Babies Born with Genetal Malformations Increasing

Another screaming wake up call that is not being heard by the government health authorities.

Please consider bringing this New York Times column to the attention of your legislator and public health department.

Add that you would like them to get on board with the Environmental Working Group's Kid Safe Chemicals Act.

It’s Time to Learn From Frogs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times: June 27, 2009

Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.


Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”

The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.

Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.

There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.

“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”

The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.

Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.

Maine CDC Autism Conference: Genes and Environment, Developmental and Chronic: An Inclusive Approach to Autism Science by Martha Herbert, MD, PhD

Maine CDC Autism Conference 2009
Genes and Environment, Developmental and Chronic: An Inclusive Approach to Autism Science, followed by Q&A
Martha Herbert, MD, PhD
Pediatric Neurologist
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School



Next Session:
Looking Forward Beyond Vaccines: How Do We Know What Autism IS NOT if We Do Not Know What Autism IS? by Jon Poling, MD, PhD

Children Living Near Toxic Waste More Likely To Have Autism

Published in NeuroToxicology:

Ockham's Razor and autism: The case for developmental neurotoxins contributing to a disease of neurodevelopment

M. Catherine DeSoto

Department of Psychology, University of Northern Iowa, Baker Hall, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0505, United States

Received 16 January 2009;
accepted 7 March 2009.
Available online 21 March 2009.

Abstract

Much professional awareness regarding environmental triggers for ASD has been narrowly focused on a single possible exposure pathway (vaccines). Meanwhile, empirical support for environmental toxins as a broad class has been quietly accumulating. Recent research has shown that persons with ASD have comparatively higher levels of various toxins and are more likely to have reduced detoxifying ability, and, that rates of ASD may be higher in areas with greater pollution. This report documents that within the state with the highest rate of ASD, the rate is higher for schools near EPA Superfund sites, t (332) = 3.84, p = .0001. The reasons for the rise in diagnoses likely involve genetically predisposed individuals being exposed to various environmental triggers at higher rates than in past generations.

Keywords: Autism; Developmental disorders; Toxins; Pollution; Heavy metals; Environmental contaminants

Dr. Stoller on His Autism Journey and the CDC

Stoller was a pediatrician that saw only two cases of autism in his first decade and a half of practice, and came to the realization with the problems with the CDC and vaccines around the same time as I did in 2004 when he was testifying before the Senate on another medical matter. He highlights the ridiculous position of the CDC:

If we were talking about children going blind read how obscene this would sound:

“The number of children diagnosed with blindness is rapidly increasing. According to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in every 150 U.S. children is blind. These numbers are startling and this disability is affecting more and more families. Twenty years ago blindness was a very rare case. Today blindness is becoming a frightening statistic in every community. April is Blindness Awareness Month and I encourage everyone to take this opportunity to learn more about this disability…”

It would be absurd to relate this information about blindness without giving any explanation about what was causing it. Everyone would be demanding answers, and I dare say there would be protests in the streets to say the least...

...No other disease in history has been subjected to the spin that has been put on autism....

...It seems the scientific world isn't concerned that more children will be diagnosed with autism this year than with AIDS, diabetes and pediatric cancer combined.

It is a long article. Read the whole thing.

Throwing children into oncoming traffic: The truth about Autism
By: Kenneth Stoller, MD, FAAP with Anne McElroy Dachel
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

I have been a practicing pediatrician for over 20 years. I saw my first child with autism in the early 90’s – before that I had never seen an autistic child, and I never saw an autistic child in all my years at school. The boy was 4 years old and you could see the frustration in his face as he wanted to speak but nothing intelligible would come from his mouth except shrieks of anguish.

As I studied his tortured face, it was as if there was an old time telephone switchboard operator inside his head trying to plug in the correct phone cables but not being able to complete the call. This family had known me from an old practice I worked at in another city, but they had traveled to see me because they trusted me and were looking for answers that no one seemed to have for them, but I too had no answers and I could see the mom was greatly disappointed. After the family left my office I poured over a few dusty textbooks and wondered if I had just seen a very rare disorder, a disorder that affected one child in 10,000 children…autism.

I had been involved in pediatrics for a decade by the time I saw this boy and it wasn’t as if I had no experience working with rare disorders. I had been able to identify a boy with Fragile-X syndrome and his mom ending up starting the Fragile-X support group at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.

I had noticed there was a strange upswing in children with attention disorders and impulsivity problems. I wasn’t a neurologist, but had studied with one of the finest at UCLA. While I was still a pediatric resident I spent time in his office where he helped me study the parade of unusual maladies that was starting to afflict children. I considered myself a closet neurologist, because that was what I had really wanted to specialize in – not pediatrics, but during my neurology rotation in medical school I learned some discouraging news. The attending neurologist, whom I greatly admired, had taken me on rounds for the first time and I watched him brilliantly explain to the family of a stroke patient how he had figured out where in the brain the blood clot had lodged. Then he stood up and walked out of the room and I asked him what therapy he was going to prescribe for the patient so he could recover from his stroke, “therapy?” he said, “there is no therapy.”

Well, I scratched neurology off my list…diagnosis was only meaningful if you could offer a treatment and it seemed neurology had few treatments to offer.

My second patient with autism came to me in the mid 1990’s, but to my relief the purpose of the visit was only to treat worms. I dutifully prescribed the medicine for pinworms and went on to my next patient. Later that afternoon I received a call from the autistic boy’s mom who wanted to know what was that medicine I had given her son for pinworms….her boy was starting to make eye contact, show affection and communicate with his family. She said it was amazing! I told her I didn’t really didn’t know what was in the pinworm pill but immediately prescribed enough pills for her son to take everyday for a month (normally you only take one or two pills to treat pinworms).

