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We can't offer you a very special concert with Yanni, or every episode of Upstairs Downstairs on DVD. All we can promise is that, with your help, we'll keep doing what we're doing.
Boring, I know. But that's what our current fund drive is all about. Last year we were approached by an Anonymous Donor, as this person wished to be known – who put up $3,000 as a matching donation. A.D. said they would give us up to that amount, but only if our readers matched it – which you did, and more. This year the same A.D. approached us again – which we were hoping they would, but were taught by our mother to be too mannerly to ask – and this time A.D. is offering an amazingly generous $5,000 match through Sunday, Thanksgiving Weekend.
That's wonderful, but it also boosts the amount we need to raise or risk leaving money on the table that, combined with your donations, will go a long way for our humble blog.
Halfway through, we're halfway to our goal – $2,880 as of last night. This is terrific, thanks to so many of you, and we really think we can get all the way there if people realize the power of doubled donations of whatever amount. And this year for the first time, we're tax deductible, something we're doing in large part to make gifts like yours (and A.D.'s) as easy as possible to make. (You should see the form the IRS wants! And I just got one from the Commonwealth of Virginia Friday "to determine liability for state unemployment tax." Yikes.)
So, in short, if you were to send us $25 via the Donate button by next Sunday, it would be the same as sending $50, and it's deductible. What is not to like? (If you want to send a check, feel free – e-mail me for the address at firstname.lastname@example.com)
All of us who converge here have different likes, dislikes, and lots in life, but we are joined by a powerful sense of outrage over what is happening to kids and a strong belief that it needs to be addressed, now. Activism, politics, legal action, journalism – we're all in it together with our own particular gifts and passions.
So: Help us keep going so we can all help end the age of autism. And know how grateful we are for all your contributions.
When Mike Nichols died Thursday, I noticed that he was born in 1931, the same year that autism began (in the person of Vivian Murdock, oldest child in Leo Kanner's case series from 1943, whom Teresa Conrick, Mark Blaxill and I first identified on AOA – an example, come to think of it, of what financial support helps accomplish).
When I learn about other people born then, it reminds me how recent autism is – within the span of one lifetime, this catastrophe has descended upon us. The reason, we believe, is the first use of ethylmercury in commercial compounds starting then, including in vaccines as thimerosal.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Fund Drive Update, and Autism Vs. Alopecia" »
Our humble blog reached the seven-year milestone this week. During that time, we've had well over 15 million hits on close to 7,000 posts; our readers have left 110,000 comments.
When we started – merging with Generation Rescue's Rescue Post – we hoped but weren't sure that this was the future of daily newspapers in general and investigative reporting about autism in particular. Events have borne that out – even though I came up through "print" and love holding real newspapers and books in my hands, I now get most of my news online. On Thursday the Post and Times came to the door as usual, but besides bringing them inside and saving the plastic wrappers for the next dog walk, all I did was check to see if the interview with Kim on Seinfeld was in the printed edition as well as online (it wasn't, but it didn't matter since it had already spread around the world).
I can't remember using or even knowing about Facebook seven years ago, or Tweeting, and such. We now have a Facebook page and plenty of tweeters, or twitterers, or however you say it. And while more blogs have arrived and joined the fray, we seem to have staked out our patch of turf and, I hope, used it to tell the truth as we see it.
That truth, as you know, is that autism is the defining disorder of our age, man-made and thus treatable and preventable. It is "made," largely, by a reckless and bloated vaccine schedule that has long since passed the risk-reward point, wherever that might be, and is wreaking all kinds of havoc. So the epidemic is real, the causes are clear, the remedy we embrace is investigating and telling the truth and bringing like-minded people to a common platform.
Of course, we've had our stumbles and tumbles. We make no apologies for declining to run material that doesn't meet our standards or divides our community, or for moderating comments, making this a safe and civil space for people – often parents living with the eyewitness truth – who are ridiculed elsewhere.
I never would have guessed seven years ago that as a result of this I'd have co-written two books (Vaccines 2.0 will be out early next year, again with Mark Blaxill) or had the pleasure of seeing our own Anne Dachel (The Big Autism Cover-up) and Kent Heckenlively (Plague) and Kim Stagliano (All I Can Handle, I'm No Mother Teresa) and Cat Jameson and Lisa Goes (Thinking Moms Revolution) publish books, along with close allies like Lou Conte and Wayne Rohde. I'd never have imagined Sharyl Attkission leaving CBS and launching some of the same broadsides in her book (Stonewalled) that we've been hurling – the old mainstream media is dying, it's a mediocre shell of its former self, it is enabling catastrophes like the autism epidemic and the Iraq war by failing in its first duty, to hold government and other powers-that-be to account.
Nor did I envision the Canary Party or HealthChoice arising in tandem with our efforts. We are, first of all, journalists, and our advocacy results from what we have discovered ourselves, not because anyone told us what to say or think.
As journalists like Glenn Greenwald and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have helped demonstrate, our government has operated with a sense of secrecy and superiority for far too long, unchecked by good traditional journalism. If the NSA and CIA can spy on its own citizens, the FDA and CDC should not be considered above reproach, either. The mess the CDC first made of Ebola was a wake-up call for some who consider it sacrosanct, and the appearance of whistleblowers at the CDC and Merck show where things are headed.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Happy Anniversary to Us!" »
Kent Heckenlively, Anne Dachel , Louis Conte and Wayne Rohde have been as busy as Santa's elves in 2014 writing and editing their books. It's no easy feat to publish a book. A special thank you to Tony Lyons of Skyhorse Publishing who took a risk on a kooky woman (Kim here) with three daughters with autism and published her pink book. And who from there built the very best, most informative and innfluential catalog of titles about autism. Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted have another book coming out as well. Stay tuned.
Whether you've been naughty or nice, hang a stocking, spin a dreidel or celebrate Festivus (since we have Seinfeld on our minds), we can all welcome the New Year with a stack of books.
Plague by Kent Heckenlively - One Scientist's Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases
The Big Autism Cover Up by Anne Dachel - How and Why the Media Is Lying to the American Public
The Autism War - a Novel by Louis Conte - Tony Colletti, a good suburban cop and father of a child with autism, finds himself drawn into the controversy over the apparent but rarely acknowledged connection between childhood vaccines and autism. His quest to uncover the truth forces him to risk all he holds dear while confronting corrupt government officials, the powerful pharmaceutical industry, and disturbing elements of his own past.
The Vaccine Court by Wayne Rohde - The Dark Truth of America's Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
Finding Lina by Helena Hjalmarsson - A Mother's Journey from Autism to Hope
The Thinking Moms' Revolution - Autism beyond the Spectrum: Inspiring True Stories from Parents Fighting to Rescue Their Children
By Dan Olmsted
I know our readers appreciate Sharyl Attkisson and her willingness to take on vaccines and autism in a fair-minded way, but her new book Stonewalled really puts her at the center of a broad revival of fearless investigative reporting. It is the opposite of the "access journalism" that has plagued Washington for far too long. The New York Times-sponsored war in Iraq (aided by Judith Miller's cozy lunches with Cheney aide Scooter Libby) and the media-wide cheerleading for the idea that vaccines don't cause autism (because their pals at the CDC tell them so) are cases in point. Sadly, it is no exaggeration to say that lazy, credulous, cozy-up journalism has helped lead this country into the two worst international and domestic disasters of our time.
Otherwise, the media is doing just fine in their role as "watchdogs of democracy" (the ironic title of a book by another great Washington reporter, Helen Thomas).
I thought about this as I took Uber – a disruptive innovation that I'd never heard of just a few months ago and now means I will never call a taxi again -- from my home in Falls Church, Virginia, into what we locals call "the district" on Thursday night. As we crossed the Roosevelt Bridge, the Lincoln Memorial was lit up on the right and the Kennedy Center and Watergate on the left, with Arlington Cemetery and the Potomac River receding in the rear window. For once I wasn't driving and trying to figure out the next turn, so I settled back. It is an awe-inspiring vista if you let it be – the greatness and majesty of the American Experiment spread out before you, with Watergate thrown in to remind us that the press keeps the government honest -- and tonight I was letting it be, the way I had 32 years ago when I came here as a wide-eyed member of the startup crew for USA Today. (These days, I'm one of those jaded residents who like to tell visitors that the rococo multi-tiered Watergate looks like a wedding cake, and the bland, rectangular Kennedy Center like the box it came in.)
The book party was in Georgetown, the center of the permanent establishment in Washington. This is where so many of the government and media bigwigs live – Bob Woodward, and Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee before their deaths, and John Kennedy up to the morning he became president. Its charm is undercut these days for the people who actually live there by the Georgetown students who roam the streets after the rowdy bars let out, and by the lack of a metro stop which makes traffic and parking impossible (hence my Uber ride). But its iconic role is intact -- the last scene in All the President's Men is Woodward and Bernstein standing with Ben Bradlee in his pajamas and robe on his front lawn in the middle of the night, conveying the full scope of the Watergate scandal and warning him that his own house might be bugged.
The car deposited me at a magnificent mansion on a quiet side street, one I suspect would have made Ben's eyes pop and Kay Graham wonder where she went wrong. This place, I knew from a little research after I got the invitation, was most definitely not Sharyl's; the owners had paid in the upper seven figures (as Realtors here like to say) for it a decade ago, and, at unfathomable further expense, transformed its interior into an "oasis of Zen tranquility" in white, according to a design magazine spread, complete with priceless Asian artwork and statuary. (I also had borrowed a friend's house for our book party four years ago, though on a somewhat smaller scale.)
There was a young woman just inside the door holding up a copy of Sharyl's book, although whether that was an invitation to buy it or just a sign that we had wandered into the right mansion was unclear to me. Beyond her, a couple of hundred loudly energetic people were milling about the gorgeous rooms and, I feared, tracking mud from the recent rain onto the (white) carpets. Sharyl was surrounded, so I got a drink and a plateful of A-list food ("journalists love free food" is a truism that has fueled many a successful media event), and moved to a corner of the dining room next to a nearly full-size Buddhist statue to eat in tranquility.
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Sharyl Attkisson Gets it Right" »
By Dan Olmsted
The field of autism research looks just about the way you would expect it to look if the nature of the condition –inflammation and immune stimulation in utero and in infancy – were inescapably clear, yet the biggest and most obvious contributor – vaccines in utero and in infancy that cause inflammation and autoimmunity – were suppressed by mainstream media, medicine and scientific research.
If that were the case, we'd hear about every other possible source of inflammation and autoimmunity in utero and infancy popping up in their tedious turn -- traffic pollution and air pollution and power plant emissions as culprits, and pesticides and sudden unexplained surges in head size, and kids with all the signs of encephalitis (brain swelling) after well-baby visits (note, well babies), and we'd get too much white matter (autoimmunity) making for generalized inability of parts of the brain to connect, even as some parts function at savant levels; and we'd get typical facial features and normal intellectual development because the triggers all came along not in the genes but after the genes had expressed themselves and assembled the architecture and wiring for the last and most innately human functions – language, affective contact, a zest for novelty, not repetition – to come on line. But they wouldn't, for some mysterious reason.
We'd hear things that point to exactly what is happening and where it is happening – in the doctor's office, the health clinic, the grocery store "health" center – but because of what and where it is happening and whose job it is to figure it out – the bureaucrats who approve and recommend the shots – we'd be having the ridiculous conversation we are in fact having about traffic pollution, which has only gotten better, not worse, and methyl but not ethyl mercury (ditto) and lead (double ditto).
We'd hear about "exciting" gene discoveries that in some unfathomably complexificated way must grab onto the 80,000 other environmental factors through some Rube Goldberg contraptions that are no doubt the next "frontier" at Autism Speaks, even as the daughter of the founder is begging them to look her child in the eyes and publicly acknowledge the truth.
We'd witness an outpouring of parents and families and (increasingly) doctors and researchers who have seen the truth, and seen it again, and again, and again, armed with hashtags and transcripts and room numbers for Congresspersons, and the evidence of their eyes and their children's lives, stepping beyond their individual catastrophes in a messy but massive advance.
We'd see the truth leaking out of vaccine court rulings and fishy legal language and we'd detect it in the shrill dismissals of "skeptics" whose business is to take down the reputations of anyone who even gets close to speaking the truth.
We'd see the dawning realization among the supposed cognoscenti that the disease fighters don't have the sense to stay off the subway and away from commercial flights and bowling alleys and panini shops in Princeton for 21 days because they believe their work in other countries – other countries, not here, where we could use some common sense and common decency -- places them in a special category where the only harm they can imagine is harm done to their own schedules and convenience. That's the modern medical mantra -- Do no harm – to me!
We'd see all that, and we'd say, the doubt and anger are just about everywhere now. If we wanted to be nasty we could call it a virus and say it's endemic, which is the epidemiological version of "too late." It got loose while the experts were trying to appear above it all and stamp out chicken pox and hep B in newborns, and it's infecting the institutions dedicated to holding it back. How it all goes down from here is just guesswork, but one thing for sure is that there's no vaccine to stop it.
That's how the field of autism research would look right now if the only suspect remaining in the lineup were the truth. And that, in fact, is how it looks to me.
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.
As the walls close in on the bogus claim that vaccines don't cause autism, the latest trick of the vaccine injury deniers seems to be calling it something else.
So we've got idiopathic autism (meaning cause unknown). Secondary autism (meaning triggered by some acceptable environmental factor, like valproic acid, in the womb). Regressive autism (like, we just didn't notice it before). Autistic-like features due to some genetic vulnerability merely triggered by vaccination (like, mito disorder). And even vaccination that results in autism but doesn't cause it.
And now comes "isolated" autism. This charming term popped up in the William Thompson whistleblower investigation. One of the stated purposes of the 2004 study he has renounced was to look for "isolated" autism as a risk of earlier MMR administration – "isolated" being a subset defined by the paper's authors as "those with autism and without comorbid developmental disabilities."
According to the powerful fraud complaint filed this week with the HHS Office of Research Integrity, the research did in fact turn up a link with "isolated" autism, just as it did with black males, but both findings were suppressed.
Reading the description of "isolated" autism brought to mind those hoary days of yore, lo a decade ago now, when I looked into the rate of autism among ye olde Amish. Much time and effort has gone into debunking my humble anecdotal observation – which was, and is, that in this group with a documented lower vaccination rate, there appeared to be less autism.
One of the debunkers, Autism News Beat, no friend of this site, did me an accidental favor. Mr. News Beat reported that Dr. Kevin Strauss, a pediatrician at the Clinic For Special Children in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, told him "the idea that the Amish do not vaccinate their children is untrue," something I never claimed anyway.
Then came the beauty part: "Strauss said the clinic treats 'syndromic autism,' where autism is part of a more complicated clinical spectrum that can include mental retardation, chromosomal abnormalities, unusual facial features, and short stature, as well as Fragile X syndrome. 'We see quite a few Amish children with Fragile X,' he said.
"Strauss said he doesn't see 'idiopathic autism' at the clinic, which he defines as children with average or above average IQs who display autistic behavior. 'My personal experience is we don't see a lot of Amish children with idiopathic autism,' Strauss said. 'It doesn't mean they don't exist, only that we aren't seeing them at the clinic.'"
In other words, all those Amish kids whose autism can't be explained as part of a genetic spectrum present from birth – where the hell are they? They sure aren't hard to find in the rest of the country.
