AGE OF AUTISM

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.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism

 

 

 

Cold, Snow and a Warm Welcome in Minneapolis

From Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill: The Age of Autism Book Tour beat the snow (barely) into Minnesota this past weekend. We were hosted by a vibrant autism community -- many thanks to Patti Carroll and everyone else who worked so hard to make it happen. In addition to a talk Saturday at the University of Minnesota's St. Paul Campus, we did a video interview with Craig Evans of autismhangout.com, a terrific Web site. It may be the only interview we've ever done in a bowling alley (in the student union -- no bowling was happening). HERE
 
On Thursday, 12/9 Dan will speak and sign books at a TACA event in Richmond, Va. See our book website for details. We've been tremendously energized and encouraged by the enthusiasm and shared commitment we've found all along the way. Our book tour picks up after the first of the year. First stop: Houston on January 15. Stay tuned, and see you on the road.

 

Autism From a Flu Shot? The Ominous Clue From Kanner's Autism Case #7

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
 
Seventy-three years ago, Elizabeth Peabody Trevett, a pediatrician and pioneer in promoting mass vaccination for infants, gave birth to a boy named John who became the seventh child ever diagnosed with autism. She presumably vaccinated her baby, and perhaps herself while pregnant, with the same shots she administered to her own patients. One of those shots, the newly developed diphtheria toxoid, was the first to contain the ethyl mercury preservative, thimerosal.
 
Today, pediatricians and public health officials scoff at concerns that thimerosal, still used today in most flu shots recommended for all pregnant women and infants older than 6 months, could cause autism. But after researching our new book, "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic," we are much less sanguine about such an outcome.
 
Our conclusion: The facts of Case 7 fit with a common familial background exposure in the first cases to newly commercialized ethyl mercury compounds in agriculture and vaccines. They suggest children, then as now, are at risk from the dangerous and indefensible practice of injecting them with mercury for the stated purpose of protecting their health.
--
 
Elizabeth Peabody Trevett graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School and won a fellowship to Harvard where she was one of seven pediatricians who pioneered the well-baby visit – at which vaccines are routinely administered. Her son John was born in November 1937. She subsequently divorced her husband, psychiatrist Laurence Trevett, and resumed using her maiden name, Peabody.
 
A few years later, back in Maryland, she was quoted about the importance of vaccination in an Annapolis newspaper article: “Too many parents, said Dr. Peabody, have the proper shots given and then relax, forgetting that booster shots are needed and that immunization does wear off. Speaking specifically of some of the most prevalent ailments, she stated that a child cannot be vaccinated against smallpox too often and it should be done for the first time when a baby is between three months and one year of age. In the case of diphtheria, booster shots are extremely important.”
 
Diphtheria was the first mass vaccine to contain thimerosal, starting in the 1930s just as the first autism cases were identified. It would have been widely available at a teaching hospital like Harvard at the time John was born.

Following her passion for public health, Elizabeth Peabody later set up a well-baby clinic in Iraq, again emphasizing the importance of vaccinating thousands of babies, and then joined the Public Health Service in Atlanta as a regional administrator for children’s health programs.
 
 As flu season kicks into high gear this year in the United States, infants, pregnant women and nursing mothers are among the millions of Americans whom public health officials are urging with unprecedented fervor to get a flu shot. Because most flu shots contain mercury, and because the CDC has declined to express a preference for giving these groups a mercury-free version, this means millions of the most vulnerable among us are getting a significant dose of the dangerous neurotoxin – some at grocery stores and airports and retailers, some without even having to get out of their car. Tracking short-term, localized and mild adverse reactions would seem difficult, and following up on any associations with the onset of chronic or delayed outcomes like autism all but impossible.

Interviews and Tour Plans for Blaxill and Olmsted's The Age of Autism Book

From Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill: Our efforts to spread the evidence about "The Age of Autism" are continuing. Dan Olmsted recently spoke with Dan Burns from The Dallas Morning News blog here HERE and with KNEWS 94.3 in California here (HERE). We'll be in Minneapolis-St. Paul next Saturday (See HERE), and plans are shaping up for visits to Dallas just after the New Year, Missouri in February, Los Angeles in March, Illinois and Indiana in May, and other points in between. Stay tuned, and see you on the road!

Dan Burns Interviews Dan Olmsted on New Book on Mercury in Medicine

Dan Burns, author of Saving Ben, interviewed Dan Olmsted about the new book he co-authored with Mark Blaxill, The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic at the Dallas New blog. Here's the beginning of the interview, please pop over to Dan's blog to read and comment on the full post. Dallas News Blog Full Interview

Dan Olmsted, an investigative reporter, left his job as a senior editor for United Press International (UPI) to pursue what he called "the story of the century." After a five-year journey with co-author Mark Blaxill (statistician, business consultant, and father of a child with autism), Olmsted and Blaxill recently released The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, a devastating account, in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s words, "that shows how medical and manufacturing interests have mounted an assault on human health for decades and covered their tracks along the way."

I talked to Dan Olmsted about their journey.

Burns: What makes autism the story of the 21st century?

Olmsted: Children are the future. Autism is epidemic among this generation: one child in one hundred, up 50% in less than ten years. While treatable, and sometimes reversible, most kids with autism will grow up to be adults on the autism spectrum. This epidemic is eating away at our society from the inside. It's a national security issue. Outside of a nuclear weapon detonated in a major city, what could be more important?

Burns: How has this been a journey of discovery for you?

Olmsted: The deeper we dug, the bigger the issues. We went to the source material, the eleven sentinel cases in Leo Kanner's 1943 Nervous Child journal article, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact," and looked at them with fresh eyes. Out jumped several eye poppers, never recognized as relevant that ended up shaping the book: familial exposure to the same toxic substance.

Burns: And those are the clusters you write about in the book. What are they?

First, forestry and plant pathology. Case one is from a small lumber town called Forest. Case two is the son of a plant pathologist. Case three is the son of a forestry professor. Forest, plants, forest. Interesting.

I put that pattern to Mark, who asked, "Could these cases could be driven by exposure to the new organic mercury fungicides used in forestry and agriculture?" Yes, they could. And ethyl mercury, the kind of mercury used in fungicides, is the same kind that was used in vaccinations. That was an unexpected, jaw dropping discovery.

Burns: Any other surprises?

Olmsted: Syphilis. As we poured over the source material, it looked like the worst form of syphilis - neurosyphilis, which results in paralysis, insanity, and death - was caused by the medicine that was used to treat it: mercury.

We went back into those early studies, including the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study from the 1930s, when the U.S. Public Health Service deliberately withheld treatment from black Americans so they could study them as they went insane and died. Those who were not treated with mercury stayed healthier longer and did not go insane. Interesting.

That led us to a third surprise. Sigmund Freud observed that most of the young adults that he treated for hysteria were women whose fathers had syphilis. He didn't know what to make of it. He also observed that nursing was among the most common occupation of hysteria patients.

Today we can make the connection that Freud missed. After treating their syphilitic fathers with mercury rubs, these young adults developed paralysis, seizures, and hallucinations - symptoms now shockingly obvious as signs of mercury poisoning.

 Dallas News Blog Full Interview

Chantal Sicile-Kira on Thanksgiving at Huffington Post

From our friend  Chantal Sicile-Kira. Check out the fun slide show there. Please leave a comment at Huffington Post. 

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Ten days ago, I attended the National Autism Association's (NAA) annual conference in Florida and was thrilled to be able to spend a little time with so many autism parents, advocates and other authors. I have been trying to find the time to sit down and write proper reviews for two important and recently published books. However, I have been more time-challenged than usual as I am 'negotiating' with the powers that be here in San Diego for the supports needed as my 21-year-old son with autism transitions into adult services. (Parents of younger children, if you feel you have it tough right now dealing with the school district or systems in place: you haven't a clue. It only gets worse unless you own two homes -- one for you, and one for your child when he turns 18. Helpful coping strategies for parents of teens may include the three V's: Vodka, Valium and Vacation, but I digress).

Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-Made Epidemic (HERE) by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill is a critical book for all humans to read -- not just those interested in autism. Most would agree that environmental health is a concern to all of us and impacts everyone's daily life. You'd have to have your head stuck in the sand (hopefully not on the Texas Gulf Coast) to believe otherwise. This book explains how, as Robert K. Kennedy Jr. puts it, "medical and manufacturing interests have mounted an assault on human health."

All I Can Handle -- I'm No Mother Teresa: A Life Raising Three Daughters With Autism (HERE) by Kim Stagliano is also a relevant read. Stagliano's personal account of raising children on the spectrum will make you alternately laugh and weep, and more importantly gives the reader an insight as to how profoundly autism changes families. All community members should read this book -- because Kim's daughters have the same needs that many of our children do in the autism community, and this is another environmental and monetary impact you won't be able to escape. Gianna, Bella, Mia are here, and they are not going away, Neither are the Jeremys, the Ians, the Sams, and the Blazes.

The autism community is often divided on what it believes autism is or is not, what does or does not cause autism, whether autism is a form of neurodiversity or not, and so on. As for me, I believe that autism is best described with the Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant. Six blind men feel a different part of the elephant, and thus each have their own opinion about what the elephant is, based on their examination and interpretation of the part of the elephant they are exploring. The autism community has it's differing opinions, because all of our perceptions and experiences are a part of the mystery that is autism: we share a similar label but our personal stories, perceptions, beliefs, and truths are different. And this needs to be respected. However, I believe that there cannot be any arguments to the fact that we are polluting our environment, our health, our elderly relatives' health, and our children's health in many different ways, and the world has got to start paying attention to this very real fact.

As Thanksgiving looms, I am grateful for all the people I have met on this autism journey -- regardless of which part of the elephant they are feeling and interpreting. We each have our own truths. Our beliefs may be different, but our goals are the same: a happy, healthy, love-filled and productive life -- as independent and self-determined as possible.

Happy Thanksgiving, and may your blessings be many.

 

Winner: Signed Copy The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic

Congrats to Susan in TX who has won a signed copy of Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted's The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic.

Also, Google Books has posted the Foreward, Introduction and part of Chapter One of "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic." Read what David Kirby says about it, how we came developed our ideas and discoveries, and why The Age of Syphilis is where it all began. Then buy the book and share the evidence with people who can help us bring The Age of Autism to an end. Click HERE to begin reading. Good luck in the contest!

Read an Excerpt and Win A Signed Copy of The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic

Win a signed copy of Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted's The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic by leaving a comment on this post. Make sure you fill in the email field with your proper email address.

Also, Google Books has posted the Foreward, Introduction and part of Chapter One of "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic." Read what David Kirby says about it, how we came developed our ideas and discoveries, and why The Age of Syphilis is where it all began. Then buy the book and share the evidence with people who can help us bring The Age of Autism to an end. Click HERE to begin reading. Good luck in the contest!

Meet The Age of Autism's Mark Blaxill & Dan Olmsted At the NAA Conference

Managing Editor's Note: Mark your calendars for The NAA Conference in St. Pete  this weekend to meet Dan and Mark. They'll be in Minnesota in December. See below for details. From their website:

A groundbreaking book, THE AGE OF AUTISM explores how mankind has unwittingly poisoned itself for half a millennium.

For centuries, medicine has made reckless use of one of earth's most toxic substances: mercury—and the consequences, often invisible or ignored, continue to be tragic. Today, background pollution levels, including global emissions of mercury as well as other toxicants, make us all more vulnerable to its effects. From the worst cases of syphilis to Sigmund Freud's first cases of hysteria, from baffling new disorders in 19th century Britain to the modern scourge of autism, THE AGE OF AUTISM traces the long overlooked history of mercury poisoning.