I called up the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the pinworm pill and spoke to one of their technical staff. They told me the pill worked by blocking the transport of molecules of a certain size from crossing cell membranes, so in the case of the hapless pinworms they were unable to absorb the sugars they feed upon in the lower intestines of their victims.

What did that have to do with this boy’s newly found improved behavior? Either one of two things were going on: 1) the drug was either blocking a molecule that shouldn’t be passing across the gut to the blood and then the brain and that molecule was having a drug-like affect on the brain, or; 2) the drug was blocking a molecule that normally crossed from the gut into the blood but in certain children these molecules had a strange drug-like affect.

I made several calls across the country to find a researcher who might be interested in this serendipitous finding which could be an important clue into this disease, because no where had I found anything saying that the guts of these children were involved in their disease. Unfortunately, no one I talked to was interested.

Testifying to Congress...

In May 2004, I had been invited to testify in front of the Government Reform Committee to discuss new developments in treating children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. I had been invited because of the work I was doing with hyperbaric oxygen in treating brain injured children, including fetal alcohol syndrome. Hyperbaric oxygen is where oxygen is given under pressure in chambers that are used to treat scuba divers who get the bends. I and several other physicians had found that hyperbaric oxygen was returning functionality to the brains of affected children.

Sitting next to me was a physician who told the story of his son who had become autistic after receiving vaccine and how he discovered his son was retaining toxic heavy metals, specifically mercury. Over the course of a year this physician had given his son a chemical to pull out the mercury and his son began speaking again and in fact jumped on his dad’s lap and addressed the Committee members having been restored to be a healthy boy without any signs of his autism.

In the 1990’s I had known there was a problem with many of the vaccines because they contained the preservative Thimerosal (50% mercury) and I had discouraged many parents from getting vaccine containing Thimerosal – there is no safe level of mercury, and it didn’t make sense to inject the most toxic non-radioactive element on the planet into children, but I never made the connection between autism and mercury. I knew what Thimerosal was because while I was in college my brother had a very bad reaction to the Thimerosal that used to be used in contact lens solution.

I was taken aback that something so obvious had not registered with me, but I didn’t realize that I and my physician colleagues had been subjected to a disinformation campaign to make us think there was no connection between mercury and autism. It has been known for sometime that mercury was causing autism, but someone was running interference. The question was who was running interference?

In February 2007, the watchdog agency on America's health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), made the official announcement that a breath-taking one in 150 kids is autistic in the U.S. If you go to the CDC website on autism (http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism) you’d see lots of pictures of smiling happy children with autism and we’d be told that autism spectrum disorders are “a group of developmental disabilities defined by significant impairments in social interaction and communication and the presence of unusual behaviors and interests.”

You won’t be told that for many parents autism is a nightmare from which they never wake up. “Significant impairments” can mean that a child is violent and self-abusive, non-verbal, and physically sick. You won’t be told that this is a medical disease where most autistic children have significant inflammation in both gut and brain including colitis, super-infections and severe food allergies.

Even though autism affects one in 90 boys (four boys affected for every girl) in the U.S., the CDC can’t seem to tell us exactly why. The CDC states, “We still don’t know a lot about the causes of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Scientists think that both genes and the environment play a role, and there might be many causes that lead to ASDs.”

The site also doesn’t mention that only one in 10,000 children in the 1970s, and one in 2,500 in the 1980s were autistic.

The CDC site also doesn’t tell us about a secret meeting that was held in June of 2000 where over 50 individuals from the CDC, WHO, NIH, American Academy of Pediatrics, and many representatives from pharmaceutical interests discussed data from the CDC Vaccine Data Sets showing that the increase in mercury exposure from the stepped-up vaccine schedule in the 1990’s caused an 11 fold increase in neurobehavioral disorders (www.autismhelpforyou.com/Simpsonwood_And_Puerto%20%20Rico.htm). What you will see on the CDC website is “Several studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and autism. The weight of the evidence indicates that vaccines are not associated with autism.”

Evidence? Someone at the CDC was ‘cooking the books’ and what they told the public was not what they knew to be the case. You see, the CDC was put in the untenable position of helping to develop vaccines, mandate the vaccines, promote the vaccines, pay for their administration and be responsible for their safety – Ye olde fox watching the hen house scenario with the inevitable untoward result. There will always be a problem with vaccine safety until this responsibility is moved out of the CDC. Today, the CDC and its vaccine public-relation front group’s answer to any criticism is that the motivations of those that are critical of any part of the vaccine program are because they really want to destroy the vaccine program.

The truth is that the CDC has been very effective in laying the foundation to destroy the vaccine program all by themselves and their double speak is analogous to someone saying you can’t be against war and support the troops at the same time, you’re either for us or against us, etc. It is actually illegal for a federal agency to propagandize the American public, but that is exactly what the vaccine division of the CDC does. It has used the tactic of generating fear and it has earned billions of dollars for this agency.

Once the public loses trust in public health programs it can take many years to regain that trust. I am reminded of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments that are still a cause of distrust of public health programs amongst Black Americans.

Losing the Public Trust...

The cover-up at the CDC surrounding the mercury preservative found in so many vaccines (up until about 2003) has had very serious far-reaching implications. The children whose lives were forever changed by being injected with Thimerosal preservative were giving us a global ‘heads-up.’ They were showing us that the background level of mercury pollution has increased to the point that it is beginning to take its toll on the human species, but the CDC turned its head away from this crisis because it conflicted with what they were promoting in the vaccine program.