Idiopathic autism. Isolated autism. Same difference. That's because there's a low rate of autism in otherwise typical children who are not inflicted with the CDC's bloated infant vaccine schedule. There's a high rate of autism in previously typical children who are.
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Renaming Autism Won't Work Forever" »
We knew this was coming: "Imagine cities, countries, and entire continents ravaged by Ebola-like outbreaks, with millions dying in the streets from crippling, incurable, and fatal diseases," someone named Eliyahu Federman writes over at Fox News. "That is what the world looked like before the middle of the last century - before the widespread use and development of vaccines that eradicated these diseases."
And of course the return of this pestilence is all on Jenny McCarthy: "Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy are scaring parents out of vaccinating their children, spreading misinformation and promoting conspiracy theories, such as the long-disproved claim that vaccines cause autism."
Conflating death in the streets with reasonable concern that vaccines cause autism is really pushing it, wouldn't you say? The fact is that an effective response to a rapidly spreading epidemic – Ebola in Africa – is completely consistent with taking action to end a slower but no less damaging one in America – autism and other disorders caused by the bloated and out-of-control CDC childhood immunization schedule.
And isn't it interesting how the CDC has ended up on the wrong side of both? Its stewardship of the response to the arrival of Ebola on our shores has been so messed up that President Obama just appointed a lawyer – a lawyer, not a doctor! – to run things from here on. As far as I can tell he has zero background in public health whatsoever. What a relief.
I thought only medical professionals were qualified to make decisions about such things as disease control and prevention. But maybe not – maybe they let infectious people on planes, don't provide effective protection to the help (aka nurses), don't "scramble the jets" when they really do need scrambling (Ebola), and do scramble them when they don't (chickenpox, influenza, rotavirus, etc).
Rather than demonstrating the bankruptcy of concern over vaccination policies, Ebola points to the bungling of the people who are in charge of those policies.
Now, whether a vaccine for Ebola would be a good thing or not, the fact is there is't one. What we're seeing at the moment is the importance (and, unfortunately, the failure) of common sense public health measures – quarantining the infected, getting basic sanitation and safe water and health infrastructures into the developing world, and finding not just preventives, but treatment. Using the blood of people who've survived Ebola to treat people fighting infection is an old idea – the diphtheria toxin-antitoxin was derived from the blood of infected horses. But it works!
Taking advantage of Ebola to claim once again that vaccines don't cause autism – when the fact is, vaccines do cause autism – is really quite unpleasant, not to mention irrelevant. We have to retain the ability to prevent and respond to urgent outbreaks like Ebola along with the slower-moving kind. It's taken 25 years of a bloated and corrupt vaccine policy, but half the kids in this country now suffer from some kind of neurodevelopmental or chronic condition.
That's what's killing us, not Ebola.
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism
For sheer spectacle, it's hard to top – and maybe a little hard to watch – Autism Speaks flip, flop and flounder in the perilous sea of autism causation.
But now they've really cast their lot with the vaccine injury deniers. I don't see much more wiggle room. On Thursday, Ronan Farrow on MSNBC did an interview that managed to mangle just about every fact surround the William Thompson whistleblower controversy. He began by announcing that some are calling this Vaccine Injury Awareness Month.
Farrow attributed this to the "anti-vaccine" movement and said one of the most common alleged vaccine injuries on this group's list was autism. "The problem," he said, "is there's zero evidence of such a link. The Centers for Disease Control, reviewing existing literature, concluding there's not a causal relationship between certain vaccine types and autism." No mention of the inherent conflict that the CDC promotes vaccination.
"Where does the autism conspiracy theory come from?" Farrow asks. "Well, a study published in 2004 found a potential link between vaccines and autism in African-American boys. But this past August, two of the authors did a re-analysis of the data and concluded that their earlier analysis was faulty, apologizing for omitting key information."
Say what now? This is pretty close to gibberish.
"The report has since been removed from the public domain. So what is fact and what is fiction?"
Enter AS. "So joining me now is Paul Wang," senior vice president and director of medical research for Autism Speaks. "Clarity is the most important thing here," Farrow says, having already muddled things irretrievably. "So first of all walk me through what happens with this mysterious study. It seems to have proven back in 2004 that there was a link, but there are problems."
What now, again?
Wang says: "It's a very interesting study. If you look back at the original study from 2004, it did say -- there was no cover-up – it did say there seemed to be a higher risk for autism among children who got the MMR vaccine before three years of age. The part that nobody's talking about if you looked in that study, children who got the MMR on time, which is before 18 months, there is no increased risk. So it actually looked like the increased risk was in people who were getting it late. There's no cover-up there, that's in the original study.
"Even this new analysis, which has since been retracted, doesn't challenge that. People who got it on time have no increased risk for autism."
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Autism Speaks Says To Get the MMR and Prevent Autism!" »
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Discuss Vaccine Mercury
Controversy at Minnesota Book Symposium Nov. 1
Eight authors to speak on corruption & censorship in health science
BLOOMINGTON, MN – Scientists, attorneys and journalists will gather in Minnesota to discuss medical injuries which may have been caused by over zealous public health policies and procedures at the Health Choice/Skyhorse Publishing Book Symposium Saturday, November 1. The event runs from 10 am to 6 pm at the Radisson Blu Mall of America, 2100 Killebrew Drive in Bloomington.
Register before 10/20 and you receive all 8 books for just $99.00.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the attorney, radio host, Riverkeeper and author, will read from his book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak – The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury – a Known Neurotoxin – from Vaccines. Kennedy has appeared on various TV and radio programs explaining how government is suppressing evidence showing how the ethylmercury-based vaccine preservative damages and kills cells at extremely low doses.
Other book presentations on the intersection of science and politics include:
• Science for Sale: How the U.S. Government Uses Powerful Corporations and Leading Universities to Support Government Policies, Silence Top Scientists, Jeopardize Our Health, and Protect Corporate Profits by Dr. David Lewis, a former EPA microbiologist now with the National Whistleblowers Center;
• Plague: One Scientist's Intrepid Search for the Truth about Retroviruses, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Autism, and Other Diseases by Kent Heckenlively, J.D. & Dr. Judy Mikovits;
• Vaccines 2.0: The Careful Parent's Guide to Making Safe Vaccination Choices for Your Family by Mark Blaxill & Dan Olmsted, a former UPI investigative reporter;
Continue reading "Minneapolis Book Symposium on Public Health Policies to Feature Robert Kennedy, Jr" »
Right now the media is fixated on the first case of Ebola to reach U.S. shores (without the assistance of the CDC, that is). Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC director, says the disease will be stopped in its tracks, and for once I believe him. This is what the CDC does well -- track an outbreak in real time, find contacts, quarantine if necessary, and put an end to it.
Enterovirus 68, I'm afraid, may be another story. We first started hearing about the bug earlier this year, when a couple of dozen cases of paralysis in children started popping up in California. At that point we weren't hearing about how dangerous the respiratory symptoms were, just that some children ended up with various kinds of paralysis in association with it. Now the primary respiratory illness seems more virulent (a Rhode Island girl died just yesterday), and it's causing wider cases of paralysis (Colorado, Michigan, Boston ... and counting).
Which story is bigger? I vote for the enterovirus.
On the one hand, we've got one case of exotic and terrifying Ebola, a disease that makes your eyes ooze blood and is the proverbial "plane ride away." We keep hearing about how every terrible vaccine-preventable disease that is no longer a threat in the United States -- polio being a classic example -- is just a plane ride away, and that all 300 million of us need multiple injections starting in infancy in case it lands here. (Makes you wonder why we're not still getting yellow fever shots, doesn't it!)
But when a disease does in fact land here, public health surveillance catches it in a heartbeat, even with a goof like the Dallas emergency room sending the Ebola victim home the first time.
What's much more disturbing, on the other hand, is a disease that appears to be endemic - Enterovirus 68 -- that spreads much more easily.
And -- this is key -- the endemic one appears to be acting strangely. Ebola is nasty, but we know its evil ways. We haven't seen an enterovirus causing any appreciable paralysis since -- well, since polio. That bug circulated in the same way, generally caused no major problems, but starting in the late 1800s, inexplicably got into the nervous system of a small percentage of those infected and became something else entirely.
No one ever really got a handle on why that happened -- they just created a vaccine that wiped it out in the United States. Now, having basically learned nothing from that epidemic, we've got another bug whose behavior is similar -- and about which we also know nothing.
"Parents ask, 'Why? Why my child or why not my child?'" Colorado public health official Larry Wolk said of paralysis from E-68. "And it's a question we can't answer because we don't really know why some of these kids go on to develop this type of serious complication."
Well, we do have an idea, one that AOA has been investigating for several years, since Mark Blaxill and I observed in 2011 that polio epidemics seemed to arise along with new and highly toxic pesticides -- namely, lead arsenate -- in the late 1800s. Because polio is an enterovirus, which reproduces in the gut, we proposed an interaction between the virus and the pesticide residue from fruits or vegetables. We theorized this let the virus into the nervous system, where it caused the characteristic damage to the anterior horn cells at the top front of the spinal column.
Any serious critique of the "vaccines cause autism" position – a position that I certainly hold – henceforth needs to take account of William Thompson.
Vaccine injury deniers who trot out the "study after study show no link" gambit, the "discredited doctor" shibboleth, the "Playboy bunny " ploy and the "correlation is not causation" canard really can't get by on just that any more. Those were simpler times.
But of course, they'll try. They'll try to ignore Thompson, the CDC Senior Scientist who blew the whistle on the study that found no link between the timing of the MMR shot and the risk of autism. Oh yes they did, Thompson said; they hid the finding that black males are at much higher risk if they get the MMR before 36 months.
So when, this week, on Huffington Post, Jeff Schweitzer, "scientist and former White House Senior Policy Analyst, PH.D. in marine biology/neurophysiology," writes this –
"There is no evidence none, zero, absolutely nothing to link vaccinations with autism. It is a myth, a fallacy, factually incorrect. Yet tens of thousands of parents risk their children's health by withholding critical vaccinations. Like [Rob] Schneider, many parents still to this day insist that vaccines cause autism, even in the complete absence of any evidence to support the claim with the withdrawal of the original paper. You might as well claim that vaccines cause baldness; no, no, I've got the perfect claim: Vaccines are ineffective but cause global warming! In that we combine belief in something for which there is no evidence and disbelief in another other for which there is indisputable proof. Perfect."
-- When someone writes this, I can't help thinking that an advanced degree in marine biology slash neurophysiology and a White House gig can't keep the true dilettante in someone from emerging.
But of course, ignoring or nullifying the Thompson disclosure is not just pathetic and evidence of a lack of moral seriousness; it perpetuates the tragic autism epidemic. When you've got 4 million babies born every year in the U.S., and a 1 in 68 autism rate, that's an appreciable number of kids at risk every single day this goes on.
The CDC, in trying to brush Thompson aside and issue bland bromides about its concern for autism, continues its abysmal pattern. This, in turn, breeds complacency in the medical industry at the expense of the parents and few medical professionals trying to sound the alarm. Isabella Thomas, mother of two of the Lancet 12 children in Andy Wakefield's landmark (not discredited!) MMR study, sent a letter to the equivalent of the FDA in England:
"CDC Whistleblower William Thompson has released a formal statement confirming the original study found a link between MMR and Autism, especially in African American and that the CDC hid the results.
"I would like to know if you have investigated this report and your comments please."
The response:
"We are aware that the CDC has issued a statement standing by the findings of its original study. . We are also aware that the analysis by Dr Hooker has since been retracted by the journal in which it appeared. . "
How condescending. Shouldn't health authorities take some immediate action in response to Thompson's disclosure, moving the MMR to age 3 for black males today – not tomorrow, today?
And shouldn't pediatricians and pharmacies demand answers to Thompson's statement that he'd never let his own pregnant wife get a mercury-containing flu shot – because they cause tics in children, and tics are four times more common in autism, and, therefore, it's biologically plausible to say right now that vaccine can cause autism?
Of course this is hardly the first harsh truth to confront the powers that be – see Verstraeten, Unanswered Questions, Simpsonwood, et al. It's just one more piece of evidence that points to a pattern and practice of deceit, delay and denial.
I hear things are in an uproar down in Atlanta. As I said a few months ago, Freddy Krueger is coming for the CDC.
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.
Watergate has been on my mind lately. For one thing, Nixon resigned 40 years ago in August. When I started full time journalism a few week later, in October 1974, Woodward and Bernstein were my huge, daunting inspiration. (Another Watergate link – I turned 20 on the day of the break-in.)
There's a moment in the movie of All the President's Men, during a news meeting at the Washington Post, where one editor is skeptical of the paper's Watergate reporting. Ben Bradlee asks him to stay behind and explain his concerns.
"It's not just that we're using unnamed sources that bothers me, or that everything we print the White House denies, or that almost no other papers are reprinting our stuff.
"Look, there are over 2,000 reporters in this town. Are there five on Watergate? Where did the Washington Post suddenly get the monopoly on wisdom? … Why would the Republicans do it? I don't believe the story. Doesn't make sense." Why? Why? Why?
When it comes to vaccines and autism, people very much like that guy have been expressing disbelief about a vaccine-autism link for a very long time now. The skeptical mainstream media is sitting around letting the "Why?" stop them cold. Why in God's name would anyone who cares about public health ever conceal a link between vaccines and autism. They don't believe it. Doesn't make sense. Besides, if it were true, why wasn't some important publication covering it, not just borderline characters like us? Why? Why? Why?
Another version of this skepticism goes like this: "So you're telling me there's a giant conspiracy by doctors to hurt children with vaccines and hide the truth." Uh, no, that's what you think it would take to cause the calamity at hand.
Actually, it's always been clear that a handful of well-placed people could (and did) skew the epidemiology and restrict the research to the point that a link might never emerge, or at least not until they were safely retired, rehired, deceased, or had eradicated measles and gotten a Nobel Prize or at least an HHS Secretary's Citation and a nice bonus.
That narrative has been unfolding since SafeMinds discovered the early generations of Verstraeten's thimerosal study and the Simpsonwood transcripts. It picked up momentum from the Unanswered Questions study linking vaccine injury awards and autism; from multiple other streams of effort and evidence; and first and last and always from parents who want the powers that be to hear this well: Vaccines cause autism.
Now that William Thompson – unnamed source no more -- has come forward, it is possible to see the actual fingerprints of the perpetrators on the evidence. A bunch of bureaucrats, many of them cozy with drug companies as employers or partners, tamped down the associations to the point that business as usual could continue.
It does feel like a business decision, doesn't it – the business of vaccination, the medical industry, cannot be crossed. It must not be seen to shudder or quake.
But, again, why? Motivation can't be known, and in a larger sense it doesn't matter. Whether to fulfill professional goals, rise in the ranks, protect friends or previous mistakes – really, who cares. The doctors running the Tuskegee experiment actually thought they were doing God's work. One of the leaders was a black nurse who made sure the men showed up when they were supposed to. She picked them up in her car. She loved them. She wouldn't hurt a flea.
