"The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother." - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) French Soldier, Emperor
Congratulations to the two moms who got this published. NVIC has posted a formal mercury petition that was sent to Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson and to the FDA. http://www.909shot.com
1: Neurotoxicology 2001 Oct;22(5):691-7 Books, LinkOut
Predicted mercury concentrations in hair from infant immunizations: cause for concern.
Redwood L, Bernard S, Brown D.
Coalition for Safe Minds, Cranford, NJ 07016, USA. tlredwood@mindspring.com
Mercury (Hg) is considered one of the worlds most toxic metals. Current thinking suggests that exposure to mercury occurs primarily from seafood contamination and rare catastrophic events. Recently, another common source of exposure has been identified. Thimerosal (TMS), a preservative found in many infant vaccines, contains 49.6% ethyl mercury (EtHg) by weight and typically contributes 25 microg of EtHg per dose of infant vaccine. As part of an ongoing review, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced in 1999 that infants who received multiple TMS-preserved vaccines may have been exposed to cumulative Hg in excess of Federal safety guidelines. According to the centers for disease control (CDC) recommended immunization schedule, infants may have been exposed to 12.5 microg Hg at birth, 62.5 microg EtHg at 2 months, 50 microg EtHg at 4 months, 62.5 microg EtHg at 6 months, and 50 microg EtHg at approximately 18 months, for a total of 237.5 microg EtHg during the first 18 months of life, if all TMS-containing vaccines were administered. Neurobehavioral alterations, especially to the more susceptible fetus and infant, are known to occur after relatively low dose exposures to organic mercury compounds. In effort, to further elucidate the levels of ethyl mercury resulting from exposure to vaccinal TMS, we estimated hair Hg concentrations expected to result from the recommended CDC schedule utilizing a one compartment pharmacokinetic model. This model was developed to predict hair concentrations from acute exposure to methymercury (MeHg) in fish. Modeled hair Hg concentrations in infants exposed to vaccinal TMS are in excess of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) safety guidelines of 1 ppm for up to 365 days, with several peak concentrations within this period. More sensitive individuals and those with additional sources of exposure would have higher Hg concentrations. Given that exposure to low levels of mercury during critical stages of development has been associated with neurological disorders in children, including ADD, learning difficulties, and speech delays, the predicted hair Hg concentration resulting from childhood immunizations is cause for concern. Based on these findings, the impact which vaccinal mercury has had on the health of American children warrants further investigation.
Dear Mr. Speaker
2369 Rayburn HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Washington, D.C. Office: (202) 225-0697
Since 1988, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) has been a resource for bereaved parents that suddenly were launched into the worse nightmare of their lives, that a vaccine can harm them, mostly their beloved children. I have two autistic children, proven to have vaccinosis injury. I trusted my pediatrician to disclose to me the harms in front of me, while balancing the argument of protection upon them. I was a good mother, in my estimation, to proceed with the surgery (and I say it is a surgery). Little did I know what fate would be in front of me. And I will say upfront, there is no such thing as acceptable losses in our children when it comes to disease prevention!
However, the program you have set up, is not only alarmingly underreported, it is also a farce. Although, I know it was the only avenue, and blessed avenue for many parents, I contend that there is more harm being done to our children than the government or the pharma companies even want to admit. The statutes and limitations of injury are beyond ridiculous, they are incredulous. Who set forth these injury tables? I would like to in fact ask for a full disclosure of this? I can pretty much tell you, they are the pharmaceutical corporations, who by admission, have never tested long term safety studies on these vaccines in our children, nor have they studied them in non vaccinated and vaccinated populations. This is missing a very key fact. The fact is, our children are suffering at the hands of these people, and they don't care if you have a slow response to these vaccines or not. My child, 11 days after a DPT had high pitch screaming, acting blind, fever and convulsions, shaking, unconsollableness, and was "out of it" for a week. Two weeks after this numbing blow, my child stopped talking. As I still trusted my pediatrician, and should have ran away, he said, well, it must be the Pertussis portion of the shot, therefore we should not vaccinate with P in DPT anymore. This sounded at the time, reasonable to me. Then I had two kids with no reactions, and then fate rested it's ugly hand again. MMR did my daughter in, and within weeks of her innoculation, diapers full of the strangest conglomeration of sickness for days on end, and words falling by the wayside. They say this is not related. I say to them, do you see the moon in the sky at night? You have never been there, and yet you trust that indeed it is the moon? Men have walked on it, touched it and travelled to it, yet you still have faith that it is the moon. What I am saying is, AUTISM is the consequence of a child who cannot withstand the toxicity, viruses and immune collapses it gives them, especially if they cannot clear them properly, and or deal with it having an immune system unable to take it. It is clear with me, that our children have metal detox problems, hyper IGE, immune complex problems, mitochondrial and metabolic problems, etc etc etc....let us admit, that our children are sitting ducks, and when the needle comes into them, they are goners. I would propose that they are IMMUNOINCOMPETENT, and by that admission, they should provisally hold off on vaccinations, and or split and or not at all. This already, by law, they should do, but do not. This coupled with the admission, that they are vaccinating sick children, without checking their immune status.
Do not shaft these children any longer! We are not in the mood to have our fears downplayed by the most powerful and rich and assumptive corporations in the US. If we were to ASSUME that these things are harming our children, what would be the reversal? Could we both be doing each other a favor by studying it and admitting to these things? How many millions do parents put out in the name of autism? On average of a lifetime of the child, 6 million dollars! Much of this by the government and it's programs. I am proposing something that will change this! Let us test our children, with a mere 500.00 test! FIRST OF ALL, I am forming a task coalition, to TEST OUR CHILDREN of prepensive markers, meaning, we want a NEWBORN SCREEN for all the children in the US (hopefully beyond that) of the markers of SEQUALE (injury) that can happen in a prepensive child. WE propose and will write a standard that they should be tested on several researched paramaters THAT ARE KNOWN, and that by this basis, we shall quelch autism in it's tracks! How can we look away any more? Will it take the presidents daughters to have autism to make this accomplished? Will it be every Senator, every neighbor, every congressman, every school teacher, every blue collar worker, every one, to realize that we have done this great evil? Talk about the axis of evil. The axis is this. Disclose the problems with vaccines, realize that not everyone can take them, treat us not as chattle but as people who have varying immune capitals. Such can be accomplished within a year if we will it to be so. I have 20 researchers on my board, and many advocates in autism who are willing to take this to congressional committees if needs be? All this money spent, for autism, when the damage is done is ridiculous, and time consuming, and I would say, not well thought out. Let us begin with a solution in mind, rather than ok, what do we do now? Can you imagine the COUNTLESS lives, and DOLLARS that would be saved? You would not have to give millions to NIH and CDC, rather, you would now at least pilot study the fact, that our children are coming into the world with prepensity to injury. Let us reason together. Let parents have a voice for once. Let researchers tell you what they are seeing in their immune systems, and when in so doing, stop this madness.
If you are interested in what I speak of, I invite you to be on our
committee for this change!
Kathy Blanco
Chairperson for VOSI standard v50.3 "NEWBORN SCREENS FOR DETECTION OF
NEUROLOGICAL SEQUALE FROM VACCINES"
www.voicesofsafety.com
Oregon Chapter President of Autism Autoimmunity Project
http://www.gti.net/truegrit
503-629-2103
16066 NW Ramona Dr
Beaverton, OR 97006
As Chairman of this group, I guess you can say, I have seen it, lived it, and breathed autism. My research has mainly delved into what I can do as a mother to recover my children, and WHY they became autistic. Some researchers would say, a mean and angry mother is the best defense against this disease. In some fronts, that is correct. But I will go one better...I have a vested interest to find the answers. Our children live in bodies their entire lifetime, that don't work, that work against them, instead of for them. There is a reason for that, and as I found that reason, it became abundantly clear, that to prevent it from ever happening again, I would have to prevent it, if at all possible. For some, going down that rabbit hole meant also delving into literature that some would rather not see or deal with. Literature, sometimes obtained by lawyers, sometimes whistleblowers. I have talked, researched, dived head first into immunology texts, into gastroenterology texts, and other sorts of material to find the answers for my children. I have been involved in well over 20 experiments/research projects to find necessary information for me and my family. I have called the researchers up myself, boldly, to ask them detailed questions, and yes, finally, I have spent my lifesavings on trying to recover them. I never accept no for an answer. Because of that, I have recovered my youngest daughter from autism, one more to go.