As I said before, mercury is the deadliest non-radioactive element on Earth, and 1000s of tons are spewed into the environment every year. With each coal-fire power plant that comes on line we are one step closer to exterminating human life on this planet. However, mercury is politically protected because of its connection with the fossil-fuel industry, dentistry (amalgam dental filings), and vaccine.

Thimerosal is still in the flu vaccine for children above the age of 3 and they are receiving as much as half of the dose of mercury that the child in the ‘90’s received. Thimerosal was not removed from vaccine in 1999. That was when the promise was made, but promises weren’t kept. Thimerosal is also in the meningitis vaccine.

Lower IQ levels linked to mercury exposure in the womb cost the USA $8.7 billion a year in lost-earnings potential according to a study done by the Mount Sinai Center for Children's Health and the Environment (http://fusion.mssm.edu/media/content.cfm?storynum=252). If it were publicly acknowledged that mercury pollution was the trigger for the autism epidemic this number would be in the trillions of dollars. One in six children is born to mothers with dangerous levels of mercury in their blood – perhaps the same one in six that the CDC admits have a neurobehavioral disorder.

Our regulatory agencies, such as the FDA and the EPA, have been taken over by the very industries they were mandated to regulate and the revolving door between industry and top-level appointees at these regulatory agencies has eliminated many of the normal safeguards we have relied on for our protection.

There is no disputing the numbers. Last month the Tonawanda News in New York reported “cases of autism in the state jumped from fewer than 2,000 in 1992 to 9,500 in 2003.” Even worse was the number of affected children in New York schools in 2005-2006 according to the Dept. of Education. New York’s autism total had increased to 12,257.

Maybe what we really need to be made aware of is what the eventual cost of autism will be to the U.S. The Autism Society of America tells us that autism is growing by 10-17% a year. They also say that it currently costs $90 billion a year and it's projected to increase to $200-400 billion annually in ten more years. A Harvard study out last year put the cost of lifetime support conservatively at $3.2 million per individual.

April was Autism Awareness month, but why are we only asking for awareness and not for answers? This is a glaring omission when we’re talking about so many affected children. Awareness, treatment, and identification are critical but so is preventing autism.

If we were talking about children going blind read how obscene this would sound:

“The number of children diagnosed with blindness is rapidly increasing. According to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in every 150 U.S. children is blind. These numbers are startling and this disability is affecting more and more families. Twenty years ago blindness was a very rare case. Today blindness is becoming a frightening statistic in every community. April is Blindness Awareness Month and I encourage everyone to take this opportunity to learn more about this disability…”

It would be absurd to relate this information about blindness without giving any explanation about what was causing it. Everyone would be demanding answers, and I dare say there would be protests in the streets to say the least.

The CDC and Autism...

CDC director Julie Gerberding announced the new autism rate of one in every 150 children with a flourish. She said that while there were more kids being diagnosed with autism, it doesn't mean the autism was necessarily on the rise. No one in the press seemed concerned that the CDC has been counting kids with autism for years and still can't tell us if there are actually more of them. After all, it’s just "better diagnosing by doctors" and "better statistics by the Centers for Disease Control." And now we learn that the Autism Genome Project (AGP) recently uncovered evidence shows that autism is caused by "genetic flaws.”

Common sense would tell us that pushing children onto a busy street, observing that some of them were injured, and then looking for a genetic reason why some of them were hit defies credulity.

No other disease in history has been subjected to the spin that has been put on autism.

Dr. Ezra Susser, chairman of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York indicated that he believed the new genetic findings would help scientists to understand how "the environment might lead to autism by causing genetic changes."

Susser said, "It shows us that we need to think about many environmental factors that might influence autism."

The new genetic findings on autism got a lot of coverage from major news outlets and reports made it look like we're on the cutting edge of a major autism breakthrough. But let’s do a reality check here, genes don't just spontaneously and randomly mutate all by themselves. There has to be an environmental agent affecting these genes.

Some will have you believe that autism is some medical mystery that's always been around but we just haven't been able to get a handle on. So, show me the 30 year olds with autism, the 40 year olds with autism, and the 50 year olds with autism. Guess what? They aren’t there for the most part. The explosion in the number of children with autism is real but most of the scientific community has ignored this. Let’s face it they have been encouraged to ignore it, and anyone getting close to the truth finds that they get their NIH research grants pulled.

That’s right…science is being manipulated so that a big lie can stay alive and those culpable can remain unaccountable.

It seems the scientific world isn't concerned that more children will be diagnosed with autism this year than with AIDS, diabetes and pediatric cancer combined. News stories about autistic kids are now beginning to reveal the duplicity of CDC officials. These reports clearly show that this isn't something we have all the time in the world to theorize and ponder about.

All the experts searching diligently for those elusive genetic mutations seem blissfully unaware of the impact of autism on our schools and the impending disaster, as these autistic children become autistic adults. Anyone looking at the graphs and charts based on Department of Education statistics showing the soaring autism numbers has got to be worried. The dramatic increase in children in our schools disabled with autism is a scary preview of the impact they will have on the Social Security System in the next five to ten years.

Michael Ganz's Harvard study last year conservatively put the lifetime care cost for one autistic individual at $3.2 million dollars.

Robert Krakow from Lifespire gives us estimates that put the lifespan cost at $10.125 million per autistic individual. This figure is based on an annual rate for each person of $225,000 with a life expectancy of 66 years. It doesn't include the cost for the period up to age 21.

