AGE OF AUTISM

Olmsted on Autism: Affective Contact

By Dan Olmsted

One of the great ironies of autism is that a “disorder of affective contact,” as it was called the very first time it was described, has led to quite the opposite – to a community of people who care so much about each other, about their children and about the world they will inhabit.
 
This realization has been dawning on me for a while, but for some reason a number of recent posts, comments and interconnections have made it especially vivid. I think the Father’s Day posts and comments, Abdulkadir Khalif’s Autism One reflections and Kent Heckenlively’s idea that we are all “Friends of Jenny” really drove the point home. To sit at a small computer screen and connect with so many people being so open, honest, intelligent and emotional – not sentimental, not self-indulgent, but willing and able to express exactly how they feel, as they feel it, whether that is joyous or painful or some inexplicable uncertain ever-evolving mixture – can be just overwhelming. 
 
How did we get so lucky to have created a little outpost in cyberspace that would draw this kind of person and these beautiful expressions of what it means to be a deeply caring human being dealing with really tough things in really creative and courageous ways? I don’t know. I’m just glad it happened. The temptation to quote from various people’s words is quite strong – to mix up the poignant, the angry, the exhausted, the committed, the hilarious, the exasperated, the sarcastic, the dejected, the determined and the dignified voices in a way that shows exactly what I mean. But that would mean essentially repeating what you read and write, all of you, every day, and it could never recreate the flow out of which it continuously emerges, so I’m just going to stand back and let it all be, as The Boss once put it.

Olmsted on Autism: How to Completely Miss the Story

By Dan Olmsted

The New York Times published a piece over the Memorial Day weekend that must have been painful to write – they now realize they had the Watergate scandal handed to them on a silver platter four decades ago and just plain missed it. “The Watergate break-in eventually forced a presidential resignation and turned two Washington Post reporters into pop-culture heroes. But almost 37 years after the break-in, two former New York Times journalists have stepped forward to say that The Times had the scandal nearly in its grasp before The Post did — and let it slip.”

“Robert M. Smith, a former Times reporter, says that two months after the burglary, over lunch at a Washington restaurant, the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, L. Patrick Gray, disclosed explosive aspects of the case, including the culpability of the former attorney general, John Mitchell, and hinted at White House involvement.”
 
Exactly how this big fish got up off its silver lunch platter and swam away is worth reading (HERE).
 
But the bottom line is this: If the account is correct, “The Times missed a chance to get the jump on the greatest story in a generation.”
 
You can watch the same thing happen every day now with the greatest story of this generation, and I mean “this generation” very literally – the catastrophic rise of developmental and chronic diseases in this generation of children, the leading edge of which is starting to age into young adulthood. Start anywhere you want – 1 in 10 with asthma, a forty-fold increase in bipolar diagnoses, record levels of juvenile diabetes and, of course, our focus – the rise of autism and ADD and ADHD and sensory integration problems and etc., the neurodevelopmental kitchen sink that is disabling our future.

Olmsted on Autism: Welcome to Illinois

Managing Editor's Note: When my Mia was 8 years old, we took her to a ped. endocrinologist with concerns about early puberty. She also had a severe seizure disorder. The endo, a Fellow from Dartmouth working at University Hospitals of Cleveland did the routine tests.  Blood, x-ray of the hand bones. Mia was just on the cusp of what would be called "precocious puberty."  He offered me Lupron straight away. I asked, "What will Lupron do to her seizure disorder?"  He had no idea. In fact, he kept saying, "The social stigma of a girl getting her period in third grade..." And I kept responding, "But she has autism and the social stigma is a non-starter. This is at best a convenience issue for Mom."  He wanted her on Lupron but couldn't give me any facts as to how it would affect her overall health, beside her breasts disappearing and her underarm hair falling out.  I declined the Lupron out of fear for what it would do to Mia's seizures. Mainstream docs prescribe this drug every day, to children.

By Dan Olmsted

I'm at the Courier Cafe in Urbana, Ill., so named because the building was the site of the old Courier newspaper. How fitting that I'm here to meet my high school English teacher, with whom I've kept up over the years, and fill her in on the latest on the book I'm co-writing with Mark Blaxill on the natural history of autism. I'm going to read her a passage about the first child diagnosed with the disorder -- "Donald T.," in 1943, and how treatment with gold salts for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis also had a remarkable impact on his autistic symptoms, according to his family.