What I saw was a paradigm of many things in the autism community. One is, where is the beef? We spend a lot of time, and necessary time looking at things, but obvious to me, was that we were looking at the damage after the storm, instead of using our radar to detect the approaching storm. I remember sitting in a DAN meeting thinking to myself, here we are, all these mothers, and look why we came here? It's because we trusted that a biologic, and or that our children, were up to the challenge of vaccinating and subjecting them to "one more thing". Although vaccines are not the total picture, but most probably the camel that breaks the back scenario, I have come to certain researched conclusions, with the help of my researcher friends. I account them as friends, because they have a heart to listen to my pleas, and deal with a mom who is scratching at their research doors. Who really knows how many bullets our children can have in the Russian roulette game I call, vaccinate at all cost, even the cost of our children's lives. We did not now the parameters, and had we known them or had full informed consent, we would have had every opportunity to refuse a biologic (vaccine) that was harmful for them. In fact, on said vaccine vials, contraindications are laid out, yet never seen by mothers and father's eyes. With this realization, the known neurotoxins in them are enough to make your head spin. But you are probably asking yourself, why one child, and not another? It is simply stated as this, your lucky, I was not.
Every time I hold my son through a seizure (a common affliction of autism), I curse myself (which I try not to do) , then I curse the doctor who never told me what a vaccine could actually do, then I finally come to cursing the very people who made these miracles of our modern age. It has been no miracle for me and for millions. What vaccines can actually do is very telling in the prepensive to injury child. What I am asking, is that we know longer use our children as the front line soldiers, and call to the bar, these pharma companies to make safe vaccines, and if your going to vaccinate, make sure the child is up for it. Since they never do both of those things, I shall call them to the bar of reason, and ask them to follow the code of biologic ethics. I shall prove to them just how immunologically, metabolically weak and compromised they are, or prepensive to allergic or anaphylaxia they are! Based upon those premises, and their own provisos, I shall prove that autism can be squelched by putting out the radar and giving the child a do not pass go sign. The child will have to pass for a time, until their immune systems can handle such an onslaught. We will ask for proper birthing procedures, proper handling of a child with immune problems and detox problems, and we shall find how these little canary birds REALLY are doing in our day. It won't be pretty, and it won't be easy, but I intend to now take the ammunition out of vaccinating everyone. Evidence of the carefree attitude towards our children will turn to them proving that our kids ARE competent, and all I can say is, MAKE OUR DAYS. Not everyone comes into the world with the same immune healing capitals, this is a scientific fact. Let's not be treated as cattle anymore, let us have the science, and the reasons to know whether our child will have a problem with vaccinating. 1-150 children with autism is a PANDEMIC of untold proportions. Let us discontinue our present day practicum, for a new one, in which we will not risk our children, and have them become acceptable losses. There is no such thing as a genetic epidemic.
1. First of all, vaccines are not a one size fits all.
2. Our children have unique immune dysregulation and failures, including mine, the c4b anulle. This gene encodes a protein that handles, get this, VIRUS, TOXINS and FUNGALS which are in vaccines!. My son has zero complement, in other words, the gene is essentially OFF or promoted off. Essentially, a complement system problem in children is a contraindication to vaccinating.
3. My entire family is infected by the STEALTH VIRUS. This virus is an atypically structured virus, from simian monkeys SV-40 found in contaminated polio vaccines in the late 50's early 60's, and some evidences of even later than that. Many children with autism have this virus. This is a heavy duty virus, it has affinity to the central nervous system. It is often shadowed as other ailings in the family, such as depression, ALS, Parkinsons, Schizophrenia even frank cancers. Another reason to take strong family histories.
4. Some children have extreme allergies to adjuvants in vaccines, including the form of aspartame in them, the mercury or thimerosal, the 2-pe and other things such as phenols, not to mention the aluminum.
5. Our environment is lowering our immune response, especially our cell mediated immunity. Our ability to handle the one more thing scenario is becoming increasingly narrowed. Our children are subjected to heavy metals in utero, viruses, organophosphates, aspartames, air pollution, overuse of antibiotics (which are seen in our water), volatile chemicals, TCE, PCB's etc etc. These have consequences to the developing child, and our children seem to be highly toxic. All these things also disrupt the blood brain barrier, in which also vaccine breach, and we wonder why we have autism?
6. We are birthing our kids incorrectly, we are cord clamping too soon, not allowing proper iron stores and immune cells, and even oxygen itself into their brains. Our kids are not handling mercury well, from rhogam in Rh neg moms, to the fish mother ate, to the fillings in her teeth, to the water she drinks. They have a metalloathionene pathway problem, they are accumulating these metals in their tubulin and myelin sheaths.
7. Most of their family members already have an immune system gone haywire. Mothers have Chronic Fatigue, Father has Arthritis or Diabetes, all of these are markers of a prepensive to injury child. Autoimmunity runs in families of autism. Vaccines exacerbate that immune system problem even further, to arms of the immune system called TH2 or 1. Our kids get stuck in one of those arms, and therefore are on self attack mode, even their myelin sheath to their gut lining.
8. There may be a genetic tie here, and we shall address this, but let me say sysinctly, that usually means immunogenetic and or cell signals gone awry. The genetics in my opinion are what can happen if you give it a trigger. Vaccines and the environment are the triggers. It always comes down to this, let us test them if they are already dealing with something they cannot handle
9. Our children are being missed in their PKU tests. Tests are underrated, mostly because insurance organizations don't want to pay for special diets. We have proven a link of this behavior, and so, we are missing children with autism who in fact, have PKU. We intend to go down that rabbit hole, of all the things, this one scares me the most.
10. WE believe as a whole there is some genetic altering taking place, from contaminated cell lines, to foreign antigens, and that we are reaping what we are sowing, as we speak. Not only in vaccines, but in our food supply and our pesticide use as we make adducts on our genes. We can also form adducts from the very things in vaccines. This is scientific fact.
So that is why I am doing what I am doing. I don't think I am any more rehearsed on what autism is than the next mother, just a person who felt compelled to do something about it, to save the next generation from blinded halted reason. Our researchers are the tops in their fields, in immunology, in genetics, in metabolic problems, gastroenterology and so forth. Neuro-developmental researchers are assisting us along the way, to find these markers that they are studying. We will do this all grass roots. WE will have not conflicted interested parties. We want the truth, and we want it now.
We would like to further ideas on sulphar metabolism problem or detox pathway problems, glutathione alleles, metalloathionene pathway problems, neurotoxins that injure our kids, birthing procedures, environmental loads and their meaning of attack on the developing fetus, Immunological weaknesses such as c4b, Dr4, HLA types, Autoimmunity problems, Stealth viruses, family histories of gut disturbances or allergies, Secretory Iga Deficiency, IGA, and other such ideas that signal a child with immune weaknesses or detox pathway problems. Viably, it will have to be cost effective, and with no interpretation, yes or no, what the child has a problem with. We want to also look at various junk genes that scientist have thrown away without interest such as 2q and 22qr11, once again, genes that are very perturbed by environmental problems. I would also be very interested in thrombaphilia factors, sed rate and how the viscosity of blood interferes with immune processes. These and others are things that will take time, but will be clear indications of a problem in the child. Interluekins are also very interesting. I could go on, but this is an illustration of how many things can go off BEFORE and AFTER you vaccinate. We can do better than this, that is all I have to say, much better.
I'd rather not see one more child injured at the hands of this carelessness. My son and daughter have paid a heavy price for my ignorance. But again, can I go there when I was not told? My son especially who cried out to me, mommy, mommy, help me...when he was reacting to a DPT and almost dying in my arms several times in one night. Would that image be erased from your mind if your were his mom? I am helping him, I am making a solution, offering a solution if it were, and handing it to these people on a silver platter. My kids are heroes, and I am their advocate. I hope I don't throw my pearls to swine, but I am prepared that it may be a pig fest. I am not totally naive. These people make billions of dollars of profit off of the diseases they have now created in our children. It's high time they know what they have done and how a MOTHER PhD in autism can solve it.
Kathy
Chair of VOSI and Oregon Chapter pres of Autism Autoimmunity Project
I will share a speech with you that I gave in front of the Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia...needless to say.... I have a lot of enemies now:
My name is Suzanne O'Mullan. I wanted my words for you to be so profound,
but instead I only have questions.
Why is there such a CODE OF SILENCE when a parent speaks of "the autism-vaccine connection" in the medical and pharmaceutical communities?
Only 5 short years ago, Autism was told to be "very rare, 1 in every 10,000". Today, the statistics are now 1 in every 150 with some studies showing 1 in every 63... The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has now admitted that the increase is an epidemic and so far impossible to explain. Why do other authorities continue to deny increases in autism when every school department is going bankrupt trying to educate "our" children? There were 6 new cases of autism a day 7 days a week in 1999 in just one state? The past 90 days, there were 556 new cases of DSM IV autism alone. The statistics read as follows: The past 25 years between 1969-1994 there were approx 5,100 cases of autism. The past 5 years between 1994-1998 there were approx 5,100 new cases of autism. The past 2 1/4 years between January 1999 and March 2001 there are over 5,100 new cases of autism. The cost of autism over a lifetime per child is $2 million. To give you a recent figure for the new 556 children in the last 90 days that totals $1.132 billion.