Editor's Note: This is the second story (the first was How Autism Happens: A Conversation with Kathryn Wolcott) in which parents tell how they watched their child develop autism – and Sheila Ealey has quite a story to tell. She lives in New Orleans, but, married to a military man, has moved around the country. She set up a school for special needs kids in New Orleans, in part to help her autistic son, Temple, but the day it was to open, Hurricane Katrina swept in. She relocated to Houston with thousands of others but is now back in New Orleans; the school, the Creative Learning Center of Louisiana, is thriving. I met Sheila at an autism conference in 2006, introduced by our mutual friend Brooke Potthast. With the news about the higher risk of autism in black males, and the CDC effort to hide it I remembered our conversation and Brooke helped me get in touch. The conversation starts with her son, Temple, and his twin, Lucinda, at a military hospital in Maryland for their one-year shots along with their older sister. If you want to participate, e-mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Sheila: It was August 2, 2000 – my birthday – and Temple and Lucinda were almost 13 months
old. Leielani is only 15 months older. Lucinda can manage to get herself out of the triple stroller, she did not want the injection, and she was fighting tooth and nail not to have it. I looked down for just a moment -- the nurse had all the vaccinations lined up. She had the HIB, the DTaP and the MMR for each child. When I looked up after taking her twin sister up, she had given Temple both of the MMRs along with the DTaP and the HIB. The next morning, he was not responsive anymore. It took me until he was 18 months to get a finished diagnosis of autism for him.
Dan: When you say, "he was not responsive anymore," how do you mean?
Sheila: He didn't have language yet by that point, but he was walking. He walked exactly on his birthday July 12 of that year, and he was walking well. After the shot he stopped walking, he started crawling, he started banging his head against the wall, the floor, anything he could. He stopped imitating with his father, he was making no eye contact, and he didn't want you to touch him or hold him.
Dan: That happened within a day?
Sheila: He cried so -- he cried, cried, cried the entire night. I called the doctors back because I caught the mistake right away, and the doctor who was on duty at that time said, "I'm going to call Merck and find out what to do." But in the meantime the fever went up extraordinarily high. He said, "Give him Tylenol." Which is what I did. The next morning when I went to his crib he wasn't standing, rocking on his crib, calling for me, "Ma, ma, ma" to come get him. Nothing. Nothing. He was lying there looking in the ceiling. He looked gone. My baby was gone.
Dan: His sister didn't have any of these problems?
Sheila: I refused to give her the vaccination, so she didn't get it. We left. She is fine. She is learning three languages. She is doing extraordinarily well. Now it seemed that she did have a few issues from the vaccinations before, at 5 months. She had reflux, but outside of that she is absolutely fine. She doesn't have any issues. But this child, Temple, was hit so hard. Language has not come back in. Before the shot, he wasn't speaking in sentences -- he was just a year old -- but he would say "Mama," stuff like that.
After this happened I started taking him to developmental specialists and they kept saying, "He is a boy. Sometimes boys are a little slower." And I said, "Okay." I came home, I decided to pack my bags and to move back to New Orleans because I had a pediatrician I had been dealing with for years for my older daughter. I asked her, "What is this? I have never seen this before," because I didn't know about autism. She said, "Sheila, I think your child has autism." I said, "What? What is that?" The minute I took him to see a neurologist that she told me to take him to, he told me, "I'm sorry this child is so autistic, he has to have chronic autism." When I asked him what that was he told me, "He had to be born with it." I said, "I'm not sure -- this baby was just perfect and now … there was nothing wrong before."
Let me tell you what else happened to me, Dan. After I went to Autism One, I was still living in Houston because we had lost everything to Katrina, but I had his records with me where the doctor had said that he had gotten a double dose of the MMR, and that they should call Merck, and Merck said he doesn't need to be vaccinated for the MMR anymore.
We came home to New Orleans and we left those records locked up in the apartment. Someone went into our apartment and stole his records. They didn't take anything but his record.
Dan: Oh Lord.
Sheila: Temple's records were stolen from our apartment. My partner in the school is a lawyer who worked at the time for [a new Orleans law firm]. When she returned in October of '05, by spring of '06 they fired her because they were representing Merck against me. Thanks to Congress, my case was thrown out. I also filed with the vaccine injury program and they dismissed my case because they said I needed a doctor who could without a doubt state that Temple was damaged due to the double dose of the MMR.
Dan: What do you think about this new report about the black males and the high risk and all that -- what does that make you think?
Continue reading "How Autism Happens: A Conversation With Sheila Ealey" »
As we all know, the current CDC vaccination schedule is sanctified holy writ. Only one-name nitwits like Doctor Oz and Doctor Bob dare to challenge it, and they are promptly pounced on by Doctors of Orthodoxy like Offit and Orac.
But now we have a new voice on the scene – Dr. William Thompson, the CDC whistleblower who so far, and I emphasize so far, has opined on the MMR and the flu shot for fetus-bearing women, and hasn't much liked what he's seen.
MMR at one year? Well no, certainly not for black males, who Thompson says showed a high risk of developing autism if the vaccine was given before 36 months.
Flu shots for pregnant women? God no! "I can say confidently I do think thimerosal causes tics. So I don't know why they still give it to pregnant women. Like, that's the last person I would give mercury to. Thimerosal from vaccines causes tics. You start a campaign and make it your mantra.
"Do you think a pregnant mother would want to take a vaccine that they knew caused tics? Absolutely not. I would never give my wife a vaccine that I thought caused tics. I can say, tics are four times more prevalent in kids with autism. There is biological plausibility right now to say that thimerosal causes autism-like features."
So we've got an alternate vaccine schedule going right here – no MMR before three – not for nobody – and no flu shots (since most contain mercury and you shouldn't believe otherwise when it's coming toward you or your child).
Now whether the flu shot for pregnant women is actually on the childhood vaccine schedule is a matter of some serious chicanery. The CDC and AAP said in 1999 that childhood vaccines should be mercury-free as soon as possible. But they refused to express a preference for mercury-free flu shots for pregnant women and infants, even as they increased the recommended coverage to all pregnant women and to all human beings six months or older, forever. (The CDC also now recommends a Dtap shot for all pregnant women, as well.)
Given these statements by "Dr. Bill," isn't there some kind of imperative for the CDC and medical organizations to immediately suspend flu shots in pregnancy, and postpone the MMR shot to 36 months (the risk for all kids was elevated; it was astronomical for black males).
Thompson issued a statement through his lawyer with the usual blather about the value of vaccines: "I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race."
Well, yeah, you did. You said no woman carrying a fetus should get a mercury containing flu shot. You said the public should know that black males who get the MMR shot under 36 months have a higher risk of autism.
If I were an activist, I could imagine standing outside of Walgreen's – on the corner of flu shots and lifelong disability, yuk yuk – with pamphlets saying, "No flu shots for you! CDC whistleblower says they cause autism!" The pamphlet can parse the details. And "MMR before Age 3 = Autism for Life – CDC Whistleblower." Again, details can come underneath.
Because that's what we're really talking about here -- vaccine injury happening daily when Dr. Bill's alternate immunization schedule could be a good, and immediate, start at avoiding it.
He who waffles is toast: Speaking of docs, Dr. Jay Gordon offered a comment on our site this week: "I'm not sure about the whistleblower issue but I always look back to this as one of the more interesting commentaries about vaccine combinations. Like (Dr.) Bob, I give vaccines but have never given them according to the recommended schedule and support parents' right to choose when, how and if they vaccinate their children."
Followed by: "I have spent 35 years educating myself, making my own decisions, encouraging parents to make theirs. And I have always distrusted the CDC. This incident reminds me of the line in 'Casablanca' – 'Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!' A scientist participated in a study and was complicit in its omission of valuable data. He was then secretly taped by someone whose views and agenda are very well known. (Mine are, too) How valuable a piece is this in our puzzle and our struggle to bring sanity to vaccination policies and attitudes? In my opinion, the value is limited. Best, Jay"
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Dr. Bill's Alternate Vaccine Schedule" »
Editor's Note: I wrote this in 2006, which just shows that any idiot who was paying attention should have known a long time ago that the MMR is strongly linked to the autism epidemic. The filmmaker father I refer to whose daughter regressed immediately after the MMR is Erik Nanstiel, who recently described it powerfully in his own Hear This Well video. If you want to take an autism rate of 1 in 68 for around 4 million babies born every year in the United States, the damage done in the decade since the bogus 2004 CDC MMR study: 588,000 cases of autism. -- Dan Olmsted
WASHINGTON, June 12 (UPI) -- Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who first raised the prospect of a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism, is being pursued by British medical authorities.
According to the BBC: "The Independent newspaper reports that the General Medical Council will accuse Mr. Andrew Wakefield of carrying out 'inadequately founded' research. Vaccination rates fell sharply after Dr Wakefield questioned the safety of MMR, raising fears of a measles epidemic. His initial Lancet paper has since been disowned by the journal."
Let's put aside the issues surrounding the Lancet paper and concerns about a measles epidemic and go straight to the heart of the matter: Does the MMR cause autism? In other words, is Wakefield right?
After looking into the topic for more than a year, I'm very concerned that he may be -- that, especially in children whose immune systems have been rendered susceptible by any number of possible exposures, the combined live-virus vaccine has its fingerprints all over numerous cases of regressive autism.
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2006/06/13/The-Age-of-Autism-But-is-Wakefield-right/UPI-62041150213395/#ixzz3ClkYgSwb
There's a certain bleak satisfaction in watching the fortress of vaccine injury denial start to crumble, evidenced by wilder and wilder theories designed to patch together the remnants of "the science is settled … study after study" argument, now that the science is unsettled and study after study starts to look like lie after lie.
On C-SPAN, at the National Press Club, on PBS and the major networks and print outlets, they are still running off the old karma, but the new paradigm is about to catch up with them. I hope they enjoy these last late summer days in the bully pulpit ridiculing anyone who notices the reality about to crash down on them.
Over at Respectful Insolence, "Orac" is obsessing over whether CDC whistleblower William Thompson actually sent Andy Wakefield (and his wife, Carmel) apologetic texts. Never mind what Thompson said in his own statement, or was captured on audio by Brian Hooker. No, the screen grab must be a fake!
"But something about that text exchange, more specifically the image of that text exchange, bothered me. It even bothered some antivaccinationists, because I saw complaints about it. Why is it a photo of an iPhone? Doesn't Andy even know how to take a screen shot on his iPhone?"
It goes on from there. "Notice how in Andy's screenshot, the word "Back" appears by the arrow in the upper left hand corner. Notice how, in mine, the word "Messages" appears in the upper left hand corner. That's what had been bugging me when I first looked at the screenshot and it didn't look quite right to me! I had finally put my finger on it!"
In the comments section, Orac's thesis doesn't hold up very well – even Brian Deer doubts it! This causes Orac to add an editor's note allowing the possibility of error and adding: "Unlike AoA and other antivaccine groups, if I am wrong about something, I will admit it and discuss what might have led me to an incorrect conclusion."
Wow. Even an occasion for admitting error becomes an opportunity for pointing out our supposed failings! I did send Andy a text before we ran our article about Thompson's comments, here:
Now, exactly why my last text about being a fraud not going through is unknown to me. Maybe Orac interfered with it or God Herself decided that since Andy really is a fraud, no transmission casting doubt on it will be allowed. Or maybe because I was driving around in Illinois and the especially high corn this year interfered.
Andy Wakefield may not know how to take a screen shot of his iPhone. The last time I saw him with one, it had been run over in the parking lot where he dropped it before we went in for dinner, and, while the screen was good and cracked, he kept using it. And my last text to Andy may simply have failed to transmit.
One way or another, though, the message is starting to get through: Andy is not the fraud here. He is not the one who is killing babies, in Bill Gates' memorable formulation of the issue.
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.
I am not a chi square guy. I'm an English major. I am in no position to evaluate the techniques used to calibrate the autism rate in black males, or anybody else, before or after the MMR shot.
But I can read. And when I read William Thompson's statement about the CDC's study on this topic, I was struck by the way it was constructed: "I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding what findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed."
It takes a while to parse this paragraph, which sounds kind of bland and bureaucratic. The passive voice – decisions were made, reminiscent of the classic "mistakes were made" – doesn't help. And the data weren't merely collected before the decisions were made; the data were analyzed. One result really stood out, Thompson is telling us, and not in a way that suited their institutional purposes. They changed the protocol and the "statistically significant information" was no more. They wiped it out.
I bet there are reporters who read right over that. He's talking about scientific fraud on the most important health issue affecting America's children, at the agency charged with protecting them, not a gentleman's disagreement over decisions on how to apply chi square. The media coverage, such as it is, has wandered aimlessly along side issues, but the point here seems pretty basic: There was a protocol directing them how to do the study. William Thompson says he and his CDC colleagues didn't follow it. And he thinks that's a big problem. Big.
So what was the protocol and how was it not followed? Brian Hooker, who re-analyzed the data, talked about it in a video interview with Gary Franchi:
"I have the CDC's original protocol. The CDC's final agreed-upon protocol came out for this particular study on September 5, 2001, and in that particular protocol they said they would consider race among the entire population. They called race a co-variant, and that's just a term that's used in statistics for a secondary variable, but they said that race would be used within the entire population.
"So what they've done is they've deviated from their own protocol, and, according to the whistleblower, the reason why they deviated from that agreed-upon protocol [by adding in a requirement for Georgia birth certificates] was they saw this astronomical risk in African-Americans, and when they saw that astronomical risk, they looked for any way they could bury that risk, and they reduced the sample size down to what's called the birth certificate cohort, and that caused the association to no longer be statistically significant."
None of this, you'll notice, has anything to do with Brian Hooker or Andy Wakefield or "anti-vaxxers" and their relentless and cunning war against humanity. Time Magazine's question – "Did the CDC cover up the data, as Hooker claims?" – is ridiculous and shows just the kind of misreading of the story, and Thompson's own admissions, that I'm talking about. It should be, did the CDC cover up the data, as CDC Senior Scientist William Thompson, who co-authored the study, claims in a stunning break with his colleagues? In his taped comments, Thompson was much more passionate and personal, something the few news outlets who have covered it, like CNN, should have noted. Believe me, in other circumstances they wouldn't care less whether a public official who said something like this knew he was being taped.
But for now let's just take Thompson at his carefully calibrated word -- his own statement. That's quite enough.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Take Me To Your Protocol " »
Quite a week, I think you'd have to agree. William Thompson, the whistleblower first heard on a taped phone call with Brian Hooker last week, has now come forward, confirming his role in covering up evidence that black males may be particularly vulnerable to autism from the on-time MMR shot. Rather than follow up on that clue from a susceptibility group – a clue that could unravel the CDC's whole argument that vaccines never, ever cause autism – the CDC researchers buried it.
What's more, he's also on tape saying another study he was lead researcher on sends an ominous signal that the mercury-containing flu shot for pregnant woman can cause autism. The study found a higher risk of tics, and children with autism have four times the rate of tics as other children.
Meanwhile, Thompson says on the tape and doesn't take back in his statement, "I can say confidently I do think thimerosal causes tics. So I don't know why they still give it to pregnant women. Like, that's the last person I would give mercury to. Thimerosal from vaccines causes tics. You start a campaign and make it your mantra.
"Do you think a pregnant mother would want to take a vaccine that they knew caused tics? Absolutely not. I would never give my wife a vaccine that I thought caused tics. I can say, tics are four times more prevalent in kids with autism. There is biological plausibility right now to say that thimerosal causes autism-like features."
Interesting what a strong echo this is from the Simpsonwood transcript, June 7, 2000: "Forgive this personal comment, but I got called out at eight o'clock for an emergency call and my daughter-in-law delivered a son by C-section. Our first male in the line of the next generation and I do not want that grandson to get a Thimerosal containing vaccine until we know better what is going on. It will probably take a long time. In the meantime, and I know there are probably implications for this internationally, but in the meanwhile I think I want that grandson to only be given Thimerosal-free vaccines." - Dr. Robert Johnson, Immunologist, University of Colorado, Simpsonwood, Ga.
