AGE OF AUTISM

David Kirby On Vaccine Court Compensation and Autism

David Kirby writes about the EBCALA press conference at HuffPo. Please read and comment at  Autism and Vaccine Court Awards HERE.

David Kirby on Huffington Post: Government & Many Scientists Agree: Vaccine-Autism Research Should Continue

Please thank our good friend David Kirby by leaving a comment on this post at HuffPo: Government and Many Scientists Agree: Vaccine-Autism Research Should Continue Visit David's website Animal Factory The Book HERE.

David Kirby: The Vaccine-Autism Debate is Far From Over. It's Just Starting.

Read the entire entry at David's Animal Factory Site.  David notes (below) that the CDC has altered one of the pages - removing references to mercury and vaccines.

The vaccine-autism debate is far from over. If anything, it is just getting started.

As the following comments, funding decisions, research priorites and published papers suggest, the US government and many scientists will be researching and discussing this topic for years to come. Here are some reasons why:

I) FEDERAL HEALTH AGENCIES ENDORSE MORE RESEARCH

The federal government’s four leading health entitites dealing with vaccines and/or autism have all reached consensus: More vaccine safety research is required to fill gaps in knowledge, especially in the context of susceptible subpopulations, mitochondrial impairment, long-tern effects of vaccine-induced fever, seizures and brain injury, and other factors. Millions of dollars will be spent investigating these factors, and not because health officials somehow caved to parental pressure. Mercury in vaccines, for example, was designated as one of the CDC’s “high priority” vaccine safety issues, following an “extensive review of the literature, based on how strongly they seemed to be associated with ASD.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Office of Immunization Saftey

The CDC will study autism “as a possible clinical outcome of immunization” as part of its 5-year research plan. It will also study mitochondrial dysfunction and the risk for “post-vaccine neurological deterioration,” and will convene an expert panel on the feasibility of studying health outcomes, including autism, among vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Study to Explore Early Development

NOTE - THIS WEBPAGE WAS RECENTLY ALTERED BY CDC TO REMOVE REFERENCES TO VACCINES AND MERCURY - HERE IS THE ARCHIVED PAGE:

Archived CDC Page HERE

The CDC is currently looking at environmental, genetic and socioeconomic risk factors for ASD, including vaccines and mercury. “We chose to look at vaccines and other types of medical procedures that may have mercury exposure,” the CDC says. The agency “designated these factors as high priority” following “an extensive review of the literature, based on how strongly they seemed to be associated with ASD.” Selected mercury exposures include “vaccines that the mom received during pregnancy, the child’s vaccine exposures after birth and specific other factors such as RhoGAM treatment in pregnancy if the mom has developed an immune response against the fetus that can harm it.”

Read the entire entry at David's Animal Factory Site.

Win Dinner At Autism One Compliments of Dr. Amy Yasko & Autism Science Digest!

Thanks to the kindness of our colleagues at Holistic Health International, home of the Dr. Amy Yasko protocol, we have a new contest to share!  Holistic Health International is offering 10 additional AutismOne/Generation Rescue 2011 Dinner Gala & Awards Show tickets to new subscribers of Autism Science Digest who place a subscription order through April 30, 2011.  We will draw 10 names to receive a Gala ticket ($70 value) compliments of Dr. Amy.  This contest is retroactive to the first subscriber of Autism Science Digest.  Please read the wonderful article by Drs. Amy Yasko and Nancy Mullan in the April debut issue, "Methionine and Methylation: Chicken or the Egg."  Dr. Amy's seminar will be presented 1:45-6:00 on Saturday, May 28.  Please visit the HHI booth at the conference and Dr. Amy's website at www.holisticheal.com.  To subscribe, please visit Autism Science Digest.  One name will be drawn from among all Gala ticket winners for a $150 hotel credit toward the winner's hotel stay at the AutismOne/Generation Rescue 2011 Conference.  (Prizes are not transferrable for cash.)

 Subscribe and then dig in to the great articles and a delcious dinner! Good luck.

David Kirby: "My Travels with Elizabeth Taylor"

From our good friend David Kirby's blog. Read the full entry at  My Travels with Elizabeth Taylor HERE.

By David Kirby

On a warm June afternoon in 1991, about 800 members of the international press corps were fidgeting impatiently as they waited for Elizabeth Taylor to finally make her grand appearance at the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland. As National Chairwoman of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), she was to speak about the global AIDS crisis and AmFAR’s auction that night of three major works of art to support research.

