in some of those early cases: exposure, through the father's occupation, to ethyl mercury in fungicides. That's the same kind of mercury used in vaccines, and both were introduced commercially around 1930, right when those first autism cases were identified.

This is only a hypothesis, and critics have suggested it is a classic case not of connecting the dots, but of finding what I went looking for. That may be, but put yourself in my place when -- more than a year after publicly proposing the mercury fungicide idea in a column -- I identified the family of autism's Case 2 and located an extensive archive for the father, a distinguished scientist.

I sat down in the North Carolina State University library and opened the first box, took out the first folder and opened it to the first page. It was a yellowed, typewritten paper from spring 1922 summarizing a fungicide experiment the father conducted as a grad student in plant pathology -- an experiment in which mercury was the main ingredient (and in the title). By the time his son was born in 1936, he was working with the new generation of ethyl mercury fungicides -- yes, the kind used in vaccines.

Though others will disagree, I find that just a bit outside the parameters of chance, given the timeline of the disorder and the independent belief of so many of today's parents that the same kind of mercury, in a totally different context, triggered their children's autism.

It also suggests that whatever is causing autism could be coming at us from several directions -- our increasingly mercury-toxic environment as well as any medical interventions that may be implicated. Check out "Mercury Link to Case 2" in the series to get the full picture.

So thanks to UPI for supporting this work. And thanks for reading, responding to -- and critiquing -- this column. Truth is, you haven't heard the last word from me. Not by a long shot.


--

(The entire Age of Autism series is available at upi.com under
Special Reports.)

--

(e-mail: olmsted.dan@gmail.com)

The Age of Autism: Study Sees Vaccine Risk

Dan Olmsted writes about the new vaccinated v. unvaccinated study. Parents have been asking for this study to be done for at least three years (that is when I came on the scene) and the FDA recommended that this study be done in 1982 when they mandated that thimerosal be removed from over the counter products because of the danger it posed.

Julie Gerberding, honing her shoveling skills, made excuses as to why it would just be to darn hard in July of 2005.

Referring to the new study that shows vaccinated children have 2.5 times the rate of NDDs as compared with unvaccinated children...

A spokesman for the CDC, which recommends the childhood immunization schedule and has conducted studies that found no link to autism, said the agency has not seen the Generation Rescue data.

"We look forward to learning more about the survey," spokesman Curtis Allen said. "It's important to note that self-report surveys on topics like this often have significant limitations, so one must be cautious with respect to interpreting the findings.

In April of 2005, the CDC posted a note on its web site saying that they were reviewing Evidence of Harm, and would be responding to it. We are still waiting for that response.

How long do you think it will take them to comment on this?

The Age of Autism: Study sees vaccine risk
By DAN OLMSTED

WASHINGTON, June 26 (UPI) -- A new, privately funded survey finds vaccinated U.S. children have a significantly higher risk of neurological disorders -- including autism -- than unvaccinated children.

In one striking finding, vaccinated boys 11-17 were more than twice as likely to have autism as their never-vaccinated counterparts.

The telephone survey of parents representing a total of 17,000 children appears to be the first of its kind -- and contrasts starkly with several government-backed studies that have found no risk from vaccines.

"No one has ever compared prevalence rates of these neurological disorders between vaccinated and unvaccinated children," said J.B. Handley, father of a child with autism and co-founder of Generation Rescue, which commissioned the $200,000 survey conducted by SurveyUSA, a respected marketing firm. "The phone survey isn't perfect, but these numbers point to the need for a comprehensive national study to gather this critical information.

"We have heard some speculation that unvaccinated children would be difficult to locate," Handley said. "But we were able to find more than enough in our sample of more than 17,000 children to establish confidence intervals at or above 95 percent for the primary comparisons we made."

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., reintroduced a bill first submitted last year calling for the National Institutes of Health to conduct such a study.

"Generation Rescue's study is impressive and forcefully raises some serious questions about the relationship between vaccines and autism," Maloney said. "What is ultimately needed to resolve this issue one way or the other is a comprehensive national study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

"The parents behind Generation Rescue only want information. These parents deserve more than roadblocks, they deserve answers. We can and should move forward in search of those answers."

Both Maloney and Handley said their efforts were sparked by Age of Autism columns that found anecdotal, unscientific evidence of less autism among the Amish, who have a lower vaccination rate. The column also reported on Homefirst Health Services in Chicago, whose director said there is no autism or asthma among several thousand never-vaccinated children who were home-delivered and remain patients of the family practice. The U.S. autism rate is 1 in 150 children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A spokesman for the CDC, which recommends the childhood immunization schedule and has conducted studies that found no link to autism, said the agency has not seen the Generation Rescue data.

