Autism, mercury and cover up???

LydiaNN · Jul 28, 2005

The Age of Autism: Rep. wants Amish study

United Press International - July 19, 2005

Jul 19, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- A U.S. Congressman who is a medical doctor said Tuesday he will seek funding to study the autism rate among the largely unvaccinated Amish.

"I want to get somebody to do a study on that community," Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., told United Press International. "I would like to get funding and have somebody go into the Amish community and do a survey."

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday, however, that an Amish study would not yield useful information.

Weldon's comments came in response to a UPI investigation that found an apparently low level of autism among the Amish. Some parents of children with autism believe that a mercury-based preservative in vaccines called thimerosal caused the disorder, so looking at the autism rate among a group of unvaccinated children would test that theory.

Weldon made his remarks following a news briefing by federal health officials and doctors, at which they reiterated the safety and importance of childhood immunizations. They noted that thimerosal had been phased out of childhood vaccinations beginning in 1999.

Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC director, said scientific studies do not show a link between thimerosal and autism.

Asked by UPI whether the government had studied the autism rate in a never-vaccinated population, she replied that it is difficult to find such groups because the U.S. vaccination rate is so high. Also, she said, "It's very, very difficult to get an effective numerator and denominator and to get a reliable diagnosis."

She also said, however, that parents have been pushing for faster research and "I think those kind of studies could be done and should be done." She suggested that the Amish are not the right group.

"You have to adjust for the strong genetic component that also distinguishes, for example, people in Amish communities who may elect not to be immunized. To draw any conclusions from them would be difficult," Gerberding said.

Weldon responded that the isolated gene pool in the Amish community would not invalidate a study because autism is not solely a genetic disorder.

"That's operating under the assumption that it's all genetic," he said of Gerberding's comments. Weldon, a critic of the CDC's handling of autism research, said a strong outside factor is evidently at work because the number of autism cases has exploded in the past decade.

Weldon attended the news conference at the Health and Human Services building in Washington as a spectator. Afterwards, reporters spent more time interviewing him than they did the health officials, in part because there was little time for questions and in part because the officials offered no new information.

Reporters suggested that the briefing was called to overshadow a rally at the Capitol Wednesday at which parents will back Weldon's bill to remove thimerosal from all medical products; on Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., introduced a companion bill in the Senate.

An ABC television reporter asked the first question at the HHS briefing: "I'm wondering why we're all here today. I'm not hearing any new information."

"We're here to talk on an issue that we do receive questions on," a spokesman said, but did not directly deny that the briefing had been timed to head off the parents' group.

http://www.psycport.com/showArticle.cfm?xmlFile=comtex%5F2005%5F07%5F19%5Fup%5F0000%2D4639%2Dbc%2Dageofautism%2Dcrn%2Exml&provider=United%20Press%20International

Okay, I cut the article down as much as I could to provide a "synopsis" instead of posting the whole article, which is really interesting. I must say that I found very telling their acknowledgement that the "briefing" didn't have a thing to do with any news they had for us all. I feel like asking the reporter's question every time they say, yet again, "we haven't proven a link". Fine and dandy. Come wake me up when you have something to say that isn't expressed in double speak.

mandrews · Jul 28, 2005

[

"I want to get somebody to do a study on that community," Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., told United Press International. "I would like to get funding and have somebody go into the Amish community and do a survey."

:Melody:

sounds like the amish would make a very good choice for comparison.

melissa

rpggyr · Jul 29, 2005

Melissa,

If you added up all the homeschoolers, the Jehova Witness's, the Christian Scientists, and the Amish. (something that should be easy enough) they would have a diverse enough genetic population to do this study. I think while they are at it, they should check for a few other things like juvenile diabetes, asthma, and other chronic diseases that are on the rise in this generation. No, instead they will go to Denmark and do the study there. They will never undertake a study like this because they already know what they'll find.

Peggy

[
"I want to get somebody to do a study on that community," Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., told United Press International. "I would like to get funding and have somebody go into the Amish community and do a survey."
:Melody:
sounds like the amish would make a very good choice for comparison.
melissa

LydiaNN · Jul 29, 2005

Autism

by Evelyn Pringle

http://www.opednews.com

In their public statements, officials within the FDA and CDC, are always claiming that researchers and scientists who conduct studies, not funded by drug companies or the government, are making unfounded claims about a link between thimerosal-laced vaccines and autism, and other neurological disorders, which they claim could lead to reduced vaccine coverage, resulting in preventable outbreaks of disease affecting the entire planet.

I say cut the crap.

Think about it. Why would so many highly respected scientists, researchers and physicians go to such great lengths to concoct bogus studies and issue false reports, in essence putting their professional reputations on the line, if their was no connection?

I want these officials to do two things. First I want them to give me one good reason why these professionals would make this up, and two, I want them to give me one logical alternative theory for the current epidemic of disorders.

Lets look at a few of these experts.