One of the many questions we need to ask ourselves is if the very integrity of the biosphere on this planet is in jeopardy unless there is an immediate curtailment of manmade mercury pollution. Coal miners don’t look at a dead canary and blow it off or say they have just “gotten better at diagnosing dead canaries,” or “that dead canary just had a genetic defect so pay no heed.” Yet that is exactly analogous to the situation we find ourselves. We continue to pollute the planet and ourselves (there is no separation), yet the very governmental agency that would normally be taking the lead in sounding this 5 alarm alert has been compromised and remains less than silent. Mercury pollution should be considered a global crime against humanity, against mammalian life on this planet and there should be zero tolerance.

If you want to know why more isn’t being done for autistic children, why there has been a strange cover-up of the facts, then simply follow the mercury and those that benefit from its use.

Kenneth Stoller, MD, FAAP is medical director of the Hyperbaric Medical Center of New Mexico (www.hbotnm.com) and the Hyperbaric Oxygen Clinic of Sacramento (www.hbot.info). He is President of the International Hyperbaric Medical Association. He can be reached at: info@hbotnm.com

Anne McElroy Dachel of Chippewa Falls, WI is a member of A-CHAMP (Advocates for Children's Health Affected by Mercury Poisoning) and the National Autism Association (NAA). She can be reached at: amdachel@msn.com.

Fluoride Dangerous for Infants

ADA reverses position, warns its members that fluoride is too dangerous to be consumed by infants
by: Ben Kage
Tuesday, November 14, 2006

(NewsTarget) On Nov. 9, the American Dental Association released an email
alert to its members warning that, in order to prevent tooth damage,
fluoridated water should not be mixed into formula or foods intended for
babies aged 1 and younger.

Currently, two-thirds of the U.S. public water supply has fluoride
chemicals added, a move centered on a now-disproved theory that fluoride
ingestion prevents cavities. Research by the Centers for Disease Control
has shown that fluoride absorbs into tooth enamel topically, but ingestion
of the chemical can cause adverse reactions. Also, the CDC admitted that
enamel fluoride concentration was not inversely related to cavities.

Fluoridated bottled water is available in stores across the United States
along with instructions to mix into formula, which is what prompted the
ADA to warn its members.

"Infants could receive a greater than optimal amount of fluoride through
liquid concentrate or powdered baby formula that has been mixed with water
containing fluoride during a time that their developing teeth may be
susceptible to enamel fluorosis," stated the ADA report, describing the
condition marked by pitting and white spotting as well as yellow and/or
brown teeth.

Paul Beeber, lawyer and New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation
(NYSCOF) president, noted that news releases from the NYSCOF in 2000 and
2004 cited studies that linked fluorisis to infant foods mixed with
fluoridated water. However, Beeber remarked, it took the ADA until 2006 to
release its alert, right after the FDA disapproved of marketing
fluoridated water to babies in October and the National Research Council
reported that babies are fluoride overdosed from "optimally" fluoridated
water supplies.

"The ADA claims the NRC report didn't question the safety of fluoridation
but it did, as the ADA now admits," Beeber said. "The NRC also revealed
fluoridation's adverse effects to the thyroid gland, diabetics, kidney
patients, high water drinkers and others."

He added that the ADA warning had only gone out to its members, and asked,
"Who will alert parents?"

The Environmental Protection Agency, which sets allowable water fluoride
levels, is required to consider the most vulnerable members of a
population, so allowable fluoride levels should be near zero to protect
infants.

"This should end water fluoridation," Beeber said. "Fluoridation is a
failed concept that must be abandoned before more Americans are harmed."

From PutChildrenFirst.com

Press Briefing:

Thank you all for your time today. My name is JB Handley. Along with
my wife, Lisa, I am the co-founder of putchildrenfirst, the sponsor
of this survey of over 9,000 Americans on mercury in the flu shot.
Here's a quick test for all of you. We all know household paint is a
bit toxic. Would you rather A, spill some paint on your skin? Or, B,
take that same amount of paint, pop it in a syringe, and mainline it?
If you chose A, as our survey revealed, you are like most Americans.
If you chose B, you're like the FDA, who made it a high priority to
get mercury out of topical products we use on our skin in the 1990s,
but continued to allow mercury to be injected into humans at levels
exceeding any available safety standard. In fact, we don't even have
safety standards for injected mercury, because no one considered
someone would be crazy enough to inject a well-known neurotoxin into
their bloodstream. It's actually the preposterous nature of the
situation we find ourselves in today that contributes to the public's
confusion. I find that the first time I tell people mercury is in
their flu shot, they simply don't believe me.

Our health authorities realized mercury in vaccines was a mistake in
1999 and made a public statement to warn Americans and encourage
manufacturers to change their formulations. Seven years later, we're
still talking about mercury. That's part of the problem. Our survey
showed that almost no one realizes mercury is STILL in over 90% of
this year's flu shot supply. When they find out the truth, more than
three-quarters know to stay away from mercury and even more think
children and pregnant women should avoid it.

The CDC provides a number of answers for why mercury is still used in
vaccines, none of which can be supported with any facts or evidence.
They will characterize Thimerosal's toxicity as theoretical when in
fact there is nothing theoretical about mercury's dangers. They will
tell you ethyl-mercury, the kind used in Thimerosal, is less toxic.
There is no data to support this and in fact a recent biological
study disproved this completely. They will tell you that the flu can
kill which should certainly trump any danger posed by mercury. Yet,
they fail to mention their own recent admission in an October 2006
study in the Journal of the American Medical Association where four
CDC authors write: "It is also important to note that there is scant
data on the efficacy and effectiveness of influenza vaccine in young
children." And a British Medical Journal article the same month,
October 2006, noted "Evidence from systematic reviews shows that
[flu vaccines] have little or no effect on the effects measured." If
a company sold a product that didn't work and left behind a
neurotoxin they would already be bankrupt.

