AGE OF AUTISM

Why Autism is Like Watergate

By Dan Olmsted

This week’s 40^th anniversary of Watergate is a reminder of how quickly good governance can get away from us. The hodgepodge of criminality, cover-up, and sheer paranoid mendacity that came to be known by the name of the building where the break-in occurred is still breathtaking to consider.

But you don’t have to look far for a contemporary analogy – the way the feds have hidden, lied about, deflected and delayed the day of reckoning about the cause of the autism epidemic, and the way the lazy, conflicted “access media” has aided and abetted them, is fully comparable to Watergate. (The two reporters who did dog the story were covering local news at the time and had no access to lose.)

I can hear the skeptics screaming. Well, scream on. A repeated pattern of overlapping cover-ups is amply demonstrated by the record – from the CDC-Verstraeten “Generation Zero” data, to the IOM-Marie McCormick “line we will not cross” minutes, from the Simpsonwood hush-up to the Vaccine Court’s “unanswered questions,” from the Brick Township “zero to 1 in 150 in a decade is not a trend” study to the “fishy” Hannah Poling ruling in which something happened that wasn’t caused by the thing that did it, to the study that showed autism kept going up when thimerosal was removed, when it actually went down, and now, when all else is failing, to the ongoing obliteration of the entire disaster by redoing the DSM-V.

The main objection we always hear – “So you’re saying that all the pediatricians in the United States have decided to harm the children in their care by giving them an injection they know will cause autism?”

No, not saying that. Saying this: Even as it became clear that the CDC-recommended vaccine schedule -- including multiple neurotoxic live viruses injected at once, shots against diseases not worth preventing, and toxins like mercury that were removed from pesticides decades ago -- was likely causing catastrophic sickness in children, self-interested parties played with the numbers, privatized the databases, commissioned conflicted and worthless studies, kept piling on the same calamitous policies, then hunkered down and said, essentially, catch us if you can before we retire to Hilton Head.

How many people knew, how many should have known, how many simply ducked and covered will be sorted out another day (and that day is coming). For now, on this anniversary of the previously biggest scandal in American history, it’s enough to remind ourselves this is what we’re dealing with, and why it’s worth the fight.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism

A Decade after Murder-Suicides, D-Day for “the Agent Orange of our Generation”

By Dan Olmsted

1.

On June 11, 2002, a Green Beret named Rigoberto Nieves shot and killed his 28-year-old wife, Teresa, with a single bullet to the head in the bathroom of their home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Then he killed himself. Two days earlier, Nieves, 32, had returned to Fort Bragg, the sprawling Army base nearby, from several months in Afghanistan. Nieves was among the elite Special Forces soldiers who took down the Taliban following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Last Wednesday, an Army epidemiologist named Remington Nevin took a seat in the witness chair before the Defense subcommittee of the powerful U. S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. Wearing a business suit and a sober expression and looking lonely at a table more often occupied by military brass in full regalia, he began reading from a prepared statement. 

(Watch testimony beginning at 130:52 mark.) “I am here today to testify on an important issue which I fear may become the ‘Agent Orange’ of our generation: a toxic legacy that affects our troops, and our veterans,” Nevin said, emphasizing he was speaking for himself, not the Army. “This is a critical issue that is in desperate need of research funding.

“I am referring to the harmful effects of the antimalarial drug mefloquine, also known as Lariam, which was first developed over 40 years ago by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

“Mefloquine causes a severe intoxication syndrome, characterized by vivid nightmares, profound anxiety, aggression, delusional paranoia, dissociative psychosis, and severe memory loss. Experience has shown that this syndrome, even if rare, can have tragic consequences, both on the battlefield, and on the home front.”

The decade between the Nieves deaths and Nevin’s testimony has been marked by a rising wave of PTSD, suicides, and violent behavior by both active-duty  troops and veterans. March brought the worst American atrocity in the war on terror, when a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, Sgt. Robert Bales, allegedly went on a rampage, killing 16 villagers including children and a pregnant woman, setting some on fire, and single-handedly upending already shaky U.S.-Afghan relations.

In the search for explanations, these tragedies have been linked to combat stress, multiple deployments, financial problems, marital discord, pre-existing personality disorders, alcohol, steroids, and traumatic brain injury (TBI), most commonly from improvised explosive devices planted along roads. But it is becoming increasingly clear that an unknown but consequential percentage of these problems have been triggered by a toxin to which hundreds of thousands of troops have by now been exposed (hence Nevin's Agent Orange analogy). In this case, the toxin is mefloquine, or Lariam, a prescription drug acknowledged to cause serious, long-lasting, sometimes fatal problems in a significant percentage of those who take it, problems the drug company now admits can last “long after” they stop.

Dan Olmsted: The Amish All Over Again

By Dan Olmsted

Back in the early days of USA Today 30 years ago, the paper’s founder, Al Neuharth, roamed the newsroom, micromanaging and demanding impossibly high standards. That was not necessarily a bad thing – the paper was his baby and he knew what he wanted – but it produced some classic moments. In one case, he rejected headline after headline on a particular story – as it was told to me, 24 times -- until the frustrated editor once again handed him the first headline that he had by now forgotten.

“Finally!” Neuharth exclaimed.

I’m about at that point when it comes to the Amish and their amazingly good health. There’s been story after story reporting the relative absence of Alzheimer’s, allergies, asthma – you know, the big chronic disorders that plague the people who live around them, namely the rest of us. Not to mention -- not ever -- the lack of autism.

Autism aside, the medical and media establishments still manage to evade the logical implications – something is protecting the overall health of this insular community whose rejection of many contemporary norms is legendary. You would think they would want to find out what that something is and try to clone it, stat, especially as the same disorders and diseases hit epidemic rates outside the Amish world and these same “experts” express complete bafflement about what’s going on.

A letter to the editor of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, dated March 16, 2012 and published in the most recent edition online, is the latest to make this point. The six authors, scientists from Indiana, Germany, and Switzerland, state: “The prevalence of allergic sensitization has increased in most developed counties over the past century. In the United States, the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found 54.3% of the study population to have evidence of allergic sensitization.”

But not so among the 25,000 Amish in Indiana, who “live primarily an agrarian lifestyle. Many families live on working farms. All Amish families have horses that are used for transportation. A significant percentage drinks raw milk. They do not use electricity in their homes. They have large families.”

And they have very little allergy – among children ages 6 to 12 years, the percentage showing evidence of allergic sensitization was a mere 7.2 percent. This was far lower than two comparison groups; children in Switzerland who lived on farms had a still-low 25.2 percent, and Swiss non-farm children 44.2 percent, approaching international averages.

What gives? Well, “although we have not determined specific mechanisms, this study continues to support the effect of early farm exposures and their impact in significantly reducing the prevalence of asthma and allergic sensitization.” Those “exposures” might include raw milk, lots of siblings and farm animals – the usual constituents of the hygiene hypothesis that posits rolling around in lots of germs will keep you from getting allergies.

Well, maybe. Raw milk is a controversial issue right now, with the feds fighting it and lots of natural-health folks believing it is much healthier. But c’mon, people! What about non-exposures, like non-exposure to the full-throttle 2012 CDC-recommended, state-mandated vaccination schedule starting with mercury-containing flu shots in utero and Hep B at birth. What percentage of these Amish were non-exposed to that schedule compared to the average suburban family?

And we already know that vaccines can trigger asthma, the king of allergies. As my colleague Mark Blaxill has reported, “If you look at the totality of the published evidence the picture is admittedly somewhat mixed, but for anyone with an open mind and a critical eye, the argument for a strong role for vaccines as a cause of asthma is persuasive.” Even delaying the DPT shot by a couple of months cuts the rate of asthma by more than double.

 

 

Mush From the Wimps: Autism Speaks and the CDC Take Over Capitol Hill as Rep. Smith Bows Out

By Dan Olmsted

After attending Wednesday’s congressional briefing on the latest autism statistics, I found myself with three questions, despite having asked several at the briefing. They are variations on the same theme, and not exactly new, but seem more pressing after more than an hour of listening: Why is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still in charge of monitoring and explaining the rise in autism? Why are the CDC and Autism Speaks cozying up to each other in such a public way at this particular moment? And why was the Congressional host heaping praise on the agency when it covered up the first signs of the epidemic -- and in his home district in New Jersey, of all places?

The event was co-sponsored by U.S. Reps. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) and billed as “a Congressional Briefing on the Centers for Disease Control's recent announcement that autism now affects 1 in 88 American children.” 

Rep. Smith began the proceedings, which drew probably 30 people to a room in the Rayburn House Office Building. Congressmen often try to make news at these kind of events, and before he started speaking an aide passed out a statement by Smith headlined, “Global Autism: ‘A Developmental Disability Pandemic’ – 67 Million People Affected According to Autism Speaks.” Then I realized the statement was from May 31, 2011. Nothing new to say, I guess.

Smith began by describing the CDC’s Brick Township study, which started after a parent reached out to the congressman in 1997 (he’s been around for 16 terms, as he pointed out). The parent was concerned about “an apparent prevalence spike” in autism. The CDC investigated, Smith said, and “did an expert study that was extraordinary … and all of a sudden it became clear that it wasn’t just Brick. It seemed as if there was some game changer somewhere in the population causing this huge new increase in autism.”

Well, not exactly. In fact, not at all. The CDC did find a rate of 1 in 150 children in Brick Township – the highest ever reported anywhere in the world to that point – but said no conclusions could be drawn from the data about whether there was an actual increase. (That refrain has become familiar, repeated time and again by the CDC at Wednesday’s briefing. Some things never change.)

In our book, The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, Mark Blaxill and I took a look at the actual data the CDC used in its Brick Township study, which the group SafeMinds had obtained from the CDC. In fact, the autism rate in Brick Township was actually zero in 1989, the start of the study period. Not one kid had autism.

As we wrote, “Once you have the real trend data, you can figure out how hard the CDC had to work in order to report a result that said there was no trend. … If this wasn’t a cover-up, it’s hard to think of a polite synonym.”

So the opportunity to recognize, report on, and try to intervene in the autism epidemic years ago was lost, and lost by the CDC itself. Since then, hundreds of thousands more children have developed autism in the United States alone. Today, though, the CDC remains in charge of studying the rate of autism and looking for the reasons behind it. In response to a more recent spike in autism in the Somali population, the CDC said it was going to do a really thorough analysis and cited the Brick study as precedent for the kind of really thorough job it would do. Oh, joy.

The Kill Pill: Murder, Madness, and the Army's Mefloquine Cover-up

By Dan Olmsted

It’s great that the military, the VA, and the mainstream media are giving more attention to the awful mental health problems plaguing soldiers and veterans. What's not so great -- in fact, awful -- is their continuing failure to recognize the role played by the military’s own toxic anti-malaria drug.

Until that occurs, the toll will continue to rise.

The federal government has a long and sorry record of ignoring, suppressing, and covering up the truth about the drug, called mefloquine and also known by the brand name Lariam. You can almost hear the silence as the Pentagon holds its collective breath in hopes that Sgt. Robert Bales, who allegedly went on a rampage last month in Afghanistan, killing 17 villagers and setting some of them, including children, on fire, was not prescribed the drug.

That answer will emerge in time, though many have wondered why the Army won't say so if he simply didn't take it. Either way, the renewed attention from the Bales case should not be allowed to pass without reprising the military’s unconscionable history with the drug it invented and licensed to Roche pharmaceuticals, and the role of other federal agencies, in particular the FDA and CDC, in approving and recommending it. This is important because the effects are far worse and far more frequent than the military cares to admit (just check the official product label for “suicide,” "hallucinations," "psychotic or paranoid reactions," and “aggression”), and because (also per the label) they can last “long after” someone stops taking it. In many cases, that means forever. What was once a problem for deployed soldiers is now a problem for more and more reservists and veterans every day.

It is also important because the failures surrounding this drug go straight to the issue of pattern and practice -- whether the federal government is doing its job in protecting citizens from unsafe medicines. (The drug's manufacturer, Swiss-based Roche, has much to answer for as well. It stopped distributing it in the U.S. a couple of years ago but a generic remains available.)

Mefloquine has been damaging U.S. troops often enough for long enough – since the Somalia action in the early 1990s, soon after the drug was hurriedly approved in 1989 – that there are now thousands of veterans with very clear mefloquine toxicity ranging from chronic dizziness to psychosis to unrelenting depression. Some of them – an undetermined but not insubstantial number – are now dead, and some of those have taken with them family, friends, and bystanders who happened to get in the way of a full-blown mefloquine rage.

Now the VA is adding hundreds of psychiatrists to help veterans with their mental health nightmares. Nicholas Kristof of the agenda-setting New York Times has called attention to the veteran suicide rate of one every 80 minutes. The drugging of service members with everything from Adderall to Prozac is being recognized for the problem it is. But a widely prescribed pill that can cause suicide and homicide? It is still strangely absent from this discussion.

Tics and Toxins: The Crazy History of Conversion Disorder

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

If you want to know what’s wrong with the diagnoses of “conversion disorder” and “mass psychogenic illness” recently given to high school girls with tic disorders in New York State, the place to start is not the rural villages of LeRoy and Corinth but the cosmopolitan metropolis of Vienna, Austria.

More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud treated a 17-year-old he called “Dora.” She had a cough, migraines, trouble talking, a weak left leg, depression, and other symptoms. After she passed out, her worried parents took her to Dr. Freud, a neurologist with a home office who was working on some interesting new ideas about unexplained illnesses. He was already treating Dora’s father.

Freud diagnosed Dora with “hysteria” – it was all in her head. She had unknowingly converted psychological stress into mental and physical symptoms, he believed. Based on his write-up of the case -- "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ('Dora')" -- she became one of the best known of a dozen early cases that shaped the history of psychiatry.

Seventeen-year-old Thera Sanchez, and a dozen other girls who developed tics last year at LeRoy Junior/Senior High School, are in a sense Dora’s twenty-first century peers – teenagers suffering from a baffling disorder. In addition to the Tourette’s-like symptoms, Thera and the other girls repeatedly passed out, had trouble walking, and suffered from migraines, joint pain, rashes, breathing problems, and hair and weight loss.

