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Mercury Rising
by Dan Olmsted
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=13317
In 1943, a child known only as Frederick W. became part of the first medical report of a strange new disorder. Frederick was Case 2 of 11 children whose behavior "differed markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far," wrote Dr. Leo Kanner, the psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who introduced the syndrome to the world and named it "autism."
One of the children "spun with great pleasure everything he could seize upon to spin." Many of the children flapped their hands; flew into unpredictable bouts of rage and aggression; spoke in inexplicable ways if they spoke at all, sometimes referring to themselves as "you" and others as "I"; showed remarkable abilities like keen memory and perfect pitch but abject inability to perform simple tasks; obsessed over objects but ignored human beings.
Kanner didn't know why the children, all born in the 1930s, acted that way but noticed the parents were college-educated and career-oriented: lawyers, psychiatrists, scientists. He wrote, "In the whole group, there are very few really warm-hearted fathers and mothers," and later speculated, "emotionally refrigerated" parents might play a role in causing the baffling disorder.
"Most of the fathers are, in a sense, bigamists," Kanner wrote. "They are wedded to their jobs at least as much as they are married to their wives. The job, in fact, has priority."
Now, Frederick W.'s father has been identified by this reporter, who has written about autism for two years for United Press International, as a scientist named Frederick L. Wellman, and new information has been unearthed that suggests Wellman's career might indeed be a clue--though not the kind Kanner detected.
The Frederick L. Wellman Papers fill 18 boxes in the Special Collections Research Center at the North Carolina State University Libraries in Raleigh. The first item in the first folder in the first box is dated Spring 1922, when the senior Wellman was working toward his doctorate in plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin. Faded with age, the report is titled "Hot Water and Mercuric Chloride Treatments of Some Brassica Seeds and Their Effect Both on the Germination of the Seeds and the Viability of the Fungus Phoma Lingam."
In layman's terms, Wellman collected cabbage seeds infected with a common fungus and dunked some of them in a solution of mercury salts and hot water. "The lots treated with mercuric [chloride] were shaken vigorously at first to get thorough contact with the solution," he wrote. His faculty adviser at the time was concerned about an epidemic of cabbage fungus that was wrecking havoc on Wisconsin farms, and he enlisted his student Wellman's help in researching solutions.
By the time his son was born 14 years later, in 1936, Wellman had graduated to advanced plant pathology work at the U.S. Agriculture Department's main research center in Beltsville, in Prince George's County, just outside Washington.
In a résumé, he wrote at length about his experience there with fungicides. On cabbage seeds, he reported, "organic mercury compounds were found to be most satisfactory disinfecting agents." For tomatoes, "proprietary organic mercury dusts also gave good results." All three of the fungicide sales brochures in his archive were for organic mercury compounds--two of them containing ethyl mercury, which was introduced in commercial products just a few years earlier.
Ethyl mercury is also the active ingredient in a vaccine preservative called thimerosal. A maverick minority of scientists and a larger percentage of parents blame thimerosal--which is 49.6 percent ethyl mercury by weight--for the rising autism rate, up tenfold in 20 years to one in 150 8-year-old U.S. children, according to a report this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some parents say they watched their children become physically ill and regress into autism soon after they got shots that contained the chemical--a link public-health officials call coincidence, not cause and effect.
It might be just another coincidence that the father of autism's Case 2 was working with new ethyl mercury compounds seven decades ago when his son was born. Or it might not.
Coincidence or otherwise, similar echoes emerge from cases 1 and 3 in Kanner's original study. Case 1 grew up in a town called Forest, Miss., surrounded by logging camps, lumber mills, and a national forest being planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Forest is 50 miles from the Mississippi sawmills where ethyl mercury fungicides were first tested in theUnited States in 1929 to preserve lumber, a practice that quickly became widespread; that child was born in 1933.
Case 3 was the son of "a professor of forestry in a southern university," Kanner wrote. That university has been identified as North Carolina State--the same school where Frederick L. Wellman ended his career as a visiting professor. Case 3's father began research on Southern pines when he joined the N.C. State faculty in 1935.
In 1936, he assisted in the planting of pine seedlings in the university's newly acquiredHofmann Forest. His son was born in 1937. Organic mercury fungicides, including an ethyl mercury brand, were often used to prevent "damping off" or fungal contamination of pine seedlings during that era.
An advocate of the mercury-autism hypothesis says the pattern in those early cases strengthens his concern.
"So now we have learned that Frederick Wellman handled ethyl mercury fungicides that were first introduced to the market in 1929 and that his child was Kanner's patient No. 2," says Mark Blaxill, whose daughter Michaela has autism. Blaxill is vice president of the advocacy organization SafeMinds, which argues increased mercury exposure is behind the soaring autism rate. "And we know that cases 1 and 3 grew up around the first application of ethyl mercury products. If that's not a smoking gun, I don't know what is," Blaxill continues.
Consistent with that possibility, overlooked studies from the 1970s found a history of chemical exposures in a "quite startling" percentage of parents of autistic children; researchers could not isolate any one chemical as a common factor. More recently, studies have reported a statistically significant correlation between mercury pollution and autism rates.
A spokesman for the CDC cautions against making too much of Wellman's background.
"I've learned from being at CDC it's often difficult when you're trying to establish cause and effect," Glen Nowak, chief of media relations, says when the Wellman case is described to him. "There are other things that could have mitigated the effect, could have enhanced the effect, caused the effect. So a case study of one, you always want to be very careful."
In 1999, the CDC and other public-health authorities urged vaccine manufacturers to phase ethyl mercury out of U.S. pediatric vaccines as a precaution, given the well-known toxicity of mercury in developing brains and the increasing number of required childhood immunizations that contained it. Thimerosal remains in most flu shots, which are recommended by a CDC advisory committee for all pregnant women and for children as young as 6 months. Due in large measure to reassurance from United States and United Nations health authorities, ethyl mercury continues in wide use in pediatric vaccines in developing nations.
"Evidence is accumulating of lack of any harm resulting from exposure" to vaccines containing thimerosal as a preservative, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services posted on its web site. The Department of Health points to a 2004 report by the prestigious Institute of Medicine, which discounted a link with autism and took the unusual step of recommending research funding go to more "promising" areas.
Mercury-based fungicides were banned in the United States and many other countries as understanding of mercury's toxic effects became more sophisticated; they have not been on the market here since the 1970s. Such products were not a health threat when used properly, according to a leading manufacturer.
To be sure, there is no direct evidence of mercury exposure in any of the original cases, though Frederick W.'s mother had "kidney trouble" during her pregnancy--sometimes a sign of mercury toxicity. Frederick W.'s father worked with many dangerous substances besides mercury--a short list includes formaldehyde, arsenic, copper, sulfur, insecticides, and pesticides.
But it is also true that none of Kanner's case studies from Johns Hopkins has been examined for such exposures, even as more researchers suspect genes alone cannot explain the rising number of diagnoses. The Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Epidemiology, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, lists "Environmental Exposures" first among six areas of research on its web site. Johns Hopkins Medicine declined to comment for this story.
Ellen K. Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Hopkins, is currently using a $204,000 grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to test whether humans respond in different ways to mercury exposure. The goal, according to her report's abstract, is to understand "preventable risk factors for autism based upon the hypothesis that mercury compounds by themselves do not cause autism but may contribute to the risks . . . in combination with genetic susceptibility and co-exposures to other risks, such as infections." Silbergeld declined to comment for this story.
A recent issue of the Autism Advocate, published by the Autism Society of America, the nation's oldest and largest such organization, focused on "the possible link between autism and the environment." "We already have enough evidence to make the judgments that environmental factors are critical issues for autism," wrote Dr. Martha Herbert, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "This newer model of autism implies that we have great opportunities to do constructive things about this challenge."
In April the Institute of Medicine convenes a two-day conference titled, "Autism and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunities for Research."
Johns Hopkins' Medical Privacy Board denied a request for information from the medical records of the original 11 cases reported by Leo Kanner, citing both privacy and practicality. The first three cases were identified independently.
The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is located just outsideWashington's traffic-clogged I-495 beltway. The Georgian-style main building is set back majestically from Route 1.
Off the highway, two-lane roads thread through 6,600 acres as the bustle of Washingtonyields to rolling countryside, big barns, and grazing cattle. The log visitors' center with its massive stone fireplaces was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the mid-1930s. Yet even some longtime Washingtonians are unaware that the world's largest agricultural research center lies in their midst.
