Breaking Bad News
By Bill Welsh
The day after the September 11th attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York a senior British civil servant, Jo Moore, issued an email, stating that “this would be a good time to release bad news”, and thereby “bury” awkward political announcements. The cynicism of this political manoeuvre was not lost on the UK public and outrage quickly followed. 10 Downing Street, the headquarters of the then UK Prime minister, Tony Blair, issued a detailed rebuttal of any suggestion that announcements had been rushed out to take advantage of the calamity in the USA. The damage however had already been done and this newly revealed Machiavellian strategy, part of an increasingly devious armoury used by the close circle ‘spinning’ UK government policy, became a legitimate area for ongoing surveillance by a concerned public.
Over the last 6 weeks in the UK the news has been dominated by one subject, and one subject only, the ‘expenses scandal’ engulfing our Members of Parliament (MPs). Apparently ‘honourable’ members, in order to carry out their parliamentary duties, require the humble tax payer to fund, for example: ‘moat cleaning’: ‘ Scandinavian duck houses’: ‘light bulb supplies’: ‘extensive and expensive landscape gardening’; and so much more it would require a separate article to give it justice. Thirteen MPs have to date fallen on their swords and more will follow. Over £300,000 has been repaid to the British tax payer by parliamentarians and that is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. The size of this scandal and the incredible publicity it has generated makes even your non-conspiracy theorist wonder if there is any other “bad news” that may have been released by any other agency in order that it is “buried” in the media avalanche surrounding ‘parliamentary expenses’:
Step forward Cambridge University’s Autism Research Unit and its announcement that the rate of AUTISM in the UK now stands at ONE CHILD IN 66.
Fact is this figure or one remarkably similar, was apparently available for publication by Simon Baron-Cohen’s department as long as four years ago, in 2005, but inexplicably did not make it to a scientific journal. At that time a Scottish government survey indicating an autism rate of 1 child in 44 in the Orkney Islands was revealed, rather confirming that the rise in autism numbers was not limited to the South Thames region where the Cambridge study is based. What is also surprising is that Professor Baron-Cohen, a frequent self publicist, resisted the opportunity to personally announce this devastating new information at that time. One can only surmise that the 1 in 66 revelation either contradicts his earlier statements on the subject of autism prevalence or makes him and his colleagues feel rather uncomfortable for reasons not being explained.
1 child in 66 with a diagnosis of autism has astounding repercussions for UK public health finances and for the support and services sector for the foreseeable future and yet Cambridge University had apparently decided to conceal this information from all and sundry for about four years. Why? One can only speculate, but there are many in academia who have over decades made a very good living from the ‘autism enigma’ and to concede now that there is indeed an autism epidemic and that environmental factors, including vaccination, are at play as parents have consistently claimed, would undoubtedly shine an uncomfortable spotlight on the performance of cliques like the Autism Research Unit at Cambridge University.
We have so far been spared the plethora of media interviews that normally accompany a Baron-Cohen research paper but it is fair to assume he will in time rush to a microphone and issue numerous implausible explanations for the 1 in 66 figure. Baron-Cohen will continue to deny the tragedy that an increase, in what is claimed to be a lifelong and incurable illness, in the nation’s children, from 4 children in 10,000 to 1 child in 60 over a thirty year period, and what it means. He will ignore the wide ranging adverse social and personal consequences being visited on families. He will articulate his usual caveats of: better recognition; changing diagnostic criteria; inward migration; improved services etc, with the result that his paper’s 1 in 66 statistic becomes just that- a meaningless statistic, a statistic that does not require any immediate government action. Baron-Cohen will then return to his velveted ivory tower to consolidate his position as the UK’s expert on autism and continue to attract a level of research funding that other, better informed and certainly more compassionate scientists, can only dream of.
Meanwhile the sub-set of autistic children with bowel disease and/or the myriad other physiological problems that bring them daily distress and pain will have been abandoned once more. Failed by a system that places its confidence in the very people who have demonstrated time and time again that they are unwilling to acknowledge their part in what has become the biggest public health scandal ever.
There is of course a very simple solution to this ongoing absurd situation: Professor Simon Baron-Cohen could admit publicly that he has been mistaken all along.
Don’t hold your breath.
Bill Welsh is President of the Autism Treatment Trust in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Stan thanks for replying. Cassein protein in the blood vessels would really have a different effect on the body than if it just started out in the stomach. The pertussis vaccine is just a bad old thing all on it own, and some are just allergic, end of story. But what I would like to know before I die is what was that same reoccurring fever-headaches, can't stand the light and it always lasted two weeks. This went on for years. If I could have stopped that- I saw it again this Christmas in another little 3 year old boy, I would love to help him.