In line with the increase of autism, the vaccine numbers also rose. Vaccinations given to children from birth to age 2, rose from 8 in 1980, to 21 in 2001 (some as you know containing combined antigens or 3 live viruses). Before 1980: there was mostly infantile autism (symptoms in infancy and often at birth); after 1980: there is now what is called a "New Autism" with symptoms occurring after 18 months. Why does autism now start in the 2nd or 3rd year of life when it was described as Infantile Autism for years by Kanner? Why?
Why isn't anyone told that there is a vaccine compensation fund for those whose children have experienced an adverse vaccine reaction? How many adverse reactions could there be to warrant a fund to pay for damages by our government?
Why are vaccines mandated without proper safety studies? Why are a few weeks of follow-up considered adequate? Why do the vaccine manufacturer's finance safety studies when they are the very companies, which profit from sales? Safety trials not looking beyond 3 weeks post-vaccination doesn't convince me as a parent.
Why do parents have to prove that a vaccine causes a problem when the manufacturer - has no studies to prove that it does not? If all of the testing is supposedly done for exploring every angle of safety and concern, why do vaccine schedules change? Why are things taken out and why are some vaccines reformulated? Why won't the medical community listen to findings such as when Dr. Wakefield found the measles virus in the gut wall of children with autism (which was also independently confirmed by Dr. O'Leary and then again by Kawashima) instead of attacking Dr. Wakefield?
Why is every other drug administered to a person calibrated by weight when vaccines are "One size fits all?" Why do we give a 6 lb at-no-risk newborn half of the same dose of the same Hep B vaccine that we give to a 400lb at risk Sumau wrestler? Why does it take less time to approve a vaccine than a shampoo for lice? It took the FDA 5 months to approve the Recombinant Hep B vaccine and 13 months to approve NIX lice Shampoo.
What Safety and Efficacy studies have been before recommending the administration of vaccines together? Why do we have to give so many vaccines together when we know that they work better singly? If you are going to say that: parents aren't likely to return for a visit if a shot is needed, or if you want to spare the children the pain of repeated injections... just ask a mom of a child with autism who wouldn't have gladly returned to get one vaccine at a time.
When the combination of three vaccines Measles Mumps and Rubella (previously given singly) occurred into one triple vaccine, the MMR, the prevalence of autism also increased. The MMR was introduced in the US in 1972-1973 but its wide use really started in around 1978 and was clearly followed by an increase in autism. A parallel increase was noted in the UK starting in 1988 when the MMR was introduced over there. Was that just some coincidence?
Why does Japan have so little autism now after stopping the MMR. "Of the 3,969 medical compensation claims relating to vaccines in the last 30 years, a quarter had been made by those badly affected by measles, mumps and rubella." Dr. Hiroki Nakatani, director of the Infectious Disease Division at Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare said that giving individual vaccines cost twice as much as MMR, "but we believe it is worth it".
During the Congressional hearings on the autism-vaccine connection in April of 2000, why were there responses such as:Congressman Dan Burton asking the same question to Dr. Wakefield, Prof O'Leary, Dr. Singh,
Dr. Taylor: "Would you be willing to release your methodology and data to an independent panel of researchers?" Dr Andrew Wakefield "Yes of course" Prof. O'Leary "Without hesitation" Dr. Vijendra Singh "Absolutely" Dr. Brent Taylor "Uhhhh, I'd have to check with my superiors." By the way, he is the first author in the history of the Lancet to refuse to let anyone see his raw data.
How confident would parents and pediatricians be if they learned that: -Members, including the Chair of the FDA and CDC advisory committees who make decisions to approve a vaccine own stock in drug companies that make the vaccines; -Individuals on both advisory committees own patents for vaccines under consideration or affected by the decisions of the committee; -Three out of five of the FDA's advisory committee who voted for the rotavirus vaccine had their "conflicts of interest" waived; -Seven of the 15 member FDA advisory committee were not present at the meeting, two others were excluded from the vote, and the remaining five were joined by five temporary voting members who all voted to license the product; -CDC grants "conflict of interest" waivers to every member of their advisory committee a year at a time, and allows full participation in the discussions leading up to a vote by every member, whether they have financial state in the decision or not; -CDC's advisory committee has no public members-no parents have a vote in whether or not a vaccine belongs on the childhood immunization schedule. The FDA's committee has only one public member.
Why don't you have independent researchers on your approval and development panel concerning vaccines? Why not invite Dr. Singh, Dr. Wakefield, Dr. O'Leary?
Where was the information on the vaccine information sheet that lists the levels of Mercury (the 2nd most deadly substance on this earth) that my child is being exposed to, among other questionable ingredients? There are ingredients on every bit of food that goes into our bodies, why not on the vaccine information sheet? If I had known that my child was being exposed to a level of Mercury that exceeded the EPA guidelines, I would have questioned the vaccine. Some infants have received in one day as much as 100 times the amount of mercury the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says is the maximum allowable daily exposure for an adult. Mercury damages the immune system so the child becomes unable to protect itself against the damage from the viruses in the vaccines.
HEPB: Where was it listed on the vaccine information sheet that my child would only be exposed to Hepatitis sexually or by IV drug use (dirty needles)? And if my child wasn't exposed, the vaccination would be unnecessary at just 4 hours of life? So that I might have had the chance to say, "no, I don't think this is necessary at this time". How can you justify the mandatory Hep. B vaccine to infants and children when there has been no risk/benefit analysis? Why isn't the Hep. B vaccine mandatory for teachers, other school workers, day care staff employees when it is mandatory for school kids? If HepB Vaccine is safe then why has it been investigated by the US House? (Rep Mica; May'99)? Why is HepB vaccine given to an infant or child when we know that it is ineffective after 10-11 years and the average age of diagnosis of hepatitis B is 30-35 years? Why was the HepB vaccine tested on only 37 Merck employees before recommending it for all no risk children? How come the vaccines in later studies were only observed for 5 days? Are their any peer reviewed studies on the safety of the Recombinant HepB vaccine?
POLIO: Why is the reason that polio vaccines manufactured between 1955-1964 may be linked with certain kinds of cancer? What is SV40 and does it belong in vaccines?
PREVNAR: The only testing for Prevnar is by an HMO group financed by the manufacturer who compared the Prevnar group to another group receiving another vaccine (which is very unusual)? The Prevnar group had four times more seizures, four times more gastritis than the control group, significantly more developed asthma, and one death. The big push for Prevnar came from its supposed prevention of otitis media, even though it had not been approved for this use. Otitis media is viral in 60% of the cases and bacterial in less than 40% In only 20-25% it is due to pneumococcus (there are 90+ serotypes of pneumococcus and Prevnar has only 7; even in theory, it would not affect more than 2-3% of cases); In two days, 90% of the otitis cases resolve by itself without treatment.
MMR: Why did my child have another MMR vaccination 18 months after the first MMR? Why aren't a titres offered first? Why would a simple titre not be performed to check the status of my child's immunity? Titre testing only costs about $3.00. Testing titre levels after a first vaccination may show an additional vaccine is NOT needed - so why give a repeat triple vaccine when 95% of the recipients are already immune?
If there is scientific evidence showing that:
1. Measles virus can cause brain inflammation, encephalitis.
2. The vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) is known to have caused
encephalitis. And Then, couldn't it be quite true that
3. Infantile autism might be the chronic continuation of the acute inflammation and damage of the brain?
Is it true that a Japanese author reported culturing rotavirus in children with intussusception in 1978? Why was the first rotavirus vaccine released when it was known that there were several cases of intussusception during the clinical trials? Why did you abstain from voting on its withdrawal?
Where are the statistics of exactly how many children in the last decade have died from Measles Mumps or Rubella or anything else we are so aggressively vaccinating against? If I had the chance of knowing that this answer would be less than 1:1000, I would have taken the chance of my child being that 1:1000 risk rather than developing Autism (a disease worse than death) which is now 1 in every 150.
By the time children are ready for school we have given them nearly 22 vaccinations with multiple viruses. As the number of vaccinations grows, so do the profits for the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture them. A new vaccine that is added to the universal use list has an assured stable market of 3 ½ to 4 million babies born in this country every year. The manufacturer (as of 1986) has virtually no liability for adverse events that may occur, as do the doctors who administer them. No liability. A stockholders dream. Prevnar is approx $60 per injection. What is the motivation to test safety issues short and long term if you are immune from being held accountable?