When Frederick L. Wellman began working there in 1935, Henry Wallace was secretary of agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal was launching initiatives to spur crop production and overcome the Dust Bowl days of the Depression. That year Congress passed a law mandating more basic agricultural research.
By then, Wellman had earned his Ph.D., wed a Wisconsin woman named Dora U'Ren, spent a year in Honduras with the United Fruit Co., and, in 1930, was hired at the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry's headquarters in Washington. He was preceded there by a colleague fromWisconsin, John Monteith, who was one of the most active experimenters in the world with mercury fungicides. Monteith wrote numerous papers about his tests on mercury fungicides at the bureau's Arlington Turf Garden, now the site of the Pentagon. Monteith and Wellman had written a scientific paper on cabbage fungus in 1927.
During most of 1936, Wellman was hunting exotic plant diseases in Turkey, Egypt, and Iran. He was, as Leo Kanner wrote, a plant pathologist who "has traveled a great deal in connection with his work."
Their child was born on May 23, 1936. Exactly six years later, in May 1942, the boy's worried parents brought him to see Kanner at Johns Hopkins Hospital, about 30 miles up Route 1 from Beltsville. Kanner called him "Case 2: Frederick W."
"The child has always been self-sufficient," Kanner quoted his mother as saying. "Usually people are an interference. He'll push people away from him. To a certain extent, he likes to stick to the same thing.
"On one of the bookshelves we had three pieces in a certain arrangement. Whenever this was changed, he always rearranged it in the old pattern.
"He had said at least two words (`Daddy' and `Dora,' the mother's name) before he was 2 years old. From then on, between 2 and 3 years, he would say words that seemed to come as a surprise to himself. He'd say them once and never repeat them."
Editor's note: This copyright article that appears in Baltimore's citypaper.com. Please visit to read the balance of this article at their website. You can also leave a comment at the end. -L.S. Read more here.
Dan Olmsted is a journalist with United Press International in Washington, where he writes the Age of Autism column, available at www.upi.com. Copyright 2007 © United Press International Inc. All rights reserved. Researcher Beverly Crawford contributed to this story.
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Regressive Autism: Putting Together the Pieces
Michael Wagnitz
March 12, 2007
Rates of autism spectrum disorders have been rising at an alarming
rate according to the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special
Education, Data Analysis Services. Most of the new cases are
regressive or late on-set autism. The diagnostic criteria for autism
spectrum disorders are based on behavioral symptoms rather than a
specific medical cause. In addition to psychological symptoms, many
parents and physicians report conditions indicating a compromised
immune system and gastrointestinal problems. This review looks at the
most recent clinical studies indicating the causative agent may be
mercury and tries to put this complicated puzzle together.
Autism is a term used to describe a condition which affects the
immune, gastrointestinal and central nervous system. It has been shown
that many of the physical and behavioral symptoms identified in
children diagnosed with autism have been previously present in past
cases of mercury poisoning (Bernard et al.2001).
Currently there is no known cause of autism identified in the medical
literature, but by sifting through the most recently published
clinical studies, one could make a compelling case that the causative
agent is inorganic mercury (IHg). Analyses of first baby haircut
samples have shown that autistic children retain seven times more
mercury than neurologically typical controls (Holmes et al. 2003).
Studies show that Macaca fascicularis primates that were dosed with
chronic levels of methylmercury (MeHg) continued to accumulate IHg in
the brain 6 months after the MeHg dosing had stopped. This clearance
group showed a significant increase in microglial activity in the
brain. Results from mercury speciation of the brain in these primates
showed that MeHg concentration plateaued at about 12 months while the
IHg fraction, derived from the demethylation of MeHg, continued to
increase 6 months later. Autometallographic determination of the
distribution of IHg by cell types showed microglial and astroglial
cells contained significant more IHg deposits relative to other cells.
This data suggests that IHg present in the brain is the toxic agent
and responsible for the changes in the microglial and astroglial
population (Charleston et al.1996).
Chronic microglial activation is recognized as an important component
of neurodegenerative disease and neuroinflamation and contributes to
neuronal dysfunction and injury. The recognition of microglial as the
brains immune system and the understanding that chronic activation of
this system leads to pathological consequences, has been the primary
explanation for the current concept known as neuroinflamation (Streit
et al. 2004). In a 2005 study brain tissue was obtained during autopsy
from autistic patients. The author's data show an active
neroinflamatory process in the cerebral cortex, white matter and in
the cerebellum of autistic patients. Immunocytochemical studies showed
marked activation of the microglial and astroglial cells (Vargas et
al.2005).
Another piece of the puzzle is provided in a recently published study
comparing mercury brain levels in infant Macaca fascicularis primates
exposed to injected ethylmercury and infant Macaca fascicularis
primates exposed to equal amounts of ingested methylmercury (Burbacher
et al. 2005). Primates exposed to the ethylmercuy retained twice as
much IHg in their brains in comparison to the methylmercury exposed
primates. These primates were exposed to mercury levels at a rate
equal to what children in the United States received via standard
childhood vaccines from 1991- 2003. This study did not take into
account additional ethylmercury exposure from Rho D immunoglobulin
injections that children of Rh negative mothers would have received
during pregnancy nor does it look at mercury excretion issues.
While the Vargas study did not involve the testing for mercury, this
future research, if undertaken, could provide a valuable piece to this
puzzle.
References:
Bernard S, Enayati A, Redwood L, Roger H, Binstock T 2001 Autism: A
novel form of mercury poisoning. Med. Hypotheses 56:462-471.
Holmes A, Blaxil M, Haley B. 2003. Reduced levels of mercury in first
baby haircuts of autistic children. Int. Journal of Toxicology
22:277-285.
Charleston J, Body R, Bolender R, Mottet N, Vahter M, Burbacher T
1996. Changes in the number of astrocytes and microglia in the
thalamus of the monkey Macaca fascicularis following long-term
subclinical methylmercury exposure. Neurotoxicology 17:127-138
Streit W, Mrak R, Griffin W 2004. Microglia and neuroinflamation: a
pathological perspective. Journal of Neuroinflamation 1:14
Vargus DL, Nascimbene C, Krishnan C, Zimmerman AW, Pardo Ca. 2005
Neuroglial activation and neuroinflamation in the brain of patients
with autism. Annals of Neurology 57:67-81.
Burbacher T, Shen D, Liberato N, Grant K, Cernichiari E, Clarkson T.
2005. Comparison of blood and brain mercury levels in infant monkeys
exposed to methylmercury or vaccines containing thimerosal.
Environmental Health Perspectives. 113:1015-1021
About the Author:
Michael Wagnitz has over twenty years experience as a chemist working
with trace metals analysis.
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Gene That May Lead to Autism Identified
Science Daily — Yale School of Medicine autism experts Fred Volkmar, M.D. and Ami Klin are part of a global research consortium from 19 countries to identify a gene and a region of a chromosome that may lead to autism in children.
The findings are published in Nature Genetics. They are based on the largest-ever autism genome scan. Over 120 scientists from over 50 institutions who formed the Autism Genome Project (AGP) performed the research. The AGP began in 2002 when researchers from around the world decided to collaborate and share their samples, data and expertise to aid in identifying autism susceptibility genes.
Funded by Autism Speaks, a national non-profit dedicated to increasing awareness of autism and raising money to research the disorder, and the National Institutes of Health, these are the preliminary findings from the AGP's first phase.
The consortium used "gene chip" technology to look for genetic similarities in autistic individuals culled from almost 1,200 families. They also scanned the DNA to search for copy number variations, which are submicroscopic insertions and deletions of genetic material that scientists believe may be linked to autism and other diseases. The researchers found neurexin 1, part of a family of genes that plays a role with the neurotransmitter glutamate, which has been previously linked to autism. They also found a gene on chromosome 11 that may be linked to autism susceptibility. That gene has not yet been pinpointed.
Researchers speculate that there may be five or six major genes and as many as 30 other genes involved in autism. If a child has more of these genes, there is a higher chance of being born with autism or a more severe form of the disease.
Autism is a complex brain disorder that inhibits a person's ability to communicate and develop social relationships, and is often accompanied by extreme behavioral challenges. Autism Spectrum Disorders are diagnosed in one in 150 children in the United States, affecting four times as many boys as girls. The diagnosis of autism has increased tenfold in the last decade.