Now, for the first time, authors Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill uncover that history. Within this context, they present startling findings: investigating the first cases of autism diagnosed in the 1940s revealed an unsuspected link to a new form of mercury in seed disinfectants, lumber fungicides and vaccines. In the tradition of Silent Spring and An Inconvenient Truth, Olmsted and Blaxill demonstrate with clarity how chemical and environmental clues may have been missed as medical "experts," many of them blinded by decades of systemic bias, instead placed blamed on parental behavior or children's biology. By exposing the roots and rise of The Age of Autism, this book attempts to point the way out – to a safer future for our children and the planet.

November 13
Tampa, FL
National Autism Association (NAA) Conference
All day event
Trade Winds Island Gulf Resort
5600 Gulf Blvd.
St. Pete Beach, FL 33706

December 4th
St. Paul, MN
Parents United Against Autism
1:00 pmUniversity of Minnesota--St. Paul Student Center Theater2017 Buford Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55108
 
 

Two Great Interviews for The Age of Autism with Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Wade Rankin

Here's a video interview with Mark conducted by Andy Wakefield that delves deeply into the issues the book raises for the medical community: Autism File Interview HERE .

In addition, Wade Rankin interviewed Dan and Mark on Autism One Radio, listen HERE.

Please share with colleagues, friends and family alike. Learn more nad purchase the book HERE.

The Age of Autism Book Tour Heads SouthEast

From Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill: We're back from two terrific weeks in California, a jam-packed weekend in Chicago, and Dan's visits to Durham, N.C., and Lynchburg, Va. We'll be in Atlanta this weekend, pleased to share the stage with Andy Wakefield. This past Saturday, we were in Naperville, Ill., courtesy of True Health Medical Center; thanks to Teresa Conrick, Julie Obradovic, and Anju Usman. Sunday we spoke at the Book Stall in Winnetka, Ill.; thanks to Dan's sister Rosie and brother-in-law Dick Augspurger (pictured with Dan and Mark) for making that happen. Stay tuned, and see you on the road!

October 30th
Peachtree City, GA
Maggie's Hope
Books A Million
The Avenue at Peachtree City
6:00-8:00 pm
 
October 31st
North Atlanta, GA
Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) Chapter
Hilton Garden Inn/Alpharetta
4025 Windward Plaza Dr.
Alpharetta, GA 30005
12:30 – 3:00 pm

James Ottar Grundvig Reviews The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Man made Epidemic

We invite you to leave a comment on this review at The Epoch Times. The photo is from The Age of Autism Book Tour in California at the Families for Early Autism Treatment (FEAT) event at the Mind Institute. To learn more about the book click HERE.

Mercury in Vaccines and Autism: The Surprising LinkBook review: ‘The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Manmade Epidemic’

By James Ottar Grundvig Created: Oct 21, 2010 Last Updated: Oct 21, 2010

In autumn 2008, I visited an old friend and business associate at his cabin outside Oslo, Norway. He was recovering from a yearlong trial in which he lost his ability to speak, use his fingers, and think clearly. His vibrant, busy life slowed to a crawl. What caused a healthy, middle-aged man to suffer harm so rapidly?

Taking up Henry David Thoreau’s advice of going back to nature, he had outfitted the cabin for year-round living and drilled a new well. As he drank water from the well, he unwittingly poisoned his brain. An investigation into the cause of his sudden fall in mental health and leaden fatigue found that the boring machine had drilled through a thin band of mercury. The dust from the heavy metal contaminated the water and almost killed him.

In reading the seminal and terrific new book, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, the story of my friend and my son, Fridrik, who was diagnosed with autism in 2003, resonated with me—in part, because too many vaccines given too early had injured my son. Many of those vaccines contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. So the explosive idea at the core of this revelatory tome is that as a modern society, we have been poisoning our children’s brains and bodies through the over-reliance and misapplication of medicine—specifically mercury. It wedges a stone in my heart.

The four-hundred-year rise of the modern world and its great population expansion through advances of the Industrial Age has come back to haunt us in unsuspecting ways too real and too widespread to ignore. And the book, at 364 pages, is too good to put down.

The Misuse of Mercury in Medicine

What the authors Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill initially set out to do was research the origins of mercury and how it related to autism. But they found that the source was impossible to pin down.

The six they spent investigating the overlapping histories of mercury use in medicine took them down myriad paths and turned up some amazing facts. The search of how mercury impacted human health guided them back centuries before the 1943 discovery of autism by Leo Kanner, who initially diagnosed 11 children with the disorder.

It was research into seven of those families’ histories that got the authors’ blood pumping and became the foundation of the book. They seeded the book with so many fascinating details—such as the mercury content found in beluga whale teeth, which skyrocketed in the past half century, indicating the spike in its presence in the water. There’s also information about mercury as medicine, from teething powders and body creams, to calomel lotion and the toxic “Van Swieten’s liquor,” which was supposed to treat Mozart’s syphilis, but ended up killing within months.

Although the book has some declarative statements like the one above, the authors resisted the tendency to speculate; on occasion they presented scenarios. After reading the book, there’s no denying that the American government cannot explain why there’s been a spike in the autism rates since the late 1970s. It’s easier to claim that there’s no epidemic and hold the line against the status quo by injecting babies with more vaccines than any on nation on earth...

Read the full review and comment  at The Epoch Times.

James Ottar Grundvig is the father of an autistic child. He lives and works in New York City.

AoA Book Tour Takes Us Back to the Source

From Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill: The "Age of Autism Book Tour" hit Southern California this past week, with Dan signing books at the Defeat Autism Now! conference in Long Beach, then speaking at the TACA group in Poway just north of San Diego. In between, he visited Steve Edelson at the Autism Research Institute's office in San Diego. Mark Rimland -- autism pioneer Bernie Rimland's son -- dropped by the nearby coffee shop for a visit. Mark -- whose autism sparked Bernie's brilliant lifelong quest to understand and treat the disorder --  is a vibrant, good-looking, cheerful 54-year-old who swims regularly and is devoted to his passion -- painting. His highly regarded works feature animals and people portrayed in a uniquely vivid style, and include the book "The Secret Night World of Cats," which he illustrated and his sister Helen Landalf wrote. Mark Blaxill and Dan will join up for the second leg of the California tour starting Sunday, then fly to Chicago for events next weekend. Stay tuned, and see you soon!

October 17th
Woodland Hills, CA (Los Angeles)
Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) Chapter
6:30 - 8:30 pm
6800 Owensmouth Avenue, Suite 180
Woodland Hills, CA
(Corner of Vanowen and Owensmouth)

October 18th
Visalia, CA (San Joaquin Valley)
Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) Chapter
5:30 - 7:30 pm
Fuggazzi's Italian Restaurant
127 W. Main Street
Visalia, CA 93291
 
October 20th
Sacramento, CA
Families for Early Autism Treatment (FEAT)
7-9:00 pm
MIND Institute Auditorium
2825 50th St.
Sacramento, CA 95822

The Real Lessons from Medicine’s Long History of Human Experiments in Syphilis

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Yesterday, the heads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) joined the chorus of senior administration officials apologizing for human medical experiments on Guatemalan men in the 1940s. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Drs Thomas Frieden and Francis Collins excoriated their predecessors who approved experiments in which Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients were infected with syphilis without their knowledge or consent in order to test new syphilis treatments, most of which involved penicillin. The Guatemalan experiments were funded with a grant from NIH and conducted by investigators from a laboratory in the Public Health Service (PHS) that later became a part of the CDC. According to Frieden and Collins,

While effective protections against unethical research continue to evolve across the world, the past exploitations of vulnerable populations, including the subjects of the study in Guatemala in the 1940s, are regrettable and deeply saddening. For them, the basic ethical principle of respect for persons was flagrantly violated [emphasis added]. The NIH and CDC are committed to ensuring that lessons drawn from the past help shape actions to protect all future research participants, no matter where studies are conducted.The 1946-1948 inoculation study should never have happened, and nothing like it should ever happen again.

Following more heavily publicized apologies last week from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Frieden and Collins’ editorial seems like an afterthought. Perhaps that is why the main message of their essay strikes such a discordant note. “Could such unethical studies happen today?” ask the two men. “For research funded or conducted by the US government, the answer is no.”

Viewed in context, their confident answer seems oddly defiant. To be sure, they cite an impressive array of safeguards put in place over the last sixty years—from the Nuremburg Code to the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights—as evidence for their reassurances to JAMA’s core audience--current members of the American Medical Association, the largest collection of providers of American health services--that all is well.

But should the rest of us, consumers of health services from members of the AMA (and consumers too of scientific research from NIH and CDC), trust them?

Meet Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted on The Age of Autism Book Tour

From Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted: We're heading to New York this weekend for stops including Mount Kisco on Friday and Yonkers on Saturday -- click on our book at left to see details, and if you can join us, please do. Last Friday, we had a good crowd at the Brown University Bookstore in Providence, sponsored by the National Autism Association (that's us with NAA President Wendy Fournier). We've already started making waves -- David Sheffield, a columnist for the Brown student paper, says HERE we should never have been allowed to speak! Banned at Brown -- has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Click on over and let the author know your feelings if you're so inclined. Next week we're back in New York to do the Leonard Lopate radio show, then to California at the end of the week for multiple events. Stay tuned and see you on the road.

Go to The Age of Autism for more details and info on where to order.

October 1st 
Mt. Kisco, NY
SafeMinds & Bedford Autism Spectrum Support (BASS)
7:00-9:00 pm
Mt. Kisco Public Library—Community Room
100 East Main St. Mt. Kisco, NY 10549
 
October 2nd
Yonkers, NY
Navigating the Spectrum/SafeMinds
10-noon
35 E. Grassy Sprain Rd. (Hudson Valley Bank Building)
Yonkers, NY 10710

October 8-10
Long Beach, CA
ARI/Defeat Autism Now Conference
All day event Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Long Beach Westin
333 East Ocean Blvd.
Long Beach, CA 90802

October 12th
San Diego, CA
Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) Chapter
6:30 - 8:30 pm
Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church
17010 Pomerado Road
San Diego, CA 92128

The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic Interviews

Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill discuss their book Mercury Medicine and a ManMade Epidemic in two radio interviews with: Coy Barefoot and Gary Null.

 

 

Video: Don Imus Interviews Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted on Autism's Toxic Origins

Watch Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted on Imus on Fox Business channel as they discuss their new book, The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic. Thank you to Don and Deirdre Imus (check out the HuffPo post HERE she wrote that now has over 1100 comments) - for their unwavering support for the autism community. (Thanks to Ginger Taylor for the links.)


Part 2

Unofficial Transcript: Imus with Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Managing Editor's Note: Mark and Dan were on Imus in the Morning to promote their new book, The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic. Aof A reader and contributor Bob Moffit was kind enough to create an excellent unofficial transcript for us. Thank you, Bob. KS

By Bob Moffit

IMUS outlines the guests to appear on today's show:
 
0610 AM .. IMUS:  "Congressman Peter King, Chris Wallace, Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill .. who are they?  Well, these two guys wrote the book "Age of Autism:  Mercury, medicine and a man-made epidemic".  I think what they're saying is, that there is a direct link between thimerosal and autism.  Which makes everybody .. on both sides .. hysterical.  Here's the problem .. there's no evidence that thimerosal "causes" autism .. there's no evidence it does not.
 
Charles McCord:  "Conclusive evidence.
 
IMUS:  Yes, there's plenty of studies
 
MCCORD:  Anecdotal evidence.
 
IMUS:  And, there's billions of dollars spent by the pharmaceutical industry ... and ... people who suggest there is a link are characterized as being insane.  Whatever.  As I said for years .. and .. we talked about it and we're not going to talk about it a lot.  It never made any common sense to me that you could inject a neuro toxin, ethylmercury, more toxic than what's in fish, into the bloodstream of an infant or a child, or anyone ... in the multiple amounts or doses  .. and .. not have it do something.  It may not "cause" autism .. but .. you would think .. well .. of course it does.  So, it's a raging argument.  I don't want to get in the middle of it, but, I'm certainly happy to air their views.
 
MCCORD:  That's reasonable.
 