If you are sure that your product is safe, that all short and long term testing was done, administration guidelines are appropriate, ingredients aren't harmful, multiple vaccines at once don't knock out a child's immune system for some of them to develop autism, if all the research that needs to be done has been done, and if the government decided to take away the shield that protects you from lawsuits, would you still state that "There is no scientific evidence today that links vaccinations to autism?" THERE IS NO LONG-TERM SAFETY RESEARCH PROVING THAT MMR DOES NOT CAUSE AUTISM, IS THERE? And please do not mention the Finnish studies, which were terminated in 1996 before Wakefield even published his paper on MMR and Autism in 1998.
Whose job is it to protect our Nations children? Why doesn't anyone listen to parents and just consider the possibility that vaccines may cause autism? Why do we give "mad cow disease " our immediate attention when 67,000 new cases of autism (in 1999 alone) aren't comprehensive enough to merit an independent investigation? Is it because you are afraid of what you may find? Is it because vaccines represent a $2 billion industry annually? Is it because vaccines are big business?
I have learned that being left out and ignored your whole life is worse than dead. I have learned that being sick and in pain your whole life while doctors dismiss you is worse than dead.I have learned that a lifetime disability is harder than dying. As bad as death is, and it is often hideous, it is temporary and then there is peace. I do not know how long my autistic child will suffer. No one knows.
Lorenzo's Trial
A 10-year study has finally proved - after all the doubts and ridicule -that Augusto and Michaela Odone's home-made treatment for their son Lorenzo's genetic disorder really does work.
[Lucy Atkins reports in The Guardian.]
http://www.guardian.co.uk>
Lorenzo Odone was only five years old when his parents noticed that he kept bumping into the furniture. A horrifying diagnosis followed: Lorenzo had a rare, incurable genetic disorder that affects only boys, known as adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). He would lose all his bodily functions and die within two to three years. If you've seen the 1992 Hollywood film Lorenzo's Oil, you'll know what happened next. The Odones, neither of whom had medical training, were not going to sit around and watch their son deteriorate. "We were not prepared to believe that there wasn't a cure," says Augusto Odone. So they set out to find one, ignoring doctors who said the literature would be too "complex" for them to understand. The result was, says Odone "a case of man bites dog": after two years immersed in medical texts and journals, badgering specialists across the globe and wrestling with neurogenetic theories, they discovered a blend of plant oils that they believed would delay their son's disease. On May 29 this year, Lorenzo, now severely disabled, turned 24. To say there has been scepticism among doctors, scientists and support groups about the efficacy of "Lorenzo's Oil" would be an understatement.
They scoffed at the idea that an oil invented by novices could halt the disease. They put the boy's survival down to a combination of superlative care and luck. Parents of ALD boys who found that the oil did not save their sons accused the family of offering false hope. But now the Odones, who have been called anything from quacks to prophets, finally seem to have been vindicated. A clinical trial of the oil led by a world authority on ALD has just been published. It shows that Lorenzo's oil works. Dr Hugo Moser, a leading expert in ALD and director of neurogenetics at Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute conducted the 10-year-long trial, set partly in the US and partly in Europe. It followed 104 boys with the ALD gene, all less than six years old and symptom-free when the trial began. The results were dramatic: the boys who were not scrupulously given the oil were nearly three times as likely to develop symptoms as boys who were given the oil without fail. As Moser puts it, Lorenzo's oil may not be "an absolute preventive" but it certainly "reduces the chances of developing the symptoms".
The oil is a combination of two fats extracted from olive oil and rapeseed oil. It works, it is thought, because of the way it affects the "very long chain fatty acids" in the boys' bodies. In boys with ALD, the enzyme that breaks down these fatty acids is impaired. They can't properly metabolise these acids, which then build up and begin to damage the central nervous system. Specifically, they destroy myelin - the white matter that insulates the nerves and allows impulses to be conducted from one part of the body to another. This is why some of the early signs of ALD include memory loss, emotional instability, difficulty with vision, hearing and motor function.
This devastating process of gradual brain damage is known by specialists as demyelination. Usually, boys who have the childhood form of ALD will be bedridden, blind and unable to swallow by the age of 10. They will die soon after. Sadly, Michaela Odone is not here to see these results. Having given up work, social life, entertaining and all other interests to care for her son, she died of cancer in June 2000. Augusto Odone, though, sounds matter-of-fact about their public vindication. "For me, this isn't ground-breaking," he says. "I already knew it worked." He describes how, at the end of the film about his family, there is a shot of some young boys "jumping up and down". These are all boys with the ALD gene "I knew those children," Odone tells me, "I put them on Lorenzo's oil. I have followed those children as they are growing up. None that I know of have got the disease".
That the oil came too late to stop his son from developing the symptoms must be hard to bear. Lorenzo lost most of his bodily functions and has been bedridden for 18 years. His mind, however, is "still there" - his father says he communicates by blinking and raising his fingers; he loves music, and being read to. "If I'd invented Lorenzo's oil two years before, it would have been different. Most probably he would not have got the disease," says Odone. "Still, it will save the lives of many children who are destined to have the childhood form of ALD". Until now, the main treatment for childhood ALD has been a bone marrow transplant. Many specialists believe this still offers the best hope of survival. Some are saying that the trial only proves that Lorenzo's oil delays the symptoms and none are saying that Lorenzo's oil should now be used to the exclusion of all other treatments. Moser's trial was, after all, relatively small, and for obvious ethical reasons there could be no placebo group. None the less, says Dr Ian Duncan, professor of neurology at the University of Wisconsin, the consensus among specialists is that "this is an extremely important finding". Most, he says, now "acknowledge that this therapy can work". Moser, who was a doubter in the beginning is now recommending that every presymptomatic boy with ALD is given it. It's not yet clear what will happen to the boys who have taken the oil and reached the age of 10 (by which time the disease has normally shown itself) without symptoms. ALD comes in two main forms - Lorenzo's kind and an adult type, which shows up in the late teens or early 20s and acts more slowly ("you can," says Duncan, "live for long periods" with the adult form). The boys studied are still teenagers, so nobody knows yet whether they will develop the adult type. Indeed, says Duncan, we don't even know whether these boys will be at a higher risk of developing the adult form of the disease.
Sadly, for the boys who did develop symptoms, there is still no cure (though Odone certainly believes the oil has played a part in his son's survival this far). In a message to parents of boys with ALD, Odone told the New Scientist: "Give the oil as soon as you know your son carries the genetic defect. If you wait, the symptoms might come and then you are in a different ballpark." Duncan, who specialises in "re-myelination" in childhood disorders, confirms this: "The oil does not promote myelin regeneration."
This, for Odone, is the next challenge. 'What I want to do," he tells me, "is to restore functions in Lorenzo." He now runs an organisation called the Myelin Project which funds research that will "increase the odds that a way will be found to bring back myelin". If this were to happen, the implications would go far beyond ALD boys. Several other diseases destroy myelin - multiple sclerosis (MS) is perhaps the best known. About 85,000 people in the UK suffer from MS, and the Myelin Project estimates that "demyelinating" diseases affect about a million people in industrialised countries alone. The Myelin Project is currently financing Yale University doctors to do pioneering surgery that will see whether it is possible to rebuild myelin.
Three MS patients so far have had myelin producing cells taken from their ankles and transplanted into the right frontal lobe of the brain. This, Duncan explains, will eventually show whether you can "promote the brain to repair itself". It is too early to tell whether these cell transplants will work - whether they will multiply so that the patient begins to regain lost bodily functions. But for many people who hope desperately for a cure for diseases like ALD and MS, the very fact that such experiments are under way is positive. "The drive and determination behind the Myelin Project is our best and brightest hope for the future," says Diana McGovern, who has multiple sclerosis, and is honorary secretary of the British Trust for the Myelin Project. Odone is certainly a tireless ally to have. His favourite aphorisms are "Fortune favours the brave" and "You never know until you try." He will, he says, repeat these to the doctors he works with until the Myelin Project
has put itself out of business.
The Myelin Project is at www.myelin.org <http://www.myelin.org> To
contact the British Trust for the Myelin Project, call 0131 339 8424.
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A fabulous letter from Deborah Delp, moderator of
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/autism_and_vaccinations:
Mr. Crawford,
My name is Deborah Delp, I am the mother of a 5 year old boy who suffers from Autism Spectrum Disorder, better known in the autism community as ASD. I tell you this because I suspect you will become VERY familiar with the autism community. The reason? There was a report that I have sent to my group on yahoo and several others that I am a member of.