"We look forward to learning more about the survey," spokesman Curtis Allen said. "It's important to note that self-report surveys on topics like this often have significant limitations, so one must be cautious with respect to interpreting the findings.

"It's also important to note that previous studies involving hundreds of thousands of children have failed to find an association."

Generation Rescue's Handley, however, said those studies never compared vaccinated with unvaccinated American children. He also said his survey took its cue from the CDC's own phone-survey approach to estimating the incidence of such disorders among American children.

"Listening to the CDC talk about the reliability of parent reporting, we thought there's a quick way to get a proxy for whether or not there's any truth to the hypotheses that vaccines and all these neurological disorders are related," Handley said. His organization believes that mercury, including a type used for decades in routine childhood immunizations, is a major factor in the ten-fold increase in reported autism cases over the past 20 years.

Handley said the survey, conducted in nine counties in Oregon and California, asked parents "whether their child had been vaccinated, and whether that child had one or more of the following diagnoses: attention deficit disorder, ADHD, Asperger's syndrome, Pervasive Development Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, or autism."

Results highlighted by Generation Rescue:

-- "Among more than 9,000 boys age 4-17, vaccinated boys were 2.5 times (155 percent) more likely to have neurological disorders, 224 percent more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 61 percent more likely to have autism."

-- "For older vaccinated boys in the 11-17 age bracket, the results were even more pronounced. Vaccinated boys were 158 percent more likely to have a neurological disorder, 317 percent more likely to have ADHD, and 112 percent more likely to have autism."

Handley said he believes the higher results for the older boys are probably more complete because not every child in the younger age group would have received a formal diagnosis.

Concern that vaccines are linked to the rise of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders has been largely dismissed by public health officials and mainstream medical groups, especially since a 2004 report by the respected Institute of Medicine found no such evidence -- and suggested research money go to more "promising" areas.

But parents -- some of whom say they watched their children regress into autism immediately following physical reactions to vaccines -- have continued to press the issue. A U.S. vaccine court in Washington is currently hearing argument over whether nearly 5,000 such claims should be paid by a federal vaccine injury compensation fund.

Handley said the fact that his organization could produce such a study on a relative shoestring while the U.S. government has not suggests it is hesitant to confront the possible ramifications.

Two years ago CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding told UPI that "such studies could and should be done" but offered several reasons why they might prove difficult, including the variability of autism diagnoses, possible genetic differences in the Amish and the small number of never-vaccinated children in the United States.

"They haven't lifted a penny since then," Handley said.

Full results of the study are at generationrescue.org.

(The entire Age of Autism series is accessible at upi.com under Special Reports.)

(e-mail: dolmsted@upi.com)

Monday: Dan Olmsted Talks About the Hearings on C-SAPN

Dan "Age of Autism" Olmsted is scheduled to be on C-SPAN Monday morning at 9:30 to talk about the vaccine hearing. It has a call-in component as well.

Tune in won't you?

The Age of Autism: Ground Zero

The Age of Autism: Ground Zero
By DAN OLMSTED

This column has long made the controversial case that autism had a beginning, a "big bang" if you will. That moment was 1930 -- no U.S. cases before then fully match the classic description of the disorder. Now let's take the next logical step: Not only did autism have a big bang, it also had a ground zero -- a place where many of the first cases concentrated before the disorder exploded nationwide. Ground zero was the nation's capital, in particular the Maryland suburbs where cutting-edge government research in the 1930s and 1940s exposed families to the chemical that first triggered the baffling disorder.

The foundation of this argument was laid out in the most recent Age of Autism column, "Mercury link to Case 2." Case 2 was known only as Frederick W., but we identified him as the son of a prominent plant pathologist named Frederick L. Wellman. At the time "Frederick W." was born, we showed, the senior Wellman was doing advanced work at the U.S. Agriculture Department's Beltsville research center in suburban Maryland, just outside the nation ' s capital. Wellman was experimenting with plant fungi and ways to kill them, and his extensive archive makes clear one compound he studied was ethyl mercury fungicide -- the exact kind also used in the controversial vaccine preservative thimerosal, which many parents blame for the recent rise in reported cases (mainstream experts say it has been ruled out as a cause).

Ethyl mercury in both vaccines and fungicides was pioneered and patented in the 1920s through the work of Morris S. Kharasch. When Kharasch filed the first relevant patents, he was a chemistry professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, which actually adjoins the Beltsville research center.