So while the rest of us suckers shoot our kids and ourselves up with autism-causing vaccinations, the smart set – namely, epidemiologists and immunologists whom we pay to figure these things out – look at the data and say, no way you're giving that to my wife and grandson!
Of course, tell that to your pediatrician and he'll tell you there's no evidence for that. There's no evidence because the evidence has been suppressed, and now it's being unsuppressed.
As of today, August 28, 2014, it's quite clear that flu shots with mercury should be yanked off the market, and not just for pregnant women and infants (Thompson seemed not to know that they, too, get mercury-laced flu shots). Mercury-containing shots, including those promoted in third-world countries by hapless do-good-look-at-me-I'm-a-hero groups like the Gates Foundation, should be gathered up and disposed of by people in hazmat suits.
And the MMR should be moved to 36 months for any and all. Given that we now see it is capable of causing autism but don't know exactly why (it's probably viral interference at too young an age, but is the interference driven by the neurotoxic measles vaccine or the mutated and ineffective mumps portion, the subject of another whistleblower complaint?), it should be broken back into three parts and given with wide separation.
And the flawed and offensive Pediatrics article giving the MMR a clean bill of health at 12 months should be retracted.
Continue reading "Our Story So Far: Both MMR & Mercury-Laced Vaccines Cause Autism" »
As the MMR whistleblower issue blows up, here's one thing that's worth remembering: The specific manipulation of data being alleged is that the CDC covered up a risk for autism in black males who got the MMR shot earlier than 36 months. That is appalling, and raises terrible echoes of the nation's public health officials and their odious Tuskegee study of untreated black males with syphilis.
But more broadly, according to the medical, scientific, and journalistic consensus of our day, there should be no good evidence of any kind, whatsoever, linking any vaccine to autism in any child, ever. Ever! ("One Thing We Know About Autism: Vaccines Aren't to Blame" – National Geographic. "Once again, the research is definitive: vaccines don't cause autism, and the potential costs of vaccines' mild side-effects are clearly smaller than those of the lethal diseases that can spread if we don't vaccinate all children." – Vox.com)
Since "we know" that vaccines don't cause autism, they certainly don't cause it in black males. They certainly don't cause it when the MMR is given to black males. They certainly don't cause it when the MMR is given to black males in Atlanta. They certainly don't cause it when the MMR is given to black males in Atlanta before a certain age – or, for that matter, given on the day of birth to blue-eyed females in Dubuque born on the first or third Thursdays of months ending in "y."
They don't cause autism! Got it? If they did, even in such a circumscribed cohort as black males in Atlanta vaccinated with MMR before 36 months -- that would start a cascade of challenges to orthodoxy that simply can't – and, if the authority figures have their way, simply won't – be tolerated. This is what the The Times and The Networks and the Agencies are going to be working overtime to shore up.
The CDC's William Thompson, whistleblower to Brian Hooker on the MMR study and lead author on another on mercury in vaccines, has probably ruined more than a few of his colleagues' August vacations at Hilton Head. One can't help think of goofy cartoon characters running around a leaking dike and plugging every hole that starts spurting. They are down now to using their toes. (Check out this staggeringly off-message comment from Dorit Reiss on CNN: "Even if his [Brian Hooker's] claims about the study were correct, which is doubtful, it would show that for most of the population, MMR does not cause autism." I imagine a Merck guy yelling in her ear, "Dammit, Dorit, don't ever say it's OK if the MMR just makes a few thousand black boys autistic! Do you really want this job? ")
More broadly, these "leaks" in the bulwark of conventional wisdom have been coming for a long time, and not just from people on the inside with information to share.
I'm talking about leaks like all the parents of children on the other side of the elevated-risk stats – MMR shots at 12 months, illness, regression, autism.
Leaks like parents who saw it with other vaccines, at other times -- parents who were willing to share what happened to try to keep it from happening again.
Leaks like the original Verstraeten study at the CDC that found a high risk of autism for infants who got the most ethyl mercury by the first month of life, as opposed to the least.
Leaks like the CDC coverup of the soaring autism rate in Brick Township, N.J.
Leaks like all the evidence from low-and-no-vaccine populations with low-to-no autism. Leaks like the unwillingness of the public health authorities to even study the issue.
Leaks like the Hannah Poling case, which the government conceded was triggered by autism, but buried by obfuscation. Leaks like the Unanswered Questions study showing autism all over the place in unacknowledged vaccine "court" rulings.
Leaks like the SafeMinds parents identifying autism as a "novel form of mercury poisoning" more than a decade ago.
Leaks like the Merck scientists who came forward to say the company faked data to make its mumps vaccine look effective.
Leaks like the connection between the first cases of autism reported in the medical literature, in 1943, and the families' exposure to the new ethyl mercury vaccines and fungicides.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: A Torrent of Leaks Reaches Flood Stage" »
This is the first in a series of articles in which parents describe how their children developed autism. Today, a talk with Kathryn Wolcott. If you are interested in participating, please e-mail me at email@example.com
Dan: I have not done this series before, this conversation, so I appreciate your being the first one and talking to me. I wondered if you might just go over a little bit about your situation, where you live, what you do, what your family's like and maybe we can talk about what happened with your daughter, Norah.
Kathryn: I would love to actually because this is the first time I've really gotten to flesh out the whole situation.
My husband and I live in Jackson, Michigan, which is just south of the capital of Lansing. We both went to Michigan State University. We grew up together and got married after college. I actually went to school for communication, and then my master's degree is in health communication and I studied epidemiology and public health. After my daughter was born I did my master's thesis on the CDC's vaccine schedule and how Jenny McCarthy was ruining public health as we know it and how vaccines absolutely do not cause autism.
Dan: You can't be serious.
Kathryn: I'm very serious, which is why this is such an interestingly ironic situation. Of course I got all my information from the CDC itself. I was gung-ho about making sure everyone in my family got their flu shot and my daughter was vaccinated on schedule every single month and there was no delaying or anything.
We found out we were expecting after we'd been married for about two and a half years, and I heard someone talking about the vaccine-autism connection and of course I just totally blew it off, "Of course it doesn't cause autism, it's just better diagnosing and that will never happen, because I'm having a girl and girls don't get autism as much as boys do." I got the flu shot while pregnant, everything.
She was born 39 weeks. I was a planned induction, which was another big regret. She was developing fine really. I nursed her ... We had a little bit of struggles with breastfeeding at the beginning. She got Vitamin K at birth, and then two weeks in, the hep B, and she got sick, and I mean like fever.
Then we started noticing some GI issues and she was having horrible constipation and screaming and gas, which is unusual on a breastfed baby. I cut dairy and that seemed to help a little bit until we got to the two month shot and she got sick again with the high-pitched screams, the fever, all of it. Of course I pushed Tylenol like you wouldn't believe.
She got her four-month shots, same thing -- fever, screaming, but she seemed to be fine. Then between the four-month and the six-month shots, her head circumference went from the 25th percentile, which is where she was because she is little, to the 90th. That should have been a red flag for me, but retrospectively I know now.
Dan: Was that noticeable to you or is that something that the doctor noticed when he measured or what?
Continue reading "How Autism Happens: A Conversation With Kathryn Wolcott" »
By Dan Olmsted
One of the unexpected plusses of Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s book on the dangers of thimerosal, the ethyl mercury vaccine preservative: It is being greeted by another round of excruciatingly erroneous authoritative-sounding pronouncements claiming that the tiny, tiny -- truly, truly, teeny and tiny -- amounts of mercury are OK if not actually good for you.
No. As I believe Will Redwood put it, injecting mercury in babies on purpose is stupid. Out of the mouths of babes and infants comes the truth. Out of the mouths of the Mercury Drinkers comes a defense of injecting mercury in babies that is just plain astonishing:
"It doesn't matter what Bobby Kennedy, Jr. does -- the only thing is what the data show," Paul Offit said. "The question is, are the levels [of mercury] contained in vaccines shown to be harmful? And the answer is no. Thimerosal is ethyl mercury, not environmental mercury, and it's excreted from the body far more quickly ... Breast milk contains far higher [mercury] levels than you would ever get from vaccines."
The CDC is happy to chime with its usual insipid statement: "Thimerosal has been used safely in vaccines for a long time (since the 1930s) and has a proven track record of being safe." It's safe because it's safe because we say so.
Actually, it is not safe and it has a proven record of causing autism, starting with its use in the 1930s in pesticides and vaccines, before which autism didn't exist, after which it started popping up with increasing frequency -- first in families with backgrounds in pesticides and vaccination. Tell me why, if it's got nothing to do with autism, the father of the second child ever diagnosed with autism was experimenting with the ethyl mercury dust Ceresan at the same time his child was born? (While the pediatrician mother of Case 7 was promoting infant vaccinations with ethyl mercury?) It was poison in 1937, it's poison now. It was poison in pesticides (and long ago removed), it's poison in vaccines -- but still injected into tens of milliions of babies a year. ("Ethyl Mercury" is visible below Wheat in black type.)
This doesn't dissuade those who think we're all lotus-eating idiots. Journalists are drinking the mercury right along with the best and brightest vaccine zealots. "Most fundamentally, Kennedy does not get chemistry," wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time. Prepare to eye-roll: "Thimerosal is an ethylmercury product. Mercury in general may be a neurotoxin, but it's in its methylmercury form that it does its damage—and only in particular concentrations. The quantity of ethylmercury that was once in vaccines was so small that it was actually within acceptable limits for the more toxic, methyl form—but it wasn't even in that methyl form to begin with." Yes, this makes absolutely no sense. What wasn't in what?
"Sticking up for thimerosal -- Read the studies -- it's safe," was the headline on a Slate piece by Arthur Allen in 2005 when Kennedy spoke out the first time.
By Dan Olmsted
The July 20 New York Times, which never tires of promoting the germ theory of disease and the need to vax, vax, and vax some more, is my source for the following: "Over the last century, Denmark won significantly more Nobel Prizes per capita than Italy. It also had a lower prevalence of disease-causing germs."
The correlation, according to Damian Murray at UCLA, holds true in 161 countries based on 5 different metrics of innovation. "Murray speculates that vaccination programs 'may serve to foster a cultural zeitgeist that is more encouraging and rewarding of innovation.'"
About the only truth in that statement is the first two words: "Murray speculates." That's certainly fine – I do it all the time – but I'm not even sure I understand the point. I filed it in my "AOA – Read" folder to await further developments.
They came swiftly. Yesterday, I saw a friend with two preschool sons who knows first-hand the damage FDA-approved, CDC-recommended medicine -- not vaccines in his case -- can do. (He has a lot to do with why I'm writing about autism.) I asked him what vaccination schedule he follows with the kids and he replied, "We're doing the Norwegian one."
I'd never heard of someone adopting another country's schedule, but my friend is pretty cosmopolitan – thoroughly American but with recent roots in Hungary, Germany, and England.
So I looked up the Norwegian vaccination schedule for preschoolers:
• DTP combination vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough)
• Hib vaccine against Haemophilus influenzae type b infection
• Vaccination against pneumococcal disease
• Vaccination against poliomyelitis
• MMR combination vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella
Vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV, for girls from 2009)
Children are usually first vaccinated at 3 months old. MMR vaccination is first given at 15 months of age and HPV is now offered to girls at about 12 years old.
Hepatitis B vaccine is also offered through the immunisation programme to children with increased risk of infection, such as those with parents from countries with high prevalence of hepatitis B infections.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: The Vaccine Theory of Nobel Prizes " »
I've had it with the anti-American bile spewing from that leftist rag Mother Jones magazine – inciting murderous jihadis. These cretins need to shut up and stop killing people.
Oh wait, that's not what I really wanted to say. I wanted to say, the language being used against vaccine safety advocates is really getting out of control, and a recent example is Mother Jones, which referred this week to the "McCarthyite cretins in the murderous vaccinations-cause-autism movement." (Jenny, meet Joe.)
Sounds a bit harsh when their own rhetoric is flung back at 'em, doesn't it!
Not since the White House warned Americans to "watch what they say, watch what they do" in the wake of 9/11 – before starting the stupidest, longest, most ruinous wars in U.S. history, having cowed most of the press and Congress into submission – has there been a moment like this.
Egged on by the "vaccines uber alles" forces, know-nothing folks like Mother Jones' blogger Kevin Drum are stepping up the intemperate language to "baby killer" levels not seen since Bill Gates laid that one on Andy Wakefield. (These levels are likely to rise again with RFK Jr.'s new book, out next week, driving them into frenzy.)
Let's remember that the law provides some fairly easy ways to skip vaccination, from personal and religious exemptions to no mandates at all if children are educated at home. Don't like it? Change the law. Don't compare those who follow or advocate perfectly legal behavior to mass murderers.
There's been a lot of talk recently about parallels between 1914 and now, 100 years later. Here's another one – as war fever built, free speech was suppressed under the Espionage Act. President Wilson even tried to criminalize criticism of the president. I'm sure he thought that opposing entry into the war would cost lives. Instead it probably cost us a century more of constant war.
Calling us anti-vaccine because we want a safer, saner vaccine schedule and are highly critical of current government policy is like calling Mother Jones anti-American because it wants a safer, saner country and is highly critical of current government policy.
Free speech and relatively free choice is here to stay (let us pray!). The murderous anti-American cretins – wait, the lazy uninformed ideologues -- over at Mother Jones might as well calm down and get used to it.
The evidence for lower autism rates in less vaccinated populations keeps rolling in – and rolling off the backs of the media and medical establishment.
Thanks to AOA's Adriana Gamondes for spotting this March article in the Times of Israel: "In Israel, a lower percentage of ultra-Orthodox and Arabic children are diagnosed with autism compared with the general population — and no one is quite sure why.
"That pattern, which is mirrored in Aboriginal populations in Canada, was the subject of discussion by autism researchers from the two countries at a Hebrew University symposium this week. One thing is certain, they said — when it comes to autism in both Israel and Canada, not enough is known."
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Mother Jones' Murderous Jihad, the Orthodox Anomaly, Dorit on the Attack" »
We have excerpted this article from Sharyl Attkisson's website.
This is an interesting article written several years ago by UPI investigative journalist Dan Olmsted. It asks "Where are the autistic Amish?"
After the article was published, back when more reporters were covering the scientific links between vaccines and autism, I asked an official from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) about the supposed lack of autism in the unvaccinated Amish. She said that there could be many other reasons besides the community's aversion to vaccines. For example, "They don't use electricity, right?" she told me. In other words, she seemed to put lack of electricity on equal footing with lack of vaccinations when it comes to what could be responsible for the apparent lower than average autism rate in the unvaccinated Amish.
The obvious difference is there are many scientific studies supporting a link between vaccines and autism–often unreported, under-reported or dismissed by pharmaceutical interests and vaccine activists who have long fought a PR campaign to falsely portray the studies and researchers as "anti-vaccine."
I told the CDC official that it would seem that a survey of the unvaccinated population could be a good first step in further dispelling or further confirming the possibility of a vaccine tie to autism. The CDC official acknowledged to me that the information would be worthwhile. I asked whether CDC would attempt such a survey.
Such a survey wouldn't necessarily cost a penny because the CDC already conducts regular telephone and mail surveys to monitor childhood immunization coverage. It could just add a question: has your child been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder? Read the full post at Ms. Attkisson's site here.