You see Mr. Crawford we as parents/victims know when someone in the government has "set their cap" to damaging us/our children even farther. Here we have a company Kirkman Labs that has done nothing for over 30 years but try to help the autistic by researching, developing and manufacturing vitamin supplements for those whose immune systems have been damaged by the effects of environmental assaults and vaccinations.
After my son's last (very last btw) round of vaccinations at 15 months of age (December 1998) he began to regress developmentally. Losing speech, eye contact, imaginary play skills and social skills. It was August of 2000 when he was diagnosed with autism. In January of 2001 we began to suspect and investigate vaccines as a possible cause.
As it turns out we learned that not only was there no non-biased independent testing done on vaccines waiting for approval but the testing that was conducted by the pharmaceutical companies was what the FDA based their approvals on! The first thing that came to my mind after discovering this little tidbit of information was CONFLICT OF INTEREST! That phrase has been firmly seated in my mind ever since.
Now if that's not bad enough your department in the FDA, headed by you is on a witch hunt against a company that has done nothing but try to help those suffering from an epidemic rise in a disorder that is third only to spinal bifida and mental retardation in childhood developmental disorders. Third and climbing fast.
Now onto the specific topic at hand here. The use of Taurine capsules and your role in all this. According to the article that was released yesterday the 17th of October, the headline reads: "FDA's Senior Veternarian Lester Crawford Sics US Marshalls on popular supplier" Maybe you can explain what exactly your title and role actually is.
Also I don't understand why the comment: ""Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, a physician in Palm Bay, Florida who treats autistic patients reports good success in treating autism with Taurine." has your shorts in a knot. If the comments are true, (and I have no doubt that they are) and can be verified (obviously they can be as Kirkmans would not print anything that can't be verified) then I don't see a reason why the FDA is taking valuable man hours that would be better spent investigating the rise in autism and making a target of a company that has done nothing but try to aid those suffering from this developmental disorder.
I find it very insulting to my intelligence that you; as a representative of the FDA feel you have a need to be telling me; as the parent of an ASD child what is best for MY child. I have researched long and hard BEFORE (something the FDA still doesn't do an example being the vaccines) deciding to put my son on the supplements that he was using. I introduced each supplement separately for a week at a time to gauge any reactions to them and found that he had none to any of the products that Kirkman produces.
I personally find Kirkman products to be the best available due mostly to the fact that they are preservative free with no sugars, fillers, gluten or casein added. The capsules are made of plant cellulose instead of the typical animal byproducts.
My son no longer uses most of the supplements he was on. He has decided (about 6 weeks ago) that his body doesn't need them anymore (btw he is a non-verbal high functioning autistic so I guess you're insulting his intelligence as well). I must admit that I had a few sleepless nights over this but I will say that he has shown no signs of regressing to his former state of no eye contact, no pupil reactions to light (a sign btw of mercury poisoning), no social interactions and no imaginary play. He is doing so well now and I contribute a great deal of the credit to the Kirkman company and their ever diligent quality control specifications.
In closing I would like to say; spend more time investigating the pharmaceutical companies and their quality control standards and maybe there will be less of a need for vitamin supplements for our kids. Anyone who doesn't think the vaccines have something to do with this epidemic rise in autism over the past 10 to 20 years is either a fool or is a contributor to the cover-up.
Good Day,
Deborah Delp
Mother of Samantha (NT) & JR (ASD)
What we do with our lives depends on our
motivation to do something with our lives.
D.A.Delp
"Lethal injections are for criminals. We need to keep it that way."
Homepage:
http://the_delps.tripod.com/
Yahoo Group Moderator of:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/autism_and_vaccinations
Dear WebMD:
I am writing regarding Richard Bruno's article, Taking a Shot at Vaccines. He describes, "...anti-vaccination Internet sites rely more on emotional appeals than solid scientific evidence...." It is true that anti-vaccine arguments are not based on solid scientific evidence. But neither are pro-vaccine arguments. The fact is, there has never been ANY solid scientific evidence about anything vaccines do, whether it be preventing diseases or causing side effects. Naturally, medical professionals claim that evidence on their side is solid and scientific, while they slur any evidence on the other side as junk science. Show me an independent study on vaccines with rigorous scientific methodology with NO ties to financial gain from either the government or vaccine manufacturers, and I'll show you the an honest report about cigarette smoke conducted by the tobacco industry.
NOBODY has any solid scientific evidence to rely on, so we parents have to do the best we can with the anecdotal and junk science evidence that IS available. If some parents want to lend more weight to one side of the junk science than the other, that is their prerogative and their choice. No parent need to be condemned for concluding that the dangers of vaccines outweigh any benefit instead of agreeing with vaccine profiteers that the "benefits of vaccines outweigh any danger." There is no need to take cheap shots at parents who DARE to judge the evidence for themselves.
Sincerely,
Helen Tucker
Morgantown, WV
May 28, 2003
Autism: Has this mother found the key?
By Chris Ayres
In a lawsuit with worldwide implications, a British woman in Los Angeles is fighting drugs companies to prove her claim that a mecury-based preservative in vaccines caused her children's autism CLAIRE BOTHWELL wears a big badge on her jacket with “The rate of autism” written on it in bold type. Underneath, in smaller letters, it says, “Twenty years ago: 1 in 10,000; five years ago: 1 in 500; today: 1 in 250. At the bottom are another two words, again in bold type: “Scared Yet?”
Above it, Bothwell wears another badge. It looks like a No Smoking sign, but with the lit cigarette replaced by a single, unusual word: Thimerosal. “It’s pronounced thigh-mare-o-sal,” says Bothwell, tapping the badge with her finger.
We are sitting in Bothwell’s half-decorated kitchen, the protective plastic wrapping barely off the state-of-the-art stainless steel appliances. Her nearly-posh English accent (she’s from Coventry, the daughter of a special forces captain-turned-software entrepreneur) seems rather out of place here in Long Beach, a lush, affluent Los Angeles suburb where huge mock-Tudor homes overlook a pristine golf course.
Bothwell’s effortless pronunciation of Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in children’s vaccines, is the result of more than two years of study. During this time, Bothwell — the mother of three children, two of them autistic — has become an English Erin Brockovich, claiming a link between Thimerosal and her children’s disabilities and inspiring a legal crusade that has made national headlines in the US.
Indeed, the anti-Thimerosal chorus has reached such a crescendo that some predict it will become a key issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. It is already a subject of intense debate in California, where a study was released earlier this month showing that the number of autistic children in the state had doubled to more than 20,000 in four years. Ron Huff, the Californian psychologist who conducted the study, says: “I remember in the mid-1980s, when a child came in with autism, it was an event. You would get one or two in a year. I soon ended up getting one or two a month.
“I believed that every quarter the numbers would go down, but they just simply did not drop off. We’re now counting 800 new individuals with autism in California each quarter. And these are just the ‘classic’ cases; it doesn’t include the ones with difficult types of autism.”
Huff’s findings are not unique to California. All over America and in other countries, including Britain, the same autism epidemic is causing panic among parents. If Bothwell and her fellow campaigners can prove a link between Thimerosal and autism, Eli Lilly, the American pharmaceutical company that developed Thimerosal — along with several other drugs companies that manufactured the ingredient until the late 1990s — will be forced to pay billions in compensation.
Bothwell says this is not just opportunistic litigation by trial lawyers with big mortgages desperate to find the next Big Tobacco, and says she doesn’t want to put drug companies out of business: “They make things that help people.” But she accuses them of suspecting since the 1930s that the mercury in Thimerosal could poison children, bringing on autism in those with existing genetic weaknesses. The introduction of several new Thimerosal-containing vaccines in the 1980s, effectively doubling most children’s exposure to mercury, is the most likely reason why levels of autism began to spike at about the same time, Bothwell argues. Several thousand other plaintiffs across America agree with her.
Eli Lilly, unsurprisingly, does not share the view that they have been negligent, saying that the allegations are not based on scientific proof and that, besides, it has not made Thimerosal since 1974. Edward Sagebiel, a spokesman for the company, points out that the US Government took Thimerosal off the market in the late 1990s. “If the theory holds, wouldn’t you begin to see, from 2000, a decrease in the levels of autism?” he asks. The answer, according to Huff at least, is no: American doctors are still working their way through old stockpiles of Thimerosal vaccines. Also, it can take up to four years to come up with an autism diagnosis. However, Huff agrees that, ultimately, time will tell. “Because I’m a scientist, I don’t speculate until I’ve seen hard data,” he says. “There’s enough attention being given to Thimerosal that I think we’ll get a definite answer within five years.”
