Wonderful (LONG!) article on Autism/Mercury/etc.

[Guest guest]

Exploding Autism Epidemic Tied To Greed Of Pharmaceutical Companies

By Hanchette

http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/hanchette165.html

Here's an update on a topic featured in this space before: the

alarming exponential increase in young children with autism. You may have

missed it, but late in June both houses of the New York State Legislature

passed an act that, beginning in mid-2008, would prohibit further sale or

use of the mercury compound thimerosal in vaccines for children younger than

3, and for inoculating pregnant women. The office of Gov. Pataki has

said he's still pondering whether to sign the legislation into law.

If he does, it would make New York the fourth state to establish such

a law -- California, Iowa and Missouri are the others. Similar legislation

-- most of it with quicker effective dates -- has been introduced in

Florida, Delaware, land, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, North

Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Tennessee and Rhode Island. A

federal bill to ban thimerosal from all childhood vaccines in the United

States is sponsored by Rep. Weldon, a Florida Republican who is also a

physician. He says in the 1990s a baby who got all the recommended shots

could be exposed to mercury levels significantly higher than those

considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Thimerosal, which contains a neurotoxin mercury compound, has been

used for more than half a century as a preservative to prevent bacterial

contamination in vaccines. Just a decade ago, most Americans would have to

be " Jeopardy " champions just to identify the substance, but parents today

are more and more aware of it because many medical researchers believe it is

linked to the astounding increase in autism. If you're in your 20s, you had

a 1 in 10,000 chance of ending up autistic. Today, that chance in the United

States is about 1 in 166 births, according to the federal Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention.

The change in these numbers is statistically incredible, and indicates

a health problem of epidemic proportions.

As almost every concerned parent now knows, autistic children -- many

of them once normal infants and toddlers -- display heartbreaking social

withdrawal, loss of speech, reduced eye contact, temper tantrums, repetitive

hand-flapping, seizures, constant sleep disturbance, aversion to eye

contact, a seemingly weakened immune system, and odd repetitive behaviors

such as walking on their toes. The symptoms of infant mercury poisoning are

almost exactly the same.

As more and more inoculations became required for infants and toddlers

in the late 1980s and early 1990s, big pharmaceutical firms manufacturing

vaccines started combining the shots in multi-dose vials.

They were cheaper to produce, easier to store, and kept parents from

making too many trips to the doctor. The thimerosal also gave them longer

shelf-life. During this period, the number of vaccines containing thimerosal

that were added to the immunization schedule almost doubled. Kids sometimes

got three such injections in a single day, and usually nine

thimerosal-containing shots during their first half-year of life, when the

immune system is still developing and vulnerable.

It was during this period the astonishing rate of increase in autistic

children started zooming upward.

While pediatricians gave mothers tut-tut reassurances that the

vaccinations were totally safe, recently revealed documents show some

government and drug industry researchers had started wondering. The Los

Angeles Times earlier this year dug up a 1991 memo circulated within the

internal offices of pharmaceutical giant Merck. It showed real concern among

senior executives over the significant level of mercury in many children's

vaccines. It wasn't until the summer of 1999 that the influential American

Academy of Pediatrics and the federal Public Health Service issued a joint

statement urging the pharmaceutical firms to remove thimerosal from their

infant vaccines.

They did, sort of.

Much of the thimerosal-containing vaccine was shipped overseas to

developing nations and countries like China, where autism rates have since

rocketed. Some was dispatched to free health clinics in the United States.

The mercury substance still appears here in some flu shots and booster

inoculations for tetanus and diphtheria. (Russia, often described in the

American media as abysmally backward in scientific matters, banned

thimerosal from vaccines 20 years ago. So have Great Britain, Sweden,

Norway, Finland, Austria, Denmark and Japan.) The Centers for Disease

Control and the World Health Organization continued to insist thimerosal was

safe, and in May of last year -- funded by the CDC -- the Institute of

Medicine in Washington weighed in by stating scientific evidence in more

than 200 studies " favors rejection of a causal relationship " and that " all

well-designed epidemiological studies provide evidence of no association

between thimerosal and autism. "

Case closed? Hardly.

The childhood health controversy has morphed into a growing fight in

the political arena. A recent catalyst is F. Kennedy Jr., 51 -- the

son of assassinated New York senator, presidential candidate and former

Attorney General F. Kennedy, JFK's younger brother. The current

younger Kennedy, a lawyer and environmentalist, in June wrote an explosive

article in " Rolling Stone " magazine that described a secret June 2000

summit-like meeting of doctors, drug company execs, federal health officials

and other vaccine experts called together by the CDC specifically " to

discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the

safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and

young children. " Kennedy, who does not have an autistic child, said he began

his research thinking he would prove vaccines were not involved in the

autism increase.