The Buffalo neurology clinic that examined most of the girls and the state health department say they have “conversion disorder,” an updated but essentially identical diagnosis to Dora’s hysteria. Like Freud, the doctors didn’t find anything physically wrong with the girls in LeRoy, so they declared it must be psychological.

“We have conclusively ruled out any form of infection or communicable disease, and there’s no evidence of any environmental factor,” said Dr. Gregory Young of the New York Department of Health following a three-month investigation.

But in both Austria and New York, we believe, the doctors have misdiagnosed what is much more likely to be real physical illness that has nothing to do with stress or trauma. In Freud’s cases, the trigger was actually mercury poisoning from medicines that were in widespread use back then, a new idea we propose in detail in our book “The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic.” In New York, infections like strep or Lyme Disease, and/or environmental factors like toxic fungi or spills from gas wells on the school grounds, are the likeliest triggers for the illnesses.

What’s really sickening, though, is the use of this antiquated and unproven diagnosis in place of rigorous investigation and appropriate treatment.

Even though much of Freudian theory is now regarded as quaint, wrong-headed or downright destructive – blaming parents for serious biological illnesses like schizophrenia, for instance –  hysteria and its successors have gotten the medical version of a hundred-year hall pass, reflecting the power of the psychiatric establishment to create its own version of reality.

To explain why – why Freud was wrong about hysteria and why today’s medical industry is making the same mistake and doing the same disservice to patients -- we need to take a trip back to a time and place not entirely unlike our own.

--

Vienna at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th was in the grip of cultural and political turbulence that created its own catchphrase, “fin de siecle,” or end of the century, usually followed by malaise or some other term denoting angst, uncertainty, upheaval. Amid the glitter of the ancien regime, the gears of the far-flung, polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire were gnashing loudly. A young man named Adolph Hitler had come to the capital from the hustings, nurturing deep resentments toward the wealthy and artistic, many of them (like Freud) Jewish.

HuffPo: Robert Bales Charged: Military Scrambles To Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghanistan Massacre

Editor's Note: This article on Huffington Post by my former UPI reporting partner Mark Benjamin reports on a Pentagon directive last week to review the military's use of mefloquine, the anti-malaria drug (trade-name: Lariam) we investigated for several years. This once again raises the issue of prescription drugs that can do far more harm than the government (FDA, CDC, DOD) is willing to acknowledge. To see the actual directive, click  HERE. Photo credit, AP.

Dan Olmsted.

Robert Bales Charged: Military Scrambles To Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghanistan Massacre

WASHINGTON -- Nine days after a U.S. soldier allegedly massacred 17 civilians in Afghanistan, a top-level Pentagon health official ordered a widespread, emergency review of the military’s use of a notorius anti-malaria drug called mefloquine.

Mefloquine, also called Lariam, has severe psychiatric side effects. Problems include psychotic behavior, paranoia and hallucinations. The drug has been implicated in numerous suicides and homicides, including deaths in the U.S. military. For years the military has used the weekly pill to help prevent malaria among deployed troops.

The U.S. Army nearly dropped use of mefloquine entirely in 2009 because of the dangers, now only using it in limited circumstances, including sometimes in Afghanistan. The 2009 order from the Army said soldiers who have suffered a traumatic brain injury should not be given the drug.

The soldier accused of grisly Afghanistan murders on March 17 of men, women and children, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq in 2010 during his third combat tour. According to New York Times reporting, repeated combat tours also increase the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Bales' wife, Karilyn Bales, broke her silence in an interview Sunday with NBC's Matt Lauer, airing on Monday's Today show. "It is unbelievable to me. I have no idea what happened, but he would not -- he loves children. He would not do that," she said in excerpts released Sunday.

Read and comment on the full article on HuffPo HERE.

 > ‐‐‐‐‐Original Message‐‐‐‐‐
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What Letter?

By Dan Olmsted

It is entertaining to watch Brian Deer try to wriggle out of trouble and end up slithering into even more of it. In what strikes me as a highly unusual move, Deer has not contented himself with letting his lawyers rebut Andy Wakefield's defamation suit against him and the British Medical Journal. No, Deer has filed with the court his own 101-page hagiography. 

Brian Deer in 25,000 words or less. It's hard to squeeze in all the greatness, but someone has to do it.

Let me take just one little fact with which I happen to be familiar. Last March, the father of Child 11 in the Lancet study that is the focus of the court battle sent me a letter. It was just a few days after I interviewed him in California, an interview in which he told me Deer had made a big mistake. Deer had written that  the child's autism symptoms actually began before his MMR shot -- a fatal blow to Wakefield's credibility. It was so important to Deer, that's how he started the article. He quoted the father as confirming the outrage. It became Exhibit A in Deer's cover story, "How the Case Against the MMR Vaccine Was Fixed."

Without this alleged manipulation -- which the BMJ said evinced an "elaborate fraud" by Wakefield -- Deer and the BMJ really have nothing to back up their explosive claim -- especially now that John Walker-Smith has won his appeal and the judge has affirmed the key elements of the Lancet report. The case series was manipulated and not consecutive? Gone. Wakefield turned routine gut problems into a new clinical syndrome? Poof. The kids didn't have pervasive developmental disorders? Uh, yeah, they did. Walker-Smith's medical investigations were uncalled-for and invasive, simply performed to aid Wakefield's Mengele-like research agenda? Nope.

So the MMR-manipulation thing had better be right.

But the father told me: “Mr. Deer’s article makes me appear irrational for continuing to believe that the MMR caused difficulties which predated its administration," a clear contradiction that called for a prompt correction.

“Something New Was Coming”: Walker-Smith, Wakefield and the Real Narrative Behind the Lancet Paper

By Dan Olmsted

Now that Professor John Walker-Smith has been cleared of charges brought against him by Britain’s General Medical Council – with an admonition by the appeals judge that such a travesty must never happen again – his testimony can be called something important:

The truth.

When he was just a witness trying to defend himself, up against an aggressive prosecution, Walker-Smith testified for many days about how he treated the 12 children who came to make up the Lancet medical journal case series, published in 1998. In great detail, he explained how the children were referred to him; what he and his colleagues discovered, and what they decided to do about it.

Constantly urged to speak up and slow down, Walker-Smith, now in his 70s and long-retired, was vigorous in his defense of his treatment of the children and the accuracy of the Lancet paper he co-authored.

His testimony – now affirmed by the appeals judge as those of an honest and experienced practitioner whose medical license has been restored – demolishes many of the myths perpetrated about the Lancet paper. Those myths, promulgated first by Brian Deer at the Murdoch Sunday Times of London, and then by the British Medical Journal and its editor, Dr. Fiona Godlee, elevated co-author Dr. Andrew Wakefield to an all-powerful manipulator of the children’s case histories.

Wakefield falsely claimed the children were consecutively referred, so the myth went; he turned unremarkable childhood bowel problems (“diarrhea,” in Deer’s sneering dismissal) into some sort of scary new disease; he claimed the children were autistic when most had no such diagnosis; he ordered invasive medical procedures solely to serve his own research needs; and he finessed the timing of the MMR shot to suggest it might have triggered the symptoms, in one case even putting the shot before the symptoms, not after where it belonged. (It’s important to remember that Walker-Smith was the treating physician, Wakefield the researcher who was collecting data.)

As the BMJ said in its own press release about its January 2010 allegations: “In an editorial, Dr Godlee, together with deputy BMJ editor Jane Smith, and leading paediatrician and associate BMJ editor Harvey Marcovitch, conclude that there is ‘no doubt’ that it was Wakefield who perpetrated this fraud. They say: ‘A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross.’” (Earlier this year, Wakefield sued the BMJ, Godlee and Deer for defamation. Our series “An Elaborate Fraud” is addressing the fraud allegations.)

What follows is a very small sampling of Walker-Smith’s own words, words that speak eloquently in his own defense and, inevitably, to the veracity of such claims about the paper and its other key author, Andrew Wakefield.

Q. “Professor, I want to ask you again about a phrase which you have used in your evidence in dealing with correspondence, and the phrase is, “clinical need”. What do you mean when you use the term, “clinical need”?

A. Well that is basically that a child has got a problem and we need to find an answer to why the child has a problem, and that means that there is a need to indicate investigations in a child. If a child has got significant gastrointestinal symptoms, a pattern suggesting a particular disease, we then try and find out what is wrong with the child. A child who is diagnosed with something and some problem is continuing, the clinical need is to find the appropriate treatment for that.

Q. In relation to the 12 children in the Lancet paper, … on what basis did your department investigate these children?

A. We investigated them exactly on that basis of clinical need. These children had symptoms and signs. We did not know what they were due to. We undertook a series of investigations to find out what was the problem with the child and there were outcomes from these investigations and they came in the traditional way. We made a diagnosis and eventually, where it was appropriate we gave treatment. …

What is quite astonishing about this review of children is the high evidence of abnormality. In suspected Crohn's disease  [another GI disease]… we had a lower incidence of abnormality. Here we have mucosal abnormality in 47 of 50 children investigated with the autistic spectrum [the first 12 comprised the Lancet series], which almost suggests that this could be a feature of autism per se, although these are children all with bowel problems.

The children were all investigated specifically and exclusively by clinical means to determine whether bowel inflammation was present that could then be appropriately treated. …

Q. From your evidence, and indeed it is borne out by the documentation, that the early cases that you saw of the children who became the patients reported in The Lancet, you started with the premise that they might have classical IBD [inflammatory bowel disease], that they might have Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis?

A. Indeed, we did. … My whole focus and I believe my colleagues’, was first, “Did these children have Crohn’s disease”. Things change, as we have heard, as time went on.

Q. As time went on, and you were not encountering Crohn’s disease, what did you understand to be the condition or the problem that you were encountering? If it was not Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, what did you believe that you were finding?

A. Just like many times in my career before, we were finding a new disorder. … We were beginning to see a new syndrome, fairly clear features of children presenting with diarrhoea, very often abdominal pain which often was not diagnosed by other doctors. Sometimes [that] was because of the children not speaking and the fact that screaming and other manifestations were not obvious. [Those] were the chief symptoms. Then, as we found, constipation or, more appropriately in some ways, faecal loading or certainly something interfering with gut transit was a feature as well. There is a characteristic symptom pattern.

Then, rather more remarkably in a way, there was a remarkable homogeneity in the histopathology [microscopic examinations]. It is a subtle pathology, the cardinal features being particularly ileal lymphoid nodular hyperplasia [swollen lymph nodes], very often colonic lymphoid nodular hyperplasia, and a general increase in inflammatory cells in the lamina propria, and there was evidence of acute events with cryptitis and abscess formation from time to time. It was an entity not so different from an adult practice called microscopic colitis, but clearly in the context of autism we felt something new was coming, and that is the motivation, of course, for us clinicians to feel that it was appropriate for Andy Wakefield to take the lead, and write these features for publication.

Q. Having gone through the histology reports, the synthesis of those reports in the histology meetings, it is clear that there are abnormalities there ---?

A. Yes.

Q. --- which you identify as abnormalities and explain why?

A. Yes.

Q. But they are not particularly florid?

A. No.

Q. They are not, as you accept, either Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis?

A. That is true.

Health Freedom, Autism Causes Converge in Long Beach

By Dan Olmsted

If you let your eyes go out of focus at the Long Beach Convention Center this past weekend, you could think you were at Autism One in Chicago. There were the booths offering alternative medical treatments and supporting activism -- even ones for the Canary Party and Autism One. There were thousands of folks scurrying between dozens of talks, stopping to connect with people they hadn't seen since the last event, or finally meeting face-to-face with those they know so well online.

But this was different. This was the Health Freedom Expo. It represents a major force in fighting for the right to decide one's own medical treatment, and offering the means to do so. For the first time, it welcomed in the autism community as participants. What's more, key officials offered to put the full weight of their advocacy and media outlets behind the push for vaccine choice and the recognition and treatment of vaccine injury.

It was a heady moment, and many of those attending that I talked to were genuinely excited about the crossover potential. All of this came together on Saturday evening at a super-successful fundraiser for Andy Wakefield. Health Freedom advocates like Robert Scott Bell and Tim Bolen joined with familiar faces like Louise Kuo Habakus, Claire Dwoskin, and Ken Stoller to stand with Andy in the defamation lawsuit he filed last year. AOA's own Kim Stagliano did a superb job as emcee. On a personal note, I got to meet the Cedillo family, including Michelle. I feel like they are family to all of us and that I had known Theresa forever. (Mike, Theresa and Michelle are in the photo.)

There was an entire "autism track." On Saturday afternoon, I led a panel with Andy, Tim, and David Lewis, the former EPA scientist whose intellect and integrity have made him a key asset in Andy's fight. After our presentation -- the topic was Media Malfeasance, and we barely got started, of course -- David did his own presentation in which he showed why the institutional corruption now rampant in science comes from the government. Only governments have the power to control grant money and, through it, the kinds of research and results that colleges and universities now must produce if they want to stay on the payroll.

Mary Holland gave a great presentation on the legal implications of court rulings and suggested that an attack on a particularly questionable mandate -- Hep B vaccine at birth -- might open an avenue of constitutional challenge. She showed that the idea that the courts have upheld the kind of vaccine mandates now running rampant is not really true. it was fascinating and ultimately encouraging -- especially knowing that a legal mind like Mary's, and a scientific one like David's, are on our side and committed to the cause for the long run.

Tics and Toxins: Evidence Points to Environment, Infection in LeRoy Outbreak

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

As the white-hot glare of attention begins to pull away from the outbreak of tics among students at LeRoy Junior/Senior High School in Western New York, most medical and media sources appear to have settled on “conversion disorder” as their default diagnosis.

Newsweek acknowledged the families’ belief that something physical must be wrong, but the author insisted on “a very inconvenient truth: the cluster in Le Roy is, by all reasonable judgment, a mass hallucination. Aided by media of all sorts, what the girls are suffering from is perhaps the ultimate disease of our era.”