Bizarrely, Thimerosal remains virtually unknown among the general public in Britain, even though it is still used in DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) jabs. British attention is still more focused on the infamous MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination, which has never contained Thimerosal. BY RIGHTS, Claire Bothwell should be living the American dream, not fighting multinational pharmaceutical companies. She left England when she was 19, after marrying staff sergeant Ronald Miller of the US Air Force, who had been stationed at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.
The young couple moved to the former Wild West railroad town of Alamogordo, New Mexico, and made a down payment on a small two-bedroom family home. Bothwell says she remembers feeling giddy with excitement as she drove to the mall in her wood-panelled Ford Pinto station wagon and brought home groceries in stiff brown paper bags. Then one day in the spring of 1985 her husband went fishing near a New Mexico town called Truth or Consequences. He never came back.
Ron’s boat, it emerged, had capsized in choppy waters. A fisherman discovered his remains a month later. At the age of just 22, Bothwell was a widow. With encouragement from her father and friends, she decided to move to San Diego, California. She didn’t like it, so kept on driving in her Ryder van up Interstate 405 until she reached the southern suburbs of Los Angeles. Her journey came to an unscheduled end when she stopped at a petrol station in Long Beach. It was home.
She found a job as a legal secretary working for a lawyer called Bruce Bothwell, ten years her senior. Within two weeks they had begun a relationship and by 1990 — Bothwell was now 27 — they had married. Two years after that, Bothwell’s first child, William Fisk Douglas Bothwell II, was born. Tragedy, it seemed, was behind her. Like all American children, Fisk was given a cocktail of 24 vaccines in the first two years of his life. Many of them, including his four DTP shots, three hepatitis B shots and four Hib shots (haemophilus influenzae type-B), contained Thimerosal. Like most parents at the time, however, Bothwell had no idea what Thimerosal was — or that she could use a relatively inexpensive skin patch to test her son’s sensitivity to mercury.
By the time Bothwell was pregnant with her second child, Katrina, it was clear that there was something wrong with Fisk. He was obsessed with letters and numbers; he couldn’t look people in the eye; he threw violent tantrums; and he was terrified of the vacuum cleaner. As time went on, Fisk grew worse, to the point where Bothwell became reluctant to take him out in public or share her concerns with other mothers. He had no spontaneous conversation; his co-ordination was terrible; and he became engrossed in bizarre mantras and rituals.
Her husband refused to accept that there was anything wrong. “I was in denial, ” Bruce, now 49 and a typical father figure in his brown cords and lumberjack shirt, admits. “Part of me still is.” Bruce’s mother was even less understanding and still, to this day, struggles to accept any talk of the A-word. This lack of understanding by grandparents is, according to doctors, normal. They are, after all, part of the generation who believed Bruno Bettelheim, the now-discredited Austrian psychologist who blamed autism on a lack of love and support at home: parental refrigeration, he called it.
Eventually, in 1994, the Bothwells decided to consult a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) about Fisk. Then came the news they had been dreading: Fisk, then nearly three, was autistic.
Tragically, the Bothwells’ luck didn’t get much better. Katrina, although less troubled than Fisk, was also a problem child. At two years old, she too was found to be autistic. At about the same time, Bothwell had her third and final child, Jillian. She turned out to be a normal, healthy little girl. By the end of the decade, Bothwell became aware of the international controversy over MMR and the claims that it could cause autism. As a precaution, she refused to give Katrina her booster MMR jab. Jillian, meanwhile, was given no MMR at all. Bothwell also held back giving other vaccines to Jillian, who, to this day, has shown no signs of her siblings’ autism.
Then, out of the blue, Bothwell’s old boss called and said he had something she needed to see. Andy Waters had left Los Angeles to set up his own law firm, Waters & Kraus, in Dallas. But he had kept in touch over the years and knew that Frisk and Katrina had autism. The document Waters wanted to show Bothwell was a report called Autism: A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning. It claimed that children were being exposed to unsafe levels of mercury because of an ingredient called Thimerosal used in vaccines. “She was the first person I thought of when I saw it,” Waters says. He went on to ask Bothwell to help him open a new Los Angeles office. She agreed, but on the condition that Waters take on the Thimerosal case. Within a few months he had filed the first Thimerosal lawsuit in civil court.
Another 300 or so claims followed, with Bothwell appearing as a plaintiff in one of them. More than 2,000 other claims also soon made their way to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme. For Eli Lilly and the other drug manufacturers, Thimerosal was turning into a public relations nightmare and a multibillion-dollar legal headache. The company argued that it was the victim of a legal loophole: American law protects vaccine manufacturers from being sued. It does not, however, provide similar protection for the makers of vaccine ingredients.
“That programme was developed because the US was losing vaccine manufacturers at an alarming rate, in great part due to liability issues,” says Sagebiel, the Eli Lilly spokesman, adding that the likes of Waters are “abusing a loophole ” with their lawsuits.
The issue became highly politicized last year when a clause was inserted into the Homeland Security Bill giving drug companies immunity from legal action over Thimerosal. But the clause was repealed amid accusations of cronyism, with Congress agreeing to come up with a compromise by this summer. Eli Lilly has already offered to increase the statute of limitation on Thimerosal cases from three to six years, but only if the cases are heard through the vaccine injury programme, not in civil court.
Waters, however, says he is convinced that nothing much will happen until next year when the vaccine injury programme holds a hearing on the “probable causation” of autism. “There will be an election three or four months away, and this will be a significant issue,” he says. And if a link between Thimerosal and autism is found? “People will freak out. They’ll be asking what all this means and how many kids have been involved. There will be such a groundswell of public opinion on the issue, because it will become apparent that we have poisoned a generation or two of our children. At this point the Republicans will probably jump on the bandwagon and say, ’yeah, we need compensation’.” His guess is that if the link is proven, each family could be awarded a few hundred thousand dollars to ease their suffering.
Back in Long Beach, Bruce Bothwell says he was left speechless when he heard about the Homeland Security Bill. “I have never been so angry with my government,” he says. “The fact that it could disenfranchise, in such a fashion, disabled children . . .” He trails off.
Both the Bothwells agree that, despite their campaigning, they hope the vaccine injury committee finds no evidence linking Thimerosal to autism: otherwise, Fisk and Katrina’s conditions were avoidable. At this point, Fisk, looking like any American 11-year-old in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap, blusters into the room.
His behaviour, Bothwell explains, has been much improved by applied behaviour analysis, an intensive (and hugely expensive) therapy programme overseen by UCLA. Still, Fisk makes eye contact as though he is trying to force together the polar opposites of a magnet. He is able to explain, however, that he likes to be called Will, not Fisk, because it’s easier to say. “Will’s okay, but not Willy, that’s not okay with Mom,” he says in a short staccato burst.
“We’ve been so lucky that he’s responded as well as he has,” says Bothwell, after Fisk has left the room to play on his GameBoy. “But is it enough?” As well as the UCLA therapy, Fisk is on a course of chelating agents and supplements to try to reduce the toxic heavy metals, including mercury, that have been found inside him. Dramatic results are not expected, however, given Fisk’s age. “I don’t know if he’ll be able to turn up to a job every day, balance a chequebook, pay his rent and get married,” confides Bothwell.
“As a parent, you want to tell your children, ‘you can do anything, you can be anything’. But with Will, we can’t do that. He can’t see someone else’s point of view. He doesn’t get sarcasm. He’s still bullied a lot, and those bullies end up moving into the workplace. But I think we’ve done all we can do.”
Congratulations to the two moms who got this published. NVIC has posted a formal mercury petition that was sent to Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson and to the FDA. http://www.909shot.com
1: Neurotoxicology 2001 Oct;22(5):691-7 Books, LinkOut
Predicted mercury concentrations in hair from infant immunizations: cause for concern.
Redwood L, Bernard S, Brown D.
Coalition for Safe Minds, Cranford, NJ 07016, USA. tlredwood@mindspring.com
Mercury (Hg) is considered one of the worlds most toxic metals. Current thinking suggests that exposure to mercury occurs primarily from seafood contamination and rare catastrophic events. Recently, another common source of exposure has been identified. Thimerosal (TMS), a preservative found in many infant vaccines, contains 49.6% ethyl mercury (EtHg) by weight and typically contributes 25 microg of EtHg per dose of infant vaccine. As part of an ongoing review, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced in 1999 that infants who received multiple TMS-preserved vaccines may have been exposed to cumulative Hg in excess of Federal safety guidelines. According to the centers for disease control (CDC) recommended immunization schedule, infants may have been exposed to 12.5 microg Hg at birth, 62.5 microg EtHg at 2 months, 50 microg EtHg at 4 months, 62.5 microg EtHg at 6 months, and 50 microg EtHg at approximately 18 months, for a total of 237.5 microg EtHg during the first 18 months of life, if all TMS-containing vaccines were administered. Neurobehavioral alterations, especially to the more susceptible fetus and infant, are known to occur after relatively low dose exposures to organic mercury compounds. In effort, to further elucidate the levels of ethyl mercury resulting from exposure to vaccinal TMS, we estimated hair Hg concentrations expected to result from the recommended CDC schedule utilizing a one compartment pharmacokinetic model. This model was developed to predict hair concentrations from acute exposure to methymercury (MeHg) in fish. Modeled hair Hg concentrations in infants exposed to vaccinal TMS are in excess of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) safety guidelines of 1 ppm for up to 365 days, with several peak concentrations within this period. More sensitive individuals and those with additional sources of exposure would have higher Hg concentrations. Given that exposure to low levels of mercury during critical stages of development has been associated with neurological disorders in children, including ADD, learning difficulties, and speech delays, the predicted hair Hg concentration resulting from childhood immunizations is cause for concern. Based on these findings, the impact which vaccinal mercury has had on the health of American children warrants further investigation.