As AmFAR’s public information director, I had played this scene many times before. We all knew that Elizabeth (NEVER call her “Liz,” I was admonished on my first day) was not exactly an on-time sort of gal. She knew we would wait, and we always did – happily.

On this particular occasion, the wait was getting uncomfortably long. The press conference had been called for 1:00PM. I begged our Swiss hosts not to begin on time. Instead, they started 15 minutes early. By 1:00PM, the other press conference participants had completed their statements.

There were no questions, just 800 reporters from all over the world glancing at their watches. We waited. The hall was stuffy. People complained. The Italians were indignant, the French were pouty. The Swiss were downright apoplectic.

But not a single grumbling reporter left that hall.

At around 1:20, I called over to the hotel. Sally Morrison, AmFAR’s point person for Elizabeth (and faithful friend and personal publicist for many years) picked up the phone.

“I’m afraid Elizabeth’s just now gotten out of the bath,” Sally said with her British accent. “It’s going to be a while.”

My heart sank into my stomach. I had witnessed Elizabeth’s extraordinary bath-to-motorcade process the day before. It was lengthy, though efficiently executed. I had watched in awe as Elizabeth sat wrapped in a towel at a small vanity brought into her Presidential Suite overlooking the roaring Rhine River. Her husband, Larry Fortensky, was watching CNN.

One person handled her magnificent chestnut mane; another applied makeup around those extraordinary eyes, which up close seemed to be more pale lilac than deep violet. As a third assistant began painting her nails, Elizabeth set down her Richard Burton diamond, a square ice cube, just inches from my face. You don’t forget these moments..

Read the full entry at  My Travels with Elizabeth Taylor HERE.

 

 

 

David Kirby in Discover Magazine:

Click Made in China: Our Toxic Imported Air Pollution to read the full story in Discover by David Kirby.

“There is no place called away.” It is a statement worthy of 
Gertrude Stein, but University of Washington atmospheric chemist 
Dan Jaffe says it with conviction: None of the contamination we pump into the air just disappears. It might get diluted, blended, or chemically transformed, but it has to go somewhere. And when it comes to pollutants produced by the booming economies of East Asia, that somewhere often means right here, the mainland of the United States.

Jaffe and a new breed of global air detectives are delivering a sobering message to policy makers everywhere: Carbon dioxide, the predominant driver of global warming, is not the only industrial by-product whose effects can be felt around the world. Prevailing winds across the Pacific are pushing thousands of tons of other contaminants—including mercury, sulfates, ozone, black carbon, and desert dust—over the ocean each year. Some of this atmospheric junk settles into the cold waters of the North Pacific, but much of it eventually merges 
with the global air pollution pool that circumnavigates the planet.

These contaminants are implicated in a long list of health problems, including neurodegenerative disease, cancer, emphysema, and perhaps even pandemics like avian flu. And when wind and weather conditions are right, they reach North America within days. Dust, ozone, and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins, and mercury can be pulled to earth through atmospheric sinks that deposit it across large swaths of land...

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David Kirby on HuffPo: CDC to Study Vaccines and Autism

Click HERE to read and comment on the full post.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants to study autism as a possible clinical outcome of immunization, as part of its newly adopted 5-year research agenda for vaccine safety, the agency said on its website.

The CDC will also study mitochondrial dysfunction and the potential risk for post-vaccine "neurological deterioration," and convene an expert panel on the feasibility of studying health outcomes such as autism among vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

The CDC move comes one month after the federal government's leading autism body, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) announced a shift in research priorities toward environmental triggers for autism, which the IACC said could include toxins, biological agents and "adverse events following immunization."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Immunization Safety Office Scientific Agenda indentified the need to research "Neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD)" as a possible clinical outcome of vaccination.

The plan also seeks to deternine if the mercury-based preservative thimerosal is associated with increased risk for "clinically important tics or Tourette syndrome." The CDC cited one study (Thompson, NEJM, 2007), which "found that increasing exposure to mercury from birth to age 7 months was associated with motor and phonic tics in boys," and added that "an association between exposure to thimerosal and tics was found in two earlier studies (Andrews, Pediatrics, 2004; Verstraeten, Pediatrics, 2003)."

And, noting that the IACC federal autism panel "suggested several studies including vaccinated versus unvaccinated children to determine if there are differences in health outcomes," the CDC said it will convene an "external expert committee to offer guidance on the feasibility of conducting such studies and additional studies related to the immunization schedule, including studies that may indicate if multiple vaccinations increase risk for immune system disorders."

