This is a little buddy of mine that I took care of a few weeks ago. I bought him at the Soup Kitchen and he worked there for a while. I just wanted to give him an eye opener on the real world!
His brother is sadly Autistic.
I do understand only certain issues will be debated in great length in this blog!
But my question is this????
How come we have so many Autistic cases during the last 20 years in New Brunswick? What should be done with these kids? What would do the proper way to educate these poor souls???
45 comments:
Good questions Charles. Something is causing the proliferation of autism and ADHD. I don't have an asnwer. However there's also another category you didn't mention and that's behavioural problems in kids which is also exploding and this, much to the chagrin of some here, I do have two cents on.
Back in the 50's mom stayed at home with the kids generally. When the moms started going to work, the kids went into daycares. The number of sexual and physical assaults against kids has gone through the roof since that time. Why? Because strangers are looking after the kids and the level of risk is raised. Divorce has also exploded and more and more kids don't live with their mom and dad. Am I saying women should get back in the kitchen? Not at all. But having children is a responsability and Mom or Dad should make every effort to be at home with the kids particularly when they're young. That's what I find so intriguing with this multi-billion dollar daycare plan of the feds. A few provinces including NB wanted the money to be split between daycares and parents who decided to be home with their kids to make it easier on parents. A token sum but an interesting gesture considering half the kids in NB do stay at home with a parent unlike Ontario. The feds said no. Too bad. More should be done to make it possible for parents to stay at home. We'd probably have fewer behavioural problems in children who were raised by their loving parents and not strangers. In many households (these are the cases which would most benefit from the feds plan)both parents don't HAVE to work, they WANT to work so they can have two new vehicles, a big house and a luxury vacation. They do so at the peril of their children who would likely rather have Mommy or Daddy at home instead of an XBOX. There's your major contributor if not almost the sole contributor to behavioural problems which can't be attributed to ADHD or autism.
Hey Spinks! You are good at blame game. Now blame the parents.
I heard it is environment which is causing autism. Early inoculation of babies, mercury in it, is contributing too. If something is not done there will be even a greater epidemic,
Let me start by saying to Spinks...get a grip and facts before you start spouting about having mothers stay st home. You sound like Kanner back in the 60's....he gave us the "refriderator mother" theory. Boy, was he wrong....you sound like him! If you had even two clues about autism, you would soon realize you are wrong. Autism is at very prevalent, autism was always around but the diagnosis is better. So is the treatment for it called Applied Behavioral Ananysis. It works and works well. It takes a dedicted and trained professional team.....but it also takes parents that will work equally hard at home. As autism doesn't just exist between 9-5 Monday to Friday. Parents of autistics are some of the most dedicated around!! Some of us work to pay for the treatment, as it is not covered by Medicare. I
t costs tens of thousands of dollars every year, and that is just for the team of interventionists and professionals. Alot of us parents carry on at home with the treatment. Our son will not be totally reliant on the social system when he reaches adulthood....he will be employable, and quite independent with his care.
So don't blame the parents...we are working hard for our children. We don't want or have the big house or cars in the yard...we are working to give our autistic children treatment. I suggest you learn awhole lot more about autism. The Autism Society of New Brunswick would be a good place to start.
i agree with Spinks on VLTs, but i'm not sold on his opinions on this.
First, I don't accept Charles' starting proposition, that there's more autism now than say 40 years ago. Not Spinks' assertion there's more behavioural problems among childre. I don't see the data, frankly.
And even if there was data, I think it's much more likely that these things are diagnosed/offically recorded more now than in the past. That doesn't mean there's more autism, or more behavioral problems, only that professionals and society have become more aware of these phenomena and diagnoses are more likely because of this.
To be clear: MAYbe these things are up, and maybe they're not. We don't know.
Assuming there is more autism, though, I'm at a loss to explain it. The best theory seems to be environmental causes.
As for behavioral challenges, I reject Spinks' theory completely. ALL the data out there attests to the benefits for children, in the short and long terms, of licenced day care. It is simply false to assert these children are not being served well by their parents or their daytime caregivers. Their intellectual development accellerates, and their social skills improve immensely -- NOT if they're left somewhere to rot in front of a tv, whether home or babysitter or daycare, but in licenced daycare. That's why the federal initiative is so important, and the Premier's game is so wrong-headed.
And reports of abuse against children HAVE gone up since the good ol' 50s, but again, that doesn't mean abuse has gone up. It means awareness has been raised, and children are more likely to talk about abuse. And our society has become much less likely to treat authority figures like teachers, priests and police officers as gods, so formal complaints and charges are much more likely to be pursued in 2005 than in 1955.
Except those struggling with poverty, parents DO have choices about work vs. at-home parenting. Unless they can't find quality childcare, in which case their choices are limited. Choice is a good thing.
And, financial security is a good thing. It's good for children, and mothers, if mom has a career as well as dad. It's added financial "room" in the short term, and it's a cushion in case dad is lost to premature death or in case the marriage, like about 50% of all mariages, ends in separation/divorce.