Phase Two of the Autism Genome Project was also announced to continue the effort to discover the genes that cause the disorder. This second phase represents a $14.5 million, three-year investment by Autism Speaks, the British Medical Research Council, the Health Research Board of Ireland, Genome Canada and its partners, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center, and the Hilibrand Foundation.
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A mother's
battle against mercury
By TONY HOLT wholt@hernandotoday.com
Published: Feb 3, 2007
SPRING
HILL — Mikey
was oblivious to the racket
coming from the other
side of the glass a few inches
from his face.
His mother, Barbara Lupo,
had parked her car in the
parking lot of the
Spring Hill Wal-Mart and
had walked to the rear passenger
side door.
She playfully tapped on the
window to get Mikey to laugh.
But Mikey did not react.
He did not even turn his
head. Lupo knocked
again and again, each time
banging the glass harder
with her knuckles
while screaming Mikey's name.
She unbuckled her 15-month-old
son, pulled him out of the
car, held
him in her arms and tried
to establish eye contact,
but he was
unresponsive.
"I was a panicked wreck," Lupo
said. "It's like he
had lost his personality."
The abrupt change in Mikey's
behavior, his mother said,
occurred less
than 24 hours after he had
been given his immunizations
for the
measles, mumps, rubella and
Hepatitis B.
At the time, she thought
something was wrong with
his hearing. She
called her husband and the
two decided he should go
to a Tampa-area
clinic for some tests.
"I
thought, 'Oh my God, he
is going to need a hearing
aid for the rest
of his life,'" Lupo
recalled. "Now I wish
that was all he would have
needed."
After medical specialists
discovered nothing wrong
with his hearing,
Lupo took her son to three
different physicians seeking
answers. Three
months after his vaccinations,
he was diagnosed with autism
and mental
retardation.
Lupo disputes the latter
diagnosis, based on her son's
development. He
is 10 years old and is functioning
better than most expected,
she
said. He has an acute sense
of direction, can read at
a rudimentary
level and can safely ride
a bike.
Mikey is also drawn to more
hands-on activities that
require tools.
Earlier this week, his mother
took him shopping at a local
hardware
store. They walked out carrying
nearly $70 worth of items.
"Trust me, it wasn't
funny," Lupo said with
a heavy dose of dry humor.
"My husband wanted to
kill me afterwards."
In spite of his improvements,
Mikey's autism remains a
significant
handicap. The most obvious
signs of his disorder occur
daily. His
behavior can change in a
matter of seconds, from mild-mannered
to
ferocious.
His tantrums involve more
than screaming and crying.
Mikey is a bulky
child who could easily injure
anyone who gets in the way
of his
flailing arms and balled
fists.
Lupo has suffered from dislocated
shoulders, a dislocated wrist
and a
dislocated hip while trying
to calm her son during his
frenzies.
"He's strong as an
ox when he has those rages," she
said.
One day last month, Lupo
was in the front yard with
Mikey trying to
keep him occupied with an
outdoor light she had bought
for him at the
Home Depot. He wanted to
hang it in his room. His
mother was
tightening a screw, trying
to attach the base of the
light to a small
square of dry wall, but was
having difficulty.
Mikey grew impatient. He
immediately snapped into
another tantrum,
shaking his head back and
forth and screaming at the
top of his lungs.
Spittle was flying out of
his mouth. He raised his
hands over his head
and it looked like he was
about to slam his fists downward,
but Lupo
did not flinch.
She sat inches away from
him, glared at him with a
stern look on her
face said, "Listen to
me. No, don't do that. Daddy
will be home soon."
Mikey looked into his mother's
eyes and settled down. He
still had
saliva on his chin.
"Wipe your mouth please," Lupo
said.
Mikey brought his arm to
his face and wiped his chin
with the sleeve
of his sweatshirt.
Preparing for vaccine court
Most of Lupo's efforts center
on two goals — providing
for her three
children, namely Mikey, and
making sure the latter is
financially set
for the remainder of his
life.
Not long after she learned
Mikey had autism, she discovered
there were
legions of parents like her
whose children showed severe
neurological
symptoms after receiving
their vaccinations. They
were convinced their
children were poisoned by
the mercury-filled preservative,
known as
thimerosal, formerly an ingredient
in childhood vaccines.
Lupo joined the fight. She
and her husband filed a federal
petition,
along with nearly 5,000 other
parents, seeking a monetary
settlement.
The cases are heard by the
U.S. Court of Federal Claims,
created by
Congress in 1982. It specializes
in vaccine-related cases
and is
commonly known as "vaccine
court."
Lupo's attorney, John Clark,
of the Ferrero Law Firm in
Miami, said
the number of petitioners
would have been significantly
higher had it
not been for the court's "onerous
statute of limitations."
"These
parents must go before
the court within three
years of the
first sign of the first symptom,
which is rather hard to do," Clark
said. "A lot of these
parents and children were
locked out."
Mikey Lupo is 10 years old.
He was diagnosed with autism
at 18 months.
Barbara Lupo filed before
the statute of limitations
expired — a clear
sign of how much time it
takes for one case to go
through the process.
Clark's
firm represents 65 petitioners,
but the upcoming "causation
hearing," scheduled
for June, will affect all
of the petitioners'
cases.
"The
catch is, there has never
been any (scientific) connection
between vaccines and autism," Clark
admitted.
In spite of the lack of
evidence, there are several
medical experts,
as well as parents, who have
surmised beyond a reasonable
doubt that
thimerosal causes autism.
Insurance companies have
accumulated a vast database
consisting of
reports of adverse reactions
to vaccines. Whenever a parent
complains
his or her child has shown
symptoms from a vaccine,
it is added to the
records.
As of now, that database
has been off limits. Attorneys
for the
petitioners thus far have
been barred from accessing
them, Clark said.
"We
need to get our experts
to get their hands on that
information and
crunch the numbers," he
said.
The government has said
it does not have the authority
to grant access
because the database belongs
to the insurance companies.
Attorneys argue the U.S.
Department of Health and
Human Services does
have the authority, and moral
obligation, to release the
records,
Clark said.
The decision on whether
those records can be accessed
will be made by
a special master, the vaccine
court equivalent to a judge.
The case
would be greatly impacted
if the database made available
to the
petitioners' lawyers, Clark
said.
Either way, causation needs
to be established in order
for the cases
to go forward. If the special
master rules in favor of
the defendants,
or respondents, then no monetary
settlement can be sought
by Lupo or
any of the other petitioners.
"If that happens, then
it's going to be squashed," Clark
explained.
"If there is no way
to prove the connection (between
vaccines and
autism), then we are not
eligible for compensation.
That won't stop
anyone from filing a civil
suit, but the standards are
tougher there.
"A lot of families'
hopes are riding on what
happens in June," he
said.
No proof, yet no more mercury
The best-case scenario for
the Lupo family is a $250,000
settlement.
That is the maximum amount
given to a petitioner who
wins a liability
case in vaccine court.
For every vaccine purchased
since that time, Clark said,
a tiny
portion of the money went
into a pot. Over the years,
the dollar
amount has grown well into
the billions.
The pot was intended to
be the source of money that
gets dispersed to
those who are ultimately
injured by vaccines, Clark
said. Instead of
suing pharmaceutical companies,
the parents of the sick children
are
supposed to take their cases
to vaccine court. If they
win, they are
awarded money from the pot.
Some families have more
grandiose hopes and have
filed civil suits.
Those court battles may be
more difficult to win, but
the rewards are
much higher, Clark said.
Some think if a judge ruled
in favor of the plaintiff
in a vaccine
case, it would make the tobacco
company settlements from
more than a
decade ago seem paltry by
comparison. Furthermore,
if pharmaceutical
companies were found liable
of poisoning children with
mercury, the
monetary result would have
a gargantuan effect on the
U.S. economy.
That gives the federal government
a serious motive to prevent
civil
suits from going forward,
critics have said.
One of the leading crusaders
in the fight against pharmaceutical
companies and their alleged
government conspirators is
Rep. Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., D-N.J.
He
has accused the government
of covering up "damaging
data"
connecting thimerosal to
autism.
Kennedy said a group of
government scientists and
health officials
gathered for a meeting in
June 2000 in Norcross, Ga.,
to discuss the
data.
In
a 2005 published report
entitled, "Deadly Immunity," Kennedy
accusatorily wrote, "many
at the meeting were concerned
about how the
damaging revelations about
thimerosal would affect the
vaccine
industry's bottom line."