IMUS:  I probably agree with them, although I can't .. I do agree with them ... but ..I have no evidence.  I have no evidence...it's just one of my common sense (inaudible).
 
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IMUS usually asks guest appearing on his show to name their "top five" list of favorite songs ..
 
Mark Blaxill's favorite "top five"                                Dan Olmsted's
"Feeling Alright" Joe Crocker                                  "Doctor My Eyes" Jackson Browne
"I Feel Good" James Brown                                     "Like a Rolling Stone"  Bob Dylan
"Shining Star" Earth, Wind and Fire                        "Kodachrome"  Paul Simon
"Steamroller" James Taylor                                      "Suite:  Judy Blue Eyes" Crosby, Sills
"I Shot the Sheriff" Eric Clapton                                "Jeanson" Graham Blvd
 
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IMUS:  Not a bad selection from these two guys who wrote this book "Age of Autism".  Gives you a chance to review people who think mercury causes autism.  Although in the packaging of one of these vaccines, it warns a possible side-effect is autism.  I hate to bring all this up .. but .. once you've met a parent who has an autistic child, a child with autism rather .. maybe you'd change your tune on that.  But, you have to be reasonable, sensible and I think these two guys are .. and .. we'll find out.
 
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0830 IMUS:  "The Age of Autism" written by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill.  It's just been released with  forward by our old friend David Kirby, who wrote "Evidence of Harm", one of the better books ever written about the link between thimerosal and autism.  Please welcome Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill.  Alright .. guys, how are you?
 
MARK:  We're doing good.
 
DAN:  Good morning.
 
IMUS:  So, Dan, who are you and what do you do now?
 
DAN:  I run a blog called "Age of Autism" and I've done reporting on autism for about five years now.  I started at UPI writing a column of the same name .. got interested in whether the history of the disorder could give us more clues than we already possessed about what might be going on here.  That's how I got started.
 
IMUS:  Mark, what do you do?
 
MARK:  Well, I have a day job, I'm a business guy, but, I'm also the father of a daughter who is diagnosed with autism.   She's fourteen years old now.
 
IMUS:  One thing you have is a great voice.  So, when was she diagnosed?
 
MARK:  When she was about 2 1/2 years old, she had developed normally for the first year of life, she was beautiful, social, interactive, developing language .. and then .. sometime after she was one year old, she began slipping away from us .. which is an experience a lot of families have.
 
IMUS:  Where is she on the spectrum?

Imus Interviews Blaxill & Olmsted Authors of The Age of Autism

Tune into Imus in the morning Thursday, 9/23 on Fox Business Channel around 8:30am to hear Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill discuss their new book, The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic.  Visit the Imus site   HERE.

The Age of Autism Book Tour Kicks Off: Wrentham, Imus, Gary Null & Providence

The Age of Autism Book The Age of Autism book tour Tour kicked off Monday in Wrentham, Mass., where we were hosted by the TACA Chapter led by Cheryl Gaudino (left). We signed books, premiered our presentation, and really enjoyed the lively discussion afterward. Thanks for getting us off to a great start. We were especially pleased to meet Kim's parents, Richard and Elena Rossi, who live nearby (below). They've gotten an early read of Kim's upcoming book  and are still talking to her -- and laughing! Tomorrow, Thursday, Sept. 22, we'll be on Imus at 8:30 a.m., simulcast on radio and the Fox Business Channel. Friday from 12:30 to 1 p.m., we'll be on Gary Null's radio show. On Friday at 6 p.m., we'll be at the Brown University Book Store courtesy of the NAA. Click HERE or on the book image at left for details.  Meanwhile, speaking of the book, check out a post by Ginger Taylor over at Adventures in Autism -- the artwork is priceless. Hope to see you soon. -- Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Deirdre Imus Interviews Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted on Huffington Post

Deirdre Imus, a powerful advocate for children's health in America, interviewed Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill about their new book, The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic on Huffington Post. Thank you to Deirdre (and Don) for always looking out for our children.  Dan and Mark will be on Imus in the Morning this Thursday at 8:30am (simulcast on on Fox Business Fox Business Channel.)

Click HERE to read and comment on the full post at HuffPo.

The new book "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic" is shaking up the autism world. Orthodox scientists and medical groups have dismissed and even ridiculed the idea that incredibly toxic ethyl mercury -- still in flu shots given to infants and pregnant women -- could be linked to the explosion in autism rates beginning in the 1990s, when the vaccine schedule was rapidly expanded. Just the day before the book came out this week, the CDC issued yet another flawed study that found not only was mercury safe -- it actually had a protective effect against the risk of autism. This is obviously absurd, as is the fact that almost all the children in the study had received mercury-containing shots, rather than including a control group without any mercury exposure. Authors Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill -- two names well-known in the autism community and editors of the blog Age of Autism (ageofautism.com), have for the first time traced the roots of autism beginning in the 1930s. What they found is electrifying and suggests the debate is about to heat up again, whether the government and medical industry like it or not.

Deirdre: What is the major point you want people to take away from your book?

Dan: That the concern about mercury and autism is far from over. We found that the medical industry and manufacturing have had a long history of the reckless use of mercury that goes back centuries, and that does include, based on our research, the rise of autism in the 1930s when ethyl mercury was first commercialized in agricultural products and in vaccines. That's the short answer.

Mark: The other thing that we want people to embrace is contained in the title -- this really is The Age of Autism. Autism is the single most devastating childhood disorder any of us have faced in our lifetime -- and it has become a national health emergency. The rates of autism have gone from effectively zero before the 1930s to 1 in 100 children today, and that's happened in the lifetime of a single individual -- in just seven decades. In our book, we've gone back to first principles and identified the roots of the disease itself, and we place mercury exposure and new environmentally toxic products at the source of the explosion.

Click HERE to read and comment on the full post at HuffPo. 
 

Mike Frandsen Interviews Olmsted and Blaxill Authors of The Age of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic

Below is an excerpt from Mike Frandsen's interview with Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill. Please click over to The Examiner HERE to read the full interview and to comment.

In their new book, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Manmade Epidemic, Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill make a convincing case that the autism epidemic is largely environmental rather than genetic. They argue that mercury from pollution, commercial products, and vaccines has contributed greatly to the rise in autism over the last 70 years.

In doing research for the book, Olmsted and Blaxill investigated the backgrounds of the parents of some of the first children identified with autism by Leo Kanner in the 1930s. Olmsted, a reporter who has devoted his career to writing about autism, and Blaxill, a parent of a girl with autism, found links to mercury in the backgrounds of some of the parents of the children who were the original cases of autism.

Olmsted and Blaxill also state their belief that the rise in autism is related to the use of mercury in childhood vaccines. They point out that they are not anti-vaccine, but are pro-vaccine safety.

The co-authors also write about the damage that was done to patients who were given mercury as treatment for various medical ailments throughout the last few centuries.

They call for more research by the medical establishment into the environmental causes of autism.

Olmsted and Blaxill also edit and write for the web newspaper Age of Autism. An interview with the authors of the book, which goes on sale September 14, is below.

Mike Frandsen: In writing this book, you researched the backgrounds of the parents of the original children Leo Kanner identified with autism. What did you find?

Dan Olmsted: Just to set the stage a bit, Leo Kanner was a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University and in 1943 he wrote a paper called Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact. It was a case series describing 11 children and all of them had what he described as a uniquely and markedly different disorder, which became known as autism. We decided to go back and look at those cases very carefully and when we did, we found enough clues that we were able to identify seven of those 11 children.

As we looked more closely at their family background and where they lived, we saw what we thought was a pretty remarkable pattern of background exposure to a new commercial mercury compound called ethylmercury, which was used first in the 1930s in fungicides, agriculture and in vaccines as a preservative. So what we believe we see is a strong pattern, not proof, but a strong pattern that the age of autism really began when this kind of mercury reached commercial use and affected children.

Can you give an example?

Dan Olmsted: Case 2 was a child named Frederick W. We identified his family. His father had the same name, Frederick Wellman, who was a plant pathologist at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center near Washington working for the Agriculture Department. We found his archive, which is quite extensive, and the very first paper in the very first folder, in the very first box is about experimenting with mercury, which I think is quite significant.

Not only that but when we looked more deeply we were able to track the fact that he was working with the new ethylmercury seed disinfectants at the same time his son was born and we know that the dust from those can get onto clothes and carried into houses and that sort of thing. The child was born early because his mother had kidney problems, which is often a sign of mercury toxicity and then it’s very stark, very vivid. There’s even a pamphlet in his archive on the exact mercury fungicide that contains ethylmercury, so we think this is more than chance and that it is something that needs to be looked at seriously. If people want to disagree with it and dismiss it, I think they’re going to have to engage with what we’ve found here.

You trace the medical establishment’s use of mercury to treat illnesses in the last several centuries. Why did doctors continue to use mercury even after they discovered it was toxic?

Dan Olmsted: I think one answer to that is that it seemed to work when nothing else really did. Mercury is a biologically active compound. If you have sores on your body, which you would get from syphilis, and you rub a mercury salve on it, the sores would clear up and seemingly that was a good thing. Unfortunately, the side effects were longer to show up and more obscure.

And what we see is a pattern where because it seemed to be useful to doctors in treating desperate patients, they would do it for a while and then when a better treatment came along they would quit using it and never look back and realize or acknowledge that they might have been killing people by the thousands even as they were treating them. It just kind of kept going, where we are still at a point where although we wouldn’t use arsenic or plutonium or lead or any toxic compound in medicine or as medicine, we still use mercury. And it has gotten a free pass for several hundred years and that we think really needs to stop.

Mercury was used to treat syphilis for hundreds of years. What happened to those patients?

Mark Blaxill: Mercury was used from the beginning of the syphilis epidemic in Europe from the late 15th century. Mercury was used as an ointment, a skin treatment, but over time, the idea was to try to get mercury closer to the infection or the site of the infection and not just on the skin. In the 1700s and 1800s people first started the practice of internal administration of mercury, specifically mercuric chloride, and doctors first began encouraging patients to drink it, and then not longer after, they started injecting mercuric chloride into syphilis patients.

Interestingly enough, when they started this internal administration approach to treating syphilis, a new, invariably fatal form of neurosyphilis, brain syphilis, began to emerge as well, something called general paralysis of the insane (GPI). These patients would go stock raving mad, wild and crazy with delusions and they would generally die quite quickly. These cases of GPI occurred in places where mercury treatments were common, and where the practice of treating patients with mercury chloride and mercury in general was not used, you would never see these cases of GPI.

If mercury is one of the causes of autism, and syphilis patients and children given teething powders were exposed to mercury, why didn’t they get autism?

Please click over to The Examiner HERE to read the full interview and to comment.

Deirdre Imus Reviews The Age of Autism on Fox News Health Blog

Read the full post and leave a comment at the Fox News Health Blog. Read an excerpt (and order) The Age of Autism: Mercury Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic HERE.

By Deirdre Imus

Over the past 25 years, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has emerged from virtual obscurity to becoming the fastest growing developmental disorder today. Once described by experts as “extremely rare,” the number of U.S. children diagnosed with ASD has increased from 1 in 10,000 in the late 1980s to 1 in 110. The rate for boys is 1 in 70, which is four to five times higher than for girls. Today, this has become a major health concern impacting millions of children and their families.

Much has been written about autism over the past decade. Each day numerous news articles report on new research, new treatments and the many challenges faced in caring for and educating individuals with autism. Much of the coverage however, has been focused on the controversial debate surrounding the possible role vaccinations may play in triggering the onset of what is often called the “mysterious disorder.”

This week, in a first of its kind piece of investigative journalism, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and A Manmade Epidemic, takes us back to the roots of the disorder and attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding the exploding statistics that has generated so much controversy.

“The Age of Autism” delivers a compelling examination of how mercury in medicine and in the environment may be contributing to the escalation of neurological and autoimmune diseases we are witnessing today, particularly autism... Read the full post and comment at the Fox News Health Blog.