Anytime Thimerosal is mentioned, autism is brought up. We are not
here to talk about autism today. We are here to tell you that
Americans do not want mercury in their shots but few know it's there.
The CDC tries to make an argument that because they believe, through
their research, that Thimerosal is not responsible for the autism
epidemic, that makes Thimerosal safe. That is one high threshold for
safety. Interestingly, CDC never mentions that in the 2003 study they
authored in Pediatrics, they did find a correlation between
Thimerosal and both "tics" and "language delay." So, here's another
test for you. You bring your child in for a flu shot. The Doctor
tells you this shot has mercury, and that CDC found shots with
mercury lead to tics and language delay. What do you do?

The CDC wants you, the journalists, to report on the dire need for
all Americans to get a flu shot. In 2004, at a Vaccine Summit, the
British Medical Journal wrote the following, in criticizing what they
called the CDC's "marketing of fear"
"Glen Nowak, associate director for communications at the NIP, spoke
on using the media to boost demand for the vaccine. One step of
a "Seven-Step `Recipe' for Generating Interest in, and Demand for,
Flu Vaccination" occurs when "medical experts and public health
authorities publicly...state concern and alarm (and predict dire
outcomes) - and urge influenza vaccination"

My four year old son suffered an adverse reaction to a mercury
containing flu shot. That's why I'm here talking to you. His symptoms
included, and I quote, "brain damage, incoordination, seizures,
inability to speak and problems of his nervous and digestive system."
Those were my son's symptoms, but that quote is not from his medical
records. It's from the CDC's own website, discussing the harmful side-
effects of mercury, where they go on to warn all Americans to "keep
all mercury-containing medicines away from children."

Our survey proves that Americans understand this. Why doesn't the CDC?

LAT: Study Links Air Pollutants With Autism

Study Links Air Pollutants With Autism

Bay Area children with the disorder are 50% likelier to be from areas high in several toxic substances. Scientists say more research is needed.
By Marla Cone, LA Times Staff Writer
June 23, 2006

Children with autism disorders in the San Francisco Bay Area were 50% more likely to be born in neighborhoods with high amounts of several toxic air contaminants, particularly mercury, according to a first-of-its-kind study by the California Department of Health Services.

The new findings, which surprised the researchers, suggest that a mother's exposure to industrial air pollutants while pregnant might increase her child's risk of autism, a neurological condition increasingly diagnosed in the last 10 years.

But the scientists cautioned that the link they found in the Bay Area is uncertain and that more definitive evidence would be needed before concluding that mercury or any other pollutant could trigger autism.

Gayle Windham, the study's lead researcher and senior epidemiologist in the department's environmental health investigations branch, called it "a single small study" and "a first look" at whether toxic pollutants play a role in the neurological disorder, which is often marked by poor verbal and communication skills and withdrawal from social interaction.

Scientists have long wondered if the surge in diagnoses is due, in part, to environmental causes. Some of the increase comes from growing doctor and parent awareness, but experts say that cannot explain all of it.

"Clearly this suggests that there may be correlations between autism onset and environmental exposures, especially as it relates to metal exposures," said Isaac Pessah, a toxicologist who heads UC Davis' Center for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention. Pessah, who was not involved in the study, is also a researcher at the university's MIND (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders) Institute, which studies autism.

"It would be prudent to reserve judgment until we see if this study can be replicated and whether it's of general significance" by looking for the same link outside the Bay Area, he said.

About 300,000 U.S. children have been diagnosed with autism and often need special education. The study compared 284 children from six Bay Area counties who were diagnosed as having so-called autism spectrum disorders — which include a less-severe syndrome called Asperger's — with 657 children from the same counties without the disorders. All were born in 1994.

The scientists reviewed data for 19 hazardous air pollutants that are known or suspected neurotoxins: chemicals that have a toxic effect on the brain.

They found that the children with the autism disorders were 50% more likely than the non-autistic children to be born in areas with higher estimated levels of three metals and two chlorinated solvents: mercury, cadmium, nickel, trichloroethylene and vinyl chloride. No significant link was found with 14 other solvents and metals, including compounds such as lead, benzene and chromium.

The national autism rate is six children per 1,000, so a 50% increase would elevate that rate to nine per 1,000.

The biggest increase came with heavy metals including mercury, a pollutant from power plants, factories and mines that can disrupt brain development.

The Bay Area was chosen for the study because extensive data are readily available there because of a federally funded program to count and track autistic children. The region's toxic air pollution is considered typical for urban areas.

San Francisco County had the highest estimated levels of metals and solvents, including mercury, and Marin County had the lowest of those studied. But the researchers did not compare autism prevalence by county.

In their report, published online Wednesday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the authors said their research "suggests that living in areas with higher ambient levels of hazardous air pollutants, particularly metals and chlorinated solvents, during pregnancy or early childhood, may be associated with a moderately increased risk of autism. These findings illuminate the need for further scientific investigation, as they are biologically plausible but preliminary and require confirmation."

The study is the first to look for a connection between autism among children and levels of hazardous air pollutants at birth. Last year, scientists who compared volumes of industrial mercury emissions in Texas with autism in schoolchildren reported a similar link.

Autism is believed to start in the womb, early in pregnancy, when the brain develops. Genetic factors determine who is susceptible, but experts theorize that environmental factors contribute.

The new study found that mercury was the "most significant correlation with autism," Pessah said, "but every family may not be affected the same way because of their genetic makeup."

Many parents of autistic children blame vaccines that contained a type of mercury called thimerosal. Expert reviews have found no link between vaccines and autism, but some scientists do not consider them definitive.