Everywhere I look, one kind of metal or another seems to be implicated in modern environmental illnesses. You've all heard the discovery Mark Blaxill and I made that places organic mercury via both vaccines and pesticides at the start, and heart, of the autism epidemic in the 1930s. Clearly, ethylmercury is deeply implicated in the roots and rise of autism.
It's important to remember that vaccines and pesticides are merely vectors, not causes. What they deliver – the toxic exposure -– is the heart of the matter. For instance, metals delivered in quite another way – through emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources of environmental mercury – showed up as a powerful connection to autism in the two Palmer studies at the University of Texas. And coal contains not just mercury but arsenic and lead – both metals.
"We suspect low-dose exposures to various environmental toxicants, including mercury, that occur during critical windows of neural development among genetically susceptible children may increase the risk for developmental disorders such as autism," according to the authors.
Another study, by Windham and colleagues, found a similar correlation by linking "the California autism surveillance system to estimated hazardous air pollutant (HAP) concentrations compiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. … Our results suggest a potential association between autism and estimated metal concentrations, and possibly solvents, in ambient air around the birth residence, requiring confirmation and more refined exposure assessment in future studies."
Noted autism researcher Isaac Pessah, who wasn't involved in the study, told the L.A. Times, "Clearly this suggests that there may be correlations between autism onset and environmental exposures, especially as it relates to metal exposures."
Combined with the Palmer studies, and our own research on the first cases and their links to mercury, any honest effort to figure out what's causing autism would by now have zeroed in on metals and their mechanisms of delivery, whether through coal, air pollution in general, pesticides, vaccines, or what have you. But because one of the delivery mechanisms – vaccines – is protected by a moat of official denial, the entire field is blocked and diverted into unrewarding Groundhog-Day style churning of topics like genes and strictly pre-term exposures. Post-natal? Metals? No way!
One thing I've always remembered from that Windham study is that the highest correlation with autism came from three different metals: mercury, cadmium and nickel (as well as two solvents, trichloroethylene and vinyl chloride).
Cadmium. Interesting. This week I'm back in my home state of Illinois, and the Chicago Tribune (hardly a friend to the environmental theory of autism) reported on a new study comparing organic and regular produce. The conventional wisdom is that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between them, except that organic costs more. This study did find important differences – including the fact that organic foods offer more antioxidants, which is the main reason to eat your kale in the first place. Plus, the researchers found more pesticide residue on regular produce (duh!) and much higher levels of … wait for it … cadmium. The level was still below official limits, but cadmium, because it's a metal, is one of those things that can build up in your system. (Kind of like mercury and lead and arsenic.)
Cadmium, number 48 on the periodic table, is chemically similar to two other group 12 metals, zinc and … wait for it … mercury. Cadmium (like mercury) is no longer allowed in pesticides in the United States.
But it's sure interesting to see mercury pop up in a study of coal emissions and autism in Texas, mercury and cadmium in air pollution and autism in California, and cadmium in a study of produce in general. And recall that pesticides have recently been linked to autism – in mothers who live near pesticide-sprayed fields in California. This conclusion is being resisted mightily by the mainstream autism epidemic deniers; as I argued last week, it is dangerous because it ultimately points to the heart of the matter – a non-genetic, man-made, environmental disaster in which food and medicine are deeply implicated via pesticides and vaccines.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Metals on the March" »
I've been talking a lot about pesticides lately. In fact, one of our readers left this comment this week. "I'm not in any way stating that pesticide use doesn't pose health ramifications to the outside populous - it does. But I still believe that overall, the biggest 'environmental factor' re: the autism increase we're seeing today, is the continued and prolific use of the bolus doses of vaccines our kids are receiving." (So do I, bear with me just a bit longer.)
It's not the first time someone has wondered where I was going with this topic. When I spoke at Autism One in 2006, this is the impression I left on Teresa Conrick:. "He had been up on the stage in a plaid shirt, talking about mercury, seeds, and Ceresan. I didn't understand why this 'lumberjack guy' was talking to all of us parents about trees, Lignasan, and ethylmercury. Dan seemed to me to be on the wrong trail. It took me a while to connect the research and see that these clues Dan, along with Mark Blaxill, had been discussing and writing about for quite some time were the first "puzzle" pieces to autism." (Thanks, Teresa!)
But why are seeds and soil and Ceresan relevant to the current autism epidemic? Because they were an independent vector for the delivery of the same toxin, ethylmercury, that in vaccines triggered the current crisis, and keeps it spreading worldwide (shots are a much more efficient vector than pesticide dust). Critics toss out the "correlation is not causation" truism to try to discredit the vaccine-autism connection. (A better version would be "association is not necessarily causation, but it is a possible clue worth aggressive follow-up."). But when two totally independent delivery mechanisms -- pesticides with ethyl mercury and vaccines with ethylmercury -- starts flashing the same signal -- autism -- at the same time -- the 1930s -- in 11 families with clear connections to both those uses ... Well, truly independent observers ought to sit up and take notice, because they are getting a glimpse of autism's Big Bang -- the roots and rise of the preeminent disorder of our age. And when you know how an epidemic started, you have the key to ending it.
This is always worth repeating even at the risk of coming across as a one-note Johnny (see our book and blog and the video of the same name on our home page). But today I'd like to mention further evidence that links pesticides with neurological and developmental mayhem, including but not limited to autism, especially along the "left coast" of the United States, stretching from the San Joaquin and Central Valleys of California up through Napa and the orchard and wine counties of Washington State. This temperate and fertile arc, sometimes referred to as Ecotopia, began blooming with fruits and vegetables when industrial agriculture, pesticides and irrigation started taking hold at the end of the 19th Century. It now accounts for a large percentage of the nation's food supply -- and increasingly, a number of unusual outbreaks that point to toxins.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Trouble in Ecotopia" »
One of the funniest things I've ever read – and I've referred to this before, so forgive me – is this item that ran in the New York Times:
"Correction: December 3, 2008 An article last Wednesday about Gael Greene's dismissal as a restaurant critic for New York magazine misidentified the news service she was reporting for when she had an affair with Elvis Presley in 1956. It was United Press, not United Press International, which was formed in 1958 when United Press merged with the International News Service."
Perhaps my own journalism background, which included a stint at UPI, adds to my amusement here. But I mean, who really cares what United Press was called in 1956, before it merged with the International News Service in 1958, to form United Press International, when it's part of the same paragraph that tells you a prominent (recently fired) New York restaurant critic somehow ended up having an affair with Elvis Presley half a century ago. Now that's a merger worth hearing about!
It is in that spirit that I bring you news that the Gray Lady has goofed again. Basically, in its latest paean to vaccination, an article last week on the rising cost of vaccines, it managed to get things so wrong as to raise concerns about its fundamental understanding of the subject. And as you know, we are the ones the Times believes are irredeemably erroneous.
I sent the Times this e-mail last week:
this statement is flatly wrong:
"For most prescription medicines, the crucial hurdle to marketing is to win Food and Drug Administration approval. But for vaccines, the prize is the imprimatur of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Once a shot is on the committee's schedule as mandatory, every child has to get it before entering school and insurers have to cover it, at least nominally. (Many states require home-schooled children to be vaccinated as well.) 'We have to give it to every kid, so it's a golden ticket,' Dr. Irvin said."
(My e-mail continued:) In fact, the ACIP recommends childhood vaccines to the CDC, which uses that input to determine the childhood immunization schedule. that schedule is not a mandate. states consult it in adopting school entry requirements, which often do NOT include all vaccines on the CDC's schedule. also, "many" states do not require home-schooled children to be vaccinated, as i understand it -- only virginia and north carolina do so. regarding the first point, contrast it with this statement by the pro-vaccine Shot of Prevention website:
"There are no federal vaccination laws. However, just as the government requires immunizations for those who volunteer to join the military, and health providers may require employees to be vaccinated in a medical setting, immunization requirements for public school enrollment are determined by individual states. Parents are not forced to vaccinate their children. Rather, they're given a choice as to whether they want their children to attend public school and therefore be vaccinated according to state admission policies."
(my e-mail ends here)
On Tuesday, the Times printed this correction:
Continue reading "Midweek Mashup: On Vaccines, It's The Times vs. The Truth" »
A couple of recent court cases have me convinced that the religious exemption from childhood immunizations is in big trouble.
The first case is one I somehow missed when it was decided last month. It's a bit convoluted, but the gist is that three New York parents said their unvaccinated children were denied their rights by being kept out of school because another child had a vaccine-preventable disease. The judge said no.
To tell you the truth, I am not terribly concerned about that. Most parents I know who forego vaccines say that a better solution to disease control is informal quarantine – keep your kid home when they're sick, or if you don't want them to catch a disease they're not vaccinated against.
But the scary part – especially in a state with no philosophical exemption and a nasty habit of trying to make parents prove the sincerity of their religious convictions -- was this comment in the federal judge's ruling. "The Supreme Court," he wrote, has "strongly suggested that religious objectors are not constitutionally exempt from vaccinations."
I couldn't find a link to the judge's ruling, but according to the Times, he was pointing to Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which in 1905 (!) found that if Mr. Jacobson wanted to skip being vaccinated during a smallpox epidemic, he had to pay a $5 fine. More broadly, "Jacobson" has been cited as proof that the state's police powers trump personal choice when it comes to a battle over vaccine mandates.
I don't see it. He objected, he said, because both he and one of his children had bad reactions to earlier vaccinations. And all he had to do was pay five measly bucks, which even accounting for inflation is not much. How that undercuts religion as a basis for declining vaccination – especially absent a raging, deadly epidemic – is beyond me.
But just as I was digesting this, along came this week's Hobby Lobby ruling from the Supreme Court itself, which said closely held companies whose owners are opposed to contraception don't have to pay for insurance coverage. Regardless of what one thinks of that ruling, logic dictates that such firms might now be able to decline to cover other medical interventions to which they have the same objections – to wit, vaccination. To me, that case seems stronger than it does for contraception. After all, a personal religious basis for opting out of vaccination is already established in 48 states, excepting only Mississippi and West Virginia.
Nothing doing. On the contrary, the opinion emphasized, "Our decision should not be understood to hold that an insurance-coverage mandate must necessarily fall if it conflicts with an employer's religious beliefs. Other coverage requirements, such as immunizations, may be supported by different interests (for example, the need to combat the spread of infectious diseases) and may involve different arguments about the least restrictive means of providing them."
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Pray For the Religious Exemption" »
By Dan Olmsted
This week we got an e-mail from a Wisconsin couple whose local paper is The Lake Geneva Regional News (as a suburban Chicago kid I went to camp there for many summers. It's beautiful.) They attached an article from last week titled, "In county, some parents say no to vaccines." It begins: "ELKHORN -- Walworth County is not immune to the anti-vaccination movement." It went on to talk about the rising number of vaccine exemptions parents were obtaining for their children, and included the usual boilerplate handwringing from public health officials.
"A lot of [parents] have misinformation about vaccinations," said Elizabeth Walsh, public health supervisor at the county health department. "They say that vaccinations cause autism and listen to celebities on TV. It is frustrating as well as concerning." And so on -- you no doubt get the picture.
The e-mail painted a very different picture. I'm going to print the whole thing, including some nice comments about AOA (sue me!), because it really does explain why we do what we do, and will keep on regardless:
Thank you first for your commitment to the Age of Autism! Without this beaming lighthouse of information most of us would be lost, and our family thanks all of you from the bottom of our hearts!
Our only 2 grandchildren were damaged from vaccines. Mom & Dad have to work because as most of you know insurance companies do not pay squat! So our retirement was ended and grandma cares for our precious grandsons. We do not wish to contact the Regional News as we'd be recognized, as this is a small town. It would be wonderful if someone would answer the Regional News who can hit all the reason why vaccines are so dangerous! If one child could be saved by their parents becoming informed from feedback you've given to them then it would be a wonderful gift!
Thank you all for being there for so very many of us!
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Missing the Boat in Lake Geneva" »
When it comes to autism causation, the chemicals are coming home to roost. Just on Saturday I reviewed new research suggesting a link between pollution and both schizophrenia and autism. Mice exposed for just a few hours to the kind of pollution caused by traffic had inflammation in their brains; inflammation kills brain cells; dead brain cells cause all kinds of mental mayhem. I pointed out that in our book, The Age of Autism, we proposed for the first time that general pollution – namely, the coal-fired Industrial Revolution that spewed arsenic, lead, and mercury – fueled the amazing rise of schizophrenia in modern times (as well as a number of other inflammatory diseases including autism).
This week has begun with more evidence for our not-so-crackpot theories –another link between pesticides and autism. Reports CBS News: "Pregnant women who live within a mile of spaces where commercial pesticides are applied appear to have an increased risk of having a child with autism, a new study suggests. The risk that a child would develop autism appeared to be highest for women who lived near farms, golf courses and other public spaces that were treated with pesticides during the last three months of their pregnancies." (As Anne Dachel points out, this is just the latest of several studies linking pesticides and autism -- and ADHD, Parkinson's etc. The media is in perpetual Groundhog Day mode; I don't think anyone covers autism as a news beat, except us, so they don't remember anything past about midday yesterday.)
No doubt the ABV lobby – Anything But Vaccines when it comes to autism causation – will cling for dear life onto this as they have onto the traffic-causes-autism research. After all, they like to point out, we're talking prenatal exposures here, and autistic regression after vaccination is a key element of the vaccine case. So let's blame prenatal pollution and pesticides --but not vaccines, period, ever! Yeah, that's the ticket.
Continue reading "Midweek Mashup: Yes, Pesticides and Pollution Can Cause Autism – and That Implicates Vaccines" »
Sources tell us that both chambers of the United States Congress will pass similar versions of the newly named but basically unchanged Autism CARES act this week, confirming once again that the federal government couldn't care less about the autism epidemic engulfing the nation.
The House was marking up the bill Tuesday. It was expected to pass through a suspension-of-the-rules vote as early as the end of the day. In the Senate, the HELP committee will take up the bill Wednesday, and it's expected to sail through the full chamber by unanimous consent. While there may be some ironing out of differences between the two chambers, a final bill is expected to move to the president's desk with no further chance of intercepting it. (See end of story for appeal to HELP committee chair Tom Harkin [(202) 224 3254] asking him to delay vote.)
"Autism families are getting f----d again. Autism Speaks should be ashamed of themselves," said one person who has been attempting to head off the legislation AS and federal bureaucrats have been pushing for months. Autism families will let out a "primal scream" when they realize it's happened again, he added.
The new law is looming despite efforts by outgunned and underfunded autism advocates to add more environmental research and targeted funding to the bill. They say the process was hijacked by special interest and disability advocacy groups and that, once again, Autism Speaks big-footed the process with its lobbying. The result: Status quo ante -- and inadequate.
Continue reading "Bad Bill Rising: House, Senate Primed to Screw Autism Families Once Again" »
I was interested in the recent study that linked autism and schizophrenia with pollution. From Fox News:
Exposure to environmental pollution may cause brain changes that make people more vulnerable to developing autism or schizophrenia, according to a new study published in Environmental Heath Perspectives. ... Now, researchers from the University of Rochester have uncovered the biological mechanism that may explain how pollution can put people at a higher risk for both autism and schizophrenia. . . . . After four hours of pollution exposure during two four-day periods, mice exposed to pollution experienced marked changes in behavior compared to mice living in an environment with filtered air. . . "That kind of air pollution produces inflammation, it is going to produce inflammation peripherally and in the brain as well. And when you produce inflammation in the brain, you can kill cells there," Cory-Slechta said.