Primates’ Progress: Disturbing Findings from a Study of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Primates

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

We reported earlier this summer (see HERE ) on an important new study from Thoughtful House and the University of Pittsburgh describing neuroimaging results that compared a small group of vaccinated monkeys to unvaccinated monkeys during infancy. One interesting footnote in this paper from Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis (ANE) made reference to a new publication from the same research group on the delayed development of neonatal reflexes after a birth dose of thimerosal containing hepatitis B vaccine. This published reference to the Canadian journal The Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health (JTEH) was followed a few weeks later by the publication of the full article. Careful reading of this new article revealed that the August article reported on the same research findings that were first peer-reviewed and published on-line in another journal last year… then abruptly withdrawn after intervention by the publisher, Elsevier, the corporate owner of the journal Neurotoxicology. See HERE for an account of this episode.

Together, the results reported in these two papers represent an important landmark in vaccine safety research. The first published findings from a novel and unprecedented study design, they raise important questions about how United States government regulators have managed the safety profiles of childhood immunizations: not just individual infant vaccines and their ingredients, but, more importantly, the cumulative effect of the intensified program of childhood vaccination that started in 1991. This escalation of intervention (see HERE for an comparison of the U.S. childhood immunization program to those of other countries) in infant immune development—an escalation that included new vaccines administered earlier in life, cumulative exposure to ethyl mercury that exceeded federal guidelines for mercury exposure, and stepped up efforts to ensure on-time compliance with existing mandated vaccines—coincided in time with the dramatic increases in autism rates.

Despite widespread concern over vaccine safety issues, the medical industry has developed an effective public relations campaign over the last decade to defend their products. They have in the process reinforced the federal protection for what has now become the world’s most privileged product line; infant vaccines have received specific exemptions from regulatory standards and liability laws in ways that are truly without precedent. Autism may be a mystery, goes the medical industry line, but the one thing we know for certain is that vaccines have nothing to do with it. Supporting this claim is a cluster of epidemiology studies conducted by public health authorities and vaccine manufacturers and examining populations in Denmark, California and the U.K., all of which claim to find no evidence between autism risk and either thimerosal or the MMR vaccine.  Despite the fact that researchers with no affiliation with government authorities and vaccine manufacturers have found the opposite, repeatedly reporting epidemiological support for vaccine safety concerns, the public relations messengers of what some have called “the medical industrial complex” have effectively spread their message: “no credible evidence supports a link between vaccines and autism”; all relevant safety questions have been “asked and answered.”

In evaluating the state of the science that supports these sweeping conclusions, skeptical observers have consistently posed a very simple question. Have any of these supposedly credible studies compared total health outcomes in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children? The answer to the question, of course, is no. According to the official line, it would be too hard to collect a reliable sample of previously unvaccinated children (making such study designs retrospectively impossible) and medically improper to deprive children of the benefits of vaccination in a properly controlled study (making such designs prospectively unethical). Elsewhere (see HERE ), one of us has called that position “an epistemological obscenity.” 

But aside from the controversial aspects of such studies, there are other problems with what most call “vax/unvax” studies in human populations. In a nutshell, if there are subtle forms of developmental injury in human infants from intensive vaccination, there’s no way to carry out the controlled biological investigations to figure out what might be going wrong in the developing human brain.

But if researchers face constraints, both real and perceived, in performing rigorous vax/unvax studies in human children, there’s another alternative: studying the effects of intensive vaccination in infant animals. Starting with the work done at Columbia University nearly ten years ago, a growing number of scientists have reported findings relevant to vaccine safety (and especially on thimerosal exposure) in several animal models, including mice, hamsters (see HERE ) and rats (see HERE and HERE ). The evidence from these rodent studies has been nearly uniform and their conclusions overwhelmingly similar: Thimerosal at the doses involved in the childhood immunization program of the 1990s clearly causes developmental damage in infant rodents.

As Our Book Launches, A Note of Thanks to All of You

Today marks the publication of "The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic." If you click HERE or on the book cover at the left top, you'll see a new page about the book: Tour dates, an excerpt, and a button to purchase the book through the SafeMinds store. We'll be updating the page (and keeping you posted here as well) as we add cities to our tour, feedback, etc. Thanks to Ginger Taylor for setting this up, and thanks to a publicity team that has been hard at work for months: Laura Bono, Lyn Redwood, Becky Estepp and Katie Wiesman. We also want to thank each of you for making this book a reality by reading, commenting and supporting this blog. As we say in the Acknowledgements: "Many of the ideas in this book were introduced on the blog, and our readers' responses have helped refine them. The community that has grown up around Age of Autism has carried us forward on a wave of shared energy and commitment and we are privileged to serve such a generous and engaged group." Thank you. Please buy the book and help share the evidence. We hope to see you soon. -- Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill.

Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill Discuss The Age Of Autism Mercury Medicine and a Man-Made Epidemic

Teri Arranga interviews Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted on Voice America Radio "A Conversation of Hope" today at 9am PACIFIC (Noon Eastern). The show will be in the archives shortly after it airs. Congratulations to Dan and Mark on their launch day.

Flu vaccines are already in the news with the latest public health announcements urging adults and children to line up for shots. But did you know that the shots still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin? Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, the authors of an explosive new book on the autism epidemic, reveal that there is a long dark side to mercury in the origins of autism and urge caution to anyone considering getting the mercury-laced injections. Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill's groundbreaking book, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Manmade Epidemic, traces the autism epidemic by examining the first diagnosed cases of autism. Dan and Mark's detailed research is impeccable and their conclusions are stunning. The Age of Autism will revolutionize the way people think about autism and children's health. This is a must-have book and a must-hear interview. Click Voice America Radio.

Government Awards Hannah Poling $1.5 Million in Vaccine Injury Case

... vaccines didn't cause Hannah's autism -- the condition just "resulted" from the vaccines.

The totally twisted and unsustainable United States government approach to vaccines and autism was on full display today. A few months after the federal vaccine court laughed at the idea that one has anything to do with the other, tossing out more than 5,000 cases at once, CBS reports HERE "Family to Receive $1.5M in First-Ever Vaccine-Autism Court Award" that the government awarded Hannah Poling $1.5 million for regressive autism that followed vaccination. She will also receive $500K per year for life.

The government lawyers mumbled something Orwellian and incoherent about a pre-existing mitochondrial disorder and how vaccines didn't cause Hannah's autism -- the condition just "resulted" from the vaccines. Translation: The medical industry's wall of doublespeak, delay and denial is crumbling and today, at least, one child got justice. More, many more, to come. -- Dan Olmsted

My Dog Ate Our Book!

By Dan Olmsted

I know many of you are awaiting next Tuesday's release of "The Age of Autism" but I have to tell you ... the dog ate it.

Yes, our 10-pound Havenese, Rida, managed to get ahold of the PDF and start biting. I feel terrible -- almost as bad as the loss of one of my favorite episodes of Columbo: The Complete Season 2 that met the same fate. Why is it the only things I really care about are somehow irresistible to the dog?

Fortunately, the book itself is already waiting to go on display at bookstores nationwide. It's too late for man or beast to stop it. And thank the Lord, that's the last time an attack dog will tear into our book without having read or understood it.

Or am I being naive?

 

The Nightmare and the Dream: A Review of "The Age of Autism"

By Anne Dachel
 
I am amazed at this book.  How can there be all this information out there and no ones does anything? 
 
"The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine and a Man-made Epidemic," to be published next Tuesday, has a haunting sense to it.  In some ways it’s like a macabre sci fi novel.  Imagine a book where the authors create a mysterious element that has marketable uses but also has concomitant lethal effects.  No matter how much evidence piles up, the population of the world continues to use it.  Finally, after centuries of exposure, the damaging effects become overwhelming.  Children are falling victim to mysterious developmental disorders.  Adults and especially the elderly come down with neurological problems in never-before-seen numbers.  This deadly element even shows up in human blood in exponentially increasing amounts. 
 
Despite this, the public is told that nothing is wrong.  They’re assured that scientists see no problem with exposure to this element; it can even safely be injected into pregnant women and babies.  The media, the medical establishment, and the government all deny that this element is harmful. 
 
That would be the plot of a very scary novel.  Those in the population who recognize what’s going on, the parents who’ve witnessed the damage in their own children, the courageous doctors and scientists trying to speak out would hopefully save the day before it’s too late. 
 
If there’s a happy ending to the book, the world wakes up in time and the human race makes a massive effort to eliminate exposure to this toxin and recover people already affected.
 
In "The Age of Autism," the real life scenario is the same.  The mysterious toxin is the deadly element mercury.  At the end of the story, we’re also left hanging, not knowing how much time we have left if we continue the pretense that a known neurotoxin can somehow be harmless when humans eat it, have it in their teeth, breathe it, and have it injected into themselves.  The most obvious proof is the generation of children with autism.  They’re the poster kids for mercury’s damaging power.

There’s a Funny Thing About Evidence: More Support for Autism-Mercury Link

" ...thimerosal at the same concentrations received in human infants had clearly measurable effects on opioid receptor development in the infant rats. They also found that these effects were stronger at higher doses. The effect was found to be persistent, lasting well beyond the initial period of administration. According to the authors, “very likely, it is permanent.”"

By Mark Blaxill

Despite the relentless drumbeat of propaganda from the CDC, public health authorities and the thuggish on-line goons of the medical industry, there’s a funny thing going on. The evidence of a connection between mercury exposure and autism keeps growing.

Last month, two scientists at the University of Northern Iowa, Catherine DeSoto and Robert Hitlan, published a fascinating review paper (see HERE for an interview with DeSoto; also see HERE and HERE for earlier reviews of DeSoto’s successful debunking of an error-filled paper on autism and mercury). They asked a simple question: what does the published evidence linking autism and mercury really say? To answer that question, they did a simple Pub Med search. They searched for the terms “(Autism AND Mercury) OR (Autism AND Heavy Metals)”. They found 163 articles (a number that has since risen to 174) and reviewed them. According to the authors, “Of these 163 articles, 58 were research articles with empirical data relevant to the question of a link between autism and one or more toxic heavy metals. Fifteen were offered as evidence against a link between exposure to these metals and autism. In contrast, a sum of 43 papers were supporting a link between autism and exposure to those metals.” In short, 74% of the published studies supported the theory.

Evidence is a funny thing.

Last week, yet another important study was published with no fanfare in the mainstream media. A research team in Warsaw led by Dr. Dorota Majewska published the latest findings from their ongoing investigation of the effect of thimerosal administration on newborn rats. I wrote about the first published findings from this project HERE. In their latest paper, the authors extended their investigation of the potential relationship between thimerosal and the development of opioid receptors in the infant brain. They found that thimerosal at the same concentrations received in human infants had clearly measurable effects on opioid receptor development in the infant rats. They also found that these effects were stronger at higher doses. The effect was found to be persistent, lasting well beyond the initial period of administration. According to the authors, “very likely, it is permanent.”

Should it surprise anyone that thimerosal administration in low doses is dangerous to infant brain development? So far, we’ve seen this result repeated reliably in rats, hamsters, mice and monkeys (the single animal study that has not reproduced this finding was NIH-funded).  It’s obvious to these researchers what many of us have argued for years, that giving mercury to infants on purpose is stupid. In a similar spirit, the Warsaw team closed their paper with the following observation.

In conclusion, this study documents that parenteral administration of [thimerosal] to suckling rats at doses equivalent to those used in pediatric vaccines or higher produces lasting alterations of [mu-opioid receptors ] in several brain regions and damage to neurons. If analogous changes occur in the brains of some children, they are likely to have profound neurological, physiological and behavioral consequences, which may be relevant for certain neurodevelopmental disorders. These data argue for removal of [thimerosal] from all infant vaccines.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Mark Blaxill is Editor-at-Large for Age of Autism and a director of SafeMinds. His new book, co-authored with Age of Autism Editor Dan Olmsted, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-Made Epidemic will be published next week.