More links to Washington are evident in other early cases described in 1943 by Johns Hopkins University child psychiatrist Leo Kanner, who first diagnosed the disorder in Frederick W. and 10 other children born in the 1930s. Reading between the lines of his landmark 1943 paper, the very first autistic child seen at Hopkins (in 1935) was "Alfred L.," whose father was a lawyer and chemist at the U.S. Patent Office. Also a clear connection to newly patented chemicals, the federal government and the nation ' s capital. A child later profiled by Kanner was named Gary T. "Gary originally lived in Philadelphia," Kanner wrote in 1951. "The family then moved to Greenbelt, to Chicago, and back to Greenbelt." Take a look at Greenbelt, Md.: It also abuts the Beltsville agricultural center in the Washington suburbs.

Recently, a mutual friend in Washington introduced me to a 58-year-old man with Asperger's disorder, the milder version of autism. We got together for lunch, and when I asked where in the Washington area he lived, I was both startled and somehow not surprised: Riverdale, Md. That's another Washington suburb that clusters with the College Park-Beltsville-Greenbelt dots I was already plotting. What's more, he was born there in 1948 in the same house he lives in now.

I asked what his father did. He told me he was an engineer. That fits a stereotype of Asperger's affecting kids of scientists and engineers -- the so-called "geek syndrome," nerdy brainiacs hooking up to somehow spawn a generation of kids with "autism lite." I asked him what kind of engineer his father was. The answer: a mechanical engineer who tested guns for the Navy at the time he was born. And where was that? At what is now the Naval Surface Warfare Center in White Oak, Md. -- just a hop and a skip across I-95 from the Beltsville agriculture center.

I already had come across his father's line of work. In a 1972 paper, Kanner talked about a child named "Walter P.," born in June 1944. His father, too, was "an ordnance engineer for the federal government." Kanner didn't say where Walter P. was from, but the similarity makes me wonder. Mercury fulminate was widely used as a detonator for explosives and armaments. Could those two fathers, like Frederick W., be linked to cutting-edge research involving mercury? (My Riverdale acquaintance said his father sometimes brought containers of mercury home from the weapons center for the kids to play with.)

And is that kind of research a reason Leo Kanner, at Johns Hopkins in nearby Baltimore, started seeing cases of this "markedly and uniquely" different disorder in the 1930s and 1940s? Just last week I got an e-mail from the mother of a child with autism who lives on the other side of the country; her son was born nowhere near what I'm calling ground zero. But as I outlined this idea to her, she had a shock of recognition:

"I lived on a farm in Burtonsville, Md., while young and it is near Beltsville. The farm was surrounded by forest and abutted the Patuxent River." Of course, not all the early cases cluster this way. But of the two other original "Kanner kids" from his 1943 paper that I ' ve been able to identify along with Frederick W., one grew up in a town called Forest, Miss., a center of timber farming and planting; the other was the son of a forestry professor at North Carolina State University. Ethyl mercury fungicides were used to treat seeds, saplings and lumber in the 1930s, and in both places (as well as in Beltsville) the newly launched Civilian Conservation Corps was hard at work planting trees, cutting timber and building things with it. To sum up: The first cases of autism seem to radiate outward from a central point -- as big bangs tend to do. As those exposures expanded, so did autism.

This suggests a new and deeply disturbing truth about the Age of Autism: our fate is not in our genes, Dear Brutus, but in the chemicals that increasingly pollute our world and our children.

The Age of Autism: The AOA Awards '06

The Age of Autism: The AOA Awards '06
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- As this column heads into its third year, the time is right to cite those who made 2006 a memorable year in the history of autism -- and set the stage for even more remarkable ones to come.

And the winners are:

Person of the Year: Anne Dachel. This Chippewa Falls, Wis., mom and member of the National Autism Association keeps chipping away at the mainstream media's wall of indolence and incuriosity.

She sent e-mails to just about every reporter who wrote about the subject this past year along with letters-to-the-editor of their publications, as well as penning articles of her own.

She praises, she pushes, she relentlessly raises the questions at the heart of the matter: Why have the number of cases risen so dramatically? Why aren't journalists asking tougher questions of Important People?

A recent example: "We need the press to continue to investigate and report on the generation of affected children in the U.S. We're being overwhelmed by a disorder that was unheard of a few years ago, yet the press isn't calling for answers. If one in every 166 children were suddenly developing blindness, I'm sure it would be a front page story."

Some no doubt find this a bit much. But what Dachel represents is persistence. Private citizens have every right to question elected officials and keep the media on their toes, whether the pooh-bahs like it or not. It's an old-fashioned thing called citizenship.