Referring to a transcript
of the meeting, he quoted
a doctor who said,
"We are in a bad position
from the standpoint of defending
any
lawsuits."
Pressure had already been
mounting against the government
to remove
mercury from vaccines. In
spite of no medical proof
of the link
between thimerosal and autism
(an extensive study was conducted
by the
Institute of Medicine, the
results of which were published
in 2004)
mercury was pulled out of
all childhood vaccines by
2002. A voluntary
recall of the original vaccines
was implemented. Many pediatric
offices still administered
thimerosal-filled shots during
the next two
years.
Today, only flu and tetanus
shots contain thimerosal,
according to the
Food and Drug Administration.
The latter is only administered
to those
ages 7 and older.
Holistic physician versus
anthropology professor, author
Dr. David Berger, a holistic
pediatrician out of Tampa
who specializes
in treatment for autism-related
disorders, said the proper
research
has not been done on thimerosal.
He is convinced previous
studies were
too broad.
He thinks there is a biological
explanation as to why certain
children
who have been injected with
thimerosal have acquired
autistic
symptoms.
The human body, Berger said,
contains a protein that is
used for the
detoxification of potentially
hazardous substances, such
as mercury or
other metals.
If a protein-deficient child
is injected with thimerosal,
then he or
she is more likely to develop
autism, he said.
"In my heart of hearts,
I think there was something
to it," he said.
"I talk quite frequently
about this."
Many local parents of autistic
children have consulted Berger
in spite
of their HMOs not covering
visits to holistic physicians.
Because
autistic children require
more medical care, an appointment
with such
a doctor could cost them
thousands of dollars.
Many physicians, like Berger,
are sold on the alleged link
between
mercury and autism. Others
are not.
There are those who emphatically
deny there is an epidemic
in the first place.
According to Dr. Roy Grinker,
a professor of anthropology
at George
Washington University and
author of "Unstrange
Minds: Remapping the
World of Autism," the
rise in autism diagnoses
is the result of an
enhanced knowledge of the
disorder on the part of the
medical
community. He compares the
recent spike in autism numbers
to those for
depression, Alzheimer's disease,
fetal alcohol syndrome, melanoma
and
breast cancer.
"To
argue that an increase
in the numbers of people
classified in
school or public health care
assistance records is evidence
of a true
rise in autism would be like
arguing that the increase
in successful
coffee houses like Starbucks
is by itself proof of an
increase in the
number of coffee drinkers
in the U.S.," he said.
Berger scoffed at Grinker's
theory.
"If
you have ever spent five
seconds with a child, you
know he is
autistic," Berger said. "Autism
is so obvious. Were these
symptoms
showing up with the same
frequency in kids 10 years
ago? Absolutely
not.
"There
is no way we went one in
10,000 children (with autism)
10 years
ago to one in 166 just on
better diagnosis," he
continued. "I don't
see how that's possible."
"Dr. Berger's answer
is an answer from the gut," Grinker
said of
Berger's reaction. "It
feels like an epidemic. It
really does ...
(but) just because something
feels like an epidemic, it
doesn't mean
there is one. Science has
not found that there is a
true increase in
autism."
Grinker has his own personal
connection to the subject.
His
15-year-old daughter is autistic.
Debate rages on
"Everyone is entitled
to their opinion," Lupo
said of Grinker.
When told the professor
has an autistic daughter,
the outspoken mother
remained steadfast.
"I
don't care if he has 10
autistic kids, he wasn't
there when my son
changed overnight," Lupo
said. "Everybody who
knew Mikey saw it."
Had Clark overheard the
conversation, he would not
have been surprised
by Lupo's reaction to Grinker's
conclusion. He has gotten
to know her
well in the seven years he
has handled her case.
"There
have always been those
deniers who say 'it's not
so until you
prove it to me,'" Clark
said. "Then there are
those parents who know
they had happy, healthy and
normal children until they
took these
vaccines. There will be no
convincing them otherwise."
Grinker, who has received
scads of hate mail since
his book was
published, said he is perplexed
at the number of parents
who are
invested in the belief there
is an autism epidemic.
"I think the media
are to blame, in part," Grinker
said. "I also blame
scientists for not speaking
out enough. They are scared
because autism
is such a sensitive topic."
His critics point to the
relatively low number of
adults with autism,
but Grinker again was dismissive.
So many autistic adults were
misdiagnosed as children,
so unbeknownst to most of
society, "they are
living all around us," he
said.
"An autistic person
can make a tremendous amount
of progress," Grinker
said.
That is the one opinion
of Grinker's that sits well
with Lupo.
"I definitely know
we've come a long way with
Mikey," she said. "He
knows how to wash his hair.
He cleans up his room. He
knows when he
comes home to take off his
shoes. He knows to put his
dirty clothes
away.
"I've seen so much
progress," Lupo said,
stressing the amount of
effort she and her husband
have put forth to make their
son's life
easier. "He's going
to be a successful member
of society even if it
kills me."
Reporter
Tony Holt can be contacted
at 352-544-5283.
###
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Saturday, February 3, 2007
'Autistic diet' getting
a closer look
Wheat-, dairy-free plan proving
successful for some
By CHERIE BLACK
P-I REPORTER
When he was 3 years old,
Matthew Sebastian was diagnosed
with autism.
Four years later, he began
having seizures, which are
much more common in autistic
children than in the broader
population. Doctors told
his parents that by the time
their son reached puberty,
his seizures would get worse
and he would have to wear
a helmet to protect his head.
High doses of two prescription
anti-seizure medications
controlled the attacks, but
the effects of his autism
still kept the small boy
in constant motion. He slept
poorly and displayed multiple
violent daily outbursts,
which eventually made him
too dangerous to himself
and his family to live at
home.
Sebastian moved from Federal
Way to a home in Seattle,
which cared for autistic
children in a residential
setting. It was there, at
the age of 10, that he received
what his mother calls the
treatment that saved her
son's life.
Dubbed
by some as the "autism
diet," it is a gluten-
and casein-free way of eating,
often used by people diagnosed
with the digestive disorder
celiac disease. Gluten products
such as wheat, rye and barley
are eliminated, as are dairy
products, which contain the
protein casein.
For eight weeks, Sebastian
was weaned off of his anti-seizure
medication and placed on
the diet. Now 20, he has
been seizure-free and drug-free
for the past 10 years. His
violent behavior stopped.
"Matthew is the complete
opposite of what he was before," said
his mother Janet Sebastian. "That's
why the diet works. His behaviors
decreased dramatically over
the years and now he's positive
and happy."
Why
the diet seems to work
isn't completely understood.
One theory involves the "leaky
gut syndrome," in which
the autistic child's body
isn't able to process proteins
found in wheat and dairy
products, said Gary Stobbe,
medical director of Seattle's
Autism Spectrum Treatment
and Research Center, a non-profit
organization that diagnoses,
treats and manages people
with autism. The undigested
chunks of protein get into
the bloodstream and affect
the brain. Another theory
is the body's immune system
is reacting to the proteins
in the body.
"Nothing is determined
for certain, and there is
no set approach with the
diet," he said. "In
my practice, it is something
we encourage in younger kids
or if we see a kid not making
progress with more conventional
therapies."
Stobbe said for some children,
especially the more severe
autism cases and those with
physical complaints, the
diet works well. They are
calmer, have better attention
spans and have less severe
behavioral disturbances.
Still no one knows whether
this will work in the long
term. So far, only anecdotal
evidence from parents is
available.
One study under way at the
University of Rochester Medical
Center in New York looks
at the effects of the diet
in autistic children between
the ages of 2 1/2 and 4 1/2.
Sponsored by the National
Institute of Mental Health,
it began in 2004 and should
be completed in 2008.
Dr. Geraldine Dawson, director
of the University of Washington's
Autism Center, is waiting
for data from more studies
before she'll recommend the
diet to her patients, but
tells parents who have decided
to try it to make sure a
nutritionist is involved.
She said about half the children
seen at the center are on
the diet, which has worked
for some, and not others.
"While we wait to find
out more, parents should
watch their children," she
said. "You end up restricting
what they're eating and some
children are suffering nutritionally."
But Sebastian and his family
have no doubts. Sebastian
now lives at Olympic House,
opened in June in North Seattle
for those with autism or
celiac disease who are on
the diet. The house is a
part of Alpha Supported Living
Services in Seattle, which
has 16 homes for disabled
adults.