The New York Times, without bothering to name LeRoy, published an article titled “Hysteria and the Teenage Girl”: “Female adolescence is — universally — an emotionally and psychologically intense period. It is during this time that girls become aware of the emergence of womanhood, with both the great joy and promise that come with it, and also the threat of danger.” As evidence, the writer noted that a LeRoy cheerleader – not a linebacker – was one of the first stricken.

 “Well, that’s the kind of nutty story that only happens once, or so I briefly thought,” wrote Caitlin Flanagan, “until more focused Googling quickly led me to an almost identical episode, this one in 2002, in a high school in rural North Carolina. Once again, a cheerleader was first to manifest the strange symptoms, and once again other girls, some of them cheerleaders, were struck with the same condition.”

Though the writer is a woman, the supposed susceptibility of peppy, excitable female cheerleaders versus stolid, masculine football players is Freudian paternalism dressed up for a new century – a misogynist’s dream. (It was our skepticism of conversion disorder that drew us to this story, having addressed it in a chapter titled “The Age of Hysteria” in our book; we will have more to say about its shaky foundations in upcoming articles.)

Responding to community pressure, the LeRoy school district has grudgingly commissioned a new round of environmental tests while asserting “the school is safe,” a balancing act that left many in the community dissatisfied. (The school board this week approved the new tests, expected to cost as much as $75,000. Some parents and environmental groups are pushing for broader tests than are so far planned. ) Local TV stations have stopped airing videos that show the girls’ tics, concerned that might spawn more “psychogenic” cases. The neurologist in Buffalo who originally diagnosed conversion disorder has become more emphatic about the diagnosis, even as four more cases arose in the past week in and around LeRoy. He hints darkly that some of the girls have had such awful experiences that, if only we knew, we would understand – pinning responsibility on the families as well as the victims’ own psyches.

The National Institutes of Health offered to evaluate the students (about 15 total at the school, possibly including one boy) for PANDAS – an autoimmune neurological reaction to strep infection. But it is downplaying the idea in advance. The lead NIH researcher who coined the term told a local news site that simultaneous outbreaks among adolescent girls would be unprecedented and unlikely.

That appears to leave only the girls, their parents and a small corps of advocates – Erin Brokovich’s group, environmental and school safety activists, a doctor who found evidence of strep infection in most of the girls – to push for continued attention to physical causes.

Based on our own reporting and analysis, they are correct to do so. Real illness remains the likeliest explanation with the suggestion that these dramatic symptoms are provoked by stress a convenient excuse for avoiding a rigorous investigation of environmental risk factors . Here are six possible risks that need to be raised, followed by a key question that needs to be answered:

Mycotoxins on playing fields?

In any inquiry into a novel medical condition, identifying significant changes in the environment is a priority. In LeRoy, as we’ve reported, several new factors converged in May 2011, when the first girl was affected there, according to a report from the New York State health department.

That month, a statewide ban against pesticides – insecticides, herbicides, fungicides -- took effect for every school in the state. The ban coincided with the rainiest spring ever in Buffalo and the second rainiest in Rochester – LeRoy is located between them -- followed by more downpours in late summer. One of the warmest winters on record has followed.

The school district confirmed last week that it “has not applied pesticides to any of the high school athletic fields since September 2010.”

That month, a product called Turf Herbicide was “used to spray broadleaf weeds on varsity football and soccer field.” In summer 2009, Roundup Weed killer was used in mulch beds, but not in 2010. (The law banning pesticides was passed in April 2010 and may have affected spraying that summer.)

This probably explains the orange substance that cropped up on playing fields at the school last year – so thick that it coated students’ shoes and clothes, so widespread some thought it was pesticide sprayed from an airplane. Officials said it was a harmless grass fungus called rust. Ironically, these fungal outbeaks may point to a counterintuitive new development: the complete and sudden absence of pesticides on school grounds.

Based on that and a history of flooding and water problems at the school, which is partly sited on a FEMA flood hazard area and wetlands, we speculated that harmful metabolites of a fungus – otherwise known as a mycotoxin -- might also have gained a foothold. One possibility:  ergot alkaloids, toxic products of fungi that can grow on rye and other grasses. We told the story of a man in the village of Bath, about 70 miles from LeRoy, who developed similar symptoms last September. He lives next to a field that was planted last summer in ryegrass and not harvested, adjacent to a swamp and a levee. He draws his water from a well in the back yard.

Since then, local news outlets have spoken to experts debunking the possibility of mycotoxins, but no specific tests have been done. (For Leroy a Fungal Theory and Expert Doesn't Buy Ergot Theory.)

In December, the school district tested several places inside the school for mold spores and found none, although they did not do “destructive” tests – cutting open walls and the like – to look for hidden sources. Many experts say that it is the only way to completely rule out mold. They also did one test of the air outside the building – location not given – as a “control” to see if inside readings were higher.

One negative test was for a fungus called a. fumigatus, which can produce ergot alkaloids. A June 2005 study in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology found, according to its title, “Abundant Respirable Ergot Alkaloids From the Common Airborne Fungus Aspergillus Fumigatus.”

“Ergot alkaloids are mycotoxins that interact with several monoamine receptors, negatively affecting cardiovascular, nervous, reproductive, and immune systems of exposed humans and animals,” the report said. The alkaloids develop in especially high quantities on maize (corn) and latex paint, according to the study. In a comparison chart, ergot alkaloid production was far higher in latex paint than in any other medium.

That is intriguing because one substance the LeRoy school sprays annually on its grounds is white latex paint, to create the lines that mark playing fields. In the buildings and grounds report, the district said it has used Super Stripe Athletic Paint and Field Marking Paint, two latex brands, every year including 2011.

That might offer an alternative explanation for the Cheerleader Syndrome others have noted. Simply put, cheerleaders spend their time on the sidelines. (And they wear fewer clothes than running backs.) At LeRoy, four of the first 12 girls affected were cheerleaders and two were soccer players, according to the state health department report. In the 2002 North Carolina cluster cited in the Times article, five of the 10 students were current or former cheerleaders.

Tics and Toxins: Pesticide Ban, Rainfall Could Point to Poisonous Fungus as Factor in Student Outbreaks

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

LEROY, N.Y., February 6  -- Last year, during the wettest spring ever recorded across large swaths of New York state, a little-noticed law took effect: As of May 18, pesticide use was banned from the grounds of every school in the state. That same month, a girl at the junior/senior high school here, and another at a high school near Albany, developed a mysterious tic disorder. The total number of cases in LeRoy has now risen to 15.

This convergence adds a new possibility to the list of suspects already being scrutinized in this picturesque Western New York village of 4,400, suspects that range from a 1970 train derailment that spewed toxic chemicals, to an autoimmune disorder called PANDAS, to leaks from gas wells on school grounds that may or may not have employed “fracking." The new possibility: Poisoning from a fungus that grows on a grass commonly planted on school grounds.

The fungus is called ergot, and it can grow when ryegrass – used on most athletic playing fields – sprouts a floweret that gets infected. That most often happens during wet spring months and on low-lying or marshy areas. (This photo was taken on school grounds last week.)

Two other tic cases have been reported in girls who attend Corinth High School, north of Albany. Both are members of the school softball team; the first girl collapsed unconscious in May during the first inning of a softball game and began twitching and convulsing, according to the Albany Times-Union; in LeRoy, at least 6 of the first 12 cases were among athletically active girls – four cheerleaders and two members of the soccer team.

And as we have reported, a 35-year-old man in the village of Bath, about 70 miles from LeRoy, was stricken with the same symptoms in September. He lives close to a field that was planted last spring in rye and not harvested; there is a swamp and a levee nearby; and his water comes from a well in his yard. (This is a photo of the swamp.)

In Corinth, the first girl was affected in May; according to a report from the New York State Department of Health released Friday, the first case in LeRoy was also in May, followed by three more cases in weeks that began in September, two cases in October, one case in November, and one case in December. The state report dismissed environmental or infectious factors and embraced the official diagnosis of “conversion disorder,” in which stress or trauma are subconsciously converted into physical symptoms (several cases at once is called “a mass psychogenic event”).

Tics and Toxins: Similar Case in County Near LeRoy May Point to Environment

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

BATH, N.Y., February 3 – “I’ve always been a fighter,” Bryan Tremblay says, and that’s not just a metaphor. Now 35 but still a slight 112 pounds at 5 foot 1, he was a bully magnet as a child and learned early to defend himself. That was an advantage when he wrestled for his high school team.

But now Tremblay, who lives in the Steuben County village of Bath in the Finger Lakes region, is battling a demon he can’t control. Since September, he’s suffered from a major tic disorder. It goes on, unpredictably, for hours a day. Even on three heavy-duty medicines, he has seizure-like episodes that leave him sitting dazed for half an hour.

 

The disorder keeps him at home. It makes it hard to study for his online degree in graphic design from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh – and well-nigh impossible to look for work after being laid off early last year from his job at a furniture factory. It creates inevitable fears for his health, his wife, his future.

“It’s so frustrating,” he says. “I just want an answer to what I’ve got.”

Whatever Bryan Tremblay’s got is remarkably similar to the tic-like illnesses that have afflicted 15 students at LeRoy Junior/Senior High School about 70 miles away. Many of the LeRoy students, all but one a girl, came down with the disorder about the same time Tremblay did (he didn’t hear about that until much later). Most were diagnosed with “conversion disorder,” and since so many cases were involved, medical experts have declared it a “mass psychogenic event,” in which stress or trauma is supposedly converted unconsciously into physical symptoms and spreads among affinity groups. School and state health officials say they’ve ruled out environmental or infectious causes and insisted again on Wednesday that the school the girls attend “is safe.”

No one is suggesting conversion disorder in Tremblay’s illness. No one he knows has anything like it. Extensive neurological workups have turned up nothing. He’s due for another follow-up in a couple of weeks at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Tremblay doesn’t drink or use prescription or recreational drugs, nor has he been to LeRoy.

He is no publicity seeker. His sister mentioned his situation in a comment on a story we wrote about LeRoy. She gave us his contact information when we asked, and we reached out to Tremblay.

In an e-mail, he responded: “The symptoms seemed to appear almost out of thin air. It started with uncontrollable body spasms and convulsions in my mid to upper body area. These convulsions lasted from approximately 15 minutes to a 30 minute span.

“Soon the spasms started moving to my head and neck area and the movement was similar to a strong neck-whip similar to that of whiplash, sharp and strong and completely random. I did seem to notice that the amount of stress was a factor in the strength of the tics. The problem is the stress level increases once it starts and the tics become stronger and increase as well.

“I noticed that after five months the tics have become vocal, more yelling and humming with points of time where I repeat noises over and over. I find myself spacing out for large amounts of time and daydreaming with difficulty recovering.

“I have also started hand and arm movements.”

In almost every way, Tremblay’s life circumstances could not be more different from the LeRoy cases. But one common factor was evident during a visit – water. Water everywhere. Tremblay lives in a low-lying area. His house backs up to a levee less than a football field’s length behind his house.

Tics and Toxins: Leroy Put Student Playing Fields on FEMA Flood Hazard Land

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

LEROY, N.Y., February 2 – School officials who say environmental factors can’t be responsible for the outbreak of tics at the Junior/Senior High School might want to check last year’s record rainfalls – and the flood-prone ground right under their feet.

The tics broke out after an unusual pattern of heavy rain, followed by a mild winter that has kept the ground from freezing and left lots of standing water at Leroy Junior/Senior High School.

That should be no surprise. Part of the school grounds -- including athletic fields -- are right on top of a federally designated FEMA Flood Hazard Area. While a county official told us that the school itself sits on a slope just above the hazard area, the zone cuts right across the girls’ softball diamond, as well as the football/track field and another, larger baseball field.

The land in the flood hazard area generally correlates with other mapping that shows less optimal and more flood prone Canandaigua soil covering the site.

In fact, we’ve been told by local residents that some fields, including the girls’ softball field just built in 2009, had to be dug up and rebuilt within the last year because the ground was so wet. The building itself has not escaped water and structural woes – the gym could not be used when the school was first opened a few years back because the floor buckled and sank, and the opening of school was delayed one year for a week by flooding, according to a former student.

School officials won’t comment, but Superintendent Kim M. Cox issued a new statement Wednesday, mostly blasting national press attention and the involvement of famed advocate Erin Brockovich, who has cited a train derailment of hazardous material a few miles from town in 1970 as a likely cause. Cox said new tests have shown drinking water inside the school – which comes from neighboring Monroe County – is safe.

Citing state and federal experts, she said: “All of these agencies and professionals from these agencies have assured us that our school is safe. There is no evidence of an environmental or infectious cause. Environmental causes would not discriminate. We would see a wide range of people affected.”

But no one seems to be looking up at the sky or down at the ground. LeRoy, like other New York state and Northeastern U.S. locations, has seen an epic amount of rain during the past 12 months. We put this chart together to show 2011 rainfall versus normal amounts in Buffalo and Rochester. LeRoy is located between them.

Tics and Toxins: Leroy School Site has History of Health, Water, Building Woes

By Dan Olmsted

The school where 12 girls developed tics attributed to "conversion disorder" has a history of water and structural problems, and an outbreak of rashes and sores occurred among students playing sports on land where the school is now sitting, according to a student who went there.

 "When we first started we couldn't go to gym class because the floor kept sinking and cracking," said the student, who attended the new LeRoy Junior/Senior High School in 2005, its first year of operation. She was one of several people who described the site as a "swamp." 

One year, students had to start a week late because of flooding inside the building, she said.

Before the current school -- which goes from eighth to twelfth grades -- was built, the site was used for student playing fields; the school itself was at another location. The new building sits directly atop those playing fields.

In the 1970s, students using those fields suffered from open sores that would not heal and rashes, said the former student, whose mother also went there and recalled the incident. The soil was tested, the cause was found, the students were treated and recovered. She did not know what the tests had shown.