While the pollution in question in this study is the type generated by traffic, it's worth pointing out that the first to link general pollution to the rise of schizophrenia was apparently ... us! In our 2010 book, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and Man-made Epidemic, we looked at the staggering increase in schizophrenia, particularly in England, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. A lot of the high and mighty in England thought it was just ... better diagnosis. (Sound familiar?)
Mark Blaxill and I were thoroughly persuaded, however, by the painstaking research of E. Fuller Torrey, whose book The Invisible Plague charted the rise of mental illness. (And he's no crackpot -- he was the featured interviewee on 60 Minutes' recent report on mental illness and mass violence.) Torrey was more focused on the fact that schizophrenia did increase, rather than why; he was busy fighting off the mental-health version of the skeptics we all face who like to say, Epidemic? What Epidemic? He was kind enough to let us review and cite his voluminous research, and let me tell you, it is completely convincing. Strange as it seems, mental illness of the kind we deal with these days really did go from a standing start to an epidemic.
In our chapter called Pollution, we focused on schizophrenia, "The Industrial Revolution offers what is perhaps the first case study in how polluting the environment may have created conditions that give rise to new disease." We noted: "Starting around 1750, more and more peopole simply went mad in England and Wales. Statistics in E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., and Judy Miller's book The Invisible Plague, on 'Insane Persons in Psychiatric Hospitals, Workhouses and Under Care' tell the story. In 1807 the total was 5,500; by 1870 it was 54,713 -- a staggering tenfold increase over the 1807 figure. Yet historical references to insanity are few and far between before the middle of the 1700s. The meager references to madness that do exist before this time don't usuallly reference any kind of early adult onset, a characteristic that often accompanied this emerging form of mental illness."
What was happening? Most likely, some of the elements in coal -- especially lead, but also mercury and arsenic --could trigger brain disease in susceptible individuals (or just about anybody breathing that toxic stuff day after day without even the benefit of smokestacks dispersing it). Certainly, the idea that lead is implicated in schizophrenia is not new. Opler and colleagues proposed in 2004 in Environmental Health Perspectives that prenatal lead exposure might be a risk factor for later-onset schizophrenia, and that the continued use of leaded gasoline outside the developed world is a concern.
But linking the historic rise of schizophrenia to general pollution -- that appears to be our idea, one that we developed with data, charts, and logical argument four years ago. I bring this up now not to crow (although establishing priority in the publication of ideas is important for all kinds of reasons), but to suggest that those of us who link environmental exposures to modern illnesses are not so crackpot after all. We are just a little ahead of the game.
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Pollution Causes Schizophrenia, and Other Not-So-Cranky Ideas" »
In honor of the end of the school year, let's do a multiple choice quiz. Which of the following does not belong on this list:
A. Agenda 21 is a United Nations plot to end property rights, impose communism and send people off to secret camps in rail cars.
B. George W. Bush planned 9/11 and murdered thousands of Americans.
C. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are hiding the dangers of immunizations to protect profits.
D. President Obama is a Kenyan national.
Anyone? Anyone? The answer, dear readers, is C. This was a list put together by Newsweek magazine (yes, it's back in a spiffy print edition, though who knows for how long). "Social networks, media pundits and outspoken politicians are giving rise to a new emphasis on conspiracy theories," the author, Kurt Eichenwald, wrote.
On vaccines, he cites the alleged conspiracy theory "that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are hiding the dangers of immunizations to protect profits ... Now, because of this false belief advanced by scientific frauds and celebrities, vaccine-preventable diseases that were once on the brink of extinction are roaring back," he continued.
That can only be a reference to Andy and Jenny, two of my favorite people. No hint, strangely, of Bernadine Healy, the late NIH head whose concern about public health officials avoiding the vaccine-autism issue is too inconvenient to mention.
My point is that vaccine safety issues simply don't belong in this compilation of supposedly nutty ideas, because while A, B, and D lack even a modicum of evidence and plausibility, the widely acknowledged behavior of pharmaceutical companies is entirely consistent with what is being alleged. The business-friendly (but pretty good!) Financial Times recently ran a full-page piece titled Storehouse of Trouble whose basic premise, though put slightly more politely, was that pharma is a continuing criminal enterprise.
"A raft of lawsuits and regulatory probes has given fresh ammunition to critics who say the industry puts profits before public health [that sounds familiar] -- from cherry-picking clinical trial data to bribing doctors," the paper reported.
The article quoted Fiona Godlee (good grief!) of the British Medical Journal: "we have evidence time and time again that they overestimate the benefits [of new drugs] and underestimate the harm."
That is an allegation, coincidentally, that animates AOA -- pharma and public health officials are overestimating the benefits of the current vaccine schedule and understating the dangers, bigtime. Apparently, that is not an inherently conspiratorial crackpot thing to say. You just can't say it about vaccines.
Faithful AOA reader Twyla sent me an LA Times story this week: "Two California counties sued five of the world's largest narcotics manufacturers on Wednesday, accusing the companies of causing the nation's prescription drug epidemic by waging a 'campaign of deception' aimed at boosting sales of potent painkillers such as OxyContin."
Says Twyla: "This is interesting - describes a lot of the same behaviors as we see regarding vaccines. Apparently these county officials are wild conspiracy theorists?"
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Vaccine Concerns Are Not Conspiracy Theories" »
Is mainstream science and medicine ever going to recognize the real significance of the repeated clues linking parental occupation and risk of autism? I vote no.
The latest clue came in a study this month from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, which found thusly, according to Science Daily:
"Children of fathers who are in technical occupations are more likely to have an autism spectrum disorder, according to researchers. Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum. There was no association with a mother's occupation."
And what might account for this? According to a study author, "Parental occupation could be indicative of autistic-like behaviors and preferences and serve as another factor in a clinician's diagnosis of a child with suspected autism. Medical students can be taught that this is one of the things to consider."
I guess that means that perseverative and detail-oriented anti-social types would be drawn to those fields. Of course this does nothing to explain the increase in autism since these parents were kids -- an uptick on the order of twentyfold -- unless you deny the epidemic or buy into the assortative mating argument, since the study found that when both parents were in technical fields, the risk of severe autism was greatest of all.
It makes no sense that fathers, not mothers, would be 100 percent of the risk factor, unless both were in technical fields. I suspect that points to the real clue here -- toxic exposures. The workplace is where engineers, lab workers, chemists get the exposure and bring it home one way or the other. (Finance, I would guess. points to higher income and more medical interventions. And medicine points to, well, a lot of medicine!) Women get it from all kinds of things -- mercury flu shots in pregnancy come to mind -- that directly expose the fetus or infant without needing to be mediated by occupation. That adds enough noise to drown out the occupational clue for moms alone.
The bad faith that defines the mainstream medical response to autism is entirely evident here. You really need to turn away from a well-marked trail of evidence to get lost in these weeds. This is something Mark Blaxill and I have been writing about for years, and at the risk of repeating ourselves, let me marshal the evidence again.
In the 1970s -- closer to the start of autism than to today, and better able to tease out signals -- two complementary studies starkly outlined the risk between parents' exposure to toxins and the risk for autism. I wrote about that at UPI, in a two-part series in 2006 that "highlighted a study by Thomas Felicetti, now executive director of Beechwood Rehabilitation Services in Langhorne, Pa. As Felicetti described it in the journal Milieu Therapy in 1981, he compared the occupations of 20 parents of autistic children, 20 parents of retarded children and 20 parents of "normal" children who were friends and neighbors of those attending the Avalon School in Massachusetts where he taught at the time.
"The results did, in fact, suggest a chemical connection," he wrote. "Eight of the 37 known parents of the autistic children had sustained occupational exposure to chemicals prior to conception. Five were chemists and three worked in related fields. The exposed parents represent 21 percent of the autistic group. This compared to 2.7 percent of the retardation controls and 10 percent of the normal controls. The data, subjected to statistical analysis, demonstrated a chemical connection.
"The results of this study point in the direction of chemical exposure as an etiological factor in the birth of autistic children." [He emphasized that educational level had nothing to do with it. One father of an autistic child was a roof tarrier. That's chemicals, not credentials.]
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: When Occupation Is Causation" »
By Dan Olmsted
It was frustrating, but in a weird way fascinating, to sit through the House subcommittee hearing on the federal response to autism this week, and to hear Tom Insel lecture members of Congress – he called it a "teachable moment" – about the scientific method, why duplication is actually replication and must never, ever be second-guessed by laymen, even the ones who sign his paycheck, and how "exciting" – I really got tired of that word – all the advances in the field have become.
He even noted that there were 30 percent more abstracts this year than last at the IMFAR conference, as if this unnecessary proliferation of entities (see Occam's razor) was a good thing, rather than evidence that the autism industry is in self-perpetuation mode and dipping a finger in every honey pot on offer.
Why, it's a model for scientific research, Insel said of federal efforts on autism. No one has ever brought more interagency coordination to bear on any medical problem, ever. Stand by for cause and cure! But first, we all must get out of the way and let real scientists do their work.
Partway through I began thinking of another pompous, pointless, profoundly mistaken exercise that nonetheless reeked of authority and expertise. It's a book Mark Blaxill and I have written about, titled The Modern Treatment of Syphilis, published in 1943 by Hopkins professor Joseph Earle Moore. Here's what we said about it in our own book, The Age of Autism:
"Up to the very last moment before the arrival of penicillin, syphilis experts claimed extraordinary progress with ever more sophisticated applications of heavy metals (mercury very much included) and fever therapy. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Joseph Earle Moore's Modern Treatment of Syphilis included a chapter on the virtues of mercury treatment with numerous unattributed statistics and extravagant claims about the benefits of heavy metals and the dangers of leaving syphilis untreated."
More about mercury in a minute, but the point here is how gasbags with credentials and completely wrong ideas can hold sway right up to the moment when their whole enterprise collapses.
I think Insel is about there. "The science is moving so quickly," he said. No it's not. The Government Accounting Office report he was so dismissive of, with the help of Rep. Gerry Connolly, a real bullelly, nailed his misguided obsession with genes, the genome, genomics (however you pronounce it – clueless subcommittee Chair Mica wasn't sure), and his fatuous claim to be looking for the environmental triggers now clearly driving the autism epidemic.
Everything is converging on the second trimester of pregnancy, he said, as the moment when something goes wrong. No, it's not. It's converging on the first two years of infancy when, as so many parents testify, many children regress in clear response to vaccination.
Even in that narrow prenatal window, Insel said, "what the culprit or culprits are we still don't know." Yes, we do – one of them is surely mercury flu shots during pregnancy.
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: The Modern Treatment of Autism" »
Managing Editor's Note: Dan wrote this post in 2009. In light of today's OGR hearing on the Federal Response to Autism Spectrum Disorders, we thought our readers would like to see the long term inaction of Dr. Insel on behalf of the autism community.
Rep. Darrell Issa, Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced a hearing of the Government Operations Subcommittee scheduled for today on the subject of the Examining the Federal Response to Autism Spectrum Disorders.
The hearing will be held in at 9 am EDT today in 2247 Rayburn House Office Building, Tuesday, May 20, 2014. Watch via live streaming at http://oversight.house.gov/hearings/
By Dan Olmsted
Thomas Insel, the feckless factotum who heads the committee that will decide the future of the autism epidemic, needs to follow Dr. Story Landis (HERE) out the door TODAY and resign as chair of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Tomorrow is too long.
Landis inadvertently revealed the bankruptcy of Insel's leadership of the group when she both bashed parents and suggested investigating the most severe cases of vaccine injury -- which is all the parents want -- in notes dropped on the floor (see the notes here) at the IACC, recovered by friendly forces and reported on our blog by the relentless Katie Wright.
At an IOM environmental working group meeting in 2007, I walked up to Insel and handed him a copy of the piece I'd written for the Baltimore City Paper, implicating mercury in the first cases of autism. (See "Mercury Rising" HERE.) Insel told me he thought that the mercury hypothesis had been disproven (not true, but certainly his right to say so). But then he went on to say, in these words or just about, that of course, it still could be the vaccines.
A lot of us "citizen scientists" who saw the news this week about a megadose of measles vaccine as a cancer treatment seem to have had the same question at the same time.
First, the news. "Mayo Clinic researchers announced a landmark study where a massive dose of the measles vaccine, enough to inoculate 10 million people, wiped out a Minnesota woman's incurable blood cancer," USA Today reported. "The Mayo Clinic conducted the clinical trial last year using virotherapy. The method discovered the measles virus wiped out multiple myeloma cancer cells. Researchers engineered the measles virus (MV-NIS) in a single intravenous dose, making it selectively toxic to cancer cells."
Now the question: Does this suggest that wild-type measles infection, the kind hundreds of thousands of kids caught every year before the measles vaccine arrived in the 1960s, performs some unsuspected function in preventing the occurrence of cancer? And the follow-up: Did mass vaccination wipe out this protection?
The first thing that caught my eye was the type of cancer – multiple myeloma. As it happens, I've been hearing about this cancer in the autism community quite a bit in the last year. In fact, in August of last year Mark Blaxill and I reported on the anonymous Case 3 in the first medical paper on autism, from 1943. We identified him as William Ritchey Miller of Raleigh, N.C. On his death certificate from July 8, 2011, the cause was listed: multiple myeloma.
According to Wikipedia, this kind of cancer is increasing. and affecting younger people than it has in the past, resulting in about 74,000 deaths in 2010, up from 49,000 in 1990. It is a cancer of the immune system, formed by malignant plasma cells in the bone marrow. We also reported that Miller, who was known as Ritchey, had one sibling, Alden Dykstra Miller. He died in Hyattsville, Md., in 1984. He was only 44 years old. The cause of death was lupus erythermatosis, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own healthy tissue.
We all know that immune problems are common in the background of families with autistic children. It was ever thus – Case 1 in the original case series, Donald Triplett of Mississippi, had a near-fatal attack of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease, in his early teens; his father had asthma, another autoimmune condition. Donald recovered from JRA after treatment with gold salts – and, as we've reported, his autistic symptoms also improved dramatically, according to his brother. (Both Donald and his brother still live in Forest, Mississippi.)
To me, it stands to reason that a virus – like measles – that triggers an immune response in children might serve some broader biological purpose best left undisturbed. Doing so might have some downstream effect on both an autoimmune condition like autism and a cancer of the immune system like multiple myeloma. (Another of the first 11 cases, Bridget Muncie, also died of cancer.)
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Measles, Cancer, Autoimmunity, Autism" »
So many things pile up during the week that I've decided to do a Midweek Mashup from time to time to make sure I get to all of it. Some don't require a lot of words but are nonetheless worth noting. For instance, the vending machine at the left? That is in the waiting room of my doctor's office in a large health maintenance organization. Very large. Obese. Bloated. Not much left to say, except perhaps to call it an ill-health maintenance organization. These are the folks that want me to get a shingles vaccine stat!
I get a lot of e-mails. A lot of them I ignore, because I don't wish to pass my time in a state of low-grade irritation. Here's one from this week:
Continue reading "Age of Autism Midweek Mashup: "You Sound Like A Group of Very Angry People."" »
Last week this column looked at How To Not Connect the Dots, focusing on a New York Times report about problems boys have with school titled "A Link Between Fidgety Boys And a Sputtering Economy." The Times piece came very close to the core issue -- what's the matter with kids today?, and especially, what's the matter with boys? Things have gotten so dire, and the implications so large, that even a mainstream mouthpiece like The Times has no hesitation linking boys' problems to the overall economic fate of the country.