Sebastian was joined by
Jacob Al-Hakim, 24, who is
also autistic and has celiac
disease. Since being put
on the diet, his mother,
Cheryl Gere, said he is calm
and making eye contact with
people. Although he doesn't
talk much, if at all, he
interacts with people and
is more aware, she said.
"Simply what they're
eating could change their
lives," she said.
A nutritionist helped create
a rotating meal plan involving
a main dish of pork, chicken,
beef or fish accompanied
by rice, fruit and vegetables.
The main dishes are served
for both lunch and dinner
and changed each day. A rotating
staff of at least two people
is at the house 24 hours
a day and has been trained
on what and how to prepare
the limited diet.
Gere buys groceries for
the house once a week at
Central Market in Shoreline
and spends about $150 to
$200, using money both men
receive from the state and
their part-time jobs that
is allocated for food.
At the grocery store, she
can't buy citrus, apples,
potatoes, avocados, peppers
or tomatoes. She stocks up
on rice and rice cakes, yams,
bananas and meat. They need
special deodorant and shampoo.
The tiniest cheat on the
diet can cause behavioral
problems.
"At one point on his
medication, he never left
the floor of his room; he
was almost comatose," she
said of her son. "He
sings with us now. He's awake."
Sebastian and Al-Hakim's
families say the diet brought
back to them sons they thought
were lost to the behavioral
effects of autism. Sebastian,
never without his dog, Holly,
is a gold medalist in the
Special Olympics and works
part-time at a toy store.
Al-Hakim recently ice skated
for the first time.
"When he was born I
wondered what he would become," Janet
Sebastian said. "Look
at him now."
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More
Than Half-Million U.S.
Children Autistic: CDC
Early diagnosis and intervention
is key to improvement, one
expert says
By Steven Reinberg, HealthDay
Reporte
THURSDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay
News) -- One out of every
150 American eight-year-olds
has some form of autism,
meaning that 560,000 children
in the country have the
disorder, the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) said Thursday.
That's
a higher prevalence than
prior estimates, drawn from
a number of countries, that
had pegged rates at between
1 in 500 and 1 in 166 children,
according to the CDC.
"Autism
spectrum disorders (ASD)
are a major public health
issue," Dr. Marshalyn
Yeargin-Allsopp, CDC's chief
of the Developmental Disabilities
Branch, said during a teleconference
about the figures.
The full
report is published in the
Feb. 9 issue of the agency's
journal Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report.
Overall,
some 17 percent of U.S. children
have some form of developmental
disability, ranging from
mild disability, such as
speech and language problems,
to serious developmental
problems, such as intellectual
disabilities, cerebral palsy
and autism, Yeargin-Allsopp
said.
The reasons
for the increase in autism
spectrum disorders isn't
clear, added Catherine Rice,
a behavioral scientist at
the CDC's National Center
on Birth Defects and Developmental
Disabilities. "It is
difficult to determine exactly
what is going on," Rice
said during the teleconference. "Is
this a change in the way
ASDs are identified, or is
there an increase for the
people at risk for ASDs,
such that there is a real
increase in the conditions?" she
asked.
Rice noted
that the definition of these
disorders has changed over
time. It now includes, in
addition to classic autism,
Asperger syndrome and other
pervasive developmental disorders
not otherwise specified.
The CDC
data also suggest that there
are widespread delays in
diagnosing autism spectrum
disorders. "The majority
of children with an ASD had
documented concerns by a
parent or a professional
before three years of age," Rice
noted. "But the median
age of earliest ASD diagnosis
was approximately four and
a half to five and a half
years," she said.
To establish
the nationwide prevalence
of autism spectrum disorders,
the CDC looked at school
and medical records of children
in 2000 and 2002. In 2002,
their survey included 10
percent of U.S. eight-year-old
children born in 1994 in
14 states, including Alabama,
Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado,
Georgia, Maryland, Missouri,
New Jersey, North Carolina,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina,
Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The researchers calculated
that a total of 2,685 eight-year-olds
had autism or a related disorder.
There
was a difference in the prevalence
of these conditions across
states, Rice noted. In 2000,
the prevalence of autism
spectrum disorders ranged
from 4.5 per thousand in
West Virginia to 9.9 per
thousand in New Jersey, she
said.
"Autism
prevalence is higher in boys
aged eight years than in
girls the same age," Rice
added. The data indicate
that for every girl with
an autistic condition, there
are three to seven boys with
such a disorder, she noted.
In addition,
autism spectrum disorders
are common among mentally
retarded children -- those
with an IQ of 70 or less,
Rice said. "Between
33 percent and 62 percent
of children with an ASD had
cognitive impairment," she
said.
The CDC
is now conducting a study
to try to identify the environmental
factors that may put children
at risk for autism.
One expert
believes that earlier diagnosis
is essential to help these
children.
"This
tells us there are an enormous
number of children with autism," said
Dr. Gary Goldstein, chair
of the scientific affairs
committee at the advocacy
group Autism Speaks, and
president and CEO of the
Kennedy Krieger Institute
in Baltimore, which focuses
on pediatric mental health.
Goldstein
is particularly concerned
that most children with an
autism spectrum disorder
aren't diagnosed until they
start school, despite parents
raising concerns years before. "We
know that early intervention
can be helpful for these
children, and it's not going
to happen if you're not diagnosed
until you are five years
old," he said.
These
problems can be diagnosed
as early as age two, Goldstein
said. "It isn't that
children begin to show signs
of autism at four and five
-- all of them who have it
at six, had it at two. With
proper screening, many more
children would be recognized," he
said.
In addition,
autism and disorders like
it are largely genetic conditions,
Goldstein said. "If
you knew you had it, and
you know that your child
has a 10 to 15 percent risk
of having it, you could use
that information," he
said.
However,
the causes of the various
forms of autism aren't known
and may be different for
each, Goldstein said. "Right
now, we have lumped then
all in one bucket," he
said.
More research
is needed to find the causes
and treatments for autism,
Goldstein said. "By
doing the genetic studies
and the environmental studies,
within a decade, hopefully,
we are going to have some
real answers," he said. "We
don't have prevention, and
we don't have treatment right
now."
For more
information on autism, visit
the U.S.
National Institute of Mental
Health.
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to top of page
Why the debate ragesWith the first autism case now being heard in federal vaccine court inWashington D.C., it makes sense to ask: Why is anyone even still debating the possibility of a link between vaccines and autism? After all, for years, many government health officials, advisors and vaccine manufacturers have said there's no association.
Here are a number of reasons why the question remains open:
1. While government scientists, advisors and pharmaceutical companies have been responsible for infinite lifesaving and life improving medical advances, they are not infallible.
• It's the same group that originally thought it was safe to use x-ray machines in shoe stores, gave pregnant women Thalidomide for morning sickness and once allowed mercury in medicines. They assured us Vioxx and Duract were safe painkillers, prescribed Rezulin for diabetics and then denied any of them were responsible for patient deaths. If we never questioned that group, we might not have discovered that Fen-phen and the dietary supplement Ephedra are not safe weight loss products, that antidepressants in kids can lead to suicidality and Viagra can cause blindness. The list goes on.
• When it comes to vaccines, the same group failed to predict that the 1990's rotavirus (diarrhea) vaccine would have to be pulled from the market after infant deaths. They encouraged use of the oral polio vaccine (eventually discontinued after it gave too many children polio). And they allowed the use of a mercury neurotoxin preservative in childhood vaccines, only to admit later that they hadn't thought to calculate the cumulative amount kids were getting as more and more vaccines were added to the childhood immunization schedule.
• Recent history demonstrates that too often, government health officials, mainstream doctors and pharmaceutical companies aren't on the leading edge of alerting us to health risks; they're bringing up the rear. Patients feel left to fend for themselves, seeking independent research and opinions on their own. They and their dogged, relentless determination have often been the catalyst that eventually brings medical dangers to the forefront.
2. Government scientists, advisors and vaccine manufacturers often take an all-or-nothing approach to vaccinations.
• Government officials and infectious disease experts I've spoken with are fearful that if vaccine side effects are better publicized, or if a link between vaccines and autism and ADD were made, the public would overreact and lose faith in the entire vaccination program. The result, they're afraid, would be parents refusing to give their children any vaccines, leading to new, deadly epidemics of preventable diseases. That indeed would be a disaster. However, their fears have resulted in something I call an all-or-nothing approach: they tend to promote nearly all vaccines for nearly all children as equally necessary and equally safe. Yet at the same time, if asked, they agree not all vaccines are equally safe, equally beneficial, equally necessary and equally tolerated by each individual child.