This student expressed surprise that two consultant reports commissioned by the district, which found no problems with indoor air quality or toxins in the school building, stated: "No history of building water damage or site contamination was found."

She is not alone. On a Facebook site set up to support the students, one commenter wrote: "I read the environmental report and it seems like the testing wasn't very thorough. ... Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't the school partially underwater when it was first built? And how about soil testing. It seems like that would be included in thorough environmental testing? These girls deserve some answers. Praying for all of them and hoping we all get some answers soon."

Last week, I reported that except for checking a log of pesticide spraying, there is no evidence the consultants considered toxins in the schoolyard or on playing fields. Yet the symptoms occurred during mild weather when students would have been outside, and the school grounds are surrounded by intensively farmed land from which chemicals could conceivably have seeped or drifted.

The school is required to keep annual pesticide logs that were reviewed by the consulting firm, and therefore pesticides were ruled out. As best I could determine, that’s as far as it went.

The former student told me that some outside areas are used exclusively by girls, including a softball diamond.

Conversion disorder is a psychogenic diagnosis that means a psychological issue, such as stress or trauma, is converted unconsciously into physical symptoms. Several parents and affected students say they don’t accept that explanation. According to press reports, they have lost confidence in the Buffalo clinic that made the diagnosis and are now seeking other doctors to examine their children; the Buffalo clinic has reportedly now offered to conduct more tests.

One press report says the total number of students affected has reached 16 and includes one boy.

Neither the district nor the consulting firm it hired would talk to me about the issue.

On Friday, Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesman for the state Department of Health, told me, "The school is safe. The environment or an infection is not the cause of the students’ tics. There are many causes of tics-like symptoms. Stress can often worsen tic-like symptoms.

“All of the affected students have been evaluated and some have shown signs of improvement. Vaccines (Gardasil) have been ruled out."

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism and co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of "The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Disorder." He has been an editor and reporter at USA Today and United Press International, where his investigation of severe side effects of an antimalaria drug given to U.S. soldiers won Best Wire Service Reporting from the National Mental Health Association.

Tics and Toxins: LeRoy Officials Gave Little Attention to Schoolyard Before Ruling Out Environment

By Dan Olmsted

Health experts say they’ve eliminated every possible environmental and infectious cause for the “tics” afflicting 12 girls at LeRoy Junior/Senior High School in New York state. They’ve scoured the building for mold and carbon monoxide (nothing, they say), considered illnesses that might cause the symptom (none), even checked on vaccinations (not all girls had the same shot).

However thorough that workup may have been, it seems to have stopped at the schoolhouse Exit sign. Except for checking a log of pesticide spraying, there is no evidence they considered toxins in the schoolyard or on playing fields. Yet the symptoms occurred during mild weather when students would have been outside, and the school grounds are surrounded by intensively farmed land from which chemicals could conceivably have seeped or drifted.

The school is required to keep annual pesticide logs that were reviewed by a consulting firm looking into environmental factors, and therefore pesticides were ruled out. As best I can determine, that’s as far as it went.

That may not be far enough, given that parents and some of the students involved don’t accept the psychogenic diagnosis they have been given, and that a number of Web commentators familiar with the school have raised concerns about the grounds and how the relatively new building is sited.

Public health officials remain adamant that the case is closed.

"The LeRoy school is safe,” Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesman for the state Department of Health, replied Friday after I raised the issue in a telephone call. “The environment or an infection is not the cause of the students’ tics. There are many causes of tics-like symptoms. Stress can often worsen tic-like symptoms.

“All of the affected students have been evaluated and some have shown signs of improvement. Vaccines (Gardasil) have been ruled out."

While the department has been careful for privacy reasons to avoid naming the illness, a doctor treating the girls has now gone public, with their permission, by calling it “conversion disorder.” Known less gingerly as mass hysteria, the diagnosis is rooted in 19^th century Freudian psychology: Stress or trauma is subconsciously transformed into physical symptoms that can occur in several people at the same time. 

In part because the LeRoy diagnosis took months to emerge, and in part because many people – including parents and affected children – find conversion disorder a suspect explanation, multiple theories continue to arise. Those include concerns about the school building and grounds, expressed in online comments:

-- An environmental study “would be the first logical step, knowing that the school was built in a swamp and that a number of classrooms were underwater the first year as well as the gym you would think it would be the first thing the school would address- even if only to disprove it.”

-- “Girls started feeling sick in September, sounds like pesticide spraying At the end of summer before the fall to protect late crops.” (The girls’ symptoms began as early as September 10, according to published accounts.)

 -- “Have the doctors considered that the condition may be related to the school's having been built on swampy land? Water in the building continues to be a problem. A second story that should be pursued by the press and others is why this new school was built and why it was built on this particular piece of land.”

A quick look look at Google Earth (click the plus sign to see the school and grounds in detail)  shows the setting. The high school’s Web site  has an aerial photo that appears to show a large pool of standing water close to the school, with a rivulet coming even closer; it appears to be dry in the Google photo.

Farming, despite its idyllic image in American lore, is a highly chemical-intensive practice, and Western New York is no exception. For that and other reasons, it can be dangerous. In October, a few miles west of LeRoy in Genesee County, two people became ill when a pesticide being applied to a potato field wafted in their direction.  The substance was a toxic fumigant being injected into the soil in preparation for planting this year’s crop. Officials said humidity might have helped spread it.

Obviously, that incident had nothing to do with the LeRoy illnesses, but it does give a sense of time and place missing in accounts of the area, as well as suggesting weather is an unpredictable vector. 

But in such a scenario, why would only girls be affected? That's unclear, but there are a number of possibilities that environmental triggers could help explain. For instance, in some cases of mass illness in high schools, the victims were male football players and the problems were traced to toxins where they played. Being male was not a susceptibility factor, but it pointed to the exposure nonetheless. (In another case, marching band members suffered the same problem for the same reason.)

It is possible that more has been done to consider toxins outside the school building, but if so nothing has been done to communicate it to the national media.

In fact, opportunities continue to be missed. The two consultant reports and the school district’s official statement make no mention of looking for anything amiss outside the building itself ,except to note the water supply comes from neighboring Monroe County's public system. "No history of building water damage or site contamination was found," it states.

Neither the district nor the consulting firm it hired would talk to me Friday when I told them I was seeking information on whether risks outside the school building had been investigated.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism and co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of “The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic,” published by Thomas Dunne Books.

From Dan Burns: A Little Faith

"When the road gets dark/ And you can no longer see/ Let my love throw a spark/ And have a little faith in me." -- John Hiatt

An Elaborate Fraud, Part 8: In Which The British Medical Journal Tries to Debunk a Clear-Cut Case of Regressive Autism

One of the 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

In its attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield in January, The British Medical Journal said he “manufactured” data to fabricate a link between the measles-mumps-rubella shot and the onset of autism in 12 children, setting off a worldwide vaccine scare.

Author Brian Deer questioned whether the children even had the disorder. If they did not, of course, that would be a devastating blow to Wakefield’s work. “First to crack was ‘regressive autism,’ the bedrock of his allegations,” wrote Deer, based on his seven-year investigation of Wakefield’s 1998 report. Just one child -- Case 2 -- clearly had regressive autism, he asserted.

But that charge is false. Take Child 11, whose circumstances we described in the last article in this series. Child 11 clearly had regressive autism – just as he clearly developed autism after the MMR shot, not before it, as Deer falsely reported in the BMJ (see HERE).

Once again, only Brian Deer claims otherwise.

--

When I first spoke to Father 11 earlier this year, it was by phone. I had dropped off a copy of my book at the guard’s entrance to his gated enclave in Southern California, with a note on the back of my business card that I was interviewing families of the 12 children described in Wakefield’s Lancet paper, and would like to speak with him while I was in the area.

He called the next morning.

“My son was diagnosed in 1994,” he told me. Until 15 months, “my son was a healthy young baby, and after he was given the MMR he came down with otitis media (an ear infection) and later came down with pneumonia. He was just slowly regressing, after several months. It was almost unnoticeable.”

The father and I arranged to meet about an hour later at a coffee shop nearby. At this point he hadn’t read Deer’s article and wasn’t aware of its contents – he was just unguardedly describing what happened to his son. He showed me a letter he had written to Wakefield at the Royal Free Hospital in London in 1997 that confirmed what he told me.

“My son at age 15 months, was immunized with the Merck MMR vaccine and became ill for the next several months. As his pediatric records indicate he came down with a viral infection, and shortly thereafter viral pneumonia. His condition slowly deteriorated over time, and was diagnosed as being autistic at age 3. The onset of his autistic-like behaviors began around 18 months.”

An Elaborate Fraud Series Part 7: In Which the BMJ’s Prime Example of Wakefield’s Alleged Misconduct Proves Flagrantly False

One of the 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

In January, The British Medical Journal began its attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield by claiming he altered every single one of 12 children's case histories to create a phony link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In five cases, it said, signs of autism actually began before the shot was even given.

As the strongest case in point, author Brian Deer described how  Child 11's symptoms appeared “too soon” -- a full two months before the measles-mumps-rubella shot. Deer said the father himself spotted the "anomaly" and was deeply upset about Wakefield's deception.

But none of that is true.

Child 11’s measles-mumps-rubella shot came first, and the symptoms of physical illness and regression followed, just as Wakefield reported. No one but Deer claims otherwise. Multiple records by independent medical experts establish the facts, the child’s father confirms them, and BMJ Editor Fiona Godlee and Deer have known it for months – because I told them about it and showed them the evidence, and so did the father.

Yet Godlee has refused to correct that error and numerous others of similar significance, continuing to publicly insist there were none.

This is the strange counter-factual universe into which the British medical establishment has plunged the controversy over autism and vaccines. The BMJ’s Wakefield investigation – despite peer-review and supposedly rigorous fact-checking – is replete with the kind of misrepresentations, elisions and outright falsehoods it charges Wakefield with committing.

To date, installments in our series have examined the BMJ’s failure to adhere to its own standards of confidentiality and fairness, as well as tactics employed by Deer, whom it commissioned to investigate Wakefield – tactics that included “blagging,” or using a false identity, to interview parents of vaccine-damaged children for The Sunday Times of London, where most of the material later reported in the BMJ first appeared. (In the wake of the News International scandal, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times has now banned blagging, although Deer said he remains “immensely proud” of his reporting techniques.)

We now turn to the elements of fraud alleged by Deer and the BMJ. We begin, as the journal did, with Child 11. None of the children were named in the original 1998 Lancet article written by Wakefield and 12 co-authors. Like Deer, I was able to determine the families’ identities but – unlike Deer, whose reporting was limited and selective – I reached out to every one I could find, and in every case heard a very different account from the one Deer reported.

--

I met Father 11 at a Peet’s Coffee shop in an affluent, picture-perfect Southern California enclave, and we sat outside in the mid-60s sunshine he jokingly called “a little frosty.” A wealthy businessman who lives in a gated community nearby, he wore a light jacket emblazoned with “Cal,” for the University of California at Berkeley where he got an engineering degree. He carried a thin file folder and a spiral notebook.

In this laid-back setting, it was hard to grasp the role he and his family have played in one of the major medical controversies of our time, one that unfolded in a foggy city 6,000 miles to the east.

This father is Deer’s best witness among the parents of the 12 children described in the Lancet paper – in fact, his only one, the lone parent who is hostile to Wakefield, not just a little frosty, but coldly angry. His anonymous comments to Deer in the BMJ seemed to fully support the January 5, 2011, cover story: “Secrets of the MMR Scare: How the Case Against the MMR Was Fixed.”

“The father need not have worried,” Deer continued. “My investigation of the MMR issue exposed the frauds behind Wakefield’s research.”

Child 11, in fact, was Deer’s opening.

From the Editor: Delete me!

Folks, I inadvertently deleted several comments on Jake's story. So sorry. It wasn't the bad guys, just the dumb one. -- Dan

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-Made Epidemic

(Managing Editor's Note: Below is the 7 part series in full for you to share, FB, Tweet. Thank you.)

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

1. The Wrong Narrative.

Polio is the iconic epidemic, its conquest one of medicine’s heroic dramas. The narrative is by now familiar: Random, inexplicable outbreaks paralyzed and killed thousands of infants and children and struck raw terror into 20^th century parents, triggering a worldwide race to identify the virus and develop a vaccine. Success ushered in the triumphant era of mass vaccination. Now polio’s last hideouts amid the poorest of the poor in Asia and Africa are under relentless siege by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eradication is just a matter of time, and many more illnesses will soon meet the same fate.

But based on our research over the past two years, we believe this narrative is wrong – and wrong for reasons that go beyond mere historical interest. The misunderstanding of polio has warped the public health response to modern illnesses in ways that actually make them harder to prevent, control, and treat.

The reality, we believe, is that the virus itself was just half the epidemic equation -- necessary but not sufficient to create The Age of Polio. Outbreaks were not caused solely by poliovirus – the microbe was an ancient and heretofore harmless intestinal bug -- but by its interaction with a new toxin, most often innovative pesticides used to treat fruits and vegetables.

This alternative narrative makes better sense of the natural history of polio, and it resolves a number of anomalies that remain to this day. It suggests why poliomyelitis outbreaks emerged, evolved, and exploded the way they did; it probably solves, for the first time, the enduring riddle of why Franklin D. Roosevelt was afflicted 90 years ago this summer on Campobello Island; and it may mean today’s billion-dollar-a-year eradication effort is misguided, if not downright quixotic.

These are large claims. Let us explain.

--

Polio was a strange illness, never fully understood even by those who devoted their lives to studying and subduing it. It was a summer plague, coming on in late spring and all but vanishing in the fall. Many thought contagion had something to do with water, and Americans kept their children away from swimming pools in droves.

There is a profound distinction between poliovirus – an enterovirus, one that enters through the mouth and takes up residence in the GI tract and bloodstream – and poliomyelitis, the paralytic form of the illness. In the vast majority of cases, the virus causes either a minor illness or an inapparent infection.