The abstract of the Warsaw team’s article is below. The full article is available free HERE.

New Study Shows Vaccines Cause Brain Changes Found in Autism

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Abnormal brain growth and function are features of autism, an increasingly common developmental disorder that now affects 1 in 60 boys in the US. Now researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, have found remarkably similar brain changes to those seen in autism in infant monkeys receiving the vaccine schedule used in the 1990’s that contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.

The group’s findings were published yesterday in the journal Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis. They used scanning techniques that assessed both brain growth and brain function in the same animals over time. The research team was able to see differences in the way the brains of vaccinated and unvaccinated animals developed. Scans were performed before and after the administration of primary MMR and DTaP/Hib boosters that were given at the human equivalent of 12 months of age.

New Autism Consortium Study Proves (Again) that Inherited Genes Don’t Cause Autism

By Mark Blaxill

The Autism Genome Project Consortium (AGPC) deserves credit for at least one thing. They know how to make a public relations mountain out of a scientific molehill.

The AGPC was all over the news last month, leading a celebration that went global. “Genes breakthrough in autism study” proclaimed a UK headline. “Genetic link to autism found”, announced the Sydney Morning Herald, while the Los Angeles Times told us with only bit more circumspection that a “Big study identifies new genes that may be involved in autism.” The publicity blitz included the suggestion of practical applications, with a report from the Daily Mirror in London promising that an “Autism find could lead to a new test” while Business Week picked up more directly on the commercial opportunity, “Autism’s genetic ties may lead to early detection, treatment.”

We’ve seen this movie before. No really, not just the metaphorical repetition of the autism genetics script, but a real movie. It’s called Groundhog Day. Like Bill Murray’s character waking up every morning on the same day, the autism gene hunters relive this same public relations routine over and over again with full awareness of their past failures. Meanwhile the media, like Murray’s fellow travelers in the movie, remain blessedly free of any long term memory and go willingly along for every ride.

Genetic analysis once again finds…not very much

So what, you might ask, was all the excitement about? In brief, the AGPC reported evidence that a particular type of rare, inherited mutation (called a CNV, or copy number variant) was more frequent in the DNA of autistic cases than controls. Unlike past autism-CNV studies, the authors did not report that the total number of mutations per individual was more frequent in autism. Instead, according to the AGPC, the specific mutations found in autism cases were more frequently located on active genes. In the eyes of the study authors, this “higher global burden of rare, genic CNVs” suggests that the location rather than the frequency of CNVs on the autistic genome made them likely to be disruptive in their biological effect.

One thing to know about CNVs is that they come in two flavors. They can include either missing DNA—deletions, or extra stretches of a DNA sequence—duplications. The AGPC study attempted to tie both flavors to autism. In the AGPC account, however, the coherence of the argument around these two CNV flavors mattered far less than their ability to report encouraging progress in the decades-long hunt for autism genes.

Not surprisingly, there was little encouraging news for families affected by autism in the fine print, nor was there much clarity over the CNV specifics. Notably, the AGPC authors couldn’t quite pinpoint which flavor of CNV--deletions or duplications-- was at the root of the problem in autism. Across all genes, they calculated that the DNA of autistic cases harbored more deletions but not duplications; in terms of the subset of so-called “ASD-implicated” genes (more on these below), the deletions weren’t the problem it was the duplications; yet when it came down to extracting causal insight from all these CNVs, duplications were out and deletions were in.

So here’s a simple question for the AGPC. Which is it, are deletions or duplications associated with autism?

Well, and again not surprisingly, the answer depends on what argument they’re trying to make. And the flip from deletions to duplications and back again reveals the AGPC’s progressive retreat, a retreat away from objective findings and towards questionable and therefore manipulable constructs.

The most compelling part of their evidence, the finding that is featured most actively, points to the deletion evidence. This finding emerges from the AGPC’s exhaustive analysis examining how frequently CNVs show up on the autism genome relative to unaffected controls. They report their single positive finding with great fanfare, but if one reads the study carefully (including the 74 pages of supplemental materials), one learns quickly that the vast majority of the results are actually negative. Most astonishing is that there was essentially no difference at all in the mutation rate between autistic subjects and controls, a finding that goes against several prior studies. In fact, along just about every dimensions, the AGPC team found no difference in CNVs between cases and controls: no excess of CNVs in terms of the number of CNVs per sample, the percentage of samples with CNVs, the total amount of affected DNA, or the average size of CNVs. This was true for deletions and duplications and for small and large CNVs. Nor were there any differences between families with a single child (simplex) or multiple affected (multiplex) children.

The single finding of significance relied on specifying the location of the CNVs in autism cases, i.e. that they were on active genes, the small fraction of the genome that actually encodes for proteins. And here, the AGPC found that the autistic genome more frequently demonstrated stretches of lost DNA—deletions--on such genes.  This is an interesting, if hardly revolutionary, finding but one that goes essentially nowhere in explaining causation. Even though the suggestion of a different mutation rate of just the genic regions of the autism genome narrows the range of biology under inspection, we’re still talking about the entire set of protein-coding human genes, roughly 21,000 of them according to recent estimates.

So, although the suggestion of an elevated rate of missing genic DNA in autism is interesting, the AGPC obviously needed to look for something more specific. And here, their deletion evidence failed them, because although there appeared to be more deletions in all genic regions, there weren’t really any differences in deletion rates on the genes of highest interest. Over 170 orthodox autism researchers were listed as co-authors on the study. For years, these researchers have been working overtime to specify “autism genes.” And over that period they’ve accumulated long lists of faint signals (rarely replicated with any consistency and often abandoned): genes they believe they’ve connected to autism. But when it came time to zoom in on their putative “global burden of rare, genic” deletions, the AGPC wasn’t able to connect that burden of deletions to the long list of genes they’ve been trying to implicate in autism for so long.

In fact, upon closer inspection, the deletion findings were downright embarrassing for the authors. Deletion rates in cases and controls were virtually identical on all kinds of genes that have been connected to autism. So despite a purportedly “breakthrough” finding on of an increased rate of missing genic DNA in autism, the authors had to turn to the other flavor of CNVs—duplications--to salvage some kind of biological case from their data.

For this purpose, they turned to a second analysis based on three different short lists of genes:

1) Markers of genetic syndromes like Fragile X, neurofibromatosis, Smith-Lemli-Opitz and tuberous sclerosis that are known to increase susceptibility to autism (“ASD-implicated”);

2) Genes that have been suggested in previous autism research (“ASD candidates”); and

3) Genes that have never been connected to autism but are involved in other intellectual disabilities (“ID”).

In this second analysis, they reported a small, but significant increase in the duplication rate in “ASD implicated” genes. That’s about it. (Neither deletions nor duplications showed up significant on the ID gene list, but when added together a small ID effect was just barely significant).

But in a shocking setback for decades of autism research, the findings on over 100 “ASD candidate” genes were completely negative. Anyone with fond Groundhog Day memories of earlier publicity blitzes for the HOXA1 gene, Cadherin 10, the serotonin transporter gene?  There’s not even a hint of a positive in this long list of previously ballyhooed genes that made up the AGPC’s “ASD candidate list.”

Start The Revolution: Order "The Age of Autism" Today!

From Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill: Our book "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic" goes on sale Sept. 14, and starting today we're asking you to buy copies and urge friends and family to do the same. Click HERE to order. We started on the journey to write this book determined to seek the truth, and now we need you to help spread the word about what we found: early sales increase press runs, expand bookstore orders and launch best sellers that command national attention. For the sake of our children, our country and our future, attention MUST be paid.

Says Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: "Olmsted and Blaxill’s devastating account shows how medical and manufacturing interests have mounted an assault on human health for decades and covered their tracks along the way. The Age of Autism is only the latest episode in centuries of crimes against nature but is in many ways the most troubling. Autistic children are the canaries in the coal mine; shame on all of us if we don’t heed their distress call."

Age of Autism Does Lunch at Autism One

Here's some of the AofA team at Autism One. From Left, Kent Heckenlively, Adriana Gamondes, Julie Obradovic, Steve Jameson, Cathy Jameson, Teresa Conrick, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted.

Live From Autism One!

Mark Blaxill and NAA's Wendy Fournier live from Autism One. Wendy is holding an advance copy of Dan and Mark's book!

A License to Kill? Part 3: After Gardasil’s Launch, More Victims, More Bad Safety Analysis and a Revolving Door Culture

By Mark Blaxill 

In parts 1 (HERE) and 2 (HERE) of this series, Age of Autism identified a disturbing pattern of conflicts within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) regarding Merck’s Gardasil vaccine. In an unprecedented “public-private partnership,” researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) patented the technology for the “virus-like particles” (VLPs) that provoke Gardasil’s immune response to the human papillomavirus (HPV) and licensed their VLP technology to Merck. The terms of the patent license effectively made DHHS Merck’s financial partner on Gardasil, giving DHHS a clear conflict of interest on decisions regarding Gardasil.

This partnership gave Gardasil favorable treatment at key decision points, treatment that was financially rewarding to both parties. While the NIH Director celebrated his researchers’ “heroic” achievement and the researchers received numerous awards, including “Federal Employees of the Year,” officials at NIH’s sister agency, the Center for Biologic Research and Evaluation (CBER) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stood watch over the Gardasil clinical trials. CBER’s review failed to hold Gardasil to a high standard of safety. Instead of comparing Gardasil to an inert placebo, as they should have, CBER based its entire safety assessment on a comparison of Gardasil’s adverse event profile with the adverse events associated with a “placebo” that was actually an immunologically active aluminum-based adjuvant. Despite the fact that an alternative comparison, pitting Gardasil against a relatively inert “carrier solution,” should have warned them of clear evidence of harm to Gardasil recipients, CBER approved Merck’s Gardasil Biologics License Application (BLA) anyway. In the meantime, following CBER’s approval of Merck’s BLA a key committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), put Gardasil on a fast track and immediately recommended three doses of the Gardasil vaccine to all American women between nine and twenty-six years of age. In a matter of days, Merck was guaranteed a blockbuster launch for Gardasil and within months Gardasil had reached annual revenue levels of well over $1 billion. Soon, Gardasil would become the #1 royalty generator for NIH’s technology licensing group, completing the partnership circle.

As a result of this favorable treatment at the hands of it regulatory partners at DHHS, by late 2006, Merck’s Gardasil was reaching a mass market of young American women. FDA had downplayed the fatalities associated with Gardasil in the clinical trials, but in a population of less than 12,000 young people, three sudden deaths following Gardasil and ten deaths within a year were a clear cause for concern. And as Gardasil’s reach was extending to a population numbering in the millions, the body count would soon rise. At this point in the process, the locus of DHHS conflict of interest would shift from agencies responsible for prelicensing activities such as clinical trial review and public health policy assessments to the agencies responsible for what insiders call “postlicensure surveillance” activities. The events the follow Gardasil’s launch is where part 3 of this series begins.

The body count rises

On July 20, 2008, the New York Post reported the vivid account of a mother who claimed her daughter was killed by Gardasil. In a story titled “My Girl Died As 'Guinea Pig' For Gardasil,” Lisa Ericzon’s description of her daughter’s tragic death was both detailed and disturbing. As told by the Post’s reporter, the story began like this:

“She loved SpaghettiO's, pepperoni, lilies, listening to her iPod and making her pals laugh. In her senior yearbook, she wrote, "The best things in life aren't things, they're friends."  Now that's the quote chiseled into her gravestone.

Jessica Ericzon, 17, was "an all-American teenager," as described by one of her upstate LaFargeville teachers.  Last February, she was working on her softball pitches, getting ready for a class trip to Universal Studios in Florida and hitting the slopes to snowboard with her older brother.  Then one day, the blond, blue-eyed honors student collapsed dead in her bathroom.  It started with a pain in the back of her head.

On the advice of her family doctor, Jessie had taken a series of three Gardasil shots.