No assumptions about vaccines can be made on the basis of the air pollution study. "Mercury in the air is a different type than in vaccines," Windham said.

The new study examined elemental mercury, which is released into the air from coal-burning power plants, chlorine factories and gold mines. It spreads globally and builds up in food chains, particularly in oceans. Levels of mercury are increasing in many parts of the world, largely from power plants in China and India.

The researchers had not expected to be able to discern a relationship between autism and the air pollution data.

The five metals and solvents are common industrial pollutants, but air is only one source of exposure, because they also contaminate water and food.

Some experts say that if there is a link between mercury and autism, it most likely comes from fish consumption, the main route of mercury exposure. A 20-year, ongoing study in Denmark's Faroe Islands has shown that children have slightly reduced intelligence when mothers consumed excessive mercury in seafood.

The largest limitation or uncertainty in the Bay Area study is that the pollution data did not come from measurements of compounds to which the mothers were actually exposed. Instead, they were based on estimates calculated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency using computer modeling of industrial emissions.

Windham said that "there could be other explanations" for the link they found. For example, it could be that women who live in the worst-polluted areas also smoke more or eat more contaminated seafood. The scientists did not track down the mothers to compare lifestyles.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health are conducting a similar study in the Baltimore area to see if they replicate the findings.

Here's Why the Disdain...

This post is a response to a post by JP on his new blog, SupportVaccination.org.

[Update: JP has decided to leave the vaccine discussion and take his blog down, so the link no longer works. I wish I had saved a copy of the initial post that this was written in response to, but alas, I was not forward thinking enough to save a copy.]

[Update: John Cartan is the man! He found a cashed version for me. Here ya go: http://tinyurl.com/7celt ]

In his post, he ask questions of parents like me, that I am eager to answer. Parents have been accused of being "scientifically illiterate" and dismissing "well designed" population studies that show that there is no link between autism and thimerosal. I thought this was a good opportunity to tell the blogesphere, at least in part, why we are not so hot on the IOM’s epidemiological studies.

Dear JP,

As one of those parents with… well ‘distain’ is a harsh word, lets call it an ‘unwillingness to rely on’ the epidemiological studies cited by the IOM, it probably falls upon the likes of me to answer the question you pose in the title of your piece.

Why the disdain for epidemiology...

Since I am the likes of me, I will take this on and answer your questions and challenges from my point of view.

I am going to break up my response to your post into a few separate posts, as there are several things to address.

I am the mother of an autistic 3 year old boy and a marriage and family therapist, with a masters degree from Johns Hopkins. The statistics courses that I took in grad school were designed to educate me on how to evaluate the research of others to see if it was something we should incorporate into the treatment of a client. This education has turned out to be useful in evaluating the epidemiological studies that have been offered up to prove that thimerosal is safe.

I have been looking at these studies with two basic questions in mind:

Can this study be applied to entire population of children in the U.S. and thereby be useful for guidance in setting vaccine policy? If so, how?

Can I use this study to make a determination as to the safety of vaccinating my sons, one who is autistic and one who is (mostly) neurotypical. If so, how?

I want to start first with what an epidemiological study is and what it can do.

Any question like this starts with case studies. Some one notices two things occurring together (smoking and lung cancer, vaccine reaction and autism) and they look at the plausibility of a relationship (smoke filling the lungs could cause damage, neurotoxic mercury in vaccines could cause brain damage).

Next they want to see if what they are observing in their setting could be happening else where and after conferring with associates and finding that others see the possibility of a link as well, they commission a large population study.

Epidemiological studies are limited in their use. They can be used to spot patterns and trends, but they can almost never be used to prove or disprove anything. They are one of the first stages of a medical inquiry and act as a divining rod to tell researchers where to start digging.

They are very vulnerable to confounders, because they are asking broad questions over huge numbers of people; so they should not be used to make definitive statements as much as to help researchers shape the next question that should be asked.

Those next questions are taken to smaller population studies (where confounders can be more easily controlled), lab studies (in vitro), and actual case studies (in vivo). The results of those studies, helps to further refine the questions being asked, which can be sent back up to large population studies, and so on, and so on until, (hopefully) the results of your epidemiological, in vitro and in vivo studies all line up like tumblers in a lock and the lock opens with one key.

This is not what we are seeing yet when we look at totality of autism/thimerosal research, as the IOM report shows. In fact the large epidemiological studies relied on for the conclusions in the report are at odds with other in vitro and in vivo research also in the report. The tumblers do not line up and therefore all of the research should be scrutinized to see what is throwing things off.

The scrutiny of the epidemiological studies has shown that they do not measure what they purport to measure, and even if they did, they cannot be applied in the way that they are being applied.

Your example of how epidemiological studies were used in the 50’s a nice example of how they can be used well and lead researchers to determine the source of a terrible illness like lung cancer, unfortunately it seems that what is going on today in this inquiry is a very different scenario.

What we know so far about autism tells us that it is not as straight forward as, smoke cigarettes get lung cancer. The thimerosal studies seem to have multiple confounders (genetic, environmental, etc) that cut into the reliability of epidemiological studies.

The two studies that are relied upon the most heavily are the Danish Study and the Verstraten Study. Both of these studies were designed and carried out very poorly and are being used very badly.

Here is why I treat them with such skepticism. (Quoting myself in part from an earlier post that responded to a piece by Dr. Laidler)

One of the problems that complicates the search for the causes and cures of autism is the assumption that it is a single disorder and that all cases are caused by the same thing. This is in contrast to a disease like AIDS in which all cases are brought on by the HIV virus.