Meanwhile, the IACC has signaled a major shift in research priorities into the causes of autism, moving away from purely genetic studies in favor of investigating the interaction between genes and environmental factors, which it said could include toxins, biological agents and vaccines.

Click HERE to read and comment on the full post.

David Kirby On The Autism Vaccine Debate: Why It Won't Go Away

David Kirby has a thought proviking post at HuffPO, Part 1 is up today, read and comment at HuffPo on  The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won't Go Away.

...The temporal association might be coincidental, but for many autism parents, now tens of thousands in number (but certainly not all parents), there is nothing to dissuade them: they are certain that vaccines harmed their kids. I have spoken with thousands of them personally. Their stories of regression are hauntingly similar, describing a childhood catastrophe that was virtually unheard of when I was growing up.

Age of Autism Awards 2010: Dr. Paul Offit, Denialist of the Decade

By Dan Olmsted 

Why bother to call attention to Dr. Paul Offit, the vaccine patent-holder who has led the attack on the idea that vaccines have anything to do with autism or any of the myriad of other ailments afflicting this generation of American children? Well, because other people are paying attention -- including the nation's pediatricians and the mainstream journalists who need to start calling him to account. Offit has a new book out -- "Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All." Here's the question doctors who recommend him to nervous parents, and parents unsure what to think, and journalists who interview him, need to ask: Why is Offit transparently opposed to ever studying the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated Americans, even as he acknowledges that vaccines have a long history of causing serious side effects?

While his last book, "Autism's False Prophets," focused squarely on the disability now afflicting 1 in 100 children, Offit branches out here to deride those who have any concerns whatsoever about the safety of the current vaccine schedule. There is plenty of sympathy for parents of children who have died of infectious diseases, but perfunctory dismissal in cases where parents blame vaccines. 

Thus Michael Belkin, whose daughter Lyla died after her hepatitis B shot, is treated as a gullible gadfly, goaded by Barbara Loe Fisher into heading "the Hepatitis B Vaccine Project at her National Vaccine information Center. Soon Belkin, a Wall Street financial adviser, was everywhere" -- everywhere being the CDC and Congress, which is exactly where he should have been as a citizen and parent who believes that Hep B is a dangerous and unnecessary childhood vaccine that killed his daughter. Sniffs Offit: "Despite Belkin's certainty that hepatitis B vaccine had caused his daughter's SIDS, study after study failed to support him."

Parents of girls who died after Gardasil vaccination get similar treatment. The idea that Gardasil is dangerous is "a contention refuted by careful study" and "established science." 

And chickenpox vaccines are critically important because chickenpox can lead to shingles, "one of medicine's most debilitating diseases. Shingles is so painful that it has at times led to suicide. And shingles doesn't only affect the skin; sometimes when the virus reawakens it causes strokes, resulting in permanent paralysis. Chickenpox is a disease worth preventing." Absent is any acknowledgement of the evidence that the vaccine itself, by reducing cases of simple childhood chickenpox, has led to a big increase in shingles by removing the protective immunological "bump" those who already harbor the virus receive when they are re-exposed.

Hannah Poling and the government's $20 million concession that vaccines resulted in her autistic regression? Not mentioned. Billions paid out by vaccine court for all sorts of injuries over the past 20 years? Well, vaccine court is a strange place ...

 

Anyone concerned about any of these things fits Offit's definition of anti-vaccine, because vaccines don't cause any of them, because Paul Offit says so, a solipsism that is really quite breathtaking: "[B]ecause anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots -- conditions that aren't caused by vaccines -- safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made."

Yet Offit himself yields an amazing amount of ground by describing unsafe vaccines -- including early polio shots and a rotavirus vaccine that was the immediate predecessor of his own. His technique is to situate all this as historical, part of the triumphant march of progress into the bright sunshine of vaccine safety. Here's a description I find especially astonishing: "When Barbara Loe Fisher burst onto the scene, several vaccines had serious side effects, every year causing allergic reactions, paralysis, or death. Public health officials and doctors didn't hide these problems. But they didn't do anything to correct them, either. And most parents had no idea they existed."

Public health officials did nothing to fix vaccine problems that led to paralysis and death? And parents didn't know about it? Is this not an indictment of the medical industry, and an unintentional endorsement advocates who have worked to remedy it?  Does it not argue that at least some of the time parental observations may well be correct, an early warning system of the first order? Well, no, because apparently those things no longer happen -- to say otherwise, in Offit's parallel universe, would be anti-vaccine conspiratorial quackery. 