Sadly, Jessica Ericzon’s death was not an isolated incident. Since Gardasil’s launch in late 2006, a rising number of parents have stepped forward to report the deaths of their daughters at the hands of the vaccine.  Gardasil has now become a global product, so these reports have come from around the world; but the United States is by far Merck’s largest market, so most of the reported fatalities have come from closer to home. Jessica Ericzon came from upstate New York, about a mile south of the Canadian border, and her parents were among the first to go public about Gardasil. But they haven’t been the last. There are at least ten public reports of young women allegedly killed by Gardasil in the months since FDA approved Merck’s BLA on June 8, 2006. Many more have been reported privately to the CDC.

A License to Kill? Part 2: Who Guards Gardasil’s Guardians?

(Read Parts 1 HERE and 3 HERE of this series.)

By Mark Blaxill

In the first part of this report (HERE), Age of Autism identified a pattern of conflict of interest at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) involving Merck’s Gardasil vaccine. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) invented critical technology for the “virus-like particles” (or VLPs) that were used in the Gardasil vaccine. As the invention reached the commercial marketplace, these researchers’ bosses at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) celebrated their work as “heroic” and “a journey we can learn from.” Meanwhile, officials in the NIH Office for Technology Transfer (OTT) filed for patents on the VLP technology invented at NCI, licensed those patent rights to vaccine manufacturers and eventually received royalties from Merck, Gardasil’s manufacturer, and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

In the second part of the series, Age of Autism will follow the Merck-DHHS “public-private partnership” as it moved beyond NIH to its sister agencies. In a subsequent process at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), officials in the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) supervised the clinical trials and granted Merck the first “Biologics License Application” (BLA) for a human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Three weeks later, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended universal HPV vaccination for women from nine to twenty-six years of age, guaranteeing in one series of votes that Gardasil would reach blockbuster status for Merck: annual revenues of well over $1 billion. Subsequently, agencies within FDA and CDC have been responsible for monitoring Gardasil’s safety in the field, as officials within the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) brace themselves to sit in judgment over a new wave of vaccine injury claims. As we pointed out in the first part of this series, this conflict of interest is both extraordinary in scope and poorly understood by the general public.

At the same time, simply observing the possibility of conflict between the commercial activities of NIH and the regulatory roles of other agencies doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be bias, negligence or lack of diligence on the part of DHHS regulators. Nevertheless, the proclamation of great victory for a vaccine against cervical cancer—one that prompted the NIH Director to single out the invention for praise to both Congress and the President and won its inventors recognition as Federal Employees of the Year—could certainly have created pressure to usher Gardasil through the BLA approval and ACIP recommendation processes with special attention and unusual dispatch. As a result, one might argue that the potential for bias on the part of CBER and ACIP regulators--regulators who would have had a dangerous temptation to relax their required skepticism and hold the favored new product to lower standards of safety—gave them a responsibility for unusual diligence and extra care. But what does the evidence really say about their actual level of diligence? Did CBER and ACIP officials betray their eagerness to enable the celebration of a new “anti-cancer vaccine” or did they hold Gardasil to even more exacting standards of safety? Let’s take a closer look at how FDA and CDC approached their respective responsibilities for Gardasil.

How stringent was FDA’s safety review for Gardasil?

When the FDA issued its approval of Merck’s BLA for Gardasil on June 8, 2006, its decision was based on a review of Merck’s data from five separate clinical trials, each of which included efficacy and safety assessments for Gardasil. Four of the five trials approached their efficacy and safety studies in similar fashion, comparing Gardasil against a “placebo” that contained an active ingredient, with one trial comparing Gardasil against what the CBER reviewers described as a “saline placebo.” All together, these five trials  examined a total of close 12,000 subjects who received at least one dose of Gardasil and compared their outcomes to roughly 10,000 subjects who received up to three injections of what Merck and CBER officials agreed to describe as a “placebo.”

But what is a placebo, really? One definition describes a placebo as “an innocuous or inert medication; given as a pacifier or to the control group in experiments on the efficacy of a drug.” The operative term here is the word inert. But in four of the five trials, Gardasil placebos contained a substance called an adjuvant, “a substance which enhances the body's immune response to an antigen.” According to one of the trial publications, most of the Gardasil trial placebos actually contained an “amorphous aluminium hydroxyphosphate sulfate adjuvant… and was visually indistinguishable from vaccine.”   So although the majority of the placebo treatments in the Gardasil trials did not include Gardasil VLPs, they were by no means inert. In control populations representing nearly 95% of all “placebo” recipients, the study subjects received a formulation that actually included an immunologically active (and potentially harmful) aluminum adjuvant.

One of the five trials, however, was different. In this trial, the only one that examined a younger population of nine-to-fifteen year olds, the placebo recipients did not receive an aluminum adjuvant. By contrast, and according to most of the FDA documentation, the nearly 600 control subjects in this trial received a formulation most commonly described as either a “non-alum placebo” or a “saline placebo.” The safety results of this trial deserve special notice, since it’s the only trial that compared Gardasil to a solution that could reasonably be described as “inert.”

But even that assumption would overstate the case. Although the “saline placebo” did contain water and sodium chloride (ordinary table salt), the FDA was incorrect to suggest that there were no other active ingredients. According to the published description of this trial’s methods, “The placebo used in this study contained identical components to those in the vaccine, with the exception of HPV L1 VLPs and aluminum adjuvant, in a total carrier volume of 0.5 mL.” Formulations like this, which are made up of everything in the vaccine except its immunologically active components, are sometimes called a “carrier solution.” The correct description of the placebo as a “carrier solution” rather than a “saline placebo” was provided only once in the CBER review, buried in a table on page 301. Nowhere in either the CBER review or the published account of the trial can one find any description of this placebo’s ingredients.

It is possible, however, to infer the composition of the carrier solution from Merck’s Gardasil package insert, which lists the vaccine’s immunologically inactive ingredients. These include: “yeast protein, sodium chloride [table salt], L-histidine [an amino acid], polysorbate 80 [an emulsifier], sodium borate, and water for injection.” At least one of these chemicals, sodium borate, is a chemically reactive toxin, one that has many industrial uses as an active ingredient. These include applications as: a replacement for mercury in gold mining; an insecticide and fungicide; and a food additive that is now banned in the United States.

Is there any defense for the FDA to allow this approach to placebo selection in the Gardasil trials? From an efficacy standpoint, one can reasonably argue that yes, using an adjuvant in a placebo makes sense, since it will provide the most rigorous test of the value of the active ingredient under review, in this case the VLPs invented at NCI. And in fact, the returns from all five clinical trials provided convincing evidence that when the VLPs were added to a vaccine formulation containing the aluminum adjuvant, a strong immune response resulted. CBER therefore drew the reasonable conclusion that Gardasil works, at least against the endpoints it was able to measure.

But is it safe? When it comes to the accurate measurement of adverse effects of Gardasil, there is little justification for reliance on a placebo with ingredients that are not inert. There is some limited value, perhaps, in comparing adverse events that are introduced solely by the addition of VLPs to the vaccine solution. But a truly rigorous safety assessment would investigate the full safety profile of the VLPs in combination with the aluminum adjuvant and compare that profile to the profile of an inert solution. After all, the adjuvant is present precisely because it is not inert.

A License to Kill? Part 1: How A Public-Private Partnership Made the Government Merck’s Gardasil Partner

Below is part one of a series which includes Part 2 and
Part 3.

By Mark Blaxill
 
“Perhaps no other recent product on the market demonstrates successful health care technology transfer better than the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, produced by Merck & Co. and approved by the FDA in June 2006,” proclaimed a recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) newsletter. In a February 23, 2007 article entitled “From Lab to Market: The HPV Vaccine”, the NIH Record celebrated the pivotal role of government researchers in developing Merck’s Gardasil product. “Based largely on technology developed at NIH,” the newsletter reported, “the vaccine works to prevent four types of the sexually transmitted HPV that together cause 70 percent of all cervical cancer and 90 percent of genital warts (HERE).
 
The occasion motivating this celebratory article was the “Philip S. Chen, Jr. Distinguished Lecture on Innovation and Technology Transfer” given by Douglas T. Lowy, one of the NIH scientists involved in developing the HPV vaccine. In the ceremony pictured above, Lowy is receiving an honorary poster from the head of NIH at the time, Elias Zerhouni, who took advantage of the occasion to shower praise on his team’s work, one he viewed as a model for future efforts. “It’s a ‘heroic’ story about the effort to fight cervical cancer, the second most deadly cancer for women worldwide, said NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni,” in the NIH Record’s account. “He noted that he has talked about the vaccine’s creation to Congress and with the President on his recent visit to NIH. How researchers took the technology ‘from the lab to the marketplace is a journey we can learn from,’ Zerhouni said.”
 
While Zerhouni was bragging to anyone in Washington D.C. who would listen about the NIH team’s role in this historic accomplishment, the vaccine's developers were actively spreading the news of their achievement in scientific circles. It’s hard to blame them, because at the time Lowy and his colleague John T. Schiller, leaders of the team that had invented the technology for the “virus-like particles” (or VLPs) that made Gardasil possible, were in some pretty heady company. In 2008, Harald zur Hausen, the scientist who discovered the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) in cervical cancer during the 1980s, received one half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine; the two researchers at the Pasteur Institute who had discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) had to share the other half.
 
Perhaps campaigning for their own place in the pantheon of medical heroes, Lowy and Schiller described their VLP technology in several review articles on the history and development of the Merck vaccine. These treatments were studiously scientific in tone and at points openly critical of their commercial partner, as the authors commented with disapproval on the high price Merck was charging for Gardasil. But in one May 2006 review in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, the pair also made the following disclosure about their own commercial interests:
 
“Conflict of interest: The authors, as employees of the National Cancer Institute, NIH, are inventors of the HPV VLP vaccine technology described in this Review. The technology has been licensed by the NIH to the 2 companies, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, that are developing the commercial HPV vaccines described herein.”
 
Attached to an otherwise heroic narrative of the triumph of technology over cancer, this disclosure struck a discordant note. Conflict of interest? Inventors? Vaccine technology? Licenses? Pharmaceutical companies? Commercial vaccines? This isn’t scientific language, but rather the language of money and commerce. What was this unusual concession doing there in the fine print?

Mark Blaxill on Industry Corruption of Scientific Journals: Is Something Rotten in Denmark?

By Mark Blaxill

Several years ago, at the invitation of a journal editor interested in the issue of industry corruption of scientific journals, I drafted an article on the Denmark epidemiology studies. I had just published a couple of articles on autism in other journals and was interested in making additional contributions. I was outraged that the sponsorship of the Danish publications had been spearheaded by the company that manufactured the thimerosal-containing vaccines investigated for their connection to autism and astonished that this connection had received no attention whatsoever. I did a simple analysis of the social network of authorship to show that a single collaboration was behind the entire publication program, wrote up the results and sent a first draft back to the journal.

The peer reviews that came back were constructive and helpful, but also argued for some pretty extensive revisions. The changes had little to do with the conflict of interest argument and mostly involved relatively arcane issues of network analysis and asked me to explain some of the technical choices I had made and how the results of these technical choices should be interpreted. When I got the feedback, I was quite busy on other projects and had begun losing my enthusiasm for running the publication gauntlet at academic journals. As a result, I gave up on the effort and never responded to the suggestions.

As the scandal involving Poul Thorsen’s misrepresentation of his employment and possible misappropriation of funds, it seemed to me that this analysis took on new relevance. So we have decided to run my original draft here in its entirety. We hope that you’ll read it understanding its original intent and in a spirit of forgiveness for its shortcomings.

IS SOMETHING ROTTEN IN DENMARK? A SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF CONFLICT OF INTEREST IN VACCINE SAFETY RESEARCH

Mark F. Blaxill, M.B.A.
Vice President, SafeMinds

Short title: Commercial conflicts in vaccine safety research
 
ABSTRACT

Three papers based on a Danish patient registry argued against a link between mercury-containing vaccines and autism. Following a related analysis of the autism-MMR vaccine link, these studies were published in close succession in prestigious journals, based on marginally differentiated analyses of the same events and prepared by author groups with numerous connections.