Person of the Century: Bernard Rimland, who died this year, is all that. What's more, you can pick the century -- in the one just past, he made a massive contribution by demolishing the idea that parents' behavior can make their children autistic.

In his landmark 1964 book, "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior," he laid out the case against the then-conventional wisdom. What's more, he laid the foundation for all serious research on the subject when he wrote that "conviction (must be) subordinated to evidence. The history of science proves this to be the first step toward progress."

Using that same approach, Rimland concluded that medical treatment could help many autistic kids. That's his contribution to the century just begun and the promise it holds for both prevention and treatment.

He thus exiled himself from most of mainstream medicine, but he may have helped thousands of children. Which would you rather have as your legacy?

Because of his guts, grit -- and perseverance -- he'll be remembered for leading not one, but two, medical revolutions.

Not So Hot National Magazine Story of the Year: Newsweek, which did a cover story on the looming caregiving crisis as thousands of autistic children "age out" of mandated care into an uncertain adulthood.

So far, so good. But the magazine failed to come to grips with the obvious: Why are there so many kids with autism?

Fishy Factoid of the Year Award: ABC News, which did a story much like Newsweek's and simply asserted that "up to 1 million" adults are living with autism.

Where are they?

Quote of the Year: From Irva Hertz-Picciotto, chair of an expert panel convened by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at the request of Congress. The panel poked some gaping holes in the kind of data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses to assure Americans that there's no link between autism and the mercury preservative in vaccines called thimerosal.

"I think there's more work to be done," said Hertz-Picciotto, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine.

"We know there's a major genetic component to autism, but genes cannot explain a rise over a short time period of a few decades," she said, sounding a lot more like Anne Dachel and Bernie Rimland than Newsweek, ABC and the CDC.

"It's an 'open question' whether anything about vaccines -- timing, dose, preservative -- is related to the rise in diagnoses," she said.

That's right -- an open question, one that requires an urgent and definitive answer.

Not So Hot Magazine Story of the Year, Local Division: The Washingtonian, which ran an article in its November issue titled, "Something Happened and We Don't Know Why," about twins with autism.

Although the twins' mom thinks vaccine mercury did trigger their autism, she is brushed off with the author's comment that "many large-scale studies have disproved a link between thimerosal and autism."

Yeah, large-scale studies like the one the NIH expert panel just dumped a bucket of cold water on.

Prediction for '07: The pace of change is accelerating in ways that are not entirely in the control of the government and its often defensive bureaucracies.

I believe 2007 will be a very good year for the truth -- for the subordination of conviction to evidence, as Bernard Rimland so elegantly put it. And that would be a very good year, indeed.

The Age of Autism: What Newsweek Missed

The Age of Autism: What Newsweek missed
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- Newsweek's cover story this week is about what happens to autistic kids when they grow up. The magazine does a good job of pointing to funding gaps and the plight of parents who can only imagine what will happen to their kids after they're gone.

But Newsweek fails to confront a key issue, one that bedevils mainstream publications every time they write about autism: Is it really increasing? Or are we just doing a better job of diagnosing the disorder?

Newsweek, without exactly saying it, comes down on the side of better diagnosis. " ... (M)ore sophisticated epidemiology has revealed the true magnitude of the problem," the magazine says. It also suggests the increase coincided with parents banding together "to raise awareness of a once rarely diagnosed, often overlooked disease."

Yet in a sidebar, Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, says that as a psychiatrist in the 1970s he never saw a single person with autism. "In 1985, curiosity sent him searching; it took several phone calls to find a single patient," the article says.

Does today's "more sophisticated epidemiology" really square with Insel's experience? I don't believe it does; 1985 was hardly the dark ages of medical diagnosis. And autism was described as a distinct disorder more than 40 years before that -- concern already had arisen that it was becoming a trendy diagnosis, handed out too freely.

Yet Insel, obviously well-connected to the medical and psychiatric community, had to mount a virtual search party to find a single one?

The article goes on to say that NIMH is "newly interested in environmental factors that might set off the disorder in patients who are already genetically prone to it."

What does it mean to be "already genetically prone" to autism, yet have it triggered only after exposure to some outside factor? I'm not sure that makes sense. What does make sense is that some children might have a genetic inability to cope with that factor, triggering the "environmental insult" that leads to autism.

If such an exposure increased, it could certainly account for an increase in the autism rate. NIH officials are increasingly blunt about this, even if the media are not. At a recent meeting with a group of parents, according to several participants, the head of one NIH institute said: "There are no epidemic deniers here."

I'm told a second institute director said at another recent meeting that autism is primarily an "environmental" disease. An audience member's suggestion that genes alone explain the current rate was flatly dismissed by this official.

