|
The Age of Autism
Dear Customers and
friends,
After two most
fascinating months in China and meeting extraordinary scientists
there, I am back in Australia. At a later stage I will write
about these scientists who are at home as much in Western
Science as they are in Traditional Chinese Science. It is their
wish to bring East and West together in harmony…for the benefit
of all and especially the benefit of all sick and suffering
people.
It is anticipated that
we are going to work together as soon as I am back in China in
about a month’s time. Then I will write more from ‘over there’.
In the meantime I would
like to share the following article on autism with you. I am
working on an improved formulation for the removal of metals and
will let you know when it will be available. The new formulation
will contain 84 minerals and will be classed as a food additive.
In the meantime I hope
you will enjoy the article.
Kind regards,
Hans
23.10.2007
The Age of Autism:
The last word
Published: July. 18, 2007 at 12:47 PM
Print story
Email to a friend
By
DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor
WASHINGTON, July. 18 (UPI) -- This is my 113th and final Age of
Autism column. United Press International, which has been the
hospitable home for this series, is restructuring, and I'm off
to adventures as yet unknown -- although I intend to keep my
focus on autism and related issues.
Why? Because it is the story of a lifetime.
"Autism is currently, in our view, the most important and the
fastest-evolving disorder in all of medical science and promises
to remain so for the foreseeable future," says Dr. Jeffrey A.
Lieberman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Columbia
University's school of medicine.
Most mainstream experts believe autism is a genetic disorder
that's "increasing" only because of more sophisticated
diagnoses. But based on my own reporting, I think autism is
soaring due to environmental factors -- in the sense of
something coming from the outside in -- and that genes play a
mostly secondary role, perhaps creating a susceptibility to
toxic exposures in certain children. As the saying goes: Genes
load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.
So to me, the issues autism raises -- about the health and
well-being of this and future generations, about the role that
planetary pollution, chemical inventions and medical
interventions may have inadvertently played in triggering it --
are so fundamental that by looking at autism, we're looking very
deeply into the kind of world we want to inhabit and our
children to inherit.
It is impossible to summarize all the issues I've raised in my
columns, but to me, four stand out:
-- The first question I asked when I started looking at autism
in late 2004 was this: What is the autism rate among
never-vaccinated American children? Vaccines are the leading
"environmental" suspect for many families of autistic children.
So I was stunned to learn that such a study had never been done,
given that it could quickly lay to rest concerns that public
health authorities say are dangerously undermining confidence in
childhood immunizations.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., introduced -- and just
reintroduced -- a bill to force the Department of Health and
Human Services to do just that (generously crediting this column
for finding enough never-vaccinated children to show that such a
study is indeed feasible). She calls it "common sense," and it
is an example of ordinary people -- through their
representatives -- telling the experts they want better answers,
and fast.
Recently, such a study was in fact done with private funds. It
was a $200,000 telephone survey commissioned by the advocacy
group Generation Rescue that, as limited as it is
scientifically, suggested a disturbing trend: Higher rates of
autism in vaccinated vs. never-vaccinated U.S. children, along
with similar ratios for other neurodevelopmental disorders like
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
I reported the same possible association in the Amish community.
That's been criticized as inherently unscientific and undercut
by the fact that Amish genes may differ from the rest of us and
that increasingly, the Amish do receive at least some
vaccinations.
All true, but intriguing nonetheless. I also found a family
medical practice in Chicago called Homefirst that has thousands
of never-vaccinated children as patients. According to its
medical director, Mayer Eisenstein, he's aware of only one case
of autism and one case of asthma among those kids -- not the 1
in 150 and 1 in 10 that are the national averages for those
disorders -- and he has the medical records to prove it.
I wrote about that in 2005, yet when I met again with Mayer in
Chicago last week, he told me not one public health official or
medical association has contacted him to express any interest.
Nor has any other journalist -- not a one.
-- That brings me to my second theme. I am sorry to say my
colleagues in the mainstream journalistic community have, in the
main, done a lousy job covering this issue. They, of course,
would disagree -- two were quoted (anonymously!) in the Columbia
Journalism Review saying, "Olmsted has made up his mind on the
question and is reporting the facts that support his
conclusions."
Actually, my mind is made up about only one thing: Both
vaccinations and autism are so important that definitive,
independent research needs to be done yesterday -- and the fact
that it hasn't should be making more journalists suspicious.