Dear Mr. Speaker
2369 Rayburn HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Washington, D.C. Office: (202) 225-0697
Since 1988, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) has been a resource for bereaved parents that suddenly were launched into the worse nightmare of their lives, that a vaccine can harm them, mostly their beloved children. I have two autistic children, proven to have vaccinosis injury. I trusted my pediatrician to disclose to me the harms in front of me, while balancing the argument of protection upon them. I was a good mother, in my estimation, to proceed with the surgery (and I say it is a surgery). Little did I know what fate would be in front of me. And I will say upfront, there is no such thing as acceptable losses in our children when it comes to disease prevention!
However, the program you have set up, is not only alarmingly underreported, it is also a farce. Although, I know it was the only avenue, and blessed avenue for many parents, I contend that there is more harm being done to our children than the government or the pharma companies even want to admit. The statutes and limitations of injury are beyond ridiculous, they are incredulous. Who set forth these injury tables? I would like to in fact ask for a full disclosure of this? I can pretty much tell you, they are the pharmaceutical corporations, who by admission, have never tested long term safety studies on these vaccines in our children, nor have they studied them in non vaccinated and vaccinated populations. This is missing a very key fact. The fact is, our children are suffering at the hands of these people, and they don't care if you have a slow response to these vaccines or not. My child, 11 days after a DPT had high pitch screaming, acting blind, fever and convulsions, shaking, unconsollableness, and was "out of it" for a week. Two weeks after this numbing blow, my child stopped talking. As I still trusted my pediatrician, and should have ran away, he said, well, it must be the Pertussis portion of the shot, therefore we should not vaccinate with P in DPT anymore. This sounded at the time, reasonable to me. Then I had two kids with no reactions, and then fate rested it's ugly hand again. MMR did my daughter in, and within weeks of her innoculation, diapers full of the strangest conglomeration of sickness for days on end, and words falling by the wayside. They say this is not related. I say to them, do you see the moon in the sky at night? You have never been there, and yet you trust that indeed it is the moon? Men have walked on it, touched it and travelled to it, yet you still have faith that it is the moon. What I am saying is, AUTISM is the consequence of a child who cannot withstand the toxicity, viruses and immune collapses it gives them, especially if they cannot clear them properly, and or deal with it having an immune system unable to take it. It is clear with me, that our children have metal detox problems, hyper IGE, immune complex problems, mitochondrial and metabolic problems, etc etc etc....let us admit, that our children are sitting ducks, and when the needle comes into them, they are goners. I would propose that they are IMMUNOINCOMPETENT, and by that admission, they should provisally hold off on vaccinations, and or split and or not at all. This already, by law, they should do, but do not. This coupled with the admission, that they are vaccinating sick children, without checking their immune status.
Do not shaft these children any longer! We are not in the mood to have our fears downplayed by the most powerful and rich and assumptive corporations in the US. If we were to ASSUME that these things are harming our children, what would be the reversal? Could we both be doing each other a favor by studying it and admitting to these things? How many millions do parents put out in the name of autism? On average of a lifetime of the child, 6 million dollars! Much of this by the government and it's programs. I am proposing something that will change this! Let us test our children, with a mere 500.00 test! FIRST OF ALL, I am forming a task coalition, to TEST OUR CHILDREN of prepensive markers, meaning, we want a NEWBORN SCREEN for all the children in the US (hopefully beyond that) of the markers of SEQUALE (injury) that can happen in a prepensive child. WE propose and will write a standard that they should be tested on several researched paramaters THAT ARE KNOWN, and that by this basis, we shall quelch autism in it's tracks! How can we look away any more? Will it take the presidents daughters to have autism to make this accomplished? Will it be every Senator, every neighbor, every congressman, every school teacher, every blue collar worker, every one, to realize that we have done this great evil? Talk about the axis of evil. The axis is this. Disclose the problems with vaccines, realize that not everyone can take them, treat us not as chattle but as people who have varying immune capitals. Such can be accomplished within a year if we will it to be so. I have 20 researchers on my board, and many advocates in autism who are willing to take this to congressional committees if needs be? All this money spent, for autism, when the damage is done is ridiculous, and time consuming, and I would say, not well thought out. Let us begin with a solution in mind, rather than ok, what do we do now? Can you imagine the COUNTLESS lives, and DOLLARS that would be saved? You would not have to give millions to NIH and CDC, rather, you would now at least pilot study the fact, that our children are coming into the world with prepensity to injury. Let us reason together. Let parents have a voice for once. Let researchers tell you what they are seeing in their immune systems, and when in so doing, stop this madness.
If you are interested in what I speak of, I invite you to be on our
committee for this change!
Kathy Blanco
Chairperson for VOSI standard v50.3 "NEWBORN SCREENS FOR DETECTION OF
NEUROLOGICAL SEQUALE FROM VACCINES"
www.voicesofsafety.com
Oregon Chapter President of Autism Autoimmunity Project
http://www.gti.net/truegrit
503-629-2103
16066 NW Ramona Dr
Beaverton, OR 97006
As Chairman of this group, I guess you can say, I have seen it, lived it, and breathed autism. My research has mainly delved into what I can do as a mother to recover my children, and WHY they became autistic. Some researchers would say, a mean and angry mother is the best defense against this disease. In some fronts, that is correct. But I will go one better...I have a vested interest to find the answers. Our children live in bodies their entire lifetime, that don't work, that work against them, instead of for them. There is a reason for that, and as I found that reason, it became abundantly clear, that to prevent it from ever happening again, I would have to prevent it, if at all possible. For some, going down that rabbit hole meant also delving into literature that some would rather not see or deal with. Literature, sometimes obtained by lawyers, sometimes whistleblowers. I have talked, researched, dived head first into immunology texts, into gastroenterology texts, and other sorts of material to find the answers for my children. I have been involved in well over 20 experiments/research projects to find necessary information for me and my family. I have called the researchers up myself, boldly, to ask them detailed questions, and yes, finally, I have spent my lifesavings on trying to recover them. I never accept no for an answer. Because of that, I have recovered my youngest daughter from autism, one more to go.
What I saw was a paradigm of many things in the autism community. One is, where is the beef? We spend a lot of time, and necessary time looking at things, but obvious to me, was that we were looking at the damage after the storm, instead of using our radar to detect the approaching storm. I remember sitting in a DAN meeting thinking to myself, here we are, all these mothers, and look why we came here? It's because we trusted that a biologic, and or that our children, were up to the challenge of vaccinating and subjecting them to "one more thing". Although vaccines are not the total picture, but most probably the camel that breaks the back scenario, I have come to certain researched conclusions, with the help of my researcher friends. I account them as friends, because they have a heart to listen to my pleas, and deal with a mom who is scratching at their research doors. Who really knows how many bullets our children can have in the Russian roulette game I call, vaccinate at all cost, even the cost of our children's lives. We did not now the parameters, and had we known them or had full informed consent, we would have had every opportunity to refuse a biologic (vaccine) that was harmful for them. In fact, on said vaccine vials, contraindications are laid out, yet never seen by mothers and father's eyes. With this realization, the known neurotoxins in them are enough to make your head spin. But you are probably asking yourself, why one child, and not another? It is simply stated as this, your lucky, I was not.