Because it doesn't connect the dots, Newsweek misses the point: We're in an epidemic, which is why the future of this generation is a crisis. The article's whole premise, however, inadvertently suggests the truth: There are now so many kids with autism -- "as many as 500,000 Americans under 21," the magazine says -- that caring for them as adults must be urgently addressed.

If there were already a comparable million-plus adults with the disorder, the issue would have been recognized years ago. To be sure, some autistic adults of all ages have been misdiagnosed over the years as retarded or mentally ill.

But if autism has held steady over the years, it shouldn't be hard to find thousands and thousands of clearly autistic people in their 30s, 40s, 50s -- even their 80s and 90s. The first child in the landmark 1943 study identifying autism, who was known as Donald T., is still alive at age 73. It was the striking uniqueness and novelty of such cases that prompted the study in the first place.

When NIMH's Insel went looking for cases in the 1980s, it seems autism was still pretty rare. It's not anymore -- as Newsweek points out, disorders on the autism "spectrum" now afflict as many as 1 in 166 children. Note: children. Where are the 1 in 166 autistic adults?

Until we stop ignoring the obvious, we're never going to stop this epidemic -- and find new and better treatments for people already afflicted.

And that's the most urgent issue of all.

The Age of Autism: Hot potato on the Hill

The Age of Autism: Hot potato on the Hill
By DAN OLMSTED

The newly proposed legislation to study the autism rate in never-vaccinated American kids could settle the debate over vaccines and autism once and for all. Does that mean it will never happen?

This week U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., stepped out front on the issue. She announced at a briefing at the National Press Club that she is drafting legislation to mandate that the federal government find the answer to that question.

Notice the word "mandate" -- as in "direct," which is the language the bill uses. As in, quit making excuses and just do it.

Bureaucrats and lobbyists and "experts" sometimes forget that the power in this country resides with the people, who express their will through their elected representatives. This may sound rather grand, but the point is that legislators are not some "special interest" who must be humored while the permanent ruling class goes on its merry way.

That's why putting a bill before the Congress -- which Maloney says she will do by the end of April after getting as much public comment as possible -- could be a bigger threat than people realize.

After all, as Maloney said this week, "Maybe someone in the medical establishment will show me why this study is a bad idea, but they haven't done it yet."

Maloney, who credits this column with the idea to look at the never-vaccinated, also critiqued the studies that supposedly have ruled out any link between vaccines -- particularly the mercury-based preservative thimerosal -- and autism.

"The one major government study to date, the Institute of Medicine's 2004 review, has been met with skepticism from a lot of people," she said. "There are serious questions about the data set and methodology.

"Meanwhile, there is new biological evidence published in top journals, and from major U.S. universities, to support the mercury-autism hypothesis. Just last week we saw the study out of UC Davis, which found that thimerosal disrupts normal biological signals within cells, causes inflammation and even cell death.

"In short," the congresswoman concluded, "I believe that there are still more questions than answers. But answers are what we desperately need."

Surely everyone's in favor of answers, aren't they? Well, no, they're not. Already, doubts are being raised about whether there are enough never-vaccinated kids to do such a study (there are); whether it's worth doing (it is); and what the results would really show (well, let's find out).

In fact, if the feds hadn't been contentedly dozing for the last decade as the autism rate inexplicably soared, we'd already have our answer.

Back in 2002 a woman named Sandy Gottstein, who does not even have an affected child, came all the way from Anchorage, Alaska, to raise this issue at a congressional hearing.

"My question is, is the National Institutes of Health ever planning on doing a study using the only proper control group, that is, never-vaccinated children?" Gottstein asked.

Dr. Steve Foote of NIH responded: "I am not aware of a proposed study to use a suitably constructed group of never-vaccinated children. ... Now CDC would be more likely perhaps to be aware of such an opportunity."

Responded Dr. Melinda Wharton of the CDC: "The difficulty with doing such a study in the United States, of course, is that a very small portion of children have never received any vaccines, and these children probably differ in other ways from vaccinated children. So performing such a study would, in fact, be quite difficult."

Another futile effort is recounted in David Kirby's book, "Evidence of Harm," which recounts parents' compelling stories that their children's regressive autism was triggered by vaccine reactions.

The book -- just out in paperback and winner of this year's prize from the prestigious Investigative Reporters and Editors -- describes how in 2004 Lyn Redwood of the advocacy group SafeMinds sent a list of proposed studies to Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla.