Much of the book is a score-settling screed against anyone who's ever criticized him or vaccine safety surveillance, including Fisher, Jenny McCarthy and J.B. Handley. So it's no surprise that his "can't be done" argument against studying unvaccinated populations for any untoward outcomes arrives in the middle of an attack on Handley. Offit quotes J.B.'s comments on a Larry King segment in April 2009: "Larry, we have no idea what the combination risk of our vaccine schedule looks like. At the two-month visit, a child gets six vaccines in under fifteen minutes. The only way to test that properly would be to have a group of kids who get all six and a group of kids who got none and see what happens. They don't do that testing. They have no idea."

Offit's comment: "Handley was asking for a study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. One result is certain: given recent outbreaks of Hib, measles, mumps, and pertussis, no vaccinated children would suffer and possibly die from preventable infections. It would be, of course, an entirely unethical experiment. No investigator could prospectively study children who are denied a potentially lifesaving medical product. And no university's or hospital's institutional review board worth its salt would ever approve such a study." 

Offit goes on, outrageously, to compare Handley's proposal to the infamous Tuskegee experiment in which doctors withheld treatment from black males suffering from syphilis in order to study the natural course of the disease. 

P-LEEZE. No one I know of is suggesting that a study of unvaccinated children deliberately withhold vaccination. Rather, there are growing numbers of never-vaccinated children in America -- a fact Offit acknowledges with dismay -- and plenty of families willing to participate in such a study. State governments have vaccine waivers on file for public school attendance that are another obvious source of non-life-threatening data.

The real problem for Offit is not an ethical one; the real problem is that any such study would trump all the self-interested industry and CDC studies that never manage to include never-vaccinated chldren as a control group. Informal efforts to do that -- by myself, J.B.'s Generation Rescue and others -- have pointed toward less autism and asthma, and been met by the medical establishment and its sycophantic sock puppets with an absolute frenzy of denial and misdirection.

In our book, "The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic," Mark  Blaxill and I discuss this aversion to doing the obvious. "A very simple test goes right to the heart of the vaccine controversy: What is the difference in total health outcomes, including autism, between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations? We would argue that we've uncovered a number of natural experiments in human populations that suggest we should be seriously concerned over the ever-increasing load of childhood vaccinations, especially in the United States. ... Oddly, when it comes to doing such studies in human populations, and studying the autism levels in the Amish, the homeschooled, or philosophical objectors, vaccine industry proponents resist mightily. Conducting human vax/unvax studies in existing unvaccinated groups would be so fraught with methodological problems that they are 'retrospectively impossible.' As for controlled studies, they would be so burdened with permission problems that they would be 'prospectively unethical.' In short, the resistance to the proposal to do vax/unvax work has not only taken the attitude that 'we already know the answers,' but 'we should not seek to know.' It's pretty hard to make scientific progress in the face of this kind of epistemological nihilism."  

I am begging, on bended knee, that pediatricians quit putting Offit on a pedestal, and that mainstream journalists do their job and ask him why he is so averse to any study that involves the health of never-vaccinated children. Don't let him call you "anti-vaccine," and don't let him change the subject to the quite thoroughly separate issue of preventing deadly disease. That's an important topic, but there is room at the table for both effective public health policies against disease AND a fearless examination of whether today's vaccine schedule contributes to chronic health problems -- whether Paul Offit denies it or not.

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Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism

 

 

 

Live Town Hall "Autism Today and Beyond" with David Kirby & Many Others

Managing Editor's Note: This program runs on Monday 11/1.  David Kirby is live at 3:18pm EDT. Click HERE for full details on the live webcast and how to participate.

IMPLEMENTING SOLUTIONS for Autism Today and Beyond

The First in a Series of Live Interactive Video Webcasts, November 1, 2010 at 2PM ET

Find answers to the question, "Now that many of our little children with autism are reaching adulthood, what's next?"  Experts will assemble to address this issue.
 
The Facts: As of April 2010, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website reports that an average of one in 110 children are diagnosed with autism, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people who need information and services immediately.The Need: Autism rates exponentially increased since the mid-eighties, and thousands of families have a child with autism who are reaching adulthood without a comprehensive resource to help them make that transition. Autism Today and Beyond gives you the comprehensive resource and life guide you need to help your child make a smooth transition into adulthood.When you have questions about whether your child can work, go to college, live independently, date, get married, have children, be safe, have a secure financial future, or any one of a hundred others, the experts in this our webcasts will help you with important decisions on how to proceed. The goal is to help your child not only survive, but thrive in the real world.

The First in a Series of Live Interactive National Town Hall Video Webcasts, November 1, 2010 at 2PM EST