I'm here first, so I stop at the counter for a paper -- in Illinois, everyone reads The Trib, even those who grew up "downstate" like me. It used to be a mean, bigoted, reactionary rag with a full-color American flag  and Democrat-baiting cartoon on the front page every day. Now it's just another bankrupt big city paper looking for a way out of irrelevance and insolvency.
 
And then it hit me -- the huge headline, "'Miracle Drug' Called Junk Science -- Powerful castration drug pushed for autistic children, but medical experts denounce unproven claims." There was a picture of Dr. Geier and Mayer Eisenstein and a mother with her child who has autism. The story was about the debate over Lupron and whether it was helping the hundreds of children taking it.

Olmsted On Autism: Oh, Just Another MMR Seizure

By Dan Olmsted

My little 18-month-old friend Brandon got his MMR a couple of weeks ago. I must confess, I was pretty concerned about it. For one thing, his father had died in Brandon’s first year of life from cancer. If genetic mutations have anything to do with susceptibility, this seemed like a possible problem to me. And his father had the fair-haired, blue-eyed Northern European profile that seems to go with trouble; he even had persistent skin problems that suggested autoimmune difficulties.
  
For another thing, Brandon had a bad reaction to an earlier vaccination, the DPT-and-whatever-else-was-on-tap-that-day series. He went home, fell asleep, and woke up screaming for three hours nonstop. This gentle, amiable, happy-to-go-to-bed-with-a-bottle-baby could not be consoled.
 
“Don’t worry,” the doctor said, “it’s just screaming baby syndrome.”
 
SCREAMING BABY SYNDROME? Now you tell me that enough babies scream inconsolably after vaccination that there is a recognized syndrome so common that it is met with a shrug by pediatricians, even though they never manage to mention anything that vivid and troubling in the office visit or on the consent form?

Olmsted on Autism: Among the Neurologists

By Dan Olmsted

Last week in Seattle I made what’s called a “poster presentation” at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting. This involved standing in front of a large -- four-feet-by-five-feet or so -- poster tacked up on a bulletin board in a big ballroom, taking questions from passersby.
 
The poster focused on the first 11 cases of autism described in the landmark 1943 paper I write so much about. We called it: “Association of Mercurial Exposures in Leo Kanner’s Original Case Series Entitled ‘Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.’” The poster listed each child and the source of mercury exposure and concluded, in the affectless prose these things require: “Early exposure to mercurial compounds may be an unrecognized risk factor in several of the first cases of autism described in the medical literature. This may have certain implications for further research into causation and treatment.”
 
If you read my column even episodically you already know a lot of what was on that poster (if not, check out “Mercury Rising” on our home page). Age of Autism Editor at Large Mark Blaxill and I (with tireless help from Teresa Conrick) have been slowly building information on those first cases, finding associations with the commercialization of ethyl mercury in fungicides and vaccines in the 1930s. We’ve identified seven of the 11 children so far. The bottom line is that, in our view, autism began when this new exposure began.

The rest is history -- the natural history of autism.

Drugs, Death and the Manufacture of Doubt

By Dan Olmsted

I hope regular readers of this site will indulge a fairly extended incursion into a topic that, on the surface, is unrelated to autism but that connects at a deep level with our point and purpose. It concerns what I would call an analogous situation, and analogies sometimes have just as much power as direct argument and evidence.
 
This piece is triggered by two articles written last week on The Huffington Post by Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher magazine and nine books including “Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq.” Greg is one of the really smart guys orbiting the media universe, and was among the first to raise questions about the weak and wobbly performance of the press in covering the so-called “war on terror.” 
 
My own experience with Greg comes from something he wrote in March 2004: “My vote for Iraq reporter of the year goes to a low-profile journalist who did not cover the war itself and has never even been to Baghdad. His name is Mark Benjamin, 33, and he serves as investigations editor for United Press International out of Washington, D.C. E&P has documented his work since last autumn, and now the heavy hitters - The New York Times and The Washington Post - are following his lead, taking a long look at the forgotten American victims of the war: the injured, the traumatized, and the suicides.”
 
At that point, Mark and I were colleagues at UPI -- I was his editor on those stories, although we were first and foremost co-conspirators in trying to bring attention to the woeful way the military was treating its soldiers and veterans. We had already been working together a couple of years at that point, starting in early 2002 with an investigative series on an anti-malaria drug called Lariam. The Army invented it as older malaria pills were losing effectiveness during the Vietnam era, and rushed it onto the market with inadequate testing under a licensing deal with Roche. It didn’t take long for the pharmaceutical version of  “sin in haste, repent at leisure” effect to appear -- by the late 1980s, severe mental problems that included suicide and aggressive behavior were showing up in the military and also in the general traveling population, which was being prescribed Lariam as the new wonder drug.