But in 1 or 2 in 100 cases, the virus somehow gets past multiple defenses and into the nervous system, where it finds its way to the anterior horn cells at the top front of the spinal column. There, it preferentially attacks the gray-colored motor neurons (polio means gray in Greek) and causes inflammation of the protective myelin sheath (myelitis). This interferes with nerve signals to the muscles and can lead to temporary or permanent paralysis of the limbs and the respiratory system. A small number of people who contract poliomyelitis -- on the order of 1 percent -- die.

The first recorded U.S. outbreak was in 1841 in West Feliciana, Louisiana (10 cases, no deaths). There was a half-century gap until the next cluster, in 1893 in Boston (26 cases, no deaths). Then, in 1894, came what is widely regarded as the first major epidemic, in Rutland and Proctor, Vermont (132 cases, 18 deaths). Thirty more outbreaks – from such seemingly disparate locations as Oceana County, Michigan, and California’s Napa Valley -- were reported in the United States through 1909. The worst by far was New York in 1907, with 2,500 cases and a five percent mortality rate, a harbinger of the 1916 epidemic in the Northeast that killed 2,000 in New York City alone.[i]

What is most remarkable about this list is that so few outbreaks of paralytic polio were recorded anywhere in the world before the latter 19^th century. Poliomyelitis is considered an ancient scourge, but the evidence supporting that belief is quite threadbare. An oft-cited Egyptian drawing depicts a priest with a withered leg that could have stemmed from paralytic polio, but for most of recorded history there were few observations of the sudden-onset fever and paralysis in infants that characterizes the disease. The earliest well-documented case of infantile paralysis in an individual is widely considered to be Sir Walter Scott, afflicted as an infant in 1773.[ii]

There is little question that the poliovirus was endemic in humans for millennia; there may even have been isolated cases of poliomyelitis for much of that period. Yet the poliovirus did not trigger widespread outbreaks of poliomyelitis. Setting aside for now the 1841 Louisiana outbreak, reported retrospectively, something seems to have happened around 1890 to launch The Age of Polio in the United States. And something else must have changed around the end of World War II to create the large modern epidemics seared into the minds of older Americans, thousands of whom are poliomyelitis survivors and almost all of whom know someone who was afflicted.

While we have not written about polio, we have seen this pattern before. In our book, The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, we argued that something happened in the 1930s to launch The Age of Autism.[iii] We proposed it was the commercialization of ethyl mercury compounds for use in pesticides – seed disinfectants and lumber preservatives – and in vaccinations; we offered evidence of those inventions in the family backgrounds of the first autism cases identified in the medical literature, in 1943. Similarly, we proposed that the sharp rise in autism cases beginning around 1990 tracks with the federal government recommending several more mercury-containing shots.

Our attention was drawn to polio during our autism research when a virologist mentioned, in passing, that poliomyelitis could be triggered in some instances by injections. Called “provocation poliomyelitis,”[iv] this can happen when a needle stick punctures a nerve in the peripheral nervous system. An active poliovirus infection – typically, in a child exposed to the virus for the first time and not yet immune -- can gain access to the nervous system through a process called “retrograde axonal transport,” traveling back to the spinal column and triggering the dreaded paralytic form, poliomyelitis.

Such cases of provocation paralysis, we learned, occurred in Eastern Europe when antibiotics were excessively administered by injection; this practice led to multiple cases of poliomyelitis.[v] Bulbar polio – of the throat and respiratory system – was recognized as more common after tonsillectomies, again because nerve endings had been exposed.[vi] Outbreaks, then, can unquestionably occur as a result of an environmental injury, in these instances either excessive injection or surgery that led to peripheral nerve damage, in the presence of poliovirus infection.

We began to look at the poliomyelitis literature and found that another and much more comprehensive environmental theory of the disease had been put forward almost immediately after the early outbreaks, although it never gained mainstream attention. This theory proposed that what is called “polio” is not caused by a virus at all, but by poisoning from pesticides. In this theory, lead arsenate triggered the early clusters, and DDT kicked off the large outbreaks after World War II. (The pesticide theory has been championed in recent years by Jim West[vii] and by Janine Roberts[viii].)

That really got our attention. In our research for The Age of Autism, we investigated a paralytic illness we believe resulted from an unrecognized interaction between a toxin and a microbe. Called general paralysis of the insane, or GPI, it was a gruesome and universally fatal outcome in a percentage of people infected years earlier with the syphilis bacteria. We proposed that a manmade mercury compound -- ironically used to “treat” syphilis -- allowed syphilis to gain entrance to the brain. When penicillin was developed in the 1940s and actually killed syphilis infections, GPI disappeared because one of the two requirements for the illness – the microbe – was destroyed.

We suggested that a number of other illnesses may follow a similar pattern in which microbes and metals interact, including, in some instances, autism. So the idea that an environmental insult – whether a needle stick or surgery or a toxic metals exposure – could be at work in outbreaks of poliomyelitis intrigued us.

But we did not find the claim that polio was simply poisoning by pesticides alone to be persuasive. The strong versions of both the virus theory and the pesticide theory – that it was entirely one or the other – are too simple to explain the pattern of evidence. The strong viral theory can’t explain the sudden emergence of poliomyelitis; the strong pesticide theory can’t explain the sudden protective effect of poliovirus vaccinations. Rather, we propose that poliomyelitis outbreaks are man-made events that result from the synergy of microbe and toxin.

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Created a Man-made Epidemic -- Part 7, “Where was God?” Lessons learned and lost.

Read Part 6, Part 5, Part 4, Part 3, Part 2 and Part 1.

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

What, then, is the natural history of polio telling us? Beyond the lessons for containing polio outbreaks themselves, we suggest that a single-minded focus on germs – and an unwillingness to explore novel and potentially uncomfortable ideas from outside medical orthodoxy – is an inadequate strategy when it comes to modern diseases.

It’s hard to overstate the impact the polio experience has had on our modern medical culture, starting with the doctors who watched helplessly as its victims fell. J.R. Paul, in his definitive A History of Poliomyelitis, wrote how “the flowering of scientific medicine brought a new point of view, an era of sudden and incredible hope that something might be done after all.”

For a generation of medical professionals born in the heart of this period, the heroic conquest of poliomyelitis was among the most influential narratives that shaped their beliefs about medicine. These beliefs go far beyond science, as Paul suggests. “As the crusade heightened, the world looked on expectantly. … Much as our grandparents had contributed during the nineteenth century to missionary societies, our dimes and dollars went to another ‘religious’ cause, signalized by efforts to stamp out this pestilence and to alleviate the suffering and tragedy it inflicted.”

Paul leaves no doubt as to the hero of this new religious crusade. “[I]n due time, the disease was abruptly scotched by means of vaccination. It was to all intents and purposes finished. The crusade has been described as one of the greatest technical and humanistic triumphs of the age. It was one of those rare achievements which the world greeted as an example of what could be done when science and technology were directed to good use for mankind.”[i]

--

But the victory over the epidemics of poliomyelitis means our understanding of polio is essentially frozen in amber, circa 1955. Few diseases have been so completely conquered, at least at home, while being so incompletely understood, and that is not a good outcome. In leaving so many important topics on the table – why outbreaks occurred, why the pattern of contagion was so atypical for an infectious disease – scientists allowed some weak ideas to become conventional wisdom and some important ones to be missed.

The prevailing current explanation for the rise of poliomyelitis outbreaks is the “hygiene hypothesis,” which posits that such simple steps as clean underwear, better sanitation and good housekeeping, along with less exposure to germs like polio in early infancy, meant the effects of disease became much worse when children were finally exposed. This is not a satisfactory explanation, and it never has been – the epicenter of the 1916 epidemic was placed in possibly the filthiest place in The Bronx, an Italian immigrant community evocatively called Pigtown. And hygiene certainly doesn’t work very well to explain polio’s persistence among the world’s poorest, where sanitation is bad and public health infrastructure is close to nonexistent.  (“One injection stops smallpox, The Times noted in its article of Gates’ polio drive, “but in countries with open sewers, children need 10 polio (vaccine) drops up to 10 times.”)

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-made Epidemic -- Part 6, After: The Persistence of Polio

Read Part 5, Part 4, Part 3, Part 2 and Part 1.

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

To summarize our theory: Polio is a virus, contagious like other viruses, and generally a harmless enterovirus. When it is introduced into the human body, it has the capacity to enter the nervous system when nerves are damaged. Damage can occur many ways: mechanically through needle puncture or surgery, or, we propose, biochemically via pesticidal or other toxic exposure. Once the virus enters the nervous system, it becomes dangerous in a way nature never allowed before. It spreads through the nervous system via "retrograde axonal transport." The resulting damage can lead to paralysis or death.  

Two regions of the world continue to experience polio outbreaks, despite hopes the virus would be eradicated by 2000. This persistence has surprised and confused the experts.

“The eradication campaign has been stalled from about 2002 to 2007 … Why is it so difficult to complete the global eradication of wild poliovirus?” asked Neal Nathanson of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in a 2008 medical review, “The Pathogenesis of Poliomyelitis: What We Don’t Know.”[i] (What we don’t know turns out to be a lot – the paper runs to 50 pages.)

“Currently, there are two epicenters that have resisted virus elimination, one in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India) and one in West Africa (centered in Nigeria). What explains the persistence of wild polioviruses in these two foci?”

Nathanson cites three possibilities: those are warm climates, so poliovirus doesn’t go dormant in the winter as it theoretically did in other countries; the prevalence of other enteroviruses means that the live-virus polio vaccine is not as effective because the other viruses interfere with it; and poor public health infrastructure couple with fears about vaccination made the achievement of “herd immunity” harder than expected.

If one considers the toxin idea, however, another explanation jumps out, especially in South Asia. Erase national borders for a moment. While outbreaks are small and have waxed and waned over the past decade, the primary sites have been directly south of the Himalayan range in a smiley-face arc that runs west from Nepal and Bangladesh, through the Northern India districts of West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

(Photo: The Ganga-Meghna-Bramhaputra River Basins: An arsenic hotbed below the Himalayas)

This also happens to be the area with the worst mass poisoning from arsenic in human history. This is not ancient history – it didn’t even begin until the 1980s. It is a story of the single-minded war against microbes gone badly wrong. What happened is beautifully outlined in an American Scientist article, “No one checked: Natural Arsenic in Wells.”[ii]

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-made Epidemic -- Part 5, Before

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Our research on the natural history of autism convinced us that while there may have been a few scattered cases throughout history, the disorder first occurred in appreciable numbers – as clusters and ultimately as an epidemic -- only after 1930. Observations at that time about the rarity and novelty of the disorder are far more persuasive than retrospective efforts to claim significant numbers of cases before then.

The same holds true for poliovirus. Nowhere is that clearer than in the 1917 book “Poliomyelitis In All Its Aspects,”[i] by John Ruhrah and Erwin E. Mayer. “It seems to be a disease of comparatively recent origin,” they wrote. “In the history of most diseases there is a gradual shading off into the older writers until the disease is lost in confusion of inaccurate descriptions. Not so with polio.”

They continued: “The disease is so striking in its symptomatology, so devastating in its results, and produces such a deep impression on the popular mind that it does not seem possible that any very considerable epidemics could have happened in the countries in which there were physicians making records of what occurred.”

The same point is driven home by John R. Paul in his standard 1971 text on the disease, A History of Poliomyelitis [ii]. “There was no idea in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that poliomyelitis was contagious,” wrote Paul, a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at Yale who conducted important polio research himself. A half a dozen cases within a half-mile of each other might have escaped notice, but “had there been larger outbreaks in the early or mid-19^th century it seems highly unlikely that they would have gone unnoticed.”

But just as arsenic and lead caused instances of paralysis before the invention of lead arsenate, there was also an emerging medical literature of poliomyelitis before recurring outbreaks began in 1893. Beginning just before 1800, there’s a history of doctors who took a reasonable cut at identifying the disease. These include, in 1789, Michael Underwood, who used the term “debility of the lower extremities”[iii]; and in 1840, Jacob Heine, who is sometimes credited as the first to diagnose poliomyelitis.

Several doctors later used the word “paralysis” in describing a similar condition in infants: West in 1843; Rillet in 1851; Duchesne in 1864. By 1860, Heine had pinpointed the spinal cord as the source of the paralysis, and in 1872, the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot called it “tephromyelitis anterior acuta parenchymatose.” This was a pretty modern description, but his precise nomenclature didn’t quite catch hold. In 1874, German doctor Adolph Kussmaul coined the term “poliomyelitis anterior acuta,” later shortened to poliomyelitis.

Going further back, plausible descriptions grow sparse but include the crippled Egyptian priest in a stele dated from 1580-1350 B.C. In 460 B.C., Hippocrates wrote about clubfoot, which may have included some cases of infantile paralysis. And in 200, Galen also discussed clubfoot.

But those were vanishingly rare, and when Underwood described “debility of the lower extremities” in 1789, he clearly thought he was reporting a new phenomenon, just as Ruhrah and Paul asserted with the benefit of much greater epidemiological sophistication. “This disorder either is not noticed by any medical writer within the compass of my reading, or is not so described as to ascertain the disease here intended,” Underwood wrote. “It is not a common disorder anywhere, I believe.”

--

Outbreaks of more than one case, then, were a distinctly 19^th-century phenomenon, and until the 1890s worldwide episodes can be counted on two hands[iv]:

-- In 1835, John Badham’s description of 4 cases in Worksop, England.

-- In 1830-36, Charles Bell’s discussion of multiple cases in St. Helena.

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Created a Man-made Epidemic -- Part 4, Post-War Epidemics and the Triumph of Vaccination

Read Part 3, Making Sense of Campobello; Part 2, A Gypsy Moth Flaps its Wings and Part 1, The Wrong Narrative.