Instead, from documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act

and an anonymous source who was present, Kennedy learned a CDC

epidemiologist at the meeting had declared that 100,000 medical records of

children in the CDC medical database had showed thimerosal was " directly

related to the dramatic rise " in the autism epidemic.

Instead of triggering further studies or promulgating this to the

federal scientific community, the CDC embargoed the information -- even from

government medical researchers -- but showed the data to select members of

the private drug industry. Typical federal behavior.

ABC News got onto the buzz about Kennedy's assertions and prepared a

special report that would have indicated credence, but network executives

canceled it the night before airing. The content was rewritten in a fashion

that discredited Kennedy and his discoveries. The rebroadcast was sandwiched

between expensive advertisements by big pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy upped the ante with an opinion piece last week in USA Today, in

which he claimed the " once sterling reputations " of the CDC, the IOM and the

Food and Drug Administration have all been tarnished " by the release of

transcripts of secret meetings that show government officials conspiring

with the pharmaceutical industry to hide the damning results of data showing

dramatic increases in neurological disorders among children exposed to

thimerosal. "

Kennedy scored the CDC for claiming " to have lost the original data "

and for its " defiance of federal laws and congressional requests requiring

it to allow independent scientists or the public to review federal vaccine

safety data. "

He further accused the CDC of rigging studies finding thimerosal safe

by relying on principal authors who " have close ties to the pharmaceutical

industry " and not disclosing those connections, even though the federal

health agency was aware of them, and was similarly aware the studies

contained " deceptive data " which made the studies " catastrophically flawed. "

For instance, the CDC and other thimerosal defenders keep pointing to

one of the studies that allegedly shows a big increase in autistic children

in Denmark after that country disallowed use of the substance in its

vaccines. Wouldn't that show conclusively that thimerosal is not to blame

for autism increases? One would think so, until one learns from Kennedy that

Denmark -- before banning thimerosal -- was used to registering in its

studies only autistics who were hospitalized. That number represented only

20 percent of those truly afflicted. After banning thimerosal, Denmark began

also counting out-patient children who showed autistic symptoms, four-fifths

of the total autistic population. Apples and oranges, not scientific

parallels. Of course, it appeared like the numbers spiked following the ban.

A whole new category was being counted. The clever CDC, of course, never

mentions this.

The CDC, Kennedy further charged, " has selectively ignored hundreds of

biological, toxicological and epidemiological studies linking thimerosal to

a wide range of neurological disorders, relying instead on its reputation

and its faith that journalists are too busy to read the science. "

The slopping over of the controversy into political circles is even

affecting occupants of the White House -- the current one and a possible

future resident of the executive mansion.

Last September, when W. Bush was campaigning for re-election,

vaccine safety advocates asked Bush to state his position on thimerosal.

Dubya responded: " I support the removal of thimerosal from vaccines " for

children. " He also pledged to fund autism research.

A parental group called Unlocking Autism last month unleashed a

lobbying and advertising campaign accusing Dubya of flip-flopping on the

issue and doing nothing. Members say they got the cold shoulder when they

tried to convince White House officials and the Department of Health and

Human Services thimerosal is still a problem.

The possible future president in the middle of the controversy is

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a heart surgeon and powerful Tennessee

Republican who is notoriously protecting big pharmaceutical firms from

private lawsuits and who has feverishly (and successfully) tried to deny

researchers access to the federal government's sophisticated database of

vaccine reaction documents.

Frist, you may recall, is the slick politico who after 9/11 snuck a

provision into the Homeland Security Act that shielded the big

pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly -- developer of thimerosal -- from even

being subpoenaed in connection to vaccine lawsuits. He claimed he was just

trying to protect future research that would protect against bioterrorism.

Yeah, sure.

Shortly thereafter, Eli Lilly donated $10,000 to Frist's campaign fund

and bought 5,000 copies of the senator's book on bioterrorism. The clause

protecting the big drug firm from legal action was repealed in 2003, but

Frist was not deterred. Early this year, he attached another section to

another anti-terrorism bill which denies compensation to children with

vaccine-related brain damage. His office states vaccine-damage lawsuits " are

of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and

limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists. "

Riiiight. Maybe this is why over the years pharmaceutical companies

have donated a total of almost $900,000 to Frist's campaign funds. Frist is

going to run for president in 2008. And he's going to get some tough

questions on this subject. Parents everywhere should hope young Kennedy

keeps asking them.

Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure

University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer

Prize-winning national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today

and was recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past

25 years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@....

Sue Swanson

Defeat Autism NOW: http://www.generationrescue.org/

Giving mercury to children on purpose is stupid!