Weldon, a strong advocate of banning thimerosal, sent the list on to Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redwood's proposal No. 1: "An investigation into the rates of neurodevelopmental disorders including autism in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations (e.g., Amish, Christian Scientists.)"

Last year this column set out to test that theory among the Amish, in an unvaccinated subset of homeschooled kids and in a large medical practice in Chicago with thousands of never-vaccinated children. In this admittedly unscientific and anecdotal reporting, we didn't find very many kids with autism.

That's certainly not conclusive, but we did conclude there are plenty of never-vaccinated kids in this country, and not all of them are riding around in buggies and reading by candlelight. The total number of appropriate "controls" -- reasonably typical never-vaccinated kids -- is well into the tens of thousands, at least.

Nor is the issue pro-vaccines vs. no vaccines, as some who oppose such a study are subtly suggesting. It's safety vs. complacency.

After all, the CDC switched to an inactivated polio vaccine in 2000 when it became clear that the live polio virus was causing a handful of polio cases each year. And kids today are still protected from polio -- only now with zero chance of actually contracting it from the vaccine.

Switching to a safer vaccine did not cause a collapse in public confidence in childhood immunizations -- probably quite the contrary.

Expect to hear all kinds of excuses, including that one, from the powers that be as to why such a conclusive study couldn't, shouldn't and really mustn't be done. Then ask yourself, Why?

E-mail: dolmsted@upi.com

The Age of Autism: Doctors for mercury

The Age of Autism: Doctors for mercury
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- As doctors and health authorities fight state bans on mercury in vaccines and keep giving it to kids and pregnant women, one fact stands out: their certainty.

The image of pediatricians and public officials as valiant defenders of mercury takes a bit of getting used to, given their longstanding efforts to keep the toxic element out of our food, our bodies and the environment.

No reasonable person -- let alone health professional -- would advocate keeping mercury in childhood vaccines unless they were absolutely certain it was an exception to this lethal legacy.

That's especially so because vaccines can be made without the mercury preservative, called thimerosal. You can take it out and still protect the health of American children through vaccination, and if you had a shred of doubt about its safety, surely you would.

If you keep it in, you had better be right.

But what is the real degree of certainty that thimerosal is safe? Is it absolute? Beyond a reasonable doubt? A preponderance of the evidence -- the lesser standard that applies in civil cases but not when someone's freedom (or life) is at stake?

Here's the kind of thing that makes doctors -- most of whom have no more ability than you or I to investigate the safety of vaccines for themselves -- feel so certain. It's a paper titled "Vaccine Safety Controversies and the Future of Vaccination Programs," and it appears in the November 2005 issue of The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

The authors are from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends the childhood immunization schedule; the United Nations World Health Organization, which oversees the vaccination of tens of millions of people worldwide every year, and several big universities. The report was supported by "unrestricted grants from GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, Sanofi Pasteur MSD, several universities and other institutions."

"Thimerosal has been used for (more than) 60 years in infant vaccines and in other applications and has not been associated with adverse health effects in the general population, except when persons have been exposed to amounts many orders of magnitude greater than found in vaccines or pharmaceuticals," the authors write.

That's a ringing endorsement of safety (whether it's supported by the data is an issue I'll address in upcoming columns). But keep reading: "It should also be borne in mind that the risks of thimerosal-containing vaccines to the fetus, premature infant and low-weight infant have insufficiently been studied."

Whoa. "Insufficiently studied" -- after more than 60 years of giving thimerosal to pregnant women and babies of every size and shape? Nonetheless, the CDC recommends flu shots for pregnant women and 6-to-23-months-olds and won't recommend thimerosal-free versions. As a result, most flu shots still contain mercury.

Another new study is condescendingly titled, "When science is not enough -- a risk/benefit profile of thimerosal-containing vaccines," by Australians C. John Clements and Peter B. McIntyre in the journal Expert Opinion on Drug Safety:

"Thimerosal is safe as a vaccine preservative, and should continue to be used in settings where accessibility and cost require that multi-dose vials of vaccine are available."

Clements advises the WHO on vaccine policy; McIntyre is director of Australia's National Center for Immunization Research and Surveillance of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases.

"The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion rejects the hypothesis that neurodevelopmental abnormalities are causally related to the use of thimerosal in vaccines," they point out.

This is the kind of ammunition public health officials and the American Academy of Pediatrics are firing back at proponents of mercury bans --"overwhelming" evidence that thimerosal is safe. In Illinois, the state AAP vigorously opposed the ban.

"Though well intended, these bills do not advance public health and could inadvertently diminish our state's efforts at fighting influenza," the AAP said. "Though it is a mercury-containing compound, thimerosal does not pass from the bloodstream into the brain to any significant degree."