Posted by: Benedetta Stilwell | June 07, 2009 at 06:51 PM
Benedetta:
Interesting. Molds have mycotoxins, too; anything moldy can be a problem, esp. w/people particularly sensitive to it. For example, people who have allergic reactions to antibiotics. But speaking of allergies: there are other reasons kids can react to the DPT, & its pertussis element in particular.
(1) I have read recently (can't find the reference right now) that the DPT has the casein protein in it. That's dairy; that therefore means an allergic reaction to dairy.
This business of all manner of food proteins in vaccines is a major scandal; that is what is behind anaphylactic reactions/allergies, w/ the body mounting an immune reaction to them along with the other ingredients of the vaccines. The body is just trying to do its job. What in blazes kind of job is the medical-pharmaceutical complex trying to do on us?!
(2) According to Harris L. Coulter, PhD (in his excellent book 'Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality') the pertussis vaccine is the preferred adjuvant to study allergic encephalomyelitis in animals. And, apparently, humans........
Posted by: Stan | June 07, 2009 at 04:30 PM
I have been studying diets that mimics starvation (using fat for energy instead of glucose). Starvation use to be the only cure for epileptics. Ketogenic Diet which is high in fats mimics starvation, and recently the Atkins diet and low glycemic diets were found to help. In Dr. Atkins book he mentions fungi infections. He says that he would not mention it except it was a problem with a third of his patients when they started his diet. He said this was surprising because a diet low in sugar and flour should reduce the incident of fungal infection.He thought it was because his patients were previously on low fat diets and not use to the cheeses. When they started eating sharp aged cheeses their immune systems were very sensitive to yeast infections and mistaked these age cheeses for yeast and caused an immune, inflamed, response. well I actually got a yeast infection not an immune reaction when I started it in only a couple of days. I think it was feta cheese, or maybe the extra sharp cheddar cheese. My husband who has a mitochondrial disorder claimed I was trying to kill him on the diet- his muscle locked up and he hurt all over, he kept saying this is the worse he had ever felt. But I have heard that a lot over the years. Both our children did okay though! We kept to the diet and things are fine now but I won't go near anything aged. Could there be any answers here? Or just another wasted, useless lead. I did have a yeast infection when I was pregnant with my son, did that set him up to react to his whooping cough vaccine later, did it perhaps set him up to have allergies?
Posted by: Benedetta Stilwell | June 07, 2009 at 12:07 PM
I'm intrigued with the high incidence reference to the Orkney Islands. Adriana points out the possible link with ship wrecks "which are often tainted with toxic metals" (anti-fouling); but there's another interesting association, worthy of investigation. That has to do with the fact that there is a very high incidence of MS in the Orkneys as well. Some researchers have concluded that MS may have a relationship with low levels of vitamin D, since its incidence is higher in latitudes further from the equator. But a closer look at this 'link' uncovers some other important facts.
One is that some researchers found that one of the genes known to have the strongest link with MS risk interacts closely with DNA and proteins that rely on vitamin D to activate them; thus, with low levels of vit. D there may be gene alteration. But is there anything else about this nutrient that may have a role to play here? Indeed there is. Vitamin D is also an antifungal; and this is a waving flag to pay attention to.
An article by a Dr David Holland, MD on the website of Dr Joseph Mercola, MD is entitled "MS: A Chronic Mycotoxicosis?" He points out the connection between fungi (including antibiotics) and their mycotoxins with such conditions as MS. Mycotoxins, more abundant in northern climes, contaminate many food crops, and can damage nerves through attacking the myelin sheathing of the cranial nerve systems (and by disrupting sphingolipid biosynthesis). Thus: damaged myelin sheathing. And guess what: the MMR can also damage that sheathing, particularly through contamination of the chick embryo cells that the measles component is cultured on with MBP. The body mounts an immune reaction to the vax, including the MBP in the vax, and wham: an autoimmune reaction to its own MBP. So kids in northern climes can get a double whammy of nerve - to say, brain - damage, from this sort of interaction of environmental factors. And the measles vax found in the damaged guts of kids with ASD can then leak more easily into the brain and wreak its own damage...
...plus the glutamic acid in the MMR (as a stabilizer) increases histamine response, and therefore makes an immune reaction worse...
We need to be paying more attention to the studies (in particular of Singh et al) that have evidenced the presence of MBP antibodies in the damaged guts of kids with autism ALONG WITH THE MMR VAX MEASLES VIRUS. Unless I'm mistaken, there's a smoking gun here. But who's going to do the definitive studies? Not Big Pharma. Not the health authorities. They all have their own agenda: to stonewall, as long as they can (for their various reasons).