Olmsted on Autism: Columbine's Unlearned Lesson

By Dan Olmsted

There's a reason we call this the AGE of Autism -- it's because we live in an age where autism is the most dire and widespread -- the defining -- disorder of our day. But what we really have is a generation of sick kids, and of chronic diseases of children and adults that have environmental clues and causes and potential cures -- and a media and medical establishment that won't come to grips with any of it. That's quite a saga -- it is the most important story of our time, which explains why we're all here.
 
That also explains why I want to briefly stray off-message -- or seemingly so, by noting the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. Since then, there have been more, and an isolated fact noted at Columbine has emerged as a pattern, at least for those with eyes to see. Eric Harris, the leader of the pair, was taking Luvox, an antidepressant. 

Olmsted on Autism: Healy Hit's 'Em With 'Heavy Duty' Hep B!

BY DAN OLMSTED

So many good things happened on Larry King last week that it's taken me a while to zero in on one that I want to make sure we don't overlook. It is, as far as I know, the first time anyone in the mainstream medical world has singled out a vaccine on the current CDC schedule as needless and, implicitly, downright dangerous.
 
For that we can thank -- as we can for so much else -- Bernadine Healy. Here is the passage, with the "Jesus" reference left in for its seasonal relevance and general cheekiness:
 
"HEALEY: I think we haven't had the come to Jesus session yet that says, wait a minute, this polarization is very negative. It's not good for the children and it's not good for the science. Quite frankly, Larry, there is no such thing as anti-vaccine and pro-vaccine. We are all pro-vaccine. We know what Polio is. We know what Meningitis is. We know what we want to avoid.
 
"But there are some vaccines here -- let's forget about autism. There are some vaccines here that one -- a parent can legitimately question: giving a one-day old baby, or a two-day old baby Hepatitis B vaccine, that has no risk for it. The mother has no risk for it. That's a heavy duty vaccine given on day two, at two months, at four months. I think those are legitimate questions. I think there has to be more flexibility and we need to have people smiling at each other, saying we're hearing you, let's move forward."

Olmsted on Autism: Yupidity from Yale (An Ongoing Series)

By Dan Olmsted

There is so much sheer nonsense uttered every day by the “experts” on autism that one hardly knows when silently to shake one’s head and when loudly to open one’s mouth. I’ve decided on a useful way to avoid wearing out my vocal cords. I’m going to be selective: Most of it can just sail on by. But every time another needless, pointless and/or erroneous study comes out of Yale, I’m going to yell about it -- and call it what it is, Yupidity.

Actually, I still may end up quite hoarse, as their Child Study Center appears to be a fountain of retrograde nonsense. But because it is my alma mater, and because it is always asking me for money (you would, too, if you had managed to lose at least $8 billion in the past few months), I figure they will especially appreciate my thoughts. Right? 
 
So here goes -- in a story headlined “Study: Autistic Children Miss Social Clues,” The Yale Daily News reported Monday: “According to new Yale research, 2-year-olds with autism lack a key social mechanism that normally allows non-autistic children to recognize human movement.” Well, alert the media -- because “Instead, autistic children focus on the physical aspects of motion and fail to pick up on important social information, according to the study, which was published in the March 29 online edition of Nature.” 

Olmsted on Autism: 1 in 10,000 Amish

Managing Editor's Note:  Dr. Max Wiznitzer of University Hospitals in Cleveland is an expert witness for the government against the families who file in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

 By Dan Olmsted

It is unanimous, apparently -- the rate of autism among the Amish is low. Really, really low. So low that if it were the same in the rest of the population, we wouldn't even be talking about the subject. Shockingly low.
 
But not so shocking that anyone feels compelled to follow up on the information or its logical implications -- not four years ago when I first pointed it out, not today when the clues it contains are more intriguing than ever -- in fact, never, never, never.
 
In April 2005 I wrote a UPI column called The Amish Anomaly that began this way: "Where are the autistic Amish? Here in Lancaster County, heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, there should be well over 100 with some form of the disorder. I have come here to find them, but so far my mission has failed ..."
 
In case anyone had any lingering doubts about the virtual absence of autism among the Amish, they were effectively put to rest on Friday night's Larry King segment when Dr. Max Wiznitzer -- defending the vaccine program, arguing autism has not increased and insisting it is a genetic disorder preset from birth, said the rate of autism in northeastern Ohio, the nation's largest Amish community, was 1 in 10,000. He should know, he said: "I'm their neurologist."