What is diagnosed as ‘Autism’ is actually likely to be more than one physical syndrome. Because Autism is a DSM diagnosis and based solely on behavioral criteria, the diagnosis does not address the different sets of physical anomaly clusters that researchers are finding when they look at the biology of ‘autistic’ patients.

One research group has recently made a distinction between two types of autistic profiles. One, labeled complex autism and occurring in about 30% of autism cases, presents with smaller head size, greater chance of low IQ, lower rate of siblings with the disorder and seems to have close to a 1:1 ratio of occurrence between boys and girls.

The other, essential autism, presents with larger head size, few structural brain abnormalities and has a ratio of 7:1 boys to girls.

This is a huge confounder to any epidemiological study, even a well designed one, that looks at all cases of diagnosed autism with out differentiating between groups with different phenotypes.

In discussing research into the causes of autism (in this case the genetic cause), one of the researchers commented, “…Studies haven’t found anything because they’re looking at a big heterogeneous group — a mishmash of people with different etiologies,” Takahashi said.”

One could postulate that only the larger head size group displays autistic symptoms because of mercury poisoning, as mercury toxicity does not always present with impaired IQ; and because in vitro thimerosal toxicity studies preformed at the University of Kentucky showed that estrogen has a protective effect against, and testosterone exacerbates the damage of, ethlymercury as a neurotoxin.

In light of this new information it seems that a better question than, “is autism is caused by mercury toxicity” which is the question largely being asked in these epidemiological studies, would be, “are cases of mercury toxicity being misdiagnosed as autism”.

The answer to that question cannot be found in a large epidemiological study.

The authors of the the final IOM report on the thimerosal/autism relationship in 2004 stated themselves that the epidemiological research it was relying on to clear thimerosal as a cause of autism would not pick up on a sub-set of the population that was genetically vulnerable to mercury poisoning.

If that is the case, then how much more so to these studies fail to give us meaningful data if the children who may be mercury poisoned are members of two different subsets being confused with one another?

Since the working theory in biomedical treatment of autism is that many of the children diagnosed with autism are genetically vulnerable sub set who cannot excrete heavy metals, and since this treatment is bringing about successes in the abatement of many children's autistic symptoms, does that not throw into question the use of these large scale studies to find the correlation between thimerosal and autism as easily as they would between smoking and cancer?

What causes further problems for people who want to use these studies to show that the case is closed on thimerosal and NDDs (as the conclusion in the IOM study does) is that these studies are not well designed and are very poorly applied.

The findings in the Denmark study have come under serious criticism. When the data of study was reviewed, it was found that the sampling presented fatal flaws.

The low incidence of autism during the use of thimerosal can be attributed to the fact that the database that was used only tracked inpatient cases of autism at the time. At the point in time where thimerosal was removed, the database was expanded to include cases that were diagnosed at a large clinic outside of Copenhagen where 20% of the countries autistic patents were diagnosed. At the point in time where thimerosal was no longer used, but the cases of autism seem to have skyrocketed, the database had expanded further to include all cases of autism, inpatient and outpatient, in the country.

The sample size of the study was only 956 children. That is the number of people that their disability database had on record as being diagnosed with autism in Denmark between 1971 and 2000. 956 people in 29 years. That is 33 people a year in the entire country. [Hyperbole warning] I have that many autistic kids in my kitchen right now!

The study is further compromised by the fact that several of the coauthors were employed by the Statens Serums Institut, the countries sole vaccine manufacturer who would presumably be held liable if it was indeed found that the use of thimerosal in vaccines contributed to autism.

[Update: Kristjan has pointed out here that the Danish health care system and liability laws are different from ours and no such legal liability exists for the Statens Serums Institut. I still wonder what might motivate these researchers to stand buy this study and not protest its poor use. More on that in the comments here, here and here.]

Further, even if the study were reliable, applying it to the U.S. population as the IOM has done presents problems. Children in Denmark were administered less than half the amount of thimerosal of US children, and it was administered later and over a longer period of time.

Finally, American children, like my sons, are subject to an autism rate at least 10 times that of Denmark, so this study should not be applied to determine their risk of autism from thimerosal exposure.

It seems to me to be like doing a population study of Sickle Cell Anemia in Denmark and applying it to the population of Baltimore. Clearly U.S. children have some other intervening factors that increases the threat of NDDs, be they genetic, environmental or the thimerosal dosage and age of administration.

The problems with the Verstraten study, the only epidemiological study that the CDC has done in the U.S. to examine the possible link between thimerosal containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders, are severe. It is such a badly designed and executed study that I can hardly do it justice in a blog post. I started working on a review of it about 6 weeks ago for my blog and I still have not finished.

In fact, it is currently the subject of a Senate investigation that may result in hearings on Capitol Hill.

I will try to do a quick review of my ‘distain’ for it, as I actually think the harshness of your term might apply to my attitude in this case.

Verstraten started with a nice, simple study. He had medical records of about 180,000 kids in California, a good sized sample. He broke them up into four main groups, kids who received no thimerosal, a little thimerosal, a moderate amount, and a high amount. He checked to see if the amount of thimerosal that they got, and when they got it (two months of age, six months of age, etc) corresponded to an increased risk for different types of neurodevelopmental disorders, and NDDs in general.

The study began in November of 1999 and was supposed to be finished in 4 months.

What he found was that the more thimerosal a child got, the higher their chance of an NDD, with children who got the highest doses had a huge risk of having a disorder, more than 600% in one case. He also found that the age at which it was administered determined the type of disorder that a child would develop.

Verstraten sent an email to another CDC employee, Dr. Davis, and said that no matter what he tried, could not make the relationship go away.

In December the two men, and additional researchers at the CDC, began to change the parameters of the study. When you do this, you are supposed to document all the changes and justify why they are needed to properly answer the question you are asking. They did not.