• Through the Internet and other resources, parents are now able to find research on vaccines and read it for themselves. They compare the government's all-or-nothing approach to the research and become skeptical that the government is presenting the whole picture on vaccine safety generally.
3. Government officials and mainstream scientists who dispel any vaccine/autism/ADD link have ties to vaccine makers.
• There's so much overlap among pharmaceutical companies, government scientists and advisors that the information they provide at least has the appearance of a conflict of interest. Government scientists and advisors often do not mention their connections to the vaccine industry when they provide opinions on the vaccine/autism/ADD issue.
• One of the best examples of this is the landmark autism/vaccine study published in Pediatrics. Early in his study, the lead author, CDC's Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, found statistically significant associations between the amount of mercury (thimerosal) exposure kids got from their childhood vaccines, and a wide range of brain disorders. However, the published version of the study (the one the authors say is accurate) found no evidence of a link to autism. Not disclosed was that Dr. Verstraeten had left CDC midstream during the study and had gone to work for Glaxo, a vaccine manufacturer. That failure to disclose was criticized in a later publication of Pediatrics, but it got little mainstream attention. Also getting little attention was a letter from well-respected scientists, also in Pediatrics, who echoed what parents of autistic children had been saying for months: they questioned the use and exclusion of certain data from Dr. Verstraeten's study that eventually reduced the statistical ties between vaccines and neurodisorders.
• University and government researchers and advisors often do research for vaccine companies, help develop vaccines (even profit from them), and/or are paid to consult for them. Often, these researchers do not disclose their industry ties when they publicly dispel the notion of a link between autism or ADD and vaccines.
• Lastly, the CDC is inextricably tied to vaccine makers through contracts and other business and financial relationships that open the door for the possibility of conflicts.
4. Non-profits which dispel any vaccine/autism/ADD link have ties to vaccine makers.
• Non-profits that promote vaccinations have ties to vaccine makers that they often do not disclose when giving their opinions on vaccine safety. One example is "Every Child By Two." This group contacted CBS News several years ago in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent one of our stories about the vaccine safety from airing. In forms filed for the IRS, the non-profit lists an official from vaccine maker Wyeth Pharmaceuticals as its Treasurer. It lists vaccine maker Chiron as a paid client.
• Another example of a non-profit tied to the industry is "The Vaccine Fund." Its President from 2000-2005 was Jacques-Francois Martin, formerly CEO of vaccine maker Sanofi-Pasteur, CEO of vaccine maker Chiron, and President of the International Federation of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association. While at The Vaccine Fund, his salary was paid by a company that says it "has developed particular strength in the vaccine industry and vaccine development."
5. The dual role of the CDC undermines the appearance of fairness.
• There is a perceived, if not real, conflict of interest with the government's Centers for Disease Control (CDC) heavily promoting vaccines, but also responsible for monitoring adverse events. At least two respected medical journals, the "American Journal of Public Health" and "Pediatrics" have published letters or articles recommending "greater independence in vaccine safety assessments" apart from "the highly successful program to promote immunizations." In short, the CDC's bread and butter is achieving high vaccination rates. But that role is in conflict with the agency's responsibility to fully research and disclose adverse events that could, in theory, bring down vaccination rates.
6. There is no definitive research proving a link between vaccines and autism or ADD, but there is also no definitive research ruling it out.
• Something rarely reported is that while there's no definitive study linking vaccines to autism or ADD, there is also no study definitively disproving a link. And there's a substantial body of peer-reviewed, published science from places like Columbia, Yale and Northeastern suggesting a link, or pointing to the need for further study.
• Many credible voices deny a link. But many other credible voices support the idea of a link. One example of the latter is George Wayne Lucier, formerly a senior official at the National Institutes of Health in Environmental Toxicology, an NIH advisor, member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Toxicity Testing and a scientific advisor for EPA who concludes ". .it is highly probably that use of thimerosal as a preservative has caused developmental disorders, including autism, in some children." A lengthy Congressional investigation also concluded that the autism epidemic is likely linked to vaccinations.
7. Those who say autism and ADD are not linked to vaccines do not know what is causing the epidemics.
• The most frightening part of the autism/ADD epidemics is that if, indeed, they're unrelated to vaccinations, that our best, brightest public health experts still have no idea what is causing it. Excluding ADD, one out of every 150 American children are now being diagnosed with autism.
Vaccinations have provided lifesaving miracles in public health. However, it's undisputed that they are also responsible for many serious adverse events including brain disorders and, rarely, deaths. Trying to maximize the potential benefits of vaccines and minimize the harm shouldn't be seen as a threat to the nation's inoculation program, it's merely a logical step forward.
One scientist who testified for the plaintiff this week in The Vaccine Court said there's a way to test children for a hidden hole in their immune make-up that makes them susceptible to bad immune reactions from vaccinations. He said that, ideally, every child should undergo such a test before their first vaccinations. But he also said the test is very expensive and so "not worth it." Many parents might disagree. If they knew such a test was available, they'd find a way to pay for it. But such information has to be disseminated to the public before a first step can even be considered.
Mainstream medicine initially said that autism was caused by mothers who weren't affectionate enough with their children. If that doesn't teach us that we should always seek further knowledge and not necessarily accept what's spoon-fed to us by certain experts. .then nothing will.
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Autistics Clinically Proven Mercury Poisoned
http://www.Mercury-freeDrugs.org
Washington, DC-
Recent peer-reviewed scientific/medical studies by Nataf et al. (2006) and by Geier and Geier (2006) leave little doubt that many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are indeed mercury poisoned. These studies utilized urinary porphyrin profile analysis (UPPA) to assess body-burden and physiological effects of mercury in autistics. Today, any parent, physician, or healthcare provider can easily confirm whether a non-chelated autistic is mercury poisoned by having UPPA testing run at Laboratory Corporation of
America (LabCorp) (CLIA-certified, Test#120980) or Laboratoire Philippe Auguste (ISO-certified, Urine Porphyrin Profile).
UPPA is a highly accurate, inexpensive, non-invasive, and routinely available method for estimating body-burden and toxicity of mercury. Numerous peer-reviewed scientific/medical papers published over the past 40
years, many of them supported by the US NIH, have proven the validity of using UPPA to identify mercury poisoning.
UPPA profiling, unlike attempts to directly measure mercury in the blood, urine or feces, or in tissues (e.g., hair and nail), is a proven method for assessing mercury toxicity.
Using UPPA, Nataf et al. (2006) studied the urinary porphyrin patterns in French children using the results reported by Laboratoire Philippe Auguste. Similarly, Geier and Geier (2006) studied the urinary porphyrin patterns in US children using the results reported by LabCorp.
Both published studies:
. Clearly demonstrated that non-chelated autistics had porphyrin patterns indicative of clinical mercury toxicity, while normal children and their normal sibling controls did not.
. Found that the more severely affected the ASD children were the higher their evidence of mercury toxicity.
. Established that treating autistics with chelating agents resulted in lower mercury-specific urinary porphyrins, which corresponded to apparent reductions in the mercury body-burden of these children.
Many other physicians who take care of ASD patients have ordered UPPA testing and confirmed the observations made by Nataf et al. (2006) and Geier and Geier (2006).
Thus, urinary porphyrin profile testing is being successfully used to:
. Demonstrate the role of mercury in populations of autistics,
. Identify those children and adults who are mercury poisoned, and
. Track mercury excretion from affected children undergoing treatment.
For the past several years there has been a raging controversy as to whether or not mercury in medicines, especially in vaccines, has caused the dramatic rise in the rate of children diagnosed with an ASD. Many experts have insisted ASDs are caused by some yet-to-be-identified genetic cause. A paper recently published in Nature Genetics described the results of multi-million-dollar genetics study (which studied a thousand-plus families with at least two autistics using in-depth genetic screening). Tellingly,
the authors reported, "None of our linkage results can be interpreted as 'statistically significant'." (The Autism Genome Project Consortium, 2007). This makes it unlikely that purely genetic aberrations ! are t he root cause of most ASD cases.
With the current porphyrin study results, public health officials should now publicly admit what they have been saying in their private transcripts and memos all along: Mercury from Thimerosal-containing vaccines and other medicines has been a major cause of ASD cases, which, according to recent CDC (2007) estimates, may occur one in every 150 children.