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Life magazine for August 15, 1949, reflected the booming exuberance of the times. The cover, “How to Dress for Hollywood,” featured a buxom starlet in suitably sultry attire. There were ads for DeSotos and Nashes and Chevys to mobilize families and their growing broods of children; cigarettes like Pall Mall, whose “greater length of traditionally fine, mellow tobaccos serves as a longer, natural filter to screen and cool the smoke on the way to your throat”; toothpastes to brush away smoker’s breath and shine stained teeth, and articles on everything from a new sailboat called the Sunfish to a town in Louisiana that cut its taxes in half by installing slot machines.[i]

But twin specters of death and destruction hung over this bright baby-boomer world – the anxiety over atomic annihilation if the Cold War turned hot, and every parents’ most proximate fear for their children, polio.

There were two articles on polio in this August issue. One was titled “Summer season brings epidemics of this uncontrollable disease” and noted that “throughout the nation last week the threat of polio was growing. Starting with some spotty outbreaks during May and June the disease had reached near-epidemic proportions during the sultry drought-ridden month of July. By Aug. 1, 8,300 cases had been reported, a 43% increase over last year. Polio seemed more uncontrollable than ever.”

The peak was still ahead – 1952 would bring 58,000 cases -- but the path to prevention had already accelerated faster than any of the cars on display in Life’s pages in 1949. The year before, John Enders’ research group in Boston had cultivated the poliovirus in human tissue, a Nobel-winning breakthrough that cleared a path for Jonas Salk’s vaccine, which followed in 1955. Successful field trials among several hundred thousand children known as Polio Pioneers were announced on April 12, 1955 – the tenth anniversary of FDR’s death. Church bells rang out across the nation.

The jubilation was justified in terms of the vaccine’s effect on the poliovirus – by 1961, only 161 cases of poliomyeltis were confirmed in the United States, just 29 more than the first epidemic year of 1894. But with the outbreaks ending, basic research withered. As Life noted, “how polio is spread, how the virus enters the body, they do not know.”

--

--
In 1949, the same year as the Life article, Drs. Morton S. Biskind and Irving Bieber published “DDT Poisoning – A New Symptom With Neuropsychiatric Manifestations” in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. “By far the most disturbing of all the manifestations are the subjective reactions and the extreme muscular weakness,” they reported.[ii]

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-made Epidemic -- Part 3, Making Sense of Campobello

Read Part 2, A Gypsy Moth Flaps its Wings and Part 1, The Wrong Narrative.

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Despite its name, the town of Cherryfield in Washington County, Maine, calls itself the Blueberry Capital of the World, and there is no disputing the claim. More than 90 percent of the world’s commercial blueberries are grown in Washington County, and Cherryfield is a major processing and shipping center. Machias, the county seat, hosts the annual Blueberry Festival every August. The festival puts on a musical, this year titled “Blueberry Fields Forever,” and a pie-eating contest – blueberry, of course.

The area has a couple of other claims to fame. Washington County hugs the Atlantic Coast where the United States meets Canada, the easternmost point in the United States; the city of Eastport is the first to see the sunrise. The region is known as Down East.

[A Map of Washington County Maine, also known as Sunrise County, with Cherryfield and Campobello circled. Click photo to enlarge.]

Two miles offshore is the island of Campobello, part of New Brunswick, Canada, where Franklin D. Roosevelt and his family spent summers. It was on his “beloved island” in August, 1921 – ninety years ago – that Roosevelt was afflicted with a paralytic illness diagnosed as poliomyelitis.

But this remote and lightly populated area already had a significant history with polio – one of the first clusters in the United States occurred in Cherryfield a quarter-century earlier, in 1896 (we cited it in our list of pre-1910 outbreaks with links to fruits and vegetables). Seven children were affected, and one died. In all the discussion and theorizing about Roosevelt’s illness over the intervening decades, this convergence has been overlooked.

--

Roosevelt arrived at Campobello on Sunday afternoon, August 7, on the yacht of a friend who sailed him up from New York City. The previous week, Roosevelt had visited a Boy Scout camporee on Bear Mountain, N.Y., not far from the family’s Hudson River home in Hyde Park.[i]

At the dock, his family was waiting. His children played on the yacht through the adults’ cocktail hour, then were taken home while Franklin and Eleanor stayed for an elegant dinner on the fantailed aft deck, served by uniformed stewards.

Three days later, on Wednesday, August 10, Roosevelt went to bed early in the cranberry-red cottage on Campobello Island, unusually tired and suspecting “a slight case of lumbago” (lower back pain). He had chills during the night, and in the morning one of his legs was weak; the paralysis had begun. By the next night, both legs were paralyzed.

Because of the defining role it played in his life and, inevitably, world history, the days leading up to the attack have been dissected in detail by Roosevelt’s multiple biographers. Most historians believe he contracted the poliovirus on his visit to the Boy Scouts, which would have multiplied the chances of exposure to a youth with an active infection. Alternatively, he could have come down with the virus sometime between the Bear Mountain trip and his departure for Campobello.

After his arrival at Campobello, much has been made of a fall overboard while sailing in the Bay of Fundy; of his typically energetic activities on the day he first felt ill, which included putting out a small forest fire on a nearby island and going for a dip with his children in a freshwater pond near his house. The “paralyzingly cold” water of the Bay of Fundy became an ominous metaphor for what was about to happen, but was never a serious biological argument.

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-made Epidemic -- Part 2, A Gypsy Moth Flaps Its Wings

Read Part 1, The Wrong Narrative Here.

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Etienne Leopold Trouvelot arrived in the United States from France in the late 1850s and settled into his brand new house at 27 Myrtle Street in Medford, a suburb of Boston. A self-taught scientist and later an astronomer affiliated with Harvard, his interest alighted first on insects, and he turned the land adjoining his home into a virtual boarding house for bugs.

“To contain his hordes of larvae he constructed a stupendous barricade to encircle his grounds – a wooden fence eight feet high that encompassed his full five acres of shrubs and small trees,” writes author Robert J. Spear. “Netting was stretched from the perimeter of the fences across the trees and was supported in the middle on posts, making it possible for Trouvelot to walk upright through his specialized insectary.”[i]

A decade later, he acquired a handful of gypsy moths, probably on a trip back to France – there were none in the United States. What happened next can be deduced from the title of Spear’s book, The Great Gypsy Moth War. Inevitably, insects escaped, not least because birds continually pecked their way into what they viewed as a very large diner.

The gypsy moths did not make their presence known outside the “stupendous barricade” for about a decade, but when they did, the results were apocalyptic. Lacking natural predators, they denuded trees – especially fruit trees – in what seemed like a single collective gulp. Then they crawled onward and upward. “Citizens could only stare in disbelief as the dirt streets became carpeted with millions of larvae across Myrtle Street,” writes Spear, “turning its surface black with the bodies of fast-moving caterpillars.”

Horrified residents combed gypsy moth larvae out of their hair, shoveled them off the steps, stomped them underfoot and burned huge clusters in noxious kerosene fires. But humans were simply outmatched. The Hellstrom Chronicles, the 1970s movie that suggested insects would inherit the earth, was coming alive in suburban Boston.

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-Made Epidemic -- Part 1, The Wrong Narrative

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Polio is the iconic epidemic, its conquest one of medicine’s heroic dramas. The narrative is by now familiar: Random, inexplicable outbreaks paralyzed and killed thousands of infants and children and struck raw terror into 20^th century parents, triggering a worldwide race to identify the virus and develop a vaccine. Success ushered in the triumphant era of mass vaccination. Now polio’s last hideouts amid the poorest of the poor in Asia and Africa are under relentless siege by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eradication is just a matter of time, and many more illnesses will soon meet the same fate.

But based on our research over the past two years, we believe this narrative is wrong – and wrong for reasons that go beyond mere historical interest. The misunderstanding of polio has warped the public health response to modern illnesses in ways that actually make them harder to prevent, control, and treat.

The reality, we believe, is that the virus itself was just half the epidemic equation -- necessary but not sufficient to create The Age of Polio. Outbreaks were not caused solely by poliovirus – the microbe was an ancient and heretofore harmless intestinal bug -- but by its interaction with a new toxin, most often innovative pesticides used to treat fruits and vegetables.

This alternative narrative makes better sense of the natural history of polio, and it resolves a number of anomalies that remain to this day. It suggests why poliomyelitis outbreaks emerged, evolved, and exploded the way they did; it probably solves, for the first time, the enduring riddle of why Franklin D. Roosevelt was afflicted 90 years ago this summer on Campobello Island; and it may mean today’s billion-dollar-a-year eradication effort is misguided, if not downright quixotic.

These are large claims. Let us explain.

--

Polio was a strange illness, never fully understood even by those who devoted their lives to studying and subduing it. It was a summer plague, coming on in late spring and all but vanishing in the fall. Many thought contagion had something to do with water, and Americans kept their children away from swimming pools in droves.

There is a profound distinction between poliovirus – an enterovirus, one that enters through the mouth and takes up residence in the GI tract and bloodstream – and poliomyelitis, the paralytic form of the illness. In the vast majority of cases, the virus causes either a minor illness or an inapparent infection.

But in 1 or 2 in 100 cases, the virus somehow gets past multiple defenses and into the nervous system, where it finds its way to the anterior horn cells at the top front of the spinal column. There, it preferentially attacks the gray-colored motor neurons (polio means gray in Greek) and causes inflammation of the protective myelin sheath (myelitis). This interferes with nerve signals to the muscles and can lead to temporary or permanent paralysis of the limbs and the respiratory system. A small number of people who contract poliomyelitis -- on the order of 1 percent -- die.

The first recorded U.S. outbreak was in 1841 in West Feliciana, Louisiana (10 cases, no deaths). There was a half-century gap until the next cluster, in 1893 in Boston (26 cases, no deaths). Then, in 1894, came what is widely regarded as the first major epidemic, in Rutland and Proctor, Vermont (132 cases, 18 deaths). Thirty more outbreaks – from such seemingly disparate locations as Oceana County, Michigan, and California’s Napa Valley -- were reported in the United States through 1909. The worst by far was New York in 1907, with 2,500 cases and a five percent mortality rate, a harbinger of the 1916 epidemic in the Northeast that killed 2,000 in New York City alone.[i]

“The Age of Autism” Debuts in Paperback as the Battle for the Truth Escalates

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
 
Eighty years ago today – on Sept. 13, 1931 – a girl known only as Virginia S. was born. She became the oldest child in a landmark medical paper by Leo Kanner titled, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” describing Virginia and 10 other children with a new syndrome that became known as autism.
 
By happenstance – our publisher picked the date, not us – today is the launch of the paperback edition of our book first published a year ago, “The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic.”
 
The convergence serves to make the main point in our book – that autism is a new disorder, that it arose within the span of a human lifetime, that it is therefore fundamentally an environmental illness, and that in order to prevent and treat it, medicine needs to understand that and act with urgency.
 
The past year has taken us around the country – from Minneapolis and Dallas to Visalia and Atlanta – and we have met many people who share our vision of The Age of Autism. One direct result has been the creation of the Canary Party that seeks to end medical corruption and force a reckoning with the root causes of so much chronic illness and developmental disability.
 
A number of other events this year have helped underline the theme of our book and undercut the paradigm of autism as an untreatable genetic illness– but not without the resistance of a rearguard whose livelihood and reputations depend on clinging to the old model.
 
Most astonishing, the basis for the claim that autism is mostly genetic crumbled like the Berlin Wall. As one of us wrote in July,

“For over two decades now, so-called 'autism experts' have been claiming that autism is more than 90% caused by genes. The influence of these claims on autism policy and research funding is hard to overstate. But few realize that the basis of these claims hangs on a fragile evidence base: two small twin studies--one from Great Britain, the other from Scandinavia--that reported high rates of concordance for autism among identical twins and no concordance at all among fraternal twins. Last week, the largest and most rigorous twin study ever conducted, the California Autism Twin Study (CATS) reported contradictory new evidence that struck a devastating blow to these claims. The CATS identical twins had lower and the fraternal twins higher concordance rates than past studies, a striking finding that suggests that instead of being highly heritable, the vast majority of autism cases stem from environmental causes.

An Elaborate Fraud, Part 4: News Analysis -- The British Medical Association Is “Standing Up for Doctors” Even If It Means Attacking Patients

By Mark Blaxill

If you go to the web-site of the British Medical Association you will find the BMA’s tag line prominently displayed: “Standing up for doctors.” It’s a position most notable for what they do not stand up for: not patients, not science, not health, just the doctors who join the association. The home page elaborates what this means more directly, “We are … an independent trade union dedicated to protecting individual members and the collective interests of doctors.”

In other words, The BMA is an unabashed economic entity: a trade union. And its primary purpose is to defend the money and power of its members. It’s that simple. Who does the BMA stand against? The adversary of the day might vary a bit. But on a day to day basis, the biggest conflicts British doctors face are with patients. When patients comply with what doctors tell them to do and generate income for them, they are useful to the BMA. When they want to take control of their own families’ health, or worse, suggest that member doctors may have caused harm, well that’s a different matter. When patients' interests conflict with “standing up for doctors,” It’s pretty clear what the BMA’s job is.

The BMA attacks critical patients as if they were their enemy.

One of its instruments for defending doctors’ interests is “science,” or more accurately, propaganda masquerading as science. Notably, the BMA publishes the British Medical Journal, the journal that earlier this year disseminated Brian Deer’s accusations of fraud against Andrew Wakefield. Despite Wakefield’s lengthy and Byzantine trial on allegations surrounding his medical ethics and research design in front of the General Medical Council (GMC), allegations of scientific fraud were not part of the GMC proceedings. Until January 2011, freelance reporter Brian Deer, and Deer alone, had accused Wakefield of lying about data and falsifying evidence. That is, until the BMJ entered the mix, effectively certifying the validity of Deer’s 2009 accusations in The Sunday Times with a dramatic flourish that proved even more devastating to Wakefield’s reputation than the GMC trial. How devastating were these accusations? In a press release, BMJ editor Fiona Godlee claimed to be “struck by a comparison between researcher Andrew Wakefield’s fraud and Piltdown man, that great paleontological hoax that led people to believe for 40 years that the missing link between man and ape had been found.” Sadly, these extravagant allegations were picked up by the global media, spread like wildfire, and, despite their manifest implausibility, the charges stuck.