Dr Jeffrey Bradstreet, is a practicing physician who treats children with autism and other brain-damage disorders. While in the Air Force, he was trained in toxicology and environmental health. His duties as an Officer included the responsibility for military personnel who had exposure to a wide variety of toxins, including mercury.

Dr Bradstreet has evaluated well over 2000 children with neurological disorders. He also directs a school for children with neurodevelopmental disorders where his responsibilities include supervising occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists, and applied behavioral analysts.

Dr Bradstreet is a Harvard Certified Medical Education Instructor in autism and has written three peer reviewed papers regarding the relationship between thimerosal, developmental disorders and biological markers for Mercury-Susceptibility.

In addition, he has conducted research regarding these disorders and has worked with some of the most highly respected professionals in the country, including Dr Jane El-Dahr of the Tulane University Medical Center; Dr V.K. Singh of the Utah State University Biotechnology Center; the University of Michigan Department of Pharmacology; Dr Vas Aposhian of the University of Arizona; Dr Anne Connolly of the Washington University Hospital; Dr Walter Spitzer of McGill University; the Department of Pediatrics at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Dr Jim Adams of the University of Arizona; and Dr Jill James, a former FDA researcher, now with the University of Arkansas, Department of Pediatrics.

Apparently the FDA, CDC, and vaccine makers expect us to believe that this long line of highly respected professionals from Universities all over the country somehow got together and conspired to conduct fraudulent research for decades and then authored 1000s of false reports and other publications.

I do not buy it. What would be the payoff?

Read the whole article at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_evelyn_p_050729_autism___cut_the_cra.htm

chicagrl72 · Aug 8, 2005

my dad just told me to tune in ...there is a discussion on mercury and thimerisol (sp?) in vax

check it out if you can

let me know your thoughts????

this doc seems a bit pompous

rpggyr · Aug 8, 2005

Oh yes I watched the whole thing. I thought David Kirby did a heck of a job. I find it ironic that not one of these so called experts that claim that thimerisol does not cause autism will never debate live. I also noted Dr. Finerberg admitted thimerisol was a neurotoxin but it does not cause autism. Well, I would have loved to ask him if they know its neurotoxic, and it does not casue autism then what is it doing in vaccines, and what does it cause. These people have told so many lies they are triipping over them. It will be a cold day in haites before the IOM meets again to review all the biological studies that have come out in the last two years. More are coming.

Peggy

my dad just told me to tune in ...there is a discussion on mercury and thimerisol (sp?) in vax
check it out if you can
let me know your thoughts????
this doc seems a bit pompous

LydiaNN · Aug 8, 2005

I have it recorded, and will watch it just as soon as I can. I also consider it interesting that the talking heads who claim thimerosal in vaccines doesn't cause autism stay far away from cameras. I'd think that since these people claim to have proof that "there is no link", they'd be only too happy to share with the rest of us this compelling evidence of their's.

LydiaNN · Aug 8, 2005

Okay, I couldn't sleep, so I got up and watched it. Very interesting. To start with a completely irrelevant aside, that doc from the IOM has a mighty flat affect. More to the point, I found his habit of never directly answering a question very irritating. TIM RUSSERT: Do you believe that thimerosal in vaccines may have contributed to some cases of autism? DAVID KIRBY: Absolutely. FINEBERG (sorry, I don't remember his first name): BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH for several minutes, after which, he still had failed to answer the question! I also thought it was amusing when he said he "didn't understand what was meant by the lack of transparency". Come now, he's meant to be a bright man, I'm sure he understands the meaning of that term perfectly! And the only justification he offered for the IOM's failure to share key study process information was that it has always been available to "qualified researchers". No one said it wasn't available to them. We said it wasn't available to the rest of us, and yet we are meant to accept their assurances that these were well designed studies? I also liked how he talked about the need to put these studies to rest and devote limited dollars to treatment studies, and then sat there mum when the funding of clinical studies of chelation were being discussed. I found the interview very interesting, and learned a couple important things I hadn't known before:

The schedule of vaccines to which I subjected my child exposed to 62.5 mg, which for a two year old is 125 times the EPA standard! and these so called well designed studies were then analyzed by a task force that didn't even include a toxicologist! Um, call me an uneducatedhystericalconspiracytoutingparent, but wouldn't it make sense, that if you're studying the effect of a known neurotoxin, that you would include the expertise of a toxicologist in interpreting study results?

grannynurse FNP student · Aug 8, 2005

Melissa,
If you added up all the homeschoolers, the Jehova Witness's, the Christian Scientists, and the Amish. (something that should be easy enough) they would have a diverse enough genetic population to do this study. I think while they are at it, they should check for a few other things like juvenile diabetes, asthma, and other chronic diseases that are on the rise in this generation. No, instead they will go to Denmark and do the study there. They will never undertake a study like this because they already know what they'll find.
Peggy

The Amish are not a genetically diverse population as one might think they are. They have a small population that generally tends to intermarry. There is an excellent book, regarding the beliefs and practices, of the Amish, as well as their health practices. Unfortunately, it is in my storage area, up in NYS, and I can't recall the title. I got the book because of exposure to Amish patients, in Sarasota.