"If the United States is going to build a better-functioning economy than the one we've had over the last 15 years, we're going to have to solve our boy problems," the article declared, adding that if only girls are considered, there's no problem at all. But the solutions on offer in the piece, and in the research paper it was based on, and among the "experts" in general, amount to evidence-free bromides -- better schools, more understanding of the ways boys learn, more support for families because boys suffer more when fathers are absent. To quote the Beatles: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Missing was any sense that environmental factors, and specifically toxins, which have been repeatedly linked to problems like ADHD ("fidgetiness") and other neurodevelopmental disorders, which affect 1 in 6 children, and several times more boys than girls, could be playing a role.
This week, NYT readers weighed in with letters to the editor under the title, "The Different Ways Boys Learn," yet another assumption masquerading as wisdom. Here we went again. Sample: "The achievement gap between boys and girls is not quite the mystery your article describes. 'Educational reforms' pushed by wealthy donors like the Gates Foundation, testing corporations and both Democrats and Republicans have cut recess, gym and the arts to focus on testing."
Ah yes, no recess, no fingerpainting, too many tests! How will we ever survive as a nation? And another: "Your article doesn't mention an important ingredient of the problem. The rise in boys' troubles coincides exactly with the push by schools to ramp up literacy demands in the earliest grades — a time when boys are least able to cope with reading and writing."
Ah yes, teaching boys to read and write -- that's why America is in decline. That letter was by Richard Whitmire, author of the book "Why Boys Fail," a former and very capable colleague of mine. Nonetheless, he completely misses the biological point.
And another: "Multiple studies document the academically and personally damaging effects of too much recreational 'screen time,' particularly for youths on the lower socioeconomic rungs." TV and video games, the ruination of many a young man. A capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for ... pixilated peril! (Man, did I ever have a lot of "screen time" as a kid -- to my childhood mind, the greatest show in town was Huckleyberry Hound.)
Come on, people. Boys are being damaged in a much more fundamental and durable way, which damages our country, and hence all of us, and the damage is not that hard to figure out. Autism is one heck of a clue, because it is the neurodevelopmental and learning and socialization disorder sine qua non, because it's new, because it vastly selects boys over girls, and because it's got to be environmental. That is why we call this the age of autism -- autism is telling us the nature of our problem.
So, having described last week how to not connect the dots, let me try to connect them with as few strokes as possible, kind of like one of these brain teasers where you have to link all the dots with straight lines without lifting your pencil, and can only do it when you literally think outside the box you mistakenly believe you are in.
I think you need just three dots to triangulate autism, and hence the rest of the neurodevelopmental issues affecting boys -- and children, and society, and the world -- that have so perplexed the experts.
One dot is mercury. Mercury, the organic kind used in vaccines and pesticides, clearly links the first cases of autism reported in 1943. None of the people who call us cranks or "anti-vaccine" ever bother, or perhaps the word is dare, to look at this pattern, which Mark Blaxill and I outlined in our book, The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic. (See the 10-minute video version on our home page, How Mercury Triggered the Age of Autism..) The first use of ethyl mercury in commercial products in the 1930s stands out in those autism case histories like blood under Luminol at a crime scene.
After 9/11, there was much discussion about why the experts – the people paid to make sense of seemingly random bits of data before they coalesced into a horrific attack on our "homeland" – failed to "connect the dots" in time to do anything. Al Qaeda's determination to attack; an attempt to take flying lessons in Minneapolis; a bunch of "students" here on expired visas no one followed up on … such were the signs that in retrospect were flashing a warning.
Today, we have another pattern of dots that are also signaling a warning – a warning that our country is in the process of being attacked and undermined in quite a different, but no less destructive, way. Every day when I read the paper or watch the news I see these signs flashing and the people who are paid to interpret them – to recognize patterns and act on our behalf – asleep at the switch, or even deliberately looking away.
Let's take two dots and see how the connect.
Dot One: This week, The New York Times ran an article titled, "A Link Between Fidgety Boys and a Sputtering Economy." The reporter, David Leonhardt, wrote: "The gap in behavioral skills between young girls and boys is even bigger than the gap between rich and poor.
"By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys, according to a new paper from Third Way, a Washington research group."
Leonhardt linked this, and rightly so, to the decline of the middle class in the U.S., citing the recent report that Canada is thriving by comparison. And it's the failure of boys to compete that has led to this loss – "These depressing trends have many causes, but the social struggles of men and boys are an important one. If the United States is going to build a better-functioning economy than the one we've had over the last 15 years, we're going to have to solve our boy problems."
Problem identified -- so far, so good. Yet Leonhardt lapses into the kind of vague speculation masquerading as wise observation into which these kinds of stories usually fall. He cites experts who say boys respond even more than girls to better instruction, so improving our schools must be (as ever) the obvious taxpayer-funded answer. "When good grades bring high status, boys respond."
Then there's the schools-don't-teach-boys-right school. They are forced to "sit still for hours every day" and don't have good role models (i.e., women can't teach boys, a stupid and sexist assumption, especially because almost all teachers were single women back in the good old days of boys doing well in school). Oh, and "as the economy continues to shift away from brawn and toward brains, many men have struggled with the transition."
Whatever, bro.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: How to Not Connect the Dots" »
By Dan Olmsted
I hope the CDC is enjoying these warm spring days and basking in the sunshine of mainstream media love during Autism Awareness Month. But I strongly suspect that the shadow of darker times ahead is starting to haunt their dreams.
The CDC -- mailing address, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta -- is clearly managing, massaging and manipulating the data about the growth of the autism rate. It is really hard to see how long this can go on, with people like Florida Congressman Bill Posey going after the agency's Coleen Boyle in a powerful Autism One radio interview with Brian Hooker. Sample:
"I know we have an autism epidemic. You know it. She knows it. She knows we know it. But for some reason they refuse to acknowledge it publicly." Regarding Boyle's assertion that the increase is due to better diagnosing, Posey said, "I don't think anybody that's intellectually honest with this issue can begin to fathom that lame excuse that she uses."
Yesterday, we ran an extraordinary piece by Katie Wiesman of SafeMinds making clear just how lame that excuse is.
Because problems with our blog platform (not AOA specifically) meant we were down part of the day, I'd like to urge you to go back and read that piece carefully if you have the chance. As our own John Stone wrote:
"This is a colossal and important piece of work - a superb documentation of the CDC's smoke and mirrors operation. At every point the way the data is collected is inconsistent and obfuscating. Not an ounce of good faith behind any of it and the bottom line is the four trillion dollar bill, the cold monetary figure measuring destroyed human lives.
"No wonder Coleen Boyle quaked before the congressional committee."
Yes, no wonder. Bill Posey must look like Freddy Krueger to Coleen Boyle.
Katie, whose writing is always marked by respectful but relentless clarity and attention to detail, shows how messed up the CDC epidemiological data is, even by the standards it sets one year, then forgets the next. No follow-up, no action plan, no urgency. To borrow a wonderful headline from yesterday's Dachel Media Update: "Autism No Crisis, No Cause, No Chance It's Vaccines."
Anne has been attacking the mainstream media's credulous reporting on the CDC, and Katie makes the same point: "On March 28th, thousands of media outlets released the new US autism prevalence numbers of 1 in 68 in 8-year-olds born in 2002 and counted in 2010. These children are 12 years old now. What was glaringly lacking in the media coverage was any critical thought about that actual data, any sign that reporters had actually read the new report or any sign of urgency on behalf of our children."
Which is what the press is for -- not to give 24-hour coverage to a still-missing Malaysian jetliner, but to hold powerful interests, and specifically the United States government, to account on behalf of the people.
One of the most interesting among the many overlooked points in the CDC report: The percent of autistic children who also have intellectual disability seems to be declining, a trend that roughly coincides with the phasing out of the mercury additive thimerosal in vaccines when these now-12-year-olds were infants. But as Katie summarizes the CDC attitude:
"There is no possibility that autism and vaccines are connected because the numbers are still going up."
Katie's comment: "Assuming that there is, in fact, a smaller percentage of ASD children with Intellectual Disability, those shifts do correspond to the beginning of the phase out of thimerosal in vaccines, which is a plausible explanation as well – but one CDC doesn't mention. Thimerosal reduction in the recommended childhood vaccine schedule (HepB, Hib and DTaP) started in 1999 and it was phased out over several years. However, shortly thereafter, in the 2002-2003 season, the CDC started encouraging flu shots (most of which contained thimerosal) for infants 6-23 months and in the 2004-2005 flu season flu shots were formally recommended for all infants starting at 6 months of age. Meanwhile, the CDC and ACOG also added influenza vaccines (most of which still contained thimerosal) to the recommendations for pregnant women in all trimesters in 2004. This FDA letter makes clear that thimerosal-containing infant vaccines would still have been administered throughout 2002 – the birth year of the current ADDM report but at amounts, on average, probably less than in the 2000 birth cohort. The exposure to any particular child is an unknown without checking their history."
I called attention to this possibility in a brief editor's note the day the CDC released its data, and I continue to find it fascinating. As Katie points out, the CDC data is so gummed up it's impossible to tell what might be going on, but this observation is, in fact, consistent with a pretty intriguing possibility -- the CDC, which both surveils autism and recommends the childhood vaccine schedule, might find it convenient to bumble and stumble long enough to obscure any connection between the removal of mercury in vaccines and any sort of improvement in the autism outlook.
I've been "gathering string" on this issue for quite some time (this is a phrase an editor of mine used for pulling together separate threads that might eventually build a story, like a robin finding bits and pieces that become a nest). I've heard many people in the autism community talking for several years about seeing more "autism lite" -- not Asperger's necessarily, but kids who are less impaired, less physically ill and easier to recover with biomed.
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Nightmare on Clifton Road - Freddy Krueger is Coming for the CDC" »
By Dan Olmsted
Some say that claiming vaccines are the cause of the autism epidemic is like yelling fire in a crowded theater. I agree -- except this theater really is on fire.
By now it's an open secret that the current vaccination schedule is behind the soaring autism rate -- and a wide range of other chronic and developmental disorders. So many parents, front-line professionals and others have seen this with their own eyes, so many streams of evidence are converging to make this point, and so much desperation is on display from vaccine injury deniers, especially now during Autism Awareness Month, that it's just no contest any more. The task now is to hasten the day of reckoning, keep more kids from being injured, and bring justice, compensation and treatment to the injured.
Those who deny this reality end up sounding like Nazis -- ve vill vaccinate you! -- or just intellectually incoherent. They spout a lot of platitudes about autism awareness and better diagnosis and multiple mysterious genes and gene-environment interactions that, if they (and their spouters) ever had any relevance, don't anymore.
The goofiest part is when submissive scientists try to talk about environmental links to autism without talking about THE environmental link to autism -- the bloated CDC-recommended, state-mandated, pediatrician-provided vaccine schedule. Hence this from the Harvard Gazette this year:
"Toxic chemicals may be triggering recent increases in neurodevelopmental disabilities among children — such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia — according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The researchers say a new global prevention strategy to control the use of these substances is urgently needed."
This study lists two pesticides as among the likely triggers, and follows up on a 2006 study that also listed a handful of suspect toxicants, including methylmercury. Not ethylmercury, of course, since that brings us right back to the dreaded V word, ethylmercury being the prime ingredient in thimerosal. And thimerosal exposure almost tripled via vaccines at the same time the autism epidemic began around 1988. (It's still used in flu shots in the U.S., where it is recommended for all infants and pregnant women, and in multiple shots in developing countries thanks to the endorsement of U.S. Public health officials, WHO, and the Gates Foundation.)
But pesticides and mercury and vaccines and autism? Never the twain shall meet in the mainstream medical or media universe.
As it happens, Mark Blaxill and I triangulated those dots in a way that indirectly but (IMHO) elegantly links vaccines, pesticides, and autism from the very beginning. In our book, The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic -- we showed how mercury was present at the creation of autism, causing the very first cases reported in the medical literature, in 1943.
The crux of our argument is that the three commercial vectors for the first exposures to ethylmercury in the 1930s -- via vaccines and pesticides, specifically the diphtheria shot, a lumber treatment and a plant fungicide -- are evident in those 11 families. The parents included a pediatrician mother who focused on public health and mass vaccination, one father who was a forestry professor and another who was a plant pathologist, in all three cases with documented exposure to the new ethylmercury compounds. This cannot be chance -- especially given the work of Safeminds linking mercury and autism symptoms, the absence of autism in the medical literature prior to 1930, and the coinciding explosion of ethymercury exposure and autism in the 1990s. (See our 10-minute video version on AOA's home page.)
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Yes, Vaccines Drive the Autism Epidemic" »
Update 4/7/14 The vaccine injury denial community is working overtime this week in an effort to hijack AutismAction Month and protect indudstry at the expense of people with autism. Polio is most often used as the tool of fear. Here is the Polio series from Dan and Mark to offer clarity to those who seek it.
Doctors May Have Missed Pesticide Clue in California's "Polio-like" Cluster
Child in "Polio-like Cluster" Linked to California's Winemaking Industry
"Polio-like" Cluster in California Has Eerie Echoes
Below is Dan and Mark's 7 part series on polio which ran in 2011.
By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
1. The Wrong Narrative.
Polio is the iconic epidemic, its conquest one of medicine's heroic dramas. The narrative is by now familiar: Random, inexplicable outbreaks paralyzed and killed thousands of infants and children and struck raw terror into 20th century parents, triggering a worldwide race to identify the virus and develop a vaccine. Success ushered in the triumphant era of mass vaccination. Now polio's last hideouts amid the poorest of the poor in Asia and Africa are under relentless siege by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eradication is just a matter of time, and many more illnesses will soon meet the same fate.
It was 35 years ago that Vietnamese tanks rolled into Cambodia's capital and put an end to the four-year reign of genocidal terror that wiped out a quarter of the population through starvation, torture and execution. A tidal wave of desperate refugees rolled across the border to encampments in Thailand; eventually, thousands joined a thriving community of Cambodians who had settled in Long Beach, California.
There, in the 1980s, doctors began noticing an unusual phenomenon -- some of the resettled Cambodians, mostly older women, were having problems with their vision that could not be linked to any physical cause. "Unknown etiology" would be the formal way to describe it.
But medicine abhors a mystery, and speculation as to the cause soon arose -- these survivors of war and terror could not see because they would not see, doctors concluded. They were so traumatized by what they had witnessed and suffered that their vision was impaired. They were experiencing hysterical blindness.
"Blinding Horrors : Cambodian Women's Vision Loss Linked to Sights of Slaughter," was the LA Times headline in 1989.
"Eang Long cried for many days after the Khmer Rouge soldier beat her brother and his three children to death," the story begins. "'My eyesight started to get terrible after I saw the tragedy'," Long said. "Because I was crying so hard and long, my eyes were red and started to swell up. Then I started to have problems with my eyesight."
In the face of such horror, any human reaction seems possible. Researchers identified 30 Cambodian refugee women 40 to 69 years old with a similar pattern and gave them a battery of tests, including brain waves. (Some men were also affected, but focusing on women makes "hysteria" a simpler argument.)
"In each case, the test revealed normal visual acuity, often at the 20/20 or 20/40 level. These same women, however, when looking at an eye chart could barely see the top line of 20/200--the point of legal blindness. Other women had no light perception and could not detect light or dark shadows. ...