The state legislators listened politely to that dubious assertion -- and voted to limit thimerosal in childhood vaccines anyway. But that was not the last word.

As reported by R. L. Nave in the Illinois Times last month: "Citing cost concerns and a potential shortfall for the upcoming flu season, the Illinois Department of Public Health filed for a 12-month exemption to the Mercury-Free Vaccine Act, passed last summer to limit the use of vaccines containing mercury. However, child-health-care advocates who lobbied for the bill's passage are upset by what they believe was a premeditated attempt by IDPH to circumvent state law."

This is what you call chutzpah -- public health authorities thwarting the express will of the people, certain that flu shots will save humanity and mercury never hurt anybody. Does the governor never fire anyone?

Almost lost in this crossfire is the simple fact that in 1999, these selfsame health authorities -- the CDC, the Public Health Service, the pediatricians, the family physicians -- urged drug companies to remove thimerosal from childhood immunizations in the United States as soon as possible.

Most childhood vaccines -- in the United States, not overseas -- are now thimerosal-free. But that's hardly a blanket reassurance, because most flu shots do contain thimerosal.

Yet the CDC is still studying whether thimerosal causes autism.

"We do agree the preponderance of evidence to date suggests there is no association between thimerosal and autism," CDC spokesman Glen Nowak told us last month. But he said CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding is committed to exploring all possibilities until the cause or causes of the disorder are identified.

"Dr. Gerberding has made it clear the CDC has not ruled out anything as possible causes of autism, including thimerosal," Nowak said. "Science is a dynamic process. We have continued to fund studies to look at the role, if any, of thimerosal."

Given these caveats, what would you do? Well, there are two maxims of medicine that might apply. "First, do no harm," is the obvious one.

The second, related concept is the precautionary principle which, according to wikipedia.org, "is the idea that if the consequences of an action are unknown, but are judged to have some potential for major or irreversible negative consequences, then it is better to avoid that action."

So: Vaccines don't need mercury. Even government experts acknowledge some possible risks -- to the fetus, for example -- are insufficiently studied 60 years on. A link to autism has not been ruled out. They're continuing to investigate, as they should.

But the doctors and their public and private allies are battling state by state to stop mercury bans, and the CDC won't recommend a thimerosal-free flu shot for kids and pregnant woman. There's a phrase for this approach:

Bombs away.

The Age of Autism: CDC Probes Vaccines

The Age of Autism: CDC probes vaccines
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor

The CDC is continuing to investigate whether a mercury preservative in childhood immunizations has caused cases of autism -- despite the fact a report it paid for said such research should end.

The agency wants to determine whether exposure to the vaccine preservative, called thimerosal, can be linked to autism spectrum disorders, Glen Nowak, director of media relations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Age of Autism on Friday.

The study includes 300 children with ASDs, 200 of whom have full-syndrome autism, as well as a comparison group of children who do not have the disorders.

In 2004 a CDC-funded report by the independent Institute of Medicine concluded there was no evidence of a vaccine-autism link and efforts should go instead to "promising" autism research.

"Further research to find the cause of autism should be directed toward other lines of inquiry," the immunization review panel said. "It's really terrifying, the scientific illiteracy that supports these suspicions," said Dr. Marie McCormick, chairwoman of the IOM panel, in a New York Times article in June.

And the head of the CDC's immunization program said the same year that only "junk scientists and charlatans" take such a link seriously.

Nevertheless, spokesman Nowak said the CDC -- which sets the childhood immunization schedule that states adopt -- has not eliminated thimerosal as a suspect.

"We do agree the preponderance of evidence to date suggests there is no association between thimerosal and autism," said Nowak when asked why the CDC was continuing to pursue the issue. But he said CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding is committed to exploring all possibilities until the cause or causes of the disorder are identified.

"Dr. Gerberding has made it clear the CDC has not ruled out anything as possible causes of autism, including thimerosal," Nowak said. "Science is a dynamic process. We have continued to fund studies to look at the role, if any, of thimerosal."

The study was designed in 2003 and data collection -- which includes evaluation of each child and their immunization history -- began last year, Nowak said. A letter dated Nov. 8 and an accompanying brochure were provided by a parent who received them.

"In this study, the CDC wants to find out if children who received vaccines and medicines with Thimerosal as infants are more likely to later have developmental problems such as Asperger's Syndrome or autism," says the letter, sent on behalf of the CDC by a research firm and Kaiser Permanente, one of three HMOs involved.

"Your participation in this study may help doctors learn about the possible risks of vaccines and medicines that contained thimerosal."