I am sorry but Spinks argument stinks. He is way off base.Blaming the parents. Before he attacks other parents he should state clearly: does he work? does his wife work? are his children spoiled?
I agree with above comment that proper day care is best place for children to be.
Autism cases have gone up because of better diagnoses and I heard for enviromental reasons too.
Spinks problem is that he has to give his opinion even if he does not know anything about the issues under discussion. NO sensitivity especially in the case of autism. Then he has all these brilliant questions that no one knows the answer. He is the only genius who might know the answers. My god does he repeat himself and contradict himself.
This is the reason that I decided to put this issue on the front burner because there's many people who are not educated on the issue of Autism. Robert Kennedy Jr was on the Daily Show last week and he claims that it was the mercury that was in the vaccine that cause this epidemic, The scary thing thing is that the big drug company didn't stop because they doing the same thing in China. It's just big drug compagnies making Billions of dollars and they won't admit they made a huge mistake!!!!
I'm very sorry...server wasn't running right!!!!
Yes Charles you made your point but how many times over. I think you are right about drug companies. It applies to Ritalin too. They know the dangers and yet they keep on giving to the kids. Of course Lord Government collects taxes from sale so it is not going to stop it or even study the problem.
Hmmm, I guess I wasn't clear enough. There seems to be confusion over autism, ADHD and behavioural problems. I'm referring to specifically behavioural problems undiagnosed as autism or ADHD. Kids belong ideally with their parents. Do we as society really want government raising our kids? That and unprecedented rates of divorce are having an impact on our kids. This is a touchy subject because society has everyone convinced that you can have it all, the big house, the new Lexus, the nice vacation, a fast-paced career and a family. You can but there's a price to pay and the kids are paying it. Go to any classroom and in the majority of cases, the children exhibiting behavioural problems come from broken homes or ones where both parents work. Unfortunately the solution is to drug them instead of getting to the root of the problem. Few people want to recognize this because it takes a major shift in thinking. Glad to see the subject raised though.
My apologies to the family dealing with autism. I am familiar with the problem far closer than I would like and meant no disrespect. My point was non-autism, non adhd behaviour problems.
"Before he attacks other parents he should state clearly: does he work? does his wife work? are his children spoiled?"
As someone said that above. Answer those questions,Spinks.
I've learned in a past Blog that most here don't want to make this personal and merely want to discuss the issues. I agree with that assertion.
I deleted the repeated comments!!!
A few interesting books on the subject if anyone's interested. US Senator Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family and Bernard Goldberg, former CBC correspondent devotes a chapter to it in Bias. Agree or disagree, both books raise some interesting questions on the subject and point to a few studies done in the U.S, I don't expect the Canadians Government has ever conducted a study although they might have.
Sorry, the above should read Bernard Goldberg, former CBS correspondent.
Spinks, I do not think the comments of the person above is about being personal other than knowing what is your experience with children. If you do not have any experience then rest is baloney. Do you have autistic child or experience with autistic child? If not then rest of it is baloney. I go along with other parents who did not hesitate to tell you that they do have autistic children and how annoying your insensitivity is. Read the comments above if you can read at all.
You have blinkers on and you see nothing else but your own misguided views.
It is very insensitive to blame parents for some behaviour problems of children. With all the toxins in the environment may be children have bio-chemical problem. What that has to do with parents working or day care?
Spinks says: "Do we as society really want government raising our kids? That and unprecedented rates of divorce are having an impact on our kids."
I'm not sure if this line of argument is uninformed or not completely honest. No one advocates "government raising our kids". Not even the government. All involved agree that parents should raise their kids. Those of us who advocate for expanded access to licenced daycare do not advocate daycares displacing parents, we like them as the best option for childcare assistance to parents who choose or need to work.
And, licenced daycares are not "government". They are private enterprises, some for profit and some not. All strictly regulated by government, as they should be, considering the importance of their undertakings. We need more spaces because there's a shortage. The high costs of offering licenced childcare make it a cost-prohibitive option for parents.
Some of those parents are dual-parent families, some are not.
So, government is not raising our kids, therefore government raising our kids is not "having an impact on our kids".
Divorce has an impact on kids, no question. Sometimes the impact is positive, and often it's negative.
There are myriad factors in the rising divorce rate. I don't believe autistic children are among those factors.
I agree with 1:14 pm comments. Spinks makes sweeping generalizations which make no sense.
Daycare are great for proper upbringing of children if they are properly run, private or public. No one said that parents should abdicate their responsibility and usually they do not.
Published on Thursday, June 16, 2005 by Salon.com
Deadly Immunity
When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data -- and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.
The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.
Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."
But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line.
"We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study "should not have been done at all" and warned that the results "will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled."
In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.
Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to 11-year-olds.
The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.
Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."
The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical. I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until we know the facts?"
It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children." More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.
Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis -- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. "If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the 20-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.
What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children's vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.
"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. "It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage."
Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours." Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs."
In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, 10 babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.