The changes they began to make to the statistical analysis of the study are now described by the CDC as “improvements”. How they could see some of these changes as improvements is unbelievable to me. Here are some of the changes:

They took the zero thimerosal group, and tucked them into the low thimerosal group. Now they only have three groups and in effect they have brought up the bottom, so the top does not seem as high.

That did not bring down the risk enough, so they decided to get rid of the no thimerosal group all together, so now you are only comparing the low, middle and high groups, bring up the bottom further.

They got rid of a catch all group of NDDs so the study no longer addressed the question, ‘does an increase thimerosal increase the risk of a neurodevelopmental disorder’. Now it only looked at each disorder separately.

Still not dampening the signal enough, the decided to go into and change some of the actual medical records of the patients they were studying. The CDC reports that these were correcting errors in patient records, but will not offer any proof of this claim, saying instead that the data that would confirm their claim was ‘lost’.

This brought the risk down, but still showed a link between thimerosal and NDDs, so they then started dropping children from the study. They used about 20 different ICD9 codes to exclude any child from the study that had almost any birth complication or whose mother had almost any pregnancy complication. This included serious problems like premature birth and birth defects, but went all the way down to moms who took an antibiotic while pregnant. In effect this removes from the study many children who are likely to go on to develop NDDs.

This is fine to do in your study if you want, but it renders it almost completely useless for application to vaccine policy. This policy covers all U.S. children, and lots and lots of those children were subject to pregnancy and birth complications.

This study now no longer applies to my children as both of my pregnancies had complications.

At this point it is safe to say that this study no longer addressed the question of whether or not an increase in the dose of thimerosal increases the chance of an NDD in American children. But the ‘improvements’ don’t stop there.

Many more people are given a chance to make suggestions, the Simpsonwood meeting was held, comments are made that the study never should have been done in the first place, and the research is further bastardized.

A stop date was put in place so that children who were initially diagnosed with something like a speech delay, were then always considered to be speech delayed, even if they went on to be diagnosed with a more serious disorder like full blown autism. This is important as a large number of kids diagnosed with autism at ages 3 and 4 are diagnosed with some milder developmental delay at 18 months or two years of age. Doctors don’t like giving the autism diagnosis early, and the state of California (where the study was done) won’t even formally evaluate children for autism, or diagnose it before the age of 3.

I live in California. My son was evaluated at 2 and found to have ‘speech delays’ and offered early start services. To all involved in his treatment, he was autistic, but he did not become officially “Autistic” according to the state and his own records until age 3. Chandler would not have been considered Autistic for the purposes of the Verstraeten study.

My favorite ‘improvement’ was to add into the study children who were only a year or so old at the cut off date of the study. No child is diagnosed with autism, or indeed much of anything, this early. They all could have gone on to be diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder but in the Verstraeten study, they are all considered healthy and unaffected by thimerosal.

Even with all these shenanigans, they STILL could not completely get rid of the relationship between thimerosal and NDDs. They then employed a tactic that served to make their own findings in the study irrelevant.

They split the whole group up into two, one large one from one HMO and one smaller group from another HMO (I think it was around 16,000). The small group was now too small to be of any statistical power. They used that group to say that the results in the first group could not be replicated in the second.

Then they bought another database from an HMO in New England, which was odd because they already owned dozens of them at the cost of millions of dollars in tax payer money. The HMO had failed and was in receivership due in part to poor record keeping on out of date computers. The HMO also used their own diagnostic system that didn’t even implement ICD9 codes and the researchers used completely different parameters to study this database than they did in the first. They used this third group of only 12,000 or so patients, as yet another example of how they could not replicate the results of the first, large group, which they were now referring to as ‘the screening study’.

The 4 month study took 4 years and, in my opinion, came out looking like something akin to Frankenstein’s Monster.

This study does not offer a meaningful measure of anything and cannot be applied to any group that I can think of.

Add to this the fact Verstraten himself became an employee of Glaxo (currently being sued by parents of autistic children) half way through the study, which was not disclosed when the study was published, and it becomes easy to see why where the distain comes from.

When asked to justify all the changes and publish the data so that the study could be confirmed and replicated, the CDC repeated the claim that the original data was ‘lost’. A private contractor testified before congress that he had been ordered to destroy the data sets, “to insure patient confidentiality”. This is a violation of federal law and is what sparked the congressional investigation currently underway.

It is practice in the scientific community that if a study can not be confirmed or replicated, that it should be withdrawn. Despite parent requests for such action, the CDC stands by this study and refuses to pull it.

As a parent who is looking at this issue as hard as I can, I am upset that the IOM, who should know better, keeps calling these studies ‘well designed’ and has used them to show that the case is closed on thimerosal and autism.

Verstraeten himself says that the study is a ‘neutral study’ and does not find for or against thimerosal in the implication that it is involved with NDDs.

In grad school, in order to pass statistics we had to take studies and break them down, justifying if and how they could be used for us to make treatment decisions. The Institute of Medicine would have failed my 600 level stats courses.


ADDENDUM:

People have asked for citations. What hasn't been referenced above can be found in David Kirby's book, Evidence Of Harm as this post just attempts to squish his big fat book into a blog post.

Additional addendum:

Julie Gerberding was asked by Congress to defend Verstraeten and had to reply that it was a useless study.  She did so in secret, but the document was leaked by a congressional staffer.  Even though everyone knows it is garbage, Pediatrics has not retracted it, and some still claim it clears the vaccine/autism theory.  However CDC removed it from their list of research that refutes the theory in by the end of 2008 when news of the Congressional/CDC exchange went public.