I think Big Media's performance on this issue is on a dismal par
with its record leading up to the Iraq war, when for the most
part it failed to probe deeply into the intelligence about
weapons of mass destruction and the assertions about Saddam
Hussein's link to al-Qaida. And it's bad for the same reasons --
excessive reliance on "authorities" with obvious conflicts of
interest; uncritical enlistment in the "war on terror" and "the
war on disease" without considering collateral damage or adverse
events; a stenographic and superficial approach to covering the
news, and an at-least-semiconscious fear of professional
reprisal.
In the case of Iraq, that fear included being cut off -- like my
exemplary fellow ex-Unipresser Helen Thomas -- from precious
"inside sources" in the government; in the case of autism, fear
of alienating advertisers lurks silently in the background.
To see how squeamish and slow-on-the-uptake the media can be in
the face of an urgent health crisis, look no further than the
early days of AIDS, as chronicled in Randy Shilts' "And the Band
Played On."
-- Another angle I explored intensively involved a group of
families in Olympia, Wash., who noticed their children
regressing into autism after getting four live-virus vaccines --
mumps, measles, rubella (MMR) and chickenpox -- at an early age
and in close temporal proximity. These cases seemed to have
little or nothing to do with the mercury preservative in other
vaccines, called thimerosal, that many parents blame for autism
(it was phased out of most routine immunizations starting in
1999).
That raises an ominous prospect: The still-rising autism rate
might be related to some other aspect of the immunization
schedule as well -- timing, age, total load or other
ingredients. (I didn't invent that idea; the head of an expert
panel mandated by Congress expressed it to me in an interview --
and again, her comments were largely ignored.)
One focus of that seven-part Pox series last year was a case of
autism following a small clinical trial of a new vaccine called
ProQuad, which contains the live-but-weakened MMR and chickenpox
viruses in one shot. The chickenpox virus in ProQuad is about 10
times the amount in the standalone chickenpox shot, a boost
needed to overcome "interference" among the four viruses (and a
possible sign of trouble right there). Manufacturer Merck says
the vaccine is safe and not related to autism.
Earlier this year the company announced it was suspending
production of ProQuad -- barely a year after its introduction --
because supplies of chickenpox vaccine had run unexpectedly low.
The company, however, will keep producing its other products
containing chickenpox virus: the standalone chickenpox shot and
a new vaccine for shingles.
A Merck spokesman told me the suspension of ProQuad had nothing
to do with any safety concerns, that it had been selling well
and would be reintroduced as soon as chickenpox vaccine supplies
were replenished. As I've written before, I found Merck to be
quite accessible and forthcoming when I asked questions about
this issue -- much more so than the Food and Drug
Administration, in fact.
So I take Merck at its word. But -- in the spirit of
trust-but-verify -- I'll be watching for the return of ProQuad.
-- The Age of Autism columns that may mean the most over time
(IMHO, of course) are about the first cases of autism, reported
in 1943 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore among 11
children born in the United States in the 1930s.
With crucial observations from Mark Blaxill of the advocacy
group SafeMinds, I've suggested a pattern in some of those early
cases: exposure, through the father's occupation, to ethyl
mercury in fungicides. That's the same kind of mercury used in
vaccines, and both were introduced commercially around 1930,
right when those first autism cases were identified.
This is only a hypothesis, and critics have suggested it is a
classic case not of connecting the dots, but of finding what I
went looking for. That may be, but put yourself in my place when
-- more than a year after publicly proposing the mercury
fungicide idea in a column -- I identified the family of
autism's Case 2 and located an extensive archive for the father,
a distinguished scientist.
I sat down in the North Carolina State University library and
opened the first box, took out the first folder and opened it to
the first page. It was a yellowed, typewritten paper from spring
1922 summarizing a fungicide experiment the father conducted as
a grad student in plant pathology -- an experiment in which
mercury was the main ingredient (and in the title). By the time
his son was born in 1936, he was working with the new generation
of ethyl mercury fungicides -- yes, the kind used in vaccines.
Though others will disagree, I find that just a bit outside the
parameters of chance, given the timeline of the disorder and the
independent belief of so many of today's parents that the same
kind of mercury, in a totally different context, triggered their
children's autism.
It also suggests that whatever is causing autism could be coming
at us from several directions -- our increasingly mercury-toxic
environment as well as any medical interventions that may be
implicated. Check out "Mercury Link to Case 2" in the series to
get the full picture.
So thanks to UPI for supporting this work. And thanks for
reading, responding to -- and critiquing -- this column. Truth
is, you haven't heard the last word from me. Not by a long shot.
--
(The entire Age of Autism series is available at upi.com under
Special Reports.)
--
(e-mail: olmsted.dan@gmail.com)
|
The science and philosophy of
harmonization. Helping to bring back the balance between nature
and man.