CoMeD's web site, http://www.Mercury-freeDrugs.org contains:
. Further information on how to order these tests,
. Full copies of the Nataf et al. (2006) and Geier and Geier (2006) papers, and
. Some of the many published papers validating the UPPA test.
Throwing children into oncoming traffic: The truth about Autism
By: Kenneth Stoller, MD, FAAP with Anne McElroy Dachel
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_anne_mce_070506_throwing_children_in.htm
I have been a practicing pediatrician for over 20 years. I saw my first child with autism in the early 90’s -" before that I had never seen an autistic child, and I never saw an autistic child in all my years at school. The boy was 4 years old and you could see the frustration in his face as he wanted to speak but nothing intelligible would come from his mouth except shrieks of anguish.
As I studied his tortured face, it was as if there was an old time telephone switchboard operator inside his head trying to plug in the correct phone cables but not being able to complete the call. This family had known me from an old practice I worked at in another city, but they had traveled to see me because they trusted me and were looking for answers that no one seemed to have for them, but I too had no answers and I could see the mom was greatly disappointed. After the family left my office I poured over a few dusty textbooks and wondered if I had just seen a very rare disorder, a disorder that affected one child in 10,000 children…autism.
I had been involved in pediatrics for a decade by the time I saw this boy and it wasn’t as if I had no experience working with rare disorders. I had been able to identify a boy with Fragile-X syndrome and his mom ending up starting the Fragile-X support group at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
I had noticed there was a strange upswing in children with attention disorders and impulsivity problems. I wasn’t a neurologist, but had studied with one of the finest at UCLA. While I was still a pediatric resident I spent time in his office where he helped me study the parade of unusual maladies that was starting to afflict children. I considered myself a closet neurologist, because that was what I had really wanted to specialize in -" not pediatrics, but during my neurology rotation in medical school I learned some discouraging news. The attending neurologist, whom I greatly admired, had taken me on rounds for the first time and I watched him brilliantly explain to the family of a stroke patient how he had figured out where in the brain the blood clot had lodged. Then he stood up and walked out of the room and ! I asked him what therapy he was going to prescribe for the patient so he could recover from his stroke, “therapy?” he said, “there is no therapy.”
Well, I scratched neurology off my list…diagnosis was only meaningful if you could offer a treatment and it seemed neurology had few treatments to offer.
My second patient with autism came to me in the mid 1990’s, but to my relief the purpose of the visit was only to treat worms. I dutifully prescribed the medicine for pinworms and went on to my next patient. Later that afternoon I received a call from the autistic boy’s mom who wanted to know what was that medicine I had given her son for pinworms….her boy was starting to make eye contact, show affection and communicate with his family. She said it was amazing! I told her I didn’t really didn’t know what was in the pinworm pill but immediately prescribed enough pills for her son to take everyday for a month (normally you only take one or two pills to treat pinworms).
I called up the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the pinworm pill and spoke to one of their technical staff. They told me the pill worked by blocking the transport of molecules of a certain size from crossing cell membranes, so in the case of the hapless pinworms they were unable to absorb the sugars they feed upon in the lower intestines of their victims.
What did that have to do with this boy’s newly found improved behavior? Either one of two things were going on: 1) the drug was either blocking a molecule that shouldn’t be passing across the gut to the blood and then the brain and that molecule was having a drug-like affect on the brain, or; 2) the drug was blocking a molecule that normally crossed from the gut into the blood but in certain children these molecules had a strange drug-like affect.
I made several calls across the country to find a researcher who might be interested in this serendipitous finding which could be an important clue into this disease, because no where had I found anything saying that the guts of these children were involved in their disease. Unfortunately, no one I talked to was interested.
Testifying to Congress...
In May 2004, I had been invited to testify in front of the Government Reform Committee to discuss new developments in treating children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. I had been invited because of the work I was doing with hyperbaric oxygen in treating brain injured children, including fetal alcohol syndrome. Hyperbaric oxygen is where oxygen is given under pressure in chambers that are used to treat scuba divers who get the bends. I and several other physicians had found that hyperbaric oxygen was returning functionality to the brains of affected children.
Sitting next to me was a physician who told the story of his son who had become autistic after receiving vaccine and how he discovered his son was retaining toxic heavy metals, specifically mercury. Over the course of a year this physician had given his son a chemical to pull out the mercury and his son began speaking again and in fact jumped on his dad’s lap and addressed the Committee members having been restored to be a healthy boy without any signs of his autism.
In the 1990’s I had known there was a problem with many of the vaccines because they contained the preservative Thimerosal (50% mercury) and I had discouraged many parents from getting vaccine containing Thimerosal -" there is no safe level of mercury, and it didn’t make sense to inject the most toxic non-radioactive element on the planet into children, but I never made the connection between autism and mercury. I knew what Thimerosal was because while I was in college my brother had a very bad reaction to the Thimerosal that used to be used in contact lens solution.
I was taken aback that something so obvious had not registered with me, but I didn’t realize that I and my physician colleagues had been subjected to a disinformation campaign to make us think there was no connection between mercury and autism. It has been known for sometime that mercury was causing autism, but someone was running interference. The question was who was running interference?
In February 2007, the watchdog agency on America's health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), made the official announcement that a breath-taking one in 150 kids is autistic in the U.S. If you go to the CDC website on autism(http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism) you’d see lots of pictures of smiling happy children with autism and we’d be told that autism spectrum disorders are “a group of developmental disabilities defined by significant impairments in social interaction and communication and the presence of unusual behaviors and interests.”
You won’t be told that for many parents autism is a nightmare from which they never wake up. “Significant impairments”can mean that a child is violent and self-abusive, non-verbal, and physically sick. You won’t be told that this is a medical disease where most autistic children have significant inflammation in both gut and brain including colitis, super-infections and severe food allergies.
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The CFL mercury nightmare
Steven Milloy, Financial Post
Published: Saturday, April 28, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2pk9d7
How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.
Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favour of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).
According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.
Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn't cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.
Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as US$180 annually in energy costs -- and assuming that Bridges doesn't break any more CFLs -- it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.
The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007, and, surprisingly, environmentalists.
It's quite odd that environmentalists have embraced the CFL, which cannot now and will not in the foreseeable future be made without mercury. Given that there are about five billion light bulb sockets in North American households, we're looking at the possibility of creating billions of hazardous waste sites such as the Bridges' bedroom.
Usually, environmentalists want hazardous materials out of, not in, our homes. These are the same people who go berserk at the thought of mercury being emitted from power plants and the presence of mercury in seafood. Environmentalists have whipped up so much fear of mercury among the public that many local governments have even launched mercury thermometer exchange programs.
As the activist group Environmental Defense urges us to buy CFLs, it defines mercury on a separate part of its Web site as a "highly toxic heavy metal that can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in fetuses and children" and as "one of the most poisonous forms of pollution."
Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury-thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the United States, under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.
And let's not forget about the regulatory nightmare in the U.S. known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.
We'll eventually be disposing billions and billions of CFL mercury bombs. Much of the mercury from discarded and/or broken CFLs is bound to make its way into the environment and give rise to Superfund liability, which in the past has needlessly disrupted many lives, cost tens of billions of dollars and sent many businesses into bankruptcy.
As each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, at the Maine "safety" standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to "safely" contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal.
Not only are CFLs much more expensive than incandescent bulbs and emit light that many regard as inferior to incandescent bulbs, they pose a nightmare if they break and require special disposal procedures. Yet governments (egged on by environmentalists and the Wal-Marts of the world) are imposing on us such higher costs, denial of lighting choice, disposal hassles and breakage risks in the name of saving a few dollars every year on the electric bill? - Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk-science expert and advocate of free enterprise, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Neurodevelopment & the Environment: Are Vaccines to Blame for Skyrocketing Childhood Illnesses?
Lourdes Salvador
April 28, 2007
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=25498
Remarkable controversy exists on the safety and efficacy of vaccinations in the United States. Research supporting vaccine safety is scant yet crucial to the well being of every American citizen. Since 1980 the amount of vaccinations required for children began to rise quite dramatically. These vaccines contain various toxicants including thimerosal, a mercury (Hg) containing neurotoxicant, which may contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders such as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and Environmental Illness (EI) which are all on the rise. According to the U.S. Census Bureau autism, ADHD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders may affect as many as 1 in 6 children in the U.S. totaling over 12 million citizens (Ball, 2001). Many of these conditions developed or expanded around the time of increased vaccinations. Comparison of data on the increase of neurodevelopment disorders and the growth of synthetic chemical pro! duction show the data began to merge around 1970 (Colborn, 2004) much the same time the number of vaccines given to children began to increase. Both vaccines and increased chemicals in the environment warrant further investigation as possible causation of neurodevelopment disorders.