"Most of the women's functional blindness surfaced during the Pol Pot years. Personal interviews brought out repeated stories of forced labor, the murder of family and friends--often in their presence--beating and torture, starvation, a treacherous escape to Thailand and separation from family.... The findings indicated that the longer a woman was bound to Khmer Rouge servitude or life in a refugee camp, the more her vision was impaired."
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: Psychiatry, Still Blind To the Toxic Truth" »
The mainstream media covered this week's CDC new autism data – 1 in 68 American children affected, up 29 percent in two years – without even realizing the conflict of interest at the heart of the story.
CDC is the agency that recommends and promotes the childhood vaccination schedule that so many parents know first-hand is the driving force behind the autism epidemic. The preposterous idea that there is no epidemic, or the equally ridiculous notion that it is impossible to tell, abets the CDC in avoiding culpability for what has happened the past 25 years.
But because the CDC has done such a good job of convincing the media that a vaccine-autism link has been discredited, most journalists don't realize the conflict staring them in the face. They don't understand that the CDC cannot be trusted with anything bearing on the cause or frequency of autism, that it can't be treated as a credible and disinterested source. It's amazing really: the folks that caused this train wreck by falling asleep at the switch are investigating the cause and counting the casualties, and the media treats it as gospel.
Most of the time, journalists "get" this concept -- vested interests must be disclosed and generally detract from the reliability of their claims. You could see that play out this week in Chris Christie's own internal investigation exonerating him from any culpability in Bridgegate. The big media outlets basically laughed him off the national stage, noting that his own lawyers used taxpayer money to absolve him while casting evidence-free aspersions on his "emotional" former chief of staff. (Emotional, hysterical women -- this sounds familiar!)
Yet the same day, the CDC gets away with the entirely unbelievable idea that it's unclear whether there is a real increase in autism, and never gets called on why this might serve their own purposes. That keeps the wolves from the door for a couple of more years until they can switch over to the DSM-5 and obscure matters once and for all.
Amplifying the problem is that these conflicts extend to the big media players who like to come across as ferocious watchdogs when it comes to traffic jams in Fort Lee, but have far too much at stake -- namely, pharma revenue -- and far too little intellectual curiosity to dig independently into the truth about the roots and rise of autism. Some of those journalists are just as conflicted as the CDC.
For one thing, many of the "experts" the news anchors turn to when the new numbers come out are doctors, and frequently pediatricians. That is the profession that implemented the epidemic, in my view, yet they are now helping the CDC hide the truth, whether deliberately or by being totally sunk in the orthodox quicksand.
Thus Dr. Richard Besser, not just a doctor and not just a pediatrician but the former acting Director of the CDC, for cripe's sake, is the person deemed most suited to explain it all to us on ABC's World News Tonight.
After Diane Sawyer grills Christie in a long interview, she says, "and next now tonight we turn to a startling new medical report about autism."
"Why the surge? It could be better diagnosis," Besser reports. "But experts do say there are more children with autism." Well there's your story right there, Rich -- why are there more children with autism?
"What's causing it? We know genetics play a role, that young autistic brains are physically different. But it's still a puzzle." Yes, because neither of those are causing a surge. In other words, no clue is offered as to why there are more children with autism.
Then comes the usual switch to the early intervention blather -- "doctors just aren't screening, but there's new technologies to catch it sooner." Eye tracking, new approaches to treatment -- taking autistic kids' love of trains to make them more social. Get them talking to each other about trains -- that's the ticket to responding to a damaged generation.
"Tonight, as those numbers are growing, so is the race to find out why," Besser reports over images of happy train-riding autistic kids.
No, it is not. The train wreck is right on track, and the race is on to hide the truth.
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. © 2014 AgeofAutism.com
By Dan Olmsted
It's interesting – in the sense that a train wreck that leaks toxic fumes and kills an entire town of sleeping souls is "interesting" – to watch the mainstream media descend deeper into denial about vaccines and autism.
The latest round of tut-tutting comes in the wake of a report that Americans are prone to believe in conspiracy theories, in particular that the government, corporations or both are trying to cover up the truth about some health information, USA Today reports.
"20 percent believe doctors and health officials push child vaccines even though they 'know these vaccines cause autism and other psychological disorders.'"
Over on MSNBC, Chris Hayes blamed the recrudescence of measles in Manhattan (20 cases or so) on "purveyors of anti-science hokum" like Jenny McCarthy. "This kind of thinking, it spreads like disease." The segment was dubbed "Anti-Vaccination Trutherism." Psychiatrist Dr. Gail Salz, laughed off the vaccine-autism connection: "This is essentially a coping mechanism gone awry. It makes us tremendously anxious to feel that we have no control over the possibility that our baby could get autism, and to be life-ruining, it's terrifying. So that idea that we can identify something that makes us less anxious."
And this, apparently, requires belief in extravagant conspiracy theories. Well, what is a conspiracy after all? It's more than one person working in concert, and in secret, to effect a desired and usually nefarious result.
Clearly, doctors and public health officials do know that vaccines can cause autism, because they couldn't have missed the press accounts of awards in vaccine "court" for children who developed autism as a result of vaccination. Further, studies have found a much higher rate of autism and other developmental issues in boys vaccinated as newborns with the Hepatitis B vaccine.
There is a concerted effort to keep these truths from emerging and to replace them with the false idea that vaccines have been vindicated as never causing autism. That in effect is the "trutherism" right there.
What I find amazing is the credulity of the press – many journalists are too young, and some apparently too naïve, to run this idea through their Watergate filter. Here's the truth: Public officials – and putting "health" in between those words doesn't inoculate them – do conspire to create certain outcomes when their professional mission and personal reputation are on the line. And corporations are not immune, obviously.
I didn't have to look far to be reminded of how complicit corporations can be in conspiracies. In the same Thursday issue of USA Today that reported on the health conspiracy beliefs, two stories caught my attention.
One – Toyota agreed to pay $1.2 billion to settle a criminal case involving its handling of those deadly accelerator problems a few years back. "Today, we can say for certain that Toyota intentionally concealed information and misled the public about the safety issues behind these recalls," Attorney General Eric Holder said. "Put simply, Toyota's conduct was shameful."
I love this part: Toyota, to save its corporate scalp, agreed to allow a monitor to oversee its "safety communications, its internal handling of accident reports and its processes for handling technical bulletins." In other words, the government wants to prevent another conspiracy to hide the truth about unsafe products.
Two – GM President Mary Barra penned an op-ed in which she fell on her stick shift to apologize for the mishandling of safety recalls, delays that appear to have caused a handful of deaths.
"Everyone at GM regrets that it took so long to confirm the problem with the Cobalt and similar models and issue a recall. We are deeply sorry for the lives lost and the lives it has affected."
She's deeply sorry, in effect, for a conspiracy to conceal safety defects over many years.
What's so crazy about all this is that drug companies are not held in terribly high regard in the first place, and for good reason (Vioxx, four hour erections, et al). Neither is government. Neither is the media. Yet these three groups team up to treat those with well-earned reasons to be suspicious as "truthers."
Measles is inconsequential in the fact of the real truth – that the autism epidemic is driven by excessive vaccination. But anti-vaccine truthers get blamed for every illness this side of spring fever, and probably for that.
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap:The "Trutherization" of Vaccine Injury" »
This week's New Yorker has a gripping article by Andrew Solomon on Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, based primarily on interviews with his father, Peter. To me, the first thing to pop out is that his diagnosis – Asperger's disorder – doesn't make any sense.
Here's the key part: "Adam Lanza was never typical. Born in 1992, he didn't speak until he was three, and he always understood many more words than he could muster."
Well, if he didn't speak until he was three, he didn't have Asperger's. Straight from my hefty copy of DSM-IV, retrieved from the box in the garage: "In contrast to Autistic Disorder, there are no clinically significant delays in language (e.g., single words are used by age 2 years, communicative phrases are used by age 3 years)."
Now you tell me, but assuming his own father has his personal history right, Adam as an infant did have clinically significant delays in language. So if he had an ASD, it had to be autistic disorder or PDD-NOS. Since this quickly turns into alphabet soup, here's a footnote from our book The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic:
"'Pervasive developmental disorders' is the diagnostic category often referred to as autism spectrum disorders. The three main categories of pervasive development disorder (PDD) include autistic disorder, PDD-NOS (not otherwise specified), and Asperger's syndrome. A diagnosis of PDD-NOS is similar to but less severe than autistic disorder and includes language and communication delays, unlike Asperger's."
So my question is, how on earth did Adam Lanza get an Asperger's diagnosis? Yes, in some ways he was functional, although he had the full panoply of seriously autistic traits – "such hypersensitivity to physical touch that tags had to be removed from his clothing. … A doctor diagnosed sensory integration disorder, and Adam underwent speech therapy and occupational therapy in kindergarten and first grade." His shop teacher said he could hold a Bunsen burner to his wrist and not flinch.
Continue reading "Weekly Wrap: No, Adam Lanza Did Not Have Asperger's" »
By Dan Olmsted
Don't you just love the word treacle? I do. It describes so much of what we're subjected to in pop culture these days. Without looking it up, because it speaks for itself, I'd say its approximate meaning is sickly sweet sentimentality without substance. It's no doubt named after the candy.
So much of what passes as compassionate coverage of children in this day and age is so much treacle – commodified treacle at that, by which I mean it is packaged to sell, and one touching story is just about the same as another, only distinguished by its bathos quotient (which I think of as just slightly more treacle-y than pathos).
The more bathetic, the better.
Treacle is getting easier to get away with, and harder to get away from. The whole gloppy genre of troops home from the wars and tearfully embracing their families in a brand new home that some app helped them find, etcetera, while an indecipherable Mumford-like melody swells, is a case in point.
Another: On Good Morning America Friday, a child who I'm sure is deserving of all the loving-kindness coming his way was in the spotlight – he was afraid he couldn't assemble any friends for a birthday party, because he didn't have any friends, and his mother's pleas led to an extravagant outpouring of new friends on Facebook. And did GMA ever have a birthday surprise for him!
According to the Daily Mail, "during a surprise visit to the set of "Good Morning America," Colin Cunningham found out that he has friends all around the world, even though he has to eat lunch alone at school every day."
And wouldn't you know, "Colin is very friendly and open, but often shows symptoms of a mild form of autism, which is why he is typically shunned by his schoolmates.
"Fortunately, this is just one of the many difficulties that no longer seems impossible to conquer thanks to social media."
Wow, social media as super-hero -- like Mighty Mouse, here it comes to save the day! No longer will a mild form of autism spread its evil tentacles around helpless kids -- not when heroes like Facebook and ABC have anything to say about it.
The on-air promos were enough to give me the general idea, so I turned the channel. But on the channel I turned to, the Today show was featuring Bat-Boy – the child with leukemia in remission who took over San Francisco for the day. Turned out he was going to be featured at the Oscars, but the bit got cut. Never mind, he got a trip to Disneyland with the real-life (meaning movie version) of Batman himself!
Now I have to say I loved the Bat-Kid story, which seemed to grow into a spontaneous citywide celebration of a child's triumph over adversity. (Maybe it's because Batman and Mighty Mouse are my own personal cartoon-era heroes.) The GMA extravaganza feels different to me – a child with a condition that has not been alleviated by all the attention, but is made to seem so.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Just About Treacle-d To Death" »
Our indefatigable Anne Dachel passed along a story Friday with the kind of title we are by now immune to, so to speak: "The Dangerous History of Anti-Vaccine Comspiracies," by Jeffrey Kopman. It was the usual mashup -- mishmash is probably a better word -- of Andy Wakefield being a fraudster, and the horrifying attack of mutant killer illnesses, and parents being so profoundly deluded as to think their child had a life-wrecking vaccine reaction just because their child had a vaccine followed by a life-wrecking reaction. (They are not the same thing!) How dare these benighted parents tell anyone such a tale, when endless scientific "experts" say it didn't happen because it couldn't happen? How very dare they?
But this article, as the Church Lady would say, was special: the piece was published by The Weather Channel, of all places. And its first paragraph is quite a piece of work: "Forty-three years after the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine hit the mainstream, the disease is still flaring across the country — as are mumps, rubella and whooping cough."
Now say whut, exactly? MMR disease is still flaring, as are mumps, rubella and whooping cough? Not gonna happen. Like all Gaul, the MMR is divided in three -- their cumulus total is not another disease, unless you want to count autism (snicker, snicker). These people, they make fun of our lack of scientific understanding and then they start off like that?
On a happier note, I was really glad to see that Paul Krugman is retiring from Princeton and heading to City University, in part because he wants a vibrant big-city milieu (he mentioned Zabar's, a specialty food store on the Upper West Side), and also to focus more sharply on the issue of income inequality.
Not that there's anything wrong with Princeton. What makes me happy, rather, is that Paul is my age, 61, shares my political outlook, and even my college class, and is serving notice that he's not letting up, he's bearing down on what he cares about most. And he's enjoying himself.
I can dig it.
Continue reading "Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: Say Whut, Now?" »
Read Dan and Mark's posts earlier this week:
Child in "Polio-like Cluster" Linked to California's Winemaking Industry and
"Polio-like" Cluster in California Has Eerie Echoes
By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
One of the California children with "polio-like" symptoms ate raspberries right before she got sick, her mother said Wednesday -- but that didn't seem to set off any alarm bells about pesticide residue from the medical experts investigating the baffling outbreak.
"She was wheezing, then she had lunch with raspberries and then we went to [the] pediatrician's office where they said she sounded like asthma," Jessica Tomei said in an email, describing the symptoms her daughter, Sofia Jarvis, experienced in November 2012.
"On the way home she threw up. The next day we were in the hospital. 5 days later her arm was paralyzed. I kept mentioning the raspberries but botulism was ruled out."
Doctors and public health officials have focused on microbes in their hunt for the cause of the cluster, which so far comprises five children in the San Francisco Bay area and a reported 20 more throughout the state. The five cases occurred between August 2012 and July 2013. Officials said a rare enterovirus – a stomach bug – was detected in two of the cases.
But given Jessica Tomei's account, pesticide residue seems to us like a prime suspect. "Fruit is notoriously difficult to grow organically and without pesticides," Jeff Moyer, farm director at the Rodale Institute, an organic research institution, is quoted as saying on the institute's Web site. According to the institute, "Because most fruits have soft skins, the pesticides that are used to kill those bugs (and the molds and fungi that also love fruit) get into the flesh and into your mouth, and no amount of peeling or washing can remove them."
We reported Wednesday morning that Sofia's parents, Jessica Tomei and Jeff Jarvis, are professional winemakers, but her mother was dubious of a chemical connection via that route. On Wednesday, she mentioned the raspberries as a likelier source of pesticide.
"She had raspberries the morning of her illness -- they ruled out botulism. If what you are saying is true, perhaps the raspberries played a part. I believe more chemicals are used in that type of agriculture vs. vineyard. Interesting thoughts."
In our 2011 series, The Age of Polio – How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-made Epidemic, we proposed that beginning in the late 1800s, the poliovirus – for millennia a harmless enterovirus – was rendered dangerous by its interaction with the new agricultural pesticide lead arsenate. Our theory: the pesticide caused damage that allowed the virus to penetrate the nervous system and reach the spinal cord, where it caused the paralysis called poliomyelitis.
Continue reading "Doctors May Have Missed Pesticide Clue in California's "Polio-like" Cluster" »