Grannynurse :balloons:

grannynurse FNP student · Aug 8, 2005

For anyone interested, in learning more about the Amish, I have found the title and author.

"Amish Society", by John A. Hostetler

Grannynurse :balloons:

LydiaNN · Aug 10, 2005

Ok, maybe I'm posting more than anyone else cares to know, but here's another good article. I've added the text in italics.

The Age of Autism: But what about 1930?

By Dan Olmsted, UPI Consumer Health Editor

http://tinyurl.com/cohvu

NOTE: You'll need to sign up for free registration at the Washington Post site to read this article.

UPI-Sunday's debate on NBC's "Meet the Press" over vaccines and autism gave welcome exposure to an issue that won't go away quietly. Moderator Tim Russert asked Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine -- part of the National Academy of Sciences -- this question: "Do you think there's an epidemic of autism or do you think it's simply a change in defining it?" Fineberg answered: "There's definitely a huge number of cases diagnosed with autism. ... It's also clear that the

definition was broadened markedly in the 1980s and 1990s, and there were increased incentives to recognize children from increased awareness and availability of services.

"No one knows with certainty what part of the increase is genuine, a genuine increase in numbers, and what part is from increased recognition of people who were already there but not previously recognized." As readers of this column know, we believe this is the core issue in trying to understand the disorder. If in fact autism has strikingly increased in prevalence --not just in recognition -- the idea that autism is primarily a genetic disorder doesn't hold up. No genetic illness could rise so rapidly.

But if there have always been people with autism in reasonably similar

numbers, then the idea that some new trigger -- vaccines, for example -- is

behind autism begins to look implausible if not impossible. Fineberg appeared on the show with David Kirby, author of "Evidence of Harm," a new book that looks at the debate through the eyes of parents who believe vaccines triggered their child's autism. Because of the flow of the conversation, Kirby did not have a chance to address the "epidemic" issue directly. If he had, he could have pointed to a number of studies that suggest the increase -- to 1 in 166 children -- is real; he could have cited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's own statement that one in six children has some kind of neurodevelopmental disorder. He could have noted the parents and education professionals who believe something bad has happened to this generation of children -- not just autism, but learning disabilities and behavior problems, asthma and diabetes that have never

occurred in such numbers.

Still, it's a complicated topic, one that is not easily resolved merely by citing statistics and diagnostic categories. That's why our approach has been slightly different: We've set out to describe the natural history of autism from the beginning. That means we looked at where and when autism was first diagnosed as a separate disorder; what kind of families had autistic children; how that demographic broadened to include a wider swath of society; and whether autism is as prevalent in some communities -- the Amish being our prime example -- as it is in others.

What we can't get past is this: The first person to diagnose autism said he'd never seen it before, and neither had anyone else. His name was Leo Kanner, and he was not some country doctor; he was the leading psychiatrist of his day, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He wrote the book "Child Psychiatry." In fact, he's been called the dean or father of modern child psychiatry. Beginning in 1938 he saw children with a behavioral syndrome that differed "markedly and repeatedly from anything reported so far." Kanner wrote the landmark 1943 paper, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact," about the first 11 cases.

It goes on to talk about how, within 20 years, Kanner, who had never seen autism before, had seen 150 children with the disorder, and how Hans Asperger experienced a similar trajectory. It speculates on the reasons behind this continuing phenomenon and closes with this....

We think we may have found something, which will be the subject of the

next several columns.

Stay tuned! It should be a really interesting series!

happthearts · Aug 10, 2005

I Had vacunated my child when he was young and then My husband when to chriopratic school and did a study about Vacinations .He found when reading that the AIDS virus was transferd by Vacinations in Africa Via the Boevine Virus .Plus I have had a child Pt that was damaged by Vacinations because of the serum they used and she now has CP and mental retardtion .

I have really reconsiderd my thinking on this and so has my Primary MD, he even told me not to get the Hep B shot to do the waiver instead because The Hep B is still not perfected yet.

I know personally after takeing all those Vacination shots when I was in the miltary. I have never really felt up to snuff ever since then That was in 1975 . Before I had tons of get up and go. Could run all day and not get tired . So I really feel theres something Not so great about injecting our bodies on purpose with a disease. :uhoh21:

This is a hot topic in the autism community, especially amongst parents who have to make a decision about vaccinating their children. My son had already had all his vaccinations before I even heard of the controversy, so I didn't have to make the decision. I probably would have chosen to vaccinate anyway, given that when we were little, my sister contracted encephalitis from the measles and nearly died. It caused pretty significant neurological damage for her. The irony is that the vaccine actually was available at the time, but it was fairly new, and the pediatrician told my parents, who didn't have health insurance for us, that "kids get the measles all the time and do just fine."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7395411?rnd=1118937794114&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.872