“Mercury in the thimerosal molecule is in the form of ethylmercury for which there is limited toxicologic information” (Clarkson, 2002). Thimerosal is the preservative commonly used in many vaccinations and given to children in amounts of ethylmercury that exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safety level for adults (Burbacher et al, 2005). Thimerosal has been withdrawn from many pediatric vaccines since 1999 as a result of concerns over the neurodevelopmental toxicity of organic mercury although it is still used in influenza, diphtheria, and pertussis vaccinations (Goth et al, 2006). It is plausible that the withdrawal of thimerosal is indicative of its potential as a neurotoxicant. Children vaccinated before 1990 time may have received cumulative doses of mercury exceeding 200µg/kg and because thimerosal is organic mercury there is suspicion among scientists that it acts as methylmercury does in the brain though the two forms vary in the way! they are distributed and eliminated from the brain (Spzir, 2006). Health risk estimates from thimerosal in vaccines originally assumed that ethylmercury is toxicologically similar to methylmercury (Ball et al, 2001). Studies have since found this to be misleading as methylmercury is distributed differently than methylmercury (Burbacher et al, 2005).
Reports indicating infants can be given ethylmercury in the form of thimerosal above the guidelines for safe exposure set by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency were challenged in an experiment (Burbacher et al, 2005) in which monkeys were exposed to methylmercury or thimerosal and tested at intervals to determine how long the mercury remained in the brains of the monkeys. Findings showed that methylmercury is not a proper reference for risk assessment from exposure to thimerosal-derived mercury as ethylmercury clears the brain faster than methylmercury (Burbacher et al, 2005). The deposition kinetics of the two forms of mercury varies greatly requiring further investigation into the safety and efficacy of ethylmercury from thimerosal as a vaccine preservative. “Although the initial distribution volume of total mercury is similar for the two groups, a biphasic exponential decline in total blood mercury is observed only after intramuscular injections of thimero! sal. This suggests continual distribution into and localization in tissue sites over time” (Burbacher et al, 2005) where the mercury is stored and accumulated. More “knowledge of the toxicokinetics and developmental toxicity of thimerosal is needed to afford a meaningful assessment of the developmental effects of thimerosal-containing vaccines. We need knowledge of biotransformation of thimerosal to interpret the potential developmental effects of immunization with thimerosal-containing vaccines in infants. This information is critical if we are to respond to public concerns regarding the safely of childhood immunizations” (Burbacher et al, 2005).
Thimerosal also differs from methylmercury in that it causes kidney damage as well as damage to the nervous system at the same dose (Clarkson, 2002). In addition to disposition of mercury in the body a primary area of concern is the effects of mercury in the body and particularly the central nervous system. Clarkson (2002) emphasizes that the mature central nervous system is characterized by a latent period between mercury exposure and onset of symptoms of several weeks to months. Paresthesia, cerebellar ataxia, dysarthria, constriction of the visual fields, and loss of hearing are among the first symptoms of mercury toxicity often caused by loss of or damage to neuronal cells (Clarkson 2002). Damage by mercury also includes oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation, mitochondrial dysfunction, synaptic transmission disruption, microtubule formation, amino acid transport, and cellular migration, psychomotor retardation, seizures, mental retardation, and developmental delays (Sc! hettler, 2001). There may conceivably be a correlation between the symptoms of mercury poisoning and the similar symptoms evident in neurodevelopment disorders. Clarkson (2002) ascertains “methylmercury is converted to inorganic mercury in the brain. It is possible that the inorganic ion is the proximate toxic agent responsible for the brain damage. However, experiments on rats comparing methyl and ethyl mercury compounds suggest that the intact methylmercury radical is the toxic agent. Ethylmercury converts to inorganic mercury more rapidly than methylmercury, but the latter products more serious brain damage. The toxicologic role of inorganic mercury remains a matter of debate.” What is clear is that safety of any mercury is highly questionable and requires further research before we continue to risk exposing children to thimerosal.
Effects of mercury on children show susceptibility for prenatal exposure to methylmercury as it passes though the placental barrier to the developing fetus from the mother (Bjornberg et al, 2005). Clarkson (2002) notes mothers with mild symptoms of mercury neurotoxicity often give birth to offspring with severe brain damage, delayed development, and other neurologic abnormalities. There is valid concern over the safety of the amount of additional mercury received in childhood vaccinations.
In the United States autism, once a rare condition (Goodman & Koduru, 2000), has increased from 4 – 5 per 10,000 children in the 1980’s to 30 – 60 per 10,000 children in the 1990’s, an increase of more than ten times, and the diagnosis of ADHD increased 250% between 1990 and 1998 (Szpir, 2006). The cause of these diseases is largely unknown at this time though some researchers are looking to phthalates, PCB’s, and other chemicals for which use has increased about the same time (Booker, 2001). A 2006 study concluded that there is a potential association between autism and estimated metal concentrations in the air (Windham et al, 2006). Another study postulates that thimerosal may be a potential triggering mechanism contributing to autism in susceptible individuals (Walker et al, 2006).
One of many studies examined and found correlation between sleep position and SIDS (Ostfeld et al, 2006) leaving unclear why a child would become vulnerable to a certain sleep position in recent years only when SIDS was unheard of before 1980. Another study suggests a strong link between metals in particulate air pollution and some forms of infant death (Glinianaia et al, 2004). Thimerosal being largely composed of the metal mercury is another likely culprit that requires additional research.
Also noteworthy is a study in which 33% of participants were found to be suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity, a form of EI (Meggs et al, 1996) that is caused by low molecular weight chemicals that bind to chemoreceptors on sensory nerve C-fibers leading to the release of inflammatory mediators (Meggs, 1999). With such a large percentage of the population suffering EI it is conceivable a common exposure such as thimerosal in vaccines could be the etiology behind turning on the CYP2D6 allele apparently responsible for genetically variable toxin pathways that may cause EI to surface (McKeown-Eyssen et al, 2004).
The effect of neurodevelopmental disorders reaches beyond the child to the parent, the social system, the work force, school curriculum, medical providers, care providers, the welfare system, and therefore affects the pocketbooks of every taxpaying citizen. Cumulative costs identified (Muir & Zegarac, 2001) for societal costs of exposure to toxic substances total between $568 billion and $793 billion dollars per year in Canada and the United States. Further at least 10% and as much as 50% of these costs are environmentally induced by toxicants (Muir & Zegarac, 2001). Neurodevelopment disorders cost the United States $81.5 to $167 billion annually and methylmercury induced toxicity alone is estimated to cost $8.7 billion dollars in lost productivity in the United States (Szpir, 2006). 67% of chemicals imported into the United States have not been examined for neurotoxicity (Szpir, 2006) and could also be a contributing factor. Children affected by neurodevelopment ! disorders will increasingly become burden to society for care as they age giving rise to the essentiality that scientists discover the etiology behind this alarming increase. The costs of reduced IQ in the United States alone in 1987 may have reached $327 billion (Muir & Zegarac, 2001).
What is absolutely clear is the evidence that pollution and toxicants affect the brain and central nervous system in a negative way. The symptoms of neurological disorders being similar to those of mercury poisoning will require additional research to determine if there is a connection between neurodevelopmental disorders and thimerosal in vaccines.
To date no studies have been performed to compare human populations vaccinated and populations unvaccinated. In the past the Centers for Disease Control (CC) has purported vaccines and autism to be unrelated or casually related (Institute of Medicine, 2004) though the CDC has recently announced the funding of a multi-agency study to determine the potential for environmental and genetic causes of autism which includes thimerosal (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006). Of further note is that studies have compared human populations vaccinated with thimerosal containing vaccinations to populations vaccinated with non-thimerosal containing alternatives. Do thimerosal containing vaccinations contribute to childhood developmental neurotoxicology resulting in neurodevelopment and neuropsychological disorders such as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and environmental illness in the United States?
Now we examine some of the most common neurodevelopmental and environmental disorders including autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS).
In the United States autism, once a rare condition (Goodman & Koduru, 2000), has increased from 4 – 5 per 10,000 children in the 1980’s to 30 – 60 pe | 