The mother who received the letter expressed dismay because most medical experts and federal health authorities have reassured parents thimerosal does not cause autism and is not responsible for the large increase in diagnoses beginning in the 1990s.

In 1999 the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics urged manufacturers to phase out thimerosal from childhood immunizations as soon as possible, based on the concern that the total amount of mercury received by a child could exceed some government guidelines.

But, citing five subsequent epidemiological studies, the CDC and other health authorities now say there is no evidence of an association.

The CDC continues to recommend flu shots -- most of which contain thimerosal -- for pregnant women and for children 6 to 23 months of age. The agency has declined to express a preference for the thimerosal-free version, citing concern that it might cause some parents to forego immunizing their children against flu if they cannot obtain it.

In addition, tens of millions of children around the world are being injected with thimerosal-containing vaccines, based heavily on the assurances of U.S. health authorities that it is safe and does not cause autism.

Results of the study should be available in September 2007, Nowak said.

Dan Olmsted - Autism's Dick Tracy

Dan Olmsted - Autism's Dick Tracy
by Evelyn Pringle

According to officials in the nation's regulatory agencies, the main obstacle to proving or disproving a link between the autism epidemic and the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, that was contained in childhood vaccines until a few years ago, and is still in flu vaccines, has been the inability to find a large enough group of people who have never been vaccinated to compare with people who have.

In fact, a few months ago, CDC officials claimed that such a study would be nearly impossible. On July 19, 2005, the CDC held a Media Briefing on the topic of vaccines and child health. On the issue of government research on autism, a reporter asked CDC Director, Dr Julie Gerberding: "are you putting any money into clinical studies rather than epidemiological studies, to verify or disprove the parents' claim about a particular channel, a particular mechanism by which a minority of genetically suspectable kids are supposed damaged?"

Gerberding replied: To do the study that you're suggesting, looking for an association between thimerosal and autism in a prospective sense is just about impossible to do right now because we don't have those vaccines in use in this country so we're not in a position where we can compare the children who have received them directly to the children who don't.

Dr Duane Alexander, of the National Institute of Health, agreed and said: It's really not possible ... in this country to do a prospective study now of thimerosal and vaccines in relationship to autism. Only a retrospective study which would be very difficult to do under the circumstances could be mounted with regard to the thimerosal question.

However, Dan Olmsted, investigative reporter for United Press International, and author of the Age of Autism series of reports, appears to have solved this problem when he came up with the idea of checking out the nation's Amish population where parents do not ordinarily vaccinate children.

First he looked to the Amish community in Pennsylvania and found a family doctor in Lancaster who had treated thousands of Amish patients over a quarter-century who said he has never seen an Amish person with autism, according to Age of Autism: A glimpse of the Amish on June 2, 2005.

Olmsted also interviewed Dick Warner, who has a water purification and natural health business and has been in Amish households all over the country. "I've been working with Amish people since 1980," Warner said.

"I have never seen an autistic Amish child -- not one," he told Olmsted. "I would know it. I have a strong medical background. I know what autistic people are like. I have friends who have autistic children," he added.

Olmsted did find one Amish woman in Lancaster County with an autistic child but as it turns out, the child was adopted from China and had been vaccinated. The woman knew of two other autistic children but here again, one of those had been vaccinated.

Next Olmsted visited a medical practice in Middleburg, Indiana, the heart of the Amish community, and asked whether the clinic treated Amish people with autism.

A staff member told Olmsted that she had never thought about it before, but in the five years that she had worked at the clinic she had never seen one autistic Amish.

On June 8, 2005, Olmsted reported on the autism rate in the Amish community around Middlefield, Ohio, which was 1 in 15,000, according to Dr Heng Wang, the medical director, at the DDC Clinic for Special Needs Children.

"So far," according to Age of Autism, "there is evidence of fewer than 10 Amish with autism; there should be several hundred if the disorder occurs among them at the same 166-1 prevalence as children born in the rest of the population."

In addition to the Amish, Olmsted recently discovered another large unvaccinated group. On December 7, 2005, Age of Autism reported that thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with Amish children, they have never been vaccinated and they don't have autism.

Homefirst has five offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors. "We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines," said Dr Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's medical director who founded the practice in 1973.

Olmsted reports that the autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to state Education Department data. In treating a population of 30,000 to 35,000 children, this would logically mean that Homefirst should have seen at least 120 autistic children over the years but the clinic has seen none.

It looks like the problem is finally solved. Thanks to autism's Dick Tracy, the government now has thousands of unvaccinated people to compare to people who were vaccinated.

evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net