In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.
The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."
For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.
As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"
But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.
Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisors, told me, "I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next 20 years, because we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials."
But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.
Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."
Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it works."
Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. "Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists."
Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines.
If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.
For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. "We've got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. "The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge."
Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.
In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and -- in a startling position for a scientific body -- recommended that no further research be conducted.
The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research." CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?"
Under pressure from Congress, parents and a few of its own panel members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.
So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be-published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.
As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments -- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received their vaccines.
At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa Legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in 32 other states.
But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review."
I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. "The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen." It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them sincere, even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is the co-author of "The Riverkeepers."
© 2005 Salon.com
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1:34 here....explain that comment coward.....maybe I'm a daughter not a son. If the soup kitchen was the real world...there would be no soup kitchen. You constantly crap on the people who work hard, pay taxes, donate, and volunteer to take care of you and the rest in the "REAL" world.
Charlie! This Robert Kennedy article is very good but you did not need to publish the whole book.
I deleted the comments about the real world at the soup kitchen. This blog is for the issue of Autism!
Once again. I'm not speaking about autism but behavioural problems. I suspect things we do in the environment affect our health. I suspect social changes have an effect on society sometime way down the road. Just my theory. It is a sensitive issue which is why you rarely hear anyone say Mom or Dad should raise their own kids. Good discussion on the issue though.
Broken record has begun again. This time "Mom and Dad" should raise the kids. Of course they do but day care has role to play too and there is nothing wrong with both Mom and Dad working if they are trying to survive financially, have food on the table and pay the bills. That is where day care are needed. Moreover, a child learns from his/her peers. Why Spinks assumes that daycare teach bad behaviour and mother should stay at home?
What is wrong providing good home to kids than living in a rental property where kids may have less freedom.
Does Spink practice what he preeches?
Be careful using Rick Santorum as a source of anything other than intolerance and religious radicalism - his book "It Takes a Family" is being widely panned as more right-wing rhetoric. Seems to me that Jon Stewart gave him quite an intellectual spanking a couple of nights ago. Anyone care to comment on the book? I'm about half-way through the book (online) at this point (can't rail against something I haven't read) and find it to be REALLY reaching to make anything close to coherent arguments.
After reading your comments about Rick Santorum's book and right wing stuff who wants to waste time on it. No sense reading such stuff. World has changed around these guys but they want to hang on to the past.
After reading Spinks' thoughts I surfed around this site. It looks Spinks has expressed his views on every issue all over the place. If he is spending so much time on the net then who is looking after his children if he has any. When does he work?
Review from a reader of the book sums up the discussion we're having pretty well. Kids ideally belong with their parents. It's not always possible and other arrangements can and do work but it's the ideal.
Here's the review..
"I understand that conservatives love the Senator and the liberals hate him, believing him to be the devil himself (if they believed in a devil that is). If emotions are left out of it, what we have left is an excellent read. The ideas presented are solid and sound. If you listen to the hate spewing from the mouths of the liberals one would think that it is a great idea for all children to grow up without parents. If you listen to the conservatives one would think that the only way to have a successful family is to have mom stay at home. The later would obviously be ideal and what mother, given a choice, would spend less time with her children to further her own career or make more money, sacrificing the welfare of her children to 'get ahead?' My mother worked and my wife works and my seven brothers and sisters turned out quite well as have my three grown and married children. I wish, my wife wishes, and my recently deceased mother wished that they could have stayed home more with the children. I know I missed my mother on many occasions and would have loved to have had her help or input. There is no ideal or perfect family ... but what would it hurt if we at least tried. This reviewer, trying to leave the emotions out of it, believes that the ideas in this book will make your family better when applied properly. Neither God nor the devil wrote this book. But truth is found in it"
The intolerant comment earlier is quite interesting. The word intolerance is often used by liberals to attack their enemies and paint them in a bad light. I'll use religion as an example since we've already talked politics which is the other taboo subject. I accept everyone's right to choose their own religion but I don't agree with every religion. A liberal would say I'm intolerant. I would argue if you're accepting of everything (tolerant), you effectively believe in nothing. I would suspect it's pretty hard to find someone tolerant of everything.
Spinks you say Mom and Dad should bring up the children. You do not practice that. Do you? As another one said above that you spend all your time on the net. So is it your wife who is slaving away or are your children with a baby sitter?
Since you worry so much about others' children we are worried about yours.
I know lot of conservatives and no one is as big a nutcase as you are.
Am I missing something here? Spinks, correct me if I'm wrong but all you're saying is that ideally kids should have one of their parents at home. What the heck is wrong with that? The rest of you need to get a life.
And that parent is Woman because the MAN got to earn the living. Snap off. World has passed you by.
Finally, well except for the get a life part. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Yes my 1:22 friend, you got it.
Spinks, I hope you get it too. Get a life.
Buddy, I think it's clear from the posts who needs to get a life and it isn't Spinks. Let the guy have an opinion you wuss.
Stincts has an opinion???????
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