As first reported by David Kirby in The Huffington Post, March 11, 2008, when “a conference call was held between vaccine safety officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, several leading experts in vaccine safety research, and executives from America’s Health Plans to discuss childhood mitochondrial dysfunction and its potential link to autism and vaccines” may be a tipping point similar to the opening of the Hungarian border.

Hannah Poling was supposed to be a unique case according to CDC Director Dr. Julie Geberding.  But according to a Portuguese study published last October, more than 7% of children with autism in their study had “confirmed mitochondrial disorders” and 20% had indications of mitochondrial disorders.

While David Kirby’s sources were anonymous and did not divulge the identity of a different group of medical researchers, this group had been studying the biochemistry of 30 autistic children for a period of 5 years and discovered they all “had moderate elevations or imbalances in the exact same amino acids and liver enzymes as Hannah Poling.”

Why do I think this is so important?

I’m guessing that this anonymous group of researchers is none other than Dr. Jon Poling's associates from Johns Hopkins University, the Kennedy-Kriger Institute, and the Cleveland Clinic, three of the country’s finest medical research facilities.

If I’m right, then other facets of this case begin to make more sense.

On April 11 in Washington D. C. the National Vaccine Advisory Committee’s Safety Working Group will convene a meeting to “review the current vaccine safety system.”  Perhaps this meeting was called in response to one of these researchers who told Kirby that in the March 11 conference call “the CDC people were informed, in no uncertain terms, that they need to look into this issue immediately, and do something about it. . . The clock is ticking, they were told, and if they don’t respond, the information will be made public.”

At another point during this conference call there was speculation on to prevalence of a genetic mutation which could cause the mild mitochondrial dysfunction observed in the autistic children from this anonymous study.  Those estimates ranged from 1-in-400 to 1-in-50.  Previous estimates put the number at 1-in-4,000. 

The direction in which this inquiry is going is clearly different than Dr. Gerberding’s previous claims.

From this underlying genetic susceptibility to mitochondrial dysfunction it’s a relatively simple medical jump to some “environmental adversity” like vaccines (certain medication such as AZT and toxins like mercury, aluminum, and pesticides have already been clearly identified as causing mitochondrial dysfunctions) to low cellular energy, neuroinflammation, then autism and/or seizures.

I've been informed that part of what was presented to the CDC was evidence of ongoing neuroinflammation in autopsy specimens of people with autism up to 47 years old. What appears to be happening now is that solid medical evidence is accumulating of what's actually going on in the brains of people with autism and most of it parallels what the bio-medical community has been saying for years.

When more than half a million children have been afflicted with autism or related conditions it's incumbent on the CDC to investigate these associations, even if it reveals their own culpability in this tragedy.

In January of the year in which the Berlin Wall fell, the leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, predicted the wall would stand for a "hundred more years." 

Eleven months later it was a pile of rubble.

Kent Heckenlively is Legal Editor for Age of Autism.