For any doctor or scientist who might ever have been inclined to support a critical patient the message was clear: when the BMA and its flagship journal the BMJ go after you, they will be ruthless.

Lost in the frenzy over Wakefield’s alleged scientific fraud, however, is the fact that the origin of the evidence in the 1998 Lancet article never came from Wakefield.  Rather, the Royal Free Hospital's investigation (which included many others beyond Wakefield) was launched based on the collection and reporting of observations originally made by parents. These parental observations included varying forms of regressive autism or encephalitis, inflammatory bowel disease and a temporal association between exposure to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) and the onset of symptoms. As time has passed (and in every one of the cases reported in The Lancet paper), the parents’ continuing reports support Wakefield’s original account. In addition, many thousands of parents have subsequently reported an identical sequence of events. At kitchen tables all over the world, the MMR has become known as “the autism shot.” The heart of the matter, therefore, is the tension between the British medical establishment on one hand and the Lancet parents on the other.

So in accusing Wakefield, the BMJ is really doing something else; they are accusing the Lancet parents of committing an elaborate fraud.

Why would the BMJ condone such an aggressive attack? Sadly again, in publishing Deer’s accusations, the house organ of the BMA was advancing the interest neither of science nor the truth. Instead, they were “standing up for doctors”: for the income doctors gain from frequent visits to the doctor to receive vaccination; for doctors’ freedom to avoid costly minutes with skeptical parents during their well-child visits; and for the power of doctors to force parents to comply with the recommended vaccination schedule.

As for Deer’s reporting, while Wakefield provided the proximate target, not far under the surface lurked an aggressive attack on parents who have the temerity to question the mandates of the BMA and public health officials. It’s quite a ruthless attack: Parents who question vaccine safety are a danger to the public health; Parents who allege vaccine injury are liars; Parents who take offense to intimidation and coercion are anti-vaccine campaigners; Parents who seek resources to support a vaccine-injured child are cheating the system to get rich.

This kind of attack is not delicate work. But in making the decision to tie its reputation to Deer’s, the BMA made a risky choice.

One need not look very far to find evidence of Deer’s boorishness. It’s most plainly exemplified by his unvarnished contempt for noncompliant parents. One widely circulated example was provoked following on-line challenges to Deer’s reporting by three autism parents: Lancet 12 mother Isabella Thomas, Age of Autism Contributing Editor John Stone and a third unnamed blogger. Jumping into the fray in a Pharma-friendly blog, Deer had this to say about the critical parents (see HERE)

And they wonder why their children have problems with their brains.

Apparently not content with just this brief insult, Deer elaborated further (see HERE )

An Elaborate Fraud, Part 1: In Which a Murdoch Reporter Deceives the Mother of a Severely Autistic Child

 
One of the Lancet 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

On January 5, 2011, the British Medical Journal accused Dr. Andrew Wakefield of committing “an elaborate fraud” in the controversial 1998 Lancet report about 12 children who developed bowel disease and regressed after receiving the MMR shot. The cover article by journalist Brian Deer focused on “the bogus data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.”

Deer identified and interviewed parents of some of the children in the anonymous Lancet case series, describing what he said were significant disparities. “I traveled to the family home, 80 miles northeast of London, to hear about child 2 from his mother,” Deer wrote of one interview. The child had severe autism and gut problems that she blamed on the MMR.

What Deer did not say in the BMJ article is that he had lied to the mother about his identity, claiming to be someone named “Brian Lawrence” (his middle name). Deer had written a number of critical articles about parents’ claims of vaccine injury, and if he gave his real name, he doubtless feared, Child 2’s mother would not agree to talk to him. Once she checked his blog, she would be more likely to kick him out of the family home than sit still for what turned into a six-hour inquisition.

He even created a fake e-mail address for his fake identity, and he used it to communicate with her: lawrence_b_st@yahoo.com.

Why did the highly respected British Medical Journal sanction such deceit involving the mother of a child who, whatever the cause, was severely disabled? When the interview took place in November 2003, more than seven years before the BMJ article, Deer was not working for the journal. He was on assignment for The Sunday Times of London.

The Sunday Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, part of the News International division that has come under a Watergate-size cloud in England for its newsgathering tactics – fraudulently obtaining confidential information, bribing police, hacking 9,000 phone numbers, gaining access to bank accounts, and using large financial settlements to keep some victims quiet.

The BMJ article, titled “How the Case Against the MMR Vaccine Was Fixed,” has its roots in the Sunday Times. It is remarkably similar to one Deer wrote for the Sunday Times two years earlier, in February 2009. That article was titled MMR Doctor Andrew Wakefield Fixed Data on Autism and it cited much the same data and mentioned many of the same people featured in the BMJ article.

The BMJ imprimatur gave Deer – as well as the British Medical Association, which publishes the journal -- a “peer-reviewed” platform from which the story was broadcast far and wide, as conclusive proof of fraud. The BMJ dressed up its presentation with footnotes, charts, editorials, commentary and what it called “editorial checking.”

But clearly, the crux of the article came from reporting Deer did while affiliated with the Sunday Times. Along with evidence presented at a General Medical Council hearing, Deer wrote in the Sunday Times, he relied on “unprecedented access to medical records, a mass of confidential documents and cooperation from parents during an investigation by this newspaper.” His work, he said, exposed the “selective reporting and changes to findings that allowed a link between MMR and autism to be asserted.”

Deer did not identify Child 2 or his mother in either the Sunday Times or the BMJ – he didn’t need to. He had posted their names on his blog (subsequently removed); what’s more, the names were known because the mother had spoken out on the researchers’ behalf and was a claimant in a failed legal case over the vaccine. (Deer has said any allegation he “placed confidential information on my website” is false.)

False pretenses and confidentiality aside, the BMJ’s ethics code bars the use of anyone’s medical information without written permission -- even when the subject is anonymous.

“Any article that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires the patient’s explicit consent before we can publish it,” according to the policy (italics in original).  “We will need the patient to sign our consent form,  which requires the patient to have read the article.”

If she had done so, the journal would have gotten an earful about  “Brian Lawrence,” Brian Deer and her subsequent dealings with the Sunday Times. That is the subject of our next article.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism, and co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, to be published in paperback in September by Thomas Dunne Books. 

Three Blind Mice - Bad Week for Offit, Mnookin and Deer

By Dan Olmsted

Isn't it nice to see the hammer of real journalism come down on the fringe lunatic crank ravings of the Three Blind Mice of Autism Epidemic Enablers -- profiteering vaccine-damage denier Paul Offit, cruel and credulous junk science-swallower Seth Mnookin, and sick-child tormentor Brian Deer?

Offit got the worst of it, with the Orange County Register calling out his "Liar! Liar!" accusations against Sheryl Attkisson of CBS. Offit has raked in millions off his totally unnecessary, universally recommended, pig-virus infested rotavirus vaccine. He also called Barbara Loe Fisher a liar; she sued but lost and decided not appeal; this new development ought to make her smile. Meanwhile our own J.B. Handley sued and Offit forked over money; and the British publisher of his most recent book had to shred them and print new copies because he had maligned one of the key players in the MMR saga.

Mnookin has a bad habit of reviling his elders and betters and sticking up for the dim bulbs of autism-vaccine reporting just before they get unscrewed. For instance, he was all about love for fellow feature writer Trine Tsouderos right before a respected independent science-watch group lambasted her coverage of Lyme Disease -- slamming the same snotty bias masquerading as "sound science" she has heaped on parents of vaccine-damaged kids. He also has appeared with Offit and has a callow error-laden misunderstanding of the autism epidemic that he seems to owe mostly to Saint Paul of the Syringe.

Wouldn't you know, just before the Orange County Offit smackdown he attacked Attkisson for picking up a recent study on ways that autism could occur. ONE of those ways was vaccine injury. ("More embarrassing anti-vaccine reporting from CBS News's Sharyl Attkisson.")

Now he's really gone and done it, blasting Robert MacNeil for his autism series on PBS, which included an open-minded segment about his grandson's autism. "An embarrassing, reckless, and irresponsible coda to Robert MacNeil's career" was the title of his first blog post. Seth, my man, you do project too much -- it is your career that will suffer those lasting judgments. Of course, The Mnew York Times liked your book. They also loved Bruno Bettelheim's "The Empty Fortress," the "Mommy is Homicidal and the Kids Know It" explanation for autism. That might make you the Bruno Bettelheim of our day. You say you never criticize parents, only the "moral and scientific bankruptcy of all those who'd encouraged the families of children with autism to blame vaccines." "All those" people are mostly parents! (And apparently grandparents like MacNeil are fair game -- one generation back and you're an irresponsible jerk for even discussing it.)

And speaking of projection, we must not overlook Brian Deer, the king of feces-flinging accusations that mirror his own “festering nastiness, the creepy repetitiveness, the weasly, deceitful, obsessiveness." (That was his description of parents who dared to disagree with him.) He got a nice reception at Johns Hopkins this week, where parent-blaming first came into fashion after they couldn't figure out the environmental clues that Mark Blaxill and I write about in "The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic." Deer is technically a rat, but for simplicity's sake I include him here.

There is nothing fun about autism, but it will be fun to watch their sinking ship go down.

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.

The Age of Autism: Featured Advocacy Reception at Autism One/Generation Rescue Conference

Featured Advocacy Reception in the Presidential Suite Thursday evening at the AutismOne/Generation Rescue 2011 Conference!

From our dear colleagues who brought you the magnificently well-reasoned book The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, authors Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted will be on hand for a reception highlighting autism advocacy in action:  "Press the Flesh – Learn Big Truths."

Among other crucial goals, the advocacy track at the conference strives to capture, focus, and foster positive change based on the emerging science that vaccine components have played a role in the autism epidemic. Almost 50 percent of Americans now believe there is a connection, but those in positions of authority deny any possible link and refuse to undertake any investigation that could prove embarrassing to the status quo.

This regrettable position prevents the medical community from treating autism as a biomedical, environmentally-induced condition, underfunds research efforts, marginalizes vaccine safety, and jeopardizes the vaccine program.     

Please join us as we meet in the Presidential Suite beginning at 7 pm for great conversation and refreshments.

And follow-up with us for these notable presentations:

• Friday, May 27, 1:30 pm:  Kim Stagliano, Dan Olmsted, Mark Blaxill and contributors to the Age of Autism daily Web newspaper.
• Saturday, May 28, 4 pm: Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted's inspirational advocacy presentation in the Grand Ballroom.

We're looking forward to meeting you there!

Seth Mnookin and the Error Virus

By Dan Olmsted

Seth Mnookin is a stickler for accuracy. In his new book “The Panic Virus – A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear,” Mnookin discusses Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “the eldest son and namesake of the former attorney general and New York senator.” Kennedy is an environmental lawyer and a fierce critic of the use of mercury in vaccines, and Mnookin notes that a press release for the Green Our Vaccines rally “appeared to confuse Kennedy with his uncle, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy: ‘Having Senator Kennedy as part of the supporters for the Green Our Vaccines Rally is an honor.’”

What possible purpose does this snarky observation serve? It serves to suggest that these fringe vaccine-autism types are hopelessly “confused” at the most basic level – that they can’t get anything right, even the title of the speaker at their own goofy rally, let alone the cause of autism. But wait a second – literally -- before laughing off the whole thing based on Mnookin's exposure of the Teddy-Bobby flub. Mnookin has his own Kennedy problem: Bobby Kennedy Jr. is not, as Mnookin writes, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy. That would be Joseph P. Kennedy II. Oops.

It's an easy mistake to make -- if you don't know history (hometown history, in Mnookin's case), didn’t live through it, and never bothered to check – you'd naturally assume Bobby Jr. is the eldest son of Bobby Sr. How could he not be? The only problem is that he’s just plain not. 

Now, having co-written a book myself, I’m sympathetic to the idea that some errors are going to slither in somewhere when you put more than 100,000 words on paper. You’d think, however, that if you were going to mock people for making mistakes, and use that to try to eviscerate their credibility, you’d be a little more careful out there. Especially after the voluminous corrections to Mnookin’s last book, on the Boston Red Sox, ( HERE) you’d think Mnookin or at least his editors would have fact-checked this one to death. But that would be a Bill Buckner-size error.

Just the other day a blogger in San Diego wrote about a real howler – in the book, Mnookin pegged the cost of containing a California measles outbreak at $10 million, when the real cost was $176,000.

Mnookin rushed in to fix that mistake before the blogger did, explaining in the burgeoning corrections section of his own blog (Bettelheim was not a medical doctor, Freud was not a behaviorist …) that he had multiplied the cost of each case by the number of people exposed, 839, rather than the number who actually got measles, 11. In the book, he doesn't footnote his official-sounding $10 million figure, so the reader has no way of knowing it was just Mnookin Math.

Mnookin seems to take pride in acknowledging his errors, as if doing so is kind of a red badge of intellectual courage, like Washington admitting to chopping down the cherry tree (one cherry tree, not a forest). On his blog, he writes like a detached press critic about his $10 million mistake -- headlined "Dept. of corrections: The phantom $1o million measles outbreak " -- HERE explaining, “This is a significant enough error that I wanted to draw more attention to it to make sure word got out.” Happy to help!

Speaking of significant errors (compiled by myself and others), on page 12 Mnookin says that after coming to the issue with an open mind, he concluded  “there was no evidence supporting a link between childhood inoculations and developmental disorders.”  What about the encephalopathy that the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act covers?  Encephalopathy, or brain damage, often results in mental retardation, also known as a developmental disorder.  Mnookin never points out that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out over $2 billion to over 2,500 claimants for vaccine injury, including over 1,300 for brain injury. 

In Plain Sight: Freud, Face-Blindness, and Autism

By Dan Olmsted

Consider this description: “She complained that she could not recognize people; that she used to be able to recognize faces without having to think about it and work at it. Now she was obliged to do laborious ‘recognizing work’ and had to say to herself ‘this person’s nose is such-and-such, his hair is such-and-such, so he must be so and so.’ All the people she saw seemed like wax figures without any connection with her.”