Analysis of these publications, their authors and sponsoring institutions reveals a social network with extensive personal and institutional ties. Analysis of the authors and their employers also reveals a pervasive conflict of interest that was not reported in the publishing journals.

All authors in the network have ties, direct or indirect, to a for-profit, state-owned, vaccine manufacturer: the Statens Serum Institut (SSI).  The mercury-containing vaccine investigated in the three studies was produced by SSI. Six SSI employees participated as co-authors in studies in which the safety of SSI products were evaluated. These six individuals also hold central positions in a broader network with ties to eleven additional authors and maintain formal alliances at the institutional level.

SSI has a commercial interest in vaccine products: the vaccine division contributed half of SSI’s revenues and over 80% of profits in 2002; vaccine exports were SSI’s fastest growing business; mercury-containing vaccine products support SSI’s vaccine exports; and SSI provides ingredients for mercury-containing vaccines currently used outside Denmark.

SSI has a conflict of interest in conducting assessments of vaccine safety. This conflict should be considered when evaluating the authors’ findings that mercury in Danish vaccines did not cause harm.

Key words: Vaccines, mercury, autism, thimerosal, social network analysis, conflict of interest.

Read the full paper in .pdf form Is Something Rotten in Denmark
See the figures in .pdf form HERE.

Poul Thorsen's Mutating Resume

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
 
In bits and pieces, in Danish and English, from three universities in two hemispheres and the CDC in Atlanta, a picture has begun forming in the past few days that is already startling in its outline: Paul Thorsen, one of the key scientists involved in CDC-backed studies exonerating vaccines as a cause of autism, is under investigation for collecting millions of dollars in bogus “grant” money, misrepresenting himself to his employers and the world and possibly forging the documents that enabled the scam.
 
Even more astonishing, it appears the CDC and several other major autism research centers have known about this for months and stayed publicly silent, even as the debate over autism and vaccines has reached several decisive moments -- and a new decision is expected any day from U.S. vaccine court. The CDC in particular would have a hard time claiming ignorance about the suspected crime -- at least three of the forged documents were in the agency’s name, and it helped uncover the fraud last year.
 
In addition, several current CDC employees including Drs. Diana Schendel, Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp and Catherine Rice were affiliated with Thorsen’s now-defunct research group. Age of Autism has obtained Internet-archived pages from the Web site of the North Atlantic Neuro-Epidemiology Alliances (NANEA) that list the members of the “Atlanta autism team” including Schendel, Yeargin-Allsopp and Rice, all of whom have been in leadership positions in the CDC’s autism epidemiology projects. Schendel is described as NANEA’s “coordinator at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, USA.” (The CDC did not respond to phone and e-mail requests for comment.)
 
Meanwhile, Thorsen apparently continues his involvement on an American Psychiatric Association committee that is revising the classification of autism for the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – a change that could affect how the prevalence of the disorder is calculated and its victims compensated and treated. (The APA did not respond to phone and e-mail requests for comment.)
 
Thorsen’s resume, dated Jan. 22, 2010, remains on the DSM 5 Working Group members page. (View HERE.) He lists himself as “Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.” (Calls and e-mails to Drexel seeking confirmation of his status there have gone unanswered.)
 
There is also an earlier Thorsen resume still available on an APA directory dated Jan. 12, just 10 days earlier, (View HERE) that differs substantially from the Jan. 22 update.  On that earlier resume, Thorsen calls himself “Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Institute of Public Health, University of Aarhus, Denmark, & Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, USA.”
 
What happened in 10 days to change Thorsen’s bona fides so substantially – going from apparently tenured positions at two leading autism research universities to a part-time adjunct professorship at another school?
 
Follow the chronology: On Jan. 22 – the day the new resume is dated – the University of Aarhus issued a statement "to whom it may concern" (View HERE) contradicting key parts of that first resume: “In March 2009, Dr. Thorsen resigned his faculty position at Aarhus University,” the statement said, meaning, obviously, he could not have been an associate professor of epidemiology as he was claiming as late as Jan. 12, 2010. “In the meantime, it has come to the attention of Aarhus University that Dr Thomsen [sic] has continued to act in such a manner as to create the impression that he still retains a connection to Aarhus University after the termination of his employment by the university.” Of course, one way this could have come to its attention was through a resume posted at the American Psychiatric Association in which Thorsen still stated exactly that.
 
“Furthermore,” the statement said, “it has come to the attention of Aarhus University that Dr Poul Thorsen has held full-time positions at both Emory University and Aarhus University simultaneously. Dr Thorsens [sic] double Full-time employment was unauthorised by Aarhus University, and he engaged in this employment situation despite the express prohibition of Aar- hus University.”

AOL Health: Mark Blaxill Discusses Jenny McCarthy Time Article

Mark Blaxill was on AOL Health this week talking about the TIME magazine article on Jenny McCarthy. Click HERE to see the full post with links.
 
By Mark Blaxill Mar 8th 2010 12:58PM

Categories: Family Health, News

Following a story in Time magazine about Jenny McCarthy's role as an autism activist, AOL Health contributor Mark Blaxill responds, saying that "Time" magazine is feeding what he calls "the hungry lie."

More than most other media outlets, you can count on "Time" magazine for the worst in autism coverage. In the pages of Time, rising autism rates are always due to better diagnosing; causes are always genetic, orthodox scientists are always heroic and parent advocates always sadly misguided. What's more, any and all vaccines in any combination are always safe and certainly have nothing to do with autism. A friend of mine calls this the big hungry lie. Why hungry? Because it's so wrong, it requires frequent feeding and thanks to a largely compliant media, feedings take place with regularity. Always at the front of the pack, "Time," in a February 25 article, fed the hungry lie again in a fascinatingly passive-aggressive essay titled, "Who's Afraid of Jenny McCarthy."

In case, you missed it (who reads "Time" anymore?), the Time piece focused on celebrity mom Jenny McCarthy, who has become one of the most prominent and formidable autism parent advocates. In a successful entertainment career, she has shown the world that she is beautiful, sexy, earthy, smart, articulate and determined (and in roughly that order). She also happens to have a son who received an autism diagnosis in 2005 when he was not quite three. To her lasting credit, McCarthy didn't meekly follow the advice of incompetent experts, most of them in thrall to the hungry lie, but has instead given voice to a large community of autism parents, channeling the mojo of a generation of "warrior moms" in a series of books, taking her audience's cause to a new level in the process...

Scandal Looms Over Key Scientist In Danish Mercury Autism Study

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

A website focused on flu vaccines, citing Danish news accounts and a statement from an official of Aarhus University, is reporting that "A Danish scientist who was the author of a key study that undermined the scientific basis for believing that mercury in vaccines caused autism was employed full time by Emory University in the USA without his university knowing, it has emerged. ... Aarhaus University said in a statement today that they had "expressly prohibited" Dr Poul Thorsen from working for a second university, Emory. ... The revelation that Thorsen had a second secret job will raise fears of a hidden bias in the studies and undermine the scientific case for thiomersal." (HERE)

Poul Thorsen was a co-author on two influential papers on the link between autism and vaccines, one on MMR published in 2002 by the New England Journal of Medicine and another published in 2003 by Pediatrics on thimerosal. SafeMinds performed an extensive analysis (see HERE) of the close network of collaboration the included Aarhus University researchers, employees of the Staten Serum Institut (a vaccine manufacturer) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Thorsen was a central figure in that network, with close ties to CDC (Thorsen is 4th from left in photo, click to enlarge), and now stands accused of forgery and fraud. According to a statement from Aarhus University (see HERE for full text):

“The Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI) has been a grant recipient as part of a cooperative agreement with the US National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, CDC, since 2001. The grant has been administered by Odense University Hospital and Aarhus University (AU) under the direction of Dr. Poul Thorsen. The grant has multiple components and involves collaborators at other institutions in Denmark, including the University of Copenhagen and SSI (Statens Serum Institut). This successful collaboration has resulted in numerous valuable scientific results, and many more are forthcoming.

“Unfortunately, a considerable shortfall in funding at Aarhus University associated with the CDC grant was discovered. In investigating the shortfalls associated with the grant, DASTI and Aarhus University became aware of two alleged CDC funding documents as well as a letter regarding funding commitments allegedly written by Randolph B. Williams of CDC's Procurement Grants Office which was used to secure advances from Aarhus University. Upon investigation by CDC, a suspicion arose that the documents are forgeries.”

According to the university, “a police investigation is ongoing.”

Thorsen made important contributions to some of the most influential studies that have been claimed as evidence for no link between autism and vaccines. The Pediatrics paper is one of five major epidemiology studies cited by the Institute of Medicine in their 2004 report on thimerosal and autism. Based on these studies, three of which included the Aarhus team, the IOM concluded that “the evidence now favors rejection of a relationship between thimerosal and autism.”

Stay tuned for updates on this story as more details emerge.

Dan Olmsted is Editor and Mark Blaxill is Editor-At-Large for Age of Autism.

Mark Blaxill and Rita Shreffler on Go Green Radio with Jill Buck

Tune into "Go Green Radio with Jill Buck" TODAY Friday, March 5 at noon Eastern to listen to Mark Blaxill and NAA's Rita Shreffler in “Part II: Is the Environment to Blame for Autism?”

Good parents advocate for their children, and try to keep them safe from harm. Suppose your children were being harmed by the air they breathe, by chemicals sprayed on their schoolyard, or by vaccinations recommended by your most trusted ally in keeping your child healthy – your pediatrician. If that were the case, you’d likely do all that you could to protect your child, but you’d soon find that as a lone parent it is very difficult to sway the large organizations and companies that control the environmental hazards around your child. And then…you’d do what this week’s Go Green Radio guests did…you’d band together with other concerned parents to make a difference. This week we are joined by the Executive Director of the National Autism Association, Rita Shreffler, and the editor-at-large for the Age of Autism, Mark Blaxill. Rita and Mark will discuss their experiences as parents of autistic children, and help us understand the environmental toxins that may be responsible for rising rates of autism in America.

Joan Cranmer’s Fateful Decisions and the Suppression of Autism Science

By Mark Blaxill

On February 12, 2010 the journal Neurotoxicology made a quiet change on its web-site to an “in-press” article that had previously been available as an “epub ahead of print.”  There was no press release or public announcement, simply an entry change. The entry for the article, “Delayed acquisition of neonatal reflexes in newborn primates receiving a thimerosal-containing Hepatitis B vaccine: Influence of gestational age and birth weight”, was first modified to read “Withdrawn” and has since been removed altogether from the Neurotoxicology web-site. The only remaining official trace of the paper is now the following listing on the National Library of Medicine’s “PubMed” site.

Neurotoxicology. 2009 Oct 2. [Epub ahead of print]

WITHDRAWN: Delayed acquisition of neonatal reflexes in newborn primates receiving a thimerosal-containing Hepatitis B vaccine: Influence of gestational age and birth weight.

Hewitson L, Houser LA, Stott C, Sackett G, Tomko JL, Atwood D, Blue L, White ER, Wakefield AJ.

Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States; Thoughtful House Center for Children, Austin, TX 78746, United States.

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.

How can a scientific study simply vanish? This paper had cleared every hurdle for entry into the public scientific record: it had passed peer review at a prestigious journal, received the editor’s approval for publication, been disseminated in electronic publication format (a common practice to ensure timely dissemination of new scientific information), and received the designation “in press” as it stood in line awaiting future publication in a print version of the journal. Now, and inexplicably, it has been erased from the official record. For practical scientific purposes it no longer exists.