Enter the autism community. Go for it, folks, through one or more of your 'front' groups: fronting for your kids, against an establishment that looks on them merely as collateral damage.
Posted by: Stan | June 07, 2009 at 10:37 AM
Just two hours ago I was in a library in Manila reading a magazine with an article by Mr. Baron Cohen. It was another "time machine" article- still explaining to the public what the outward features of autism are. One photo showed a boy in a chair and it explained that the boy was repetitively hitting a tray. One look at the boys face and and hair said volumes- He was in great distress, physical or mental or both - but that was not mentioned. I wonder how people can be oblivious to the suffering of small children.
Posted by: Cherry Sperlin Misra | June 04, 2009 at 12:26 AM
I just heard that Jenny Mccarthy's pilot show has been cancelled. I hope Oprah keeps standing up for children with autism.
Posted by: kay | June 03, 2009 at 11:18 PM
Politics- poly meaning many / tics meaning blood sucking insects
Posted by: Benedetta Stilwell | June 03, 2009 at 07:44 PM
It angers me so much to know that our vaccine damaged children are being ignored.
Simon Baron Cohen gets money and recognition for doing silly studies and everyone respects him. I don't, because he is just as bad as the pharmaceutical companies who are making billions out of our children's misery.
Posted by: Joan Campbell | June 03, 2009 at 05:14 PM
If the number 1 out of 66 is from 2005, I hate imagine what the number really is for 2009. I think Baron-Cohen is the Bettleheim of this generation of Autism 'experts'.
Posted by: Alison MacNeil | June 03, 2009 at 05:07 PM
Great article! and one topic that I am sure will arise when Polly Tommey (editor and creator of the Autism File Magazine) will bring up when she meets with Gordon Brown on the 16th of this month!
We are brothers and sisters in this community that we call autism, (which was quite obvious at the autism one conference in Chicago recently when the Somali autim community here in the US joined us at the conference).
This is one section of the human population that all others could learn from. Isn't it amazing that politics, religion and geography mean absolutely nothing when it comes to the binding together of souls when our children are in danger?
The world could learn something from us (uh...I mean more than the fact that oour governments our poisoning our friggin' children!)
Posted by: curt linderman sr | June 03, 2009 at 03:29 PM
Thank you so much for the sharp look at disaster politics. Your article will remain at the top of Google News under Simon Baron-Cohen's name for at least a week, as other AOA posts on him have. There's no way he doesn't know what's thought of him by the wider autism parent community at this point. It obviously doesn't matter to him, though I'm sure he doesn't appreciate the repeated blots on his Google name search.
I agree that Baron-Cohen's strange prevalence theories are key to sustaining the epidemic. He's as responsible for the disaster at this point as anyone in industry:
http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/04/this-little-piggy-crashed-the-market.html
1 in 40 boys, and that's got to be just the tip of the iceberg as far as disabling physiological and brain disorders. As my mother asked, how are they going to build an army in the future?
The Orkney issue brings up the question of how toxic metal body burden may interplay with an excess of attenuated virus vaccines. I've never thought that the idea of ambient toxins contributing to autism represent an "alternate to vaccine theory" but are instead "complementary" theories to vaccine causation, explaining increased sensitivity in some populations. As some have noted before, Orkney is surrounded by ship wrecks which are often tainted with toxic metals, which crabs and other regional commercial fishing species feed from. If their halibut is as toxic as in Alaska, the child population in Orkney may have had an extra strike against them in terms of susceptibility to the heavy British vaccine schedule: http://www.seaanglingorkney.com/species/index.shtml
Posted by: Adriana | June 03, 2009 at 02:06 PM
We should not be surprised that someone would use a national tragedy, whether it be 9/11 or British corruption...as an opportunity to release bad news.
I read somewhere the Chinese written symbol for "crisis and opportunity" are the same..and..that makes perfect sense when you think about it. Whenever there is a national "crisis", you can bet your bottom dollar someone will use that "crisis" as an "opportunity" to advance their own agenda.
Already we can see the tragic deaths from swine flu being described worldwide as a looming "crisis"...thereby providing politicians "opportunity" to lavish vast amounts of money to produce a swine flu vaccine in time for the next flu season.
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | June 03, 2009 at 07:29 AM
Thanks for the headline. Which is more tragic. That they bury the stat in the UK for four years or that the U.S. Can not be bothered to count now for over 15 years? Something is rotten in Peoria!
Posted by: Tanners Dad | June 03, 2009 at 01:02 AM