Now this one: “Although I myself may be unable to recognize a particular face, I can recognize various things about a face: that there is a large nose, a pointed chin, tufted eyebrows, or protruding ears. Such features become the identifying markers by which I recognize people. … I think that a significant part of what is variously called my ‘shyness,’ my ‘reclusiveness,’ my ‘social ineptitude,’ my ‘eccentricity,’ even my ‘Asperger’s syndrome,’ is a consequence and a misinterpretation of my difficulty recognizing faces.”

And, finally, this: A child with an autism diagnosis displayed very little functional language in his young life, but soon after undergoing a new treatment he told his mother, “I want to see you.” Taken aback – both because he rarely spoke meaningfully and because she knew there was nothing wrong with his eyesight -- she replied, “Don’t you see me?” Her son’s response: “In pieces.”

These three descriptions come from very different times and places: The first is Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s account of Anna O., the initial case study in their 1895 book “Studies on Hysteria,” which launched the psychoanalytic movement and the modern age of psychiatry. The second is from a recent New Yorker article by Oliver Sacks, the esteemed neurologist and writer, describing his own condition. And the third is a mother telling me about her son at the National Autism Association conference in Tampa in November.

Differences aside, I believe they are all describing an underlying phenomenon that goes by the intimidating name of prosopagnosia – more familiarly, face-blindness. It is a fascinating disorder and one that may be much more common than we recognize – 2.5 percent of the population, or almost 8 million people, affected to some extent, Sacks believes.

As so often happens with such conditions, the focus of interest on face-blindness remains mostly on the exotic features themselves, with little interest in why such a strange deficit, one so central to functioning as a social human being, would occur, why it has come to prominence relatively recently, and why it may now affect so many people. When etiology is considered at all, it is usually passed off, without much evidence, as a genetic or organic condition to which some people, and indeed some families, are heir, or as the obvious result of head trauma or illness.

Dan Olmsted On Charlottesville -- Right Now with Coy Barefoot

Listen HERE.

Charlottesville--Right Now, Interviews, New audio, News, Radio Shows, WINAAdd comments


1.6.11 Co-Author of the book The Age of Autism Dan Olmsted joins Coy to discuss the connection between mercury and autism. Today’s conversation focuses on the recentBritish Medical Journal study which proclaimed Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study linking the MMR vaccine and autism not only incorrect but fraudulent. Olmsted provides his take on the recent back-and forth, but also characterizes the current state of child medicine. Also, Coy provides his very personal connection to the topic.

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

 

 

 

The CDC versus The MOM – a Case Study in Ignoring the Evidence in Autism

By Dan Olmsted

One of the highlights of being out and about talking about our new book (“The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-made Epidemic,” co-authored with Mark Blaxill) has been meeting so many people who have followed our reporting and posts over many years – and have tried to bring concerns about mercury to the attention of public health officials and the media. Our main purpose in writing and promoting the book is to share what we think is powerful evidence that mercury is a major player in the autism epidemic – in effect, to help empower a critically important social movement seeking urgent reform. So connecting with others engaged in the same mission is tremendously gratifying and energizing.

One such person is Megan Allen of Meadowbrook, Pa., who we met when we spoke to a TACA group in Newtown Square. Afterwards, she forwarded me some correspondence she had five years ago with the CDC that is worth sharing in detail, because it shows how coldly resistant, and for how long, the agency has been to anything that counters its party line – that putting mercury in vaccines for babies and pregnant women is a really good thing, that the definitive data is in, and that people who think otherwise are an annoyance to be swatted away as brusquely as possible, not citizens with first-hand observations and fresh ideas that deserve serious consideration.

Megan has twin boys, now 12, who are on the autism spectrum, and two other children, a boy age 14 and a girl age 8. She is a bureaucratic mercury-in-medicine defender’s worst nightmare. She has a BS in Childhood Studies, and her husband, Justin, has a Master’s Degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology and is a patent attorney. As Megan explained to me, “It wasn't until reading an article in Mothering Magazine on Thimerosal in 2002 that we first began to question the safety of vaccines. In fact, I even called one of my best friends ‘crazy’ in the late 90's when we both had our first babies, and she decided to keep him from getting any shots whatsoever. Now, we have gone in the opposite direction and will not allow our kids to receive a vaccination until we see adequate data that they are safe. For now, at least while they are minors, that means ‘never.’”

The e-mails Megan sent me are from January 2006 when, based on her own concerns about the safety of mercury in vaccines, she wrote the CDC to tell them about articles I had written in 2005. That’s when I started The Age of Autism column at United Press International. In that first year, in retrospect, I covered a lot of territory, identifying the first child ever diagnosed with autism and describing his remarkable recovery after being treated with gold salts for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis – a fact lost to medical history and still studiously ignored by the medical industry and its pharma-dependent media allies. Also – and this is what Megan focused on – I had begun looking for autism in communities like the Amish, the Homefirst family medical practice in Chicago, and the home-schooled. There seemed to be less autism, and one fact that was inescapable was these populations were also less vaccinated.

My unofficial and low-powered research didn’t prove anything, but it did raise interesting questions and provoked a pretty strong reaction among those who were concerned that the big increase in mercury-containing vaccines in the 1990s was the trigger for the huge rise in autism cases at the same time.

Adult Flu Shot Vaccine Injury Nightmare: "Drug Store Disability" Could Happen to You

By Dan Olmsted

On the whole, Lisa Marks Smith would rather have had the flu. Instead, the Cincinnati mom of two college-age sons got a mercury-containing flu shot that nearly killed her, led to paralysis, severe neurological problems, 24 days in the hospital – and a check from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that attests to the truth of her story.

Smith has come to see first-hand how carelessly flu shots are administered, how dangerous the mercury that remains in most of them can be, how little public health officials actually seem to care when the worst happens, why the worst may not be so rare after all – even how similar the side effects can be to symptoms of autism.

She talked to Age of Autism about her ordeal, which began in 2005, in the hope of sparing others.

--

Dan: I thought I’d start by asking you where things stand now. How’s your health? How are you feeling at the moment about everything?

Lisa: The only lingering thing I have at this point is that if I do not take big doses of magnesium, my legs shake. And I mean muscle spasms, Charlie horses, twitches – think Parkinson’s shaking. I do feel my feet again after four years. I need to go shoe shopping because I only own sandals, and it’s cold this winter in Cincinnati, and if you feel your toes you can’t wear sandals in the snow.

Dan: Well, I guess that’s a good problem to have, considering what happened. Just to go over the basics, you got a monetary award from the vaccine injury compensation award program and it was how much?

Lisa: I am not allowed to tell but in all honesty the award would not have covered my medical bills. To me, it’s the validation – they can’t claim they don’t know what’s happening when they’re paying people.

Dan: And of course one thing we hear so much about, and it’s almost a cliché, is that correlation does not equal causation – in other words, "just because you got a flu shot and then got very sick doesn’t mean it caused it." But in this case, correlation was a very strong indication of causation.

Lisa: In my case, my neurologist said straight up, this is what caused it. So it’s very hard for them to say one doesn’t equal the other. You’re walking around, you’re perfectly healthy, you don’t even get colds. You have a flu shot and within two weeks you’re paralyzed, and paralysis is listed as a possible side effect.

Dan: One thing I’ve experienced, spending time with families on our book tour, is I used to think the symptoms of autism occurring immediately after vaccination were very rare, and occasionally when they did occur pretty quickly, that was an important clue. But, man, there is a lot of this – families describing these very close correlations, I guess you might say, between getting a vaccine, getting ill, and then having the onset of these symptoms. My feeling is, how long can this go on? And you must wonder the same thing in the case of the flu shot.

Lisa: I get these constant calls. The lady two houses up has Guillain Barre syndrome [a paralytic reaction] from a flu shot. My old boss, her mother-in-law got Guillain Barre from a flu shot. A woman I used to work with in California, her mom had Guillain Barre from a flu shot.

Dan: And that’s a pretty small universe.

Lisa: Yes, in our little world here in Cincinnati, to know that many people? And that’s what my neurologist even says. She says, "Lisa, it can’t be that rare," because she has five patients with it – "If it’s one in a million," she says, "I don’t have five million patients." One guy’s still at Drake Hospital, which is the long-term care facility here, one man died, one woman’s still in a wheelchair. One of the times I went into see her she said, "Oh my gosh, because of you I looked so smart the other day. They brought this man in, he was shaking, he looked all over again like your case – paralyzed, shaking, you couldn’t touch him, he would just scream. I ran over and said, 'Oh my God, did he just have a flu shot,' and they said 'Yes, two weeks ago, how would you know that?' And everyone said, 'Wow, she’s so good,' and the neurologist said, 'It scared me to death. He was like looking at you all over again.'

"I said, 'How is he?' And she said, 'He’s dead. It killed him. He was older, you were so healthy. Your heart and your body could take it. His couldn’t.'"

Dan: Just for the record, take me back to 2005. You went to get a flu shot at a drug store?

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!

Kudos to The Daily Kos for Progressive Response to Dan Olmsted's Progressive Criticism

By Dan Olmsted

The Daily Kos, probably the foremost progressive political blog in the nation, just wrote about my recent article "Why Progressives Don't Get Autism" -- and did a fair-minded and self-reflective job of it. That's probably why so many of their readers are up in arms.
 
A writer who goes by the name Critical Dune started his post this way: "Dan Olmsted, Editor of the blog "Age of Autism" and former wire service reporter, offers up an interesting (and pretty thoughtful) analysis,  pointing out what he thinks is a blind spot for many on the left: the issue of questioning current vaccine policy, especially as it relates to possible links with autism." (See here.)
 
Dune added: "Wherever you stand on this issue, or if you firmly think it's a non-issue, Olmsted points out some troubling behavior in the public health complex that should concern progressives."
 
That is music to my ears. The point of my article was that so many progressive outlets -- I named the Daily Kos, among others -- are so supportive of government-sponsored efforts to improve people's health that they can't believe, won't consider and completely miss the devil in the details, the devil in this case being strong evidence that excessive zeal in the service of good intentions has led to horrific unintended consequences.
 
The book Mark Blaxill and I just published, "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic," shows how the reckless use of mercury -- including but not limited to mass vaccinations -- triggered the Age of Autism as well as other severe ailments over several centuries. Built on a foundation of deep research and fresh discoveries, it's not an argument that can easily be dismissed with the usual "anti-vaccine," anti-science canard, but reflexive progressives who choose to remain condescending and uninformed just can't seem to help themselves.
 
I wrote in my piece:

"Progressives ought to be able to make this distinction, to tease out the fundamental public good from an inadvertent and ongoing disaster and the long failure to confront and fix it. If for no other reason, they should do this because when public action fails due to mismanagement, it plays into the idea that the public sector can’t run anything as well as  private business, and the progressive movement inadvertently validates the conservative critique. Instead, public health officials are now trying ever harder to stifle the debate, preserve the status quo and their own careers and credibility; in doing so, they betray not only the children they are charged with protecting, but the progressive values that led to mass vaccination in the first place."
 
Dune wrote:
 
"As a progressive, I strongly believe in public health initiatives all over the world to aggressively fight disease but think that a robust system of checks and balances is not what it ought to be in the United States.  It worries me greatly that for some definable, and perhaps not so small, subset of kids with immune system vulnerabilites  (like Hannah Poling and others), it's plausible that some components or timing of the recommended immunization schedule may be doing more harm than good."
 
Here we have something rare and worth nourishing -- common ground. I welcome that, and hope it provides the basis for more discussion -- not necessarily agreement, but honest and open argument. Of note, the first of the nearly 200 comments responding to the post began with the word "Bullshit," and many were of the hostile "study after study," babies-with-deadly-diseases ilk. Why not go over to Kos and join the discussion -- and put in a kind word for the author of one of the few truly welcoming and open-minded pieces I've ever seen from a progressive outlet.
--
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.

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
 
 

Happy Third Birthday to Age of Autism!

Editor's note: This post ran on November 10, 2007

Welcome to The Age of Autism, the nation's first daily Web newspaper for the environmental-biomedical community – those who believe autism is an environmentally induced illness, that it is treatable, and that children can recover. For the most part, the major media in the United States aren't interested in that point of view, they won't investigate the causes and possible biomedical treatments of autism independently, and they don't listen to the most important voices – those of the parents. We will do all those things, and more.

To illustrate the difference The Age of Autism will make, consider the way the Baltimore Sun edited a story about Jenny McCarthy, who believes that vaccines triggered her child's autism and that biomedical treatments are a big part of his remarkable and ongoing improvement. Here are phrases that were taken out of the story that originally ran in the Chicago Tribune, as noted by Anne Dachel, who will be Age of Autism's media editor:   

1)  Autism is "something McCarthy believes was triggered by vaccines." Deleted.

2)  "It's not just that she is voicing the same thing parents have been saying for years ('We vaccinated our babies and something happened') on high-profile programs such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King Live." Deleted.

3) "DAN! also provides contacts for the approximately 600 doctors in the U.S. who use complementary and alternative therapies to treat autism." Deleted.

4) "McCarthy wasn't about to wait for evidence-based medicine; she felt she had a limited window of time to pull her son back into this world." Deleted.

What the (deleted)!? And what an irony that Baltimore is where autism was first diagnosed, and that the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist who did so was the first of many to miss the environmental clues that could have kept hundreds of thousands more cases from ever happening. How can we trust the mainstream media to cover the autism epidemic when they themselves censor important information and skew the discussion toward the tired old genetic argument? Even the fact that autism rates are soaring – self-evident to anyone with eyes to see, and clear evidence of an environmental trigger – is treated as a big question mark by the media and public health officials. At The Age of Autism, we're not going to let those suffering from epidemic denial -- E.D., as our editor-at-large Mark Blaxill calls it -- waste our time or delay urgent research into What's Going On (the apt name of Mark's landmark epidemiology review).