Great column coming Aug 3

[Guest guest]

Hi all!

There is a new column being published in a local suburban Chicago paper (The Sun) on Aug 3rd I think you will all love. It's written by Dave Drown, a weekly columnist and definitely a friend, who I convinced to write about my daughter Eve back in April. (He's also a volunteer at his church who works with autistic kids in the religious ed program. Prior to me forwarding him Eve's story, he had never even heard of thimerosal.) This is a continuation, so to speak...and it's fantastic. I think you'll all love it.

Tell me what you think.

The year was 1953. In the West German laboratories of the Grunenthal Pharmaceutical Company, scientists were working on a synthetic drug to help combat sleeplessness and morning sickness in pregnant women.

After four years of testing, testing which was only conducted on animals and even those tests were suspect, the new drug with trade names like Talimol, Kevadon, Nibrol, Sedimide, Quietoplex, Contergan, and Neurosedyn was being marketed in over fifty different countries including Canada and Great Britain.

In 1960, Grunenthal applied for approval to sell its drug in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration asked for, but did not receive, adequate (for the time) lab test results from the company or any of its affiliates. In fact, it was later found at trial that lab tests were either falsified or never performed, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Before the FDA could rule on the application for approval, reports out of Europe began growing with alarming frequency. Women who had been taking the drug to prevent morning sickness were delivering children with birth defects such as shortened or missing limbs and fingers.

According to statistics of the time, around 15,000 fetuses were damaged by the drug, 12,000 children were born with deformities and only 8,000 lived past the first year. As the number of cases grew, the drug was officially banned world-wide before ever being approved in the United States. The FDA’s reviewer, Frances Kelsey, was hailed as a hero for not allowing the drug to be approved here due to what she called inadequate testing.

The drug, as anyone over the age of fifty will tell you, was thalidomide. But I want you to think about that number, 15,000 children worldwide over a four-year period.

Last year, approximately 4 million children were born in the United States. Of those children, almost 25,000 will be diagnosed with some form of autism. That’s one in every 166 births. This diagnosis rate has been growing over the years and the same FDA, and now the Centers for Disease Control and Institute of Medicine, will be darned if they can see any reason for it.

As we talked about in this space several weeks ago, some parents have offered a theory. Over the past thirty or so years, young children have been receiving more and more vaccinations each year, some as many as fifteen or twenty. The parents of some of the children diagnosed with autism have discovered that the symptoms their children are exhibiting are strangely similar to the symptoms shown when one is subjected to mercury poisoning.

When multiple-batch vaccines are produced by major drug companies like Eli Lilly and Merck, they have been supplemented with thimerasol, a preservative containing ethyl-mercury.

Hmmm. Still, the FDA, CDC and IOM insist that any number of tests have never found any causal link between thimerasol and autism, therefore groups like Generation Rescue and others are made up of conspiracy-fueled hysterical parents.

But one must listen closely; they have never said that they can prove thimerasol DOESN’T cause autism. The truth is, there are potentially billions of dollars in liability on the part of drug companies hanging out there, and this is shaping up to be the classic vs. Goliath story; we the people against the United States Federal Government.

In this case, one of our s is Kirby, author of “Evidence of Harm.” Mr. Kirby’s book is an exhaustive detail of not only the history of thimerasol and the pathetically little testing in the 1930’s that went into thimerasol’s development, but is interspersed with the personal stories of parents of autistic children and a litany of government reports, memos, meetings and more dealing with the growing controversy.

Until now, Mr. Kirby has been unable to find a broad national audience to debate the findings in his book. This Sunday, August 7th, Kirby will find that audience as he debates a doctor from the Institute of Medicine on Tim Russert’s Meet The Press on NBC. Please watch for yourselves and make your own conclusions. Russert is one of the best and will be equally hard on both sides.

Please also consider a couple of other facts. If thimerasol was so virtually safe as claimed, why did Senator Bill Frist in 2002 include a rider in the Homeland Security Act entitled the “Eli Lilly Protection Act” to prevent drug companies from liability in this issue? True, it was repealed after a public outcry, but it will be revisited.

I mean, it’s not that we should ever think our government, who always has our best interests at hand, would ever intentionally harm anyone.

But remember thalidomide, which was banned world-wide when it was found to cause birth defects in 15,000 children? The FDA, our FDA, quietly approved thalidomide in 1998, with restricted access, for the treatment of symptoms associated with leprosy. Since 2001, it has also been in trials for HIV anti-inflammatories, prostate cancer, myeloma and Crohn’s disease. Still, female users are cautioned not take it if they even think about becoming pregnant, and the FDA warns not to buy thalidomide over the Internet, as they can’t gaurantee it’s safe manufacture.

Funny, there’s a growing body of the public that doesn’t think the FDA can gaurantee the safe manufacture of anything anymore.

Accept, of course, vaccines with thimerasol.

Questions or comments? Please contact Dave via davedrown@....

[Guest guest]

WOW....It is a wonderful article.....

Thanks so much for sharing it and getting the info out there.....

Ellen