The answer, of course, is that this is no ordinary scientific study.  Age of Autism reported previously on its importance HERE , where we noted that “one likely tactic of critics of the study will include attempts to nullify the evidence based on the alleged bias of those involved.” The obvious risk, of course, was that a co-investigator on the paper, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, might make the study a target, especially in light of the hearings then underway at the U.K.’s General Medical Council (GMC).  In the wake of last month’s GMC findings of misconduct, we also reported on the calls by Generation Rescue to recognize the even greater importance of Dr. Wakefield’s work on this primate project, an analysis of the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated macaque monkeys (see HERE and HERE). Sadly, true to our prediction, and despite the quality of the work and the importance of the findings, it appears that the “attempts to nullify the evidence” have been successful.

Over the least several weeks, Age of Autism has tried repeatedly to contact the journal and spoke briefly with Joan Cranmer, the editor-in-chief of Neurotoxicology. She declined comment on the issue. We have obtained evidence, however, that Cranmer has participated in two separate communications on her decisions regarding the primate paper. The first of these came last November, in the form of a response to a threatening letter she had received, at which time Cranmer gave a strong defense of Neurotoxicology’s review procedures.

“As Editor of Neurotoxicology this is to inform you that the referenced manuscript has been subjected to rigorous independent peer review according to our journal standards.   If you have issues with the science in the paper please submit them to me as a Letter to the Editor which will undergo peer review and will be subject to publication if deemed acceptable.”

That response, of course, came before the subsequent media storm over the GMC findings and the decision by another journal, The Lancet to retract a paper co-authored by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the last listed author (a slot typically reserved for a project’s senior scientist) on the primate paper.

Mark Blaxill on Wakefield in USA Today: 'Believe objective science and parents, not the medical industry or the media frenzy"

Mark Blaxill is featured in USA Today this morning for an opposing view to, Debate on Fighting Disease: Vaccine Fear Mongering Endgangers Child Health. Mark takes ownership of his opposing view --which USA Today titled  "Unjustly accused -- Medical industry seeks to suppress science to protect vaccine profits," we have restored Mark's original title here -- and we are left wondering who wrote the "Vaccine fear mongering" editorial, excerpted below.

Americans no longer routinely see people disfigured by smallpox or crippled by polio, so it's easy to forget what terrible scourges those diseases were before vaccination eradicated them here. Routine shots also nearly wiped out measles, a dangerous childhood illness that killed 450 and caused 4,000 cases of encephalitis annually in the USA before a vaccine became widely available in the mid-1960s.

But reported cases of measles, while still tiny, are now ticking upward, and the probable reason is troubling: Fearful parents are refusing to let their children be vaccinated against once-common childhood diseases. Anxiety — fanned by a discredited British researcher and misguided celebrities — has grown that childhood vaccines, chiefly the MMR vaccine (for measles, mumps and rubella), are a reason for an alarming spike in the number of children with autism, a disorder that impairs a child's social and communication skills, often severely... (Read and comment on the full article Debate on Fighting Disease: Vaccine Fear Mongering Endgangers Child Health. )

Here is Mark Blaxill's response. Please comment at USA Today using the link below.

Believe objective science and parents, not the medical industry or the media frenzy 

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, a memorable scene follows the protagonist (working at the satirically named Ministry of Truth) as he rewrites the news to erase a man’s life and work from history. That’s what Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, just attempted when he retracted a case series report by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital from the scientific record. Horton should be ashamed of himself, and anyone who believes in the free and open discussion of controversial scientific questions should be concerned about what has happened to our civil discourse in the process.

There’s a lot of name-calling and misinformation swirling around this issue that should stop. Parents concerned about vaccine safety issues are branded “anti-vaccine.” Dedicated scientists who simply reported a series of cases combining bowel symptoms, autistic regression and exposure to the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) stand accused of fraud and misconduct. Meanwhile, the medical industry has dismissed concerns over exploding autism rates in a crusade to protect their policies and vaccine profits.

Anyone convinced that Wakefield is the problem should ask a simple question: Can you name a single instance of fraud or misconduct by Wakefield, describe it simply without deferring to the authority of some faceless tribunal and defend the evidence to an informed skeptic? You won’t succeed. Why? Because the evidence clearly shows there was neither fraud nor misconduct. The parents whose children Wakefield studied never complained, and most have gone public with their support of Wakefield and his colleagues. Why wouldn’t they? Their children were treated by Wakefield’s colleagues, experts in pediatric gastroenterology, and the children’s intestinal symptoms and symptoms of autism improved.

The Lancet parents are not alone. Thousands of parents all over the world — dedicated, educated parents of children with autism — have done their own scientific diligence and reached conclusions that differ from the media frenzy stoked up by government officials and the medical industry. They trust Wakefield and believe he and his colleagues stand unjustly accused. They also believe that scientific censorship is a pernicious thing and should stop. You should, too.

Mark Blaxill is Editor-at-Large for Age of Autism and a Director of SafeMinds, an organization that researches the role of mercury in autism.

Watch the Fox News Video on Vaccine Autism Debate with Mark Blaxill

Naked Intimidation: The Wakefield Inquisition is Only the Tip of the Autism Censorship Iceberg

  “That’s baseless conspiracy-mongering”, some might counter, contending that any anecdote I might dig up is simply the normal process of scientific quality control. “Welcome to the real world”, I respond, because this is something entirely new and disturbing. The deep and profound censorship occurring around autism science reaches depths that few casual observers can imagine.

I have proof.

By Mark F. Blaxill

There are no words to describe the findings of the General Medical Council (GMC). All I can say is that none of us should be surprised. The stakes had escalated far too high for the British medical establishment to countenance any other outcome. In the face of this parody of real justice, the only thing for the autism community to do now is stand by Andy Wakefield. Like him, we must not be intimidated; which is why I am proud to call Andy my friend. He is all of our friend.

We must also not forget two other fine men, John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, men who have devoted their professional lives to healing the guts of sick children, and whose public reputations stand in tatters before the world, assaulted by the public health propaganda machine, victims of a modern day show trial. The GMC proceeding is a frightening and thoroughly modern form of tyranny. It makes you shudder to think what Stalin or McCarthy might have accomplished if their public relations had been more skillful and better organized.

The extremity of the GMC’s verdict--all three men guilty on all counts—lays bare any pretense that the British medical establishment cares one whit about the welfare of its patients. Let’s put in perspective the actions at issue here. No children were harmed and no parent or guardian has complained about the care these three men provided. In fact, the procedures involved were routine, the resulting treatments standard and the careful attention to gastrointestinal illness in autistic children has recently been endorsed by a consensus statement published in the journal Pediatrics (no friend of the autism community). Considered in this light, the GMC hearing process stands exposed for what it is. It was not about medical standards. It was not about evidence. It was not even civilized.  It was, rather, a naked exercise in intimidation, a fateful moment of moral decision in which the medical industrial complex exposed its ruthless, repressive essence. They are a frightening bunch and their conduct here raises issues well beyond autism.

There are others who can and will speak to the particulars of the case: the accusations, the evidence, and the integrity of the witnesses for the prosecution (see HERE and  HERE ). But it’s important to remember that this trial has never really been about the three doctors. If it were, it would never have consumed so many millions of dollars and thousands of hours over more than two years. The real goal of this proceeding, what I have called The Wakefield Inquisition (see HERE ) is to send a clear message to anyone--clinician or scientist--who dares step out of line like Wakefield did. And as parents and citizens, we all need to understand one thing: that message has been received loud and clear.

From The Roman to The Wakefield Inquisition

The UK General Medical Council Hearing decision is due Thursday, January 28, at 9:01am EDT. We'll be running posts throughout the week, including this one, which first ran on 12/31/08.

From the Roman to the Wakefield Inquisition

By Mark Blaxill

As the year draws to a close, all of us at the Age of Autism are very pleased to honor Dr. Andrew Wakefield. As we’ve reported here many times during the past year, Dr. Wakefield has been the subject of a remarkable and unprecedented campaign to discredit his work and character, most notably in a show trial that is still underway in London, in hearings of the General Medical Council. In the face of extraordinary attempts to silence him, Wakefield has stood up to these attacks with grace and determination and has continued his research and clinical work on behalf of children and families suffering from autism. That makes him our first Age of Autism Galileo Award recipient.

Like many of our awards this year, this wasn’t a difficult decision. In fact, this may be one of those unusual cases where the recipient of an award in some ways outshines its namesake. To understand why that might be so, you need to understand a bit more about why we chose to name the award after the Italian scientist Galileo, what he represents to the history of science and how his experience compares with Wakefield’s.

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy in 1564. And while he was a physicist and mathematician of some note, Galileo was as much a practical mechanic as he was a grand theorist; indeed it was his tinkering with convex and concave lenses that gave him the tools to leave his lasting mark on the world. As a skilled inventor of early working telescopes, he did not design the world’s first telescope, but he was the first to make them powerful enough for scientific use. In fact, the word telescope (derived from the Greek roots skopein, “to see”, and tele for “far”) was coined in 1611 to describe one of Galileo’s first instruments. For the accomplishments that flowed from his pioneering work, he has been described by many as The Father of Modern Physics; Albert Einstein even went so far as to name him The Father of Modern Science.

But Galileo is celebrated today not as much for his engineering talent as for the suffering he endured in support of an unpopular scientific theory. Because it was Galileo’s work with telescopes in the early 17th century that lent critical support to the theory of heliocentrism, the idea that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. As with his telescope technology, Galileo was not the first to propose the heliocentric theory: that distinction belongs to Nicolai Copernicus. Yet Copernicus, a Polish mathematician, was well aware of the personal risk of disseminating his ideas and delayed their publication for many years. Copernicus’ major work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was published only shortly before his death at age 70 in 1543.

Mark Blaxill: Lies, Damned Lies and CDC Autism Statistics

By Mark Blaxill (A "Best of AoA" post from 12/09)

It’s official now, real autism rates have exploded to 1 in 100 American children. We’re facing a national public health emergency of historic proportions. Bigger than swine flu. Bigger than polio. Bigger than almost anything one can imagine except AIDS. No matter how hard some may try, it’s impossible to escape the inexorable upward march of the numbers.  Even Tom Insel, head of autism research at NIH and not exactly the autism world’s greatest forward thinker, has conceded the obvious: “There is no question that there has got to be an environmental component here.”

Following last week’s release of the latest CDC autism surveillance report, no amount of methodological obfuscation (“autism prevalence has clearly gone up but there are no real incidence studies”), epidemiological nihilism (“we simply can’t know without large scale, well-controlled, prospective studies”) or social deconstructionist nonsense (“autism is an intolerant invention of modern society”) should escape scorn . Anyone with brain, a conscience and an ounce of integrity must acknowledge that we face a crisis. Meanwhile, those who would accuse the autism parent community of “denialism”, unscientific reasoning and irresponsible irrationality need to explain how their own theories, so dependent on the evidence-free suggestion that rates are rising because of “better diagnosing”, deserve to be considered respectable scientific speech. There is no more unscientific position in public health today than the fiction that rising autism rates come from better diagnosing. Let’s be clear, the only evidence for better diagnosing is wishful thinking. Our public health institutions deserve no credit for a job done better; quite the contrary, they deserve an investigation into their negligence.

Autism - CDC Avoids The Elephant in The Room

Atlanta, GA – A study released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that autism prevalence has increased a staggering 57% from the 1994 rate of 1 in 150  to 1 in 110 for children born in 1998. SafeMinds is extremely dissatisfied with CDC’s lack of commitment to researching environmental causes and the timing of their announcement. 

Mark Blaxill, SafeMinds Director told FoxNews.com , “I would say that releasing something the Friday before Christmas is about as deep as you can bury something.”

CDC’s Catherine Rice said, “We know there are multiple complex genetic and environmental factors which result in multiple forms of autism and we have much to learn about the causes.” However, absent from press conference and subsequent call with autism advocacy groups were specifics on the types of environmental exposures to be investigated. They skirted questions about potential environmental causes and avoided using words like “toxic exposures” or “pollutants” despite very pointed questions from advocates.