Every time I hold my son through a seizure (a common affliction of autism), I curse myself (which I try not to do) , then I curse the doctor who never told me what a vaccine could actually do, then I finally come to cursing the very people who made these miracles of our modern age. It has been no miracle for me and for millions. What vaccines can actually do is very telling in the prepensive to injury child. What I am asking, is that we know longer use our children as the front line soldiers, and call to the bar, these pharma companies to make safe vaccines, and if your going to vaccinate, make sure the child is up for it. Since they never do both of those things, I shall call them to the bar of reason, and ask them to follow the code of biologic ethics. I shall prove to them just how immunologically, metabolically weak and compromised they are, or prepensive to allergic or anaphylaxia they are! Based upon those premises, and their own provisos, I shall prove that autism can be squelched by putting out the radar and giving the child a do not pass go sign. The child will have to pass for a time, until their immune systems can handle such an onslaught. We will ask for proper birthing procedures, proper handling of a child with immune problems and detox problems, and we shall find how these little canary birds REALLY are doing in our day. It won't be pretty, and it won't be easy, but I intend to now take the ammunition out of vaccinating everyone. Evidence of the carefree attitude towards our children will turn to them proving that our kids ARE competent, and all I can say is, MAKE OUR DAYS. Not everyone comes into the world with the same immune healing capitals, this is a scientific fact. Let's not be treated as cattle anymore, let us have the science, and the reasons to know whether our child will have a problem with vaccinating. 1-150 children with autism is a PANDEMIC of untold proportions. Let us discontinue our present day practicum, for a new one, in which we will not risk our children, and have them become acceptable losses. There is no such thing as a genetic epidemic.
1. First of all, vaccines are not a one size fits all.
2. Our children have unique immune dysregulation and failures, including mine, the c4b anulle. This gene encodes a protein that handles, get this, VIRUS, TOXINS and FUNGALS which are in vaccines!. My son has zero complement, in other words, the gene is essentially OFF or promoted off. Essentially, a complement system problem in children is a contraindication to vaccinating.
3. My entire family is infected by the STEALTH VIRUS. This virus is an atypically structured virus, from simian monkeys SV-40 found in contaminated polio vaccines in the late 50's early 60's, and some evidences of even later than that. Many children with autism have this virus. This is a heavy duty virus, it has affinity to the central nervous system. It is often shadowed as other ailings in the family, such as depression, ALS, Parkinsons, Schizophrenia even frank cancers. Another reason to take strong family histories.
4. Some children have extreme allergies to adjuvants in vaccines, including the form of aspartame in them, the mercury or thimerosal, the 2-pe and other things such as phenols, not to mention the aluminum.
5. Our environment is lowering our immune response, especially our cell mediated immunity. Our ability to handle the one more thing scenario is becoming increasingly narrowed. Our children are subjected to heavy metals in utero, viruses, organophosphates, aspartames, air pollution, overuse of antibiotics (which are seen in our water), volatile chemicals, TCE, PCB's etc etc. These have consequences to the developing child, and our children seem to be highly toxic. All these things also disrupt the blood brain barrier, in which also vaccine breach, and we wonder why we have autism?
6. We are birthing our kids incorrectly, we are cord clamping too soon, not allowing proper iron stores and immune cells, and even oxygen itself into their brains. Our kids are not handling mercury well, from rhogam in Rh neg moms, to the fish mother ate, to the fillings in her teeth, to the water she drinks. They have a metalloathionene pathway problem, they are accumulating these metals in their tubulin and myelin sheaths.
7. Most of their family members already have an immune system gone haywire. Mothers have Chronic Fatigue, Father has Arthritis or Diabetes, all of these are markers of a prepensive to injury child. Autoimmunity runs in families of autism. Vaccines exacerbate that immune system problem even further, to arms of the immune system called TH2 or 1. Our kids get stuck in one of those arms, and therefore are on self attack mode, even their myelin sheath to their gut lining.
8. There may be a genetic tie here, and we shall address this, but let me say sysinctly, that usually means immunogenetic and or cell signals gone awry. The genetics in my opinion are what can happen if you give it a trigger. Vaccines and the environment are the triggers. It always comes down to this, let us test them if they are already dealing with something they cannot handle
9. Our children are being missed in their PKU tests. Tests are underrated, mostly because insurance organizations don't want to pay for special diets. We have proven a link of this behavior, and so, we are missing children with autism who in fact, have PKU. We intend to go down that rabbit hole, of all the things, this one scares me the most.
10. WE believe as a whole there is some genetic altering taking place, from contaminated cell lines, to foreign antigens, and that we are reaping what we are sowing, as we speak. Not only in vaccines, but in our food supply and our pesticide use as we make adducts on our genes. We can also form adducts from the very things in vaccines. This is scientific fact.
So that is why I am doing what I am doing. I don't think I am any more rehearsed on what autism is than the next mother, just a person who felt compelled to do something about it, to save the next generation from blinded halted reason. Our researchers are the tops in their fields, in immunology, in genetics, in metabolic problems, gastroenterology and so forth. Neuro-developmental researchers are assisting us along the way, to find these markers that they are studying. We will do this all grass roots. WE will have not conflicted interested parties. We want the truth, and we want it now.
We would like to further ideas on sulphar metabolism problem or detox pathway problems, glutathione alleles, metalloathionene pathway problems, neurotoxins that injure our kids, birthing procedures, environmental loads and their meaning of attack on the developing fetus, Immunological weaknesses such as c4b, Dr4, HLA types, Autoimmunity problems, Stealth viruses, family histories of gut disturbances or allergies, Secretory Iga Deficiency, IGA, and other such ideas that signal a child with immune weaknesses or detox pathway problems. Viably, it will have to be cost effective, and with no interpretation, yes or no, what the child has a problem with. We want to also look at various junk genes that scientist have thrown away without interest such as 2q and 22qr11, once again, genes that are very perturbed by environmental problems. I would also be very interested in thrombaphilia factors, sed rate and how the viscosity of blood interferes with immune processes. These and others are things that will take time, but will be clear indications of a problem in the child. Interluekins are also very interesting. I could go on, but this is an illustration of how many things can go off BEFORE and AFTER you vaccinate. We can do better than this, that is all I have to say, much better.
I'd rather not see one more child injured at the hands of this carelessness. My son and daughter have paid a heavy price for my ignorance. But again, can I go there when I was not told? My son especially who cried out to me, mommy, mommy, help me...when he was reacting to a DPT and almost dying in my arms several times in one night. Would that image be erased from your mind if your were his mom? I am helping him, I am making a solution, offering a solution if it were, and handing it to these people on a silver platter. My kids are heroes, and I am their advocate. I hope I don't throw my pearls to swine, but I am prepared that it may be a pig fest. I am not totally naive. These people make billions of dollars of profit off of the diseases they have now created in our children. It's high time they know what they have done and how a MOTHER PhD in autism can solve it.
Kathy
Chair of VOSI and Oregon Chapter pres of Autism Autoimmunity Project
I will share a speech with you that I gave in front of the Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia...needless to say.... I have a lot of enemies now:
My name is Suzanne O'Mullan. I wanted my words for you to be so profound,
but instead I only have questions.
Why is there such a CODE OF SILENCE when a parent speaks of "the autism-vaccine connection" in the medical and pharmaceutical communities?
Only 5 short years ago, Autism was told to be "very rare, 1 in every 10,000". Today, the statistics are now 1 in every 150 with some studies showing 1 in every 63... The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has now admitted that the increase is an epidemic and so far impossible to explain. Why do other authorities continue to deny increases in autism when every school department is going bankrupt trying to educate "our" children? There were 6 new cases of autism a day 7 days a week in 1999 in just one state? The past 90 days, there were 556 new cases of DSM IV autism alone. The statistics read as follows: The past 25 years between 1969-1994 there were approx 5,100 cases of autism. The past 5 years between 1994-1998 there were approx 5,100 new cases of autism. The past 2 1/4 years between January 1999 and March 2001 there are over 5,100 new cases of autism. The cost of autism over a lifetime per child is $2 million. To give you a recent figure for the new 556 children in the last 90 days that totals $1.132 billion.
In line with the increase of autism, the vaccine numbers also rose. Vaccinations given to children from birth to age 2, rose from 8 in 1980, to 21 in 2001 (some as you know containing combined antigens or 3 live viruses). Before 1980: there was mostly infantile autism (symptoms in infancy and often at birth); after 1980: there is now what is called a "New Autism" with symptoms occurring after 18 months. Why does autism now start in the 2nd or 3rd year of life when it was described as Infantile Autism for years by Kanner? Why?
Why isn't anyone told that there is a vaccine compensation fund for those whose children have experienced an adverse vaccine reaction? How many adverse reactions could there be to warrant a fund to pay for damages by our government?
Why are vaccines mandated without proper safety studies? Why are a few weeks of follow-up considered adequate? Why do the vaccine manufacturer's finance safety studies when they are the very companies, which profit from sales? Safety trials not looking beyond 3 weeks post-vaccination doesn't convince me as a parent.
Why do parents have to prove that a vaccine causes a problem when the manufacturer - has no studies to prove that it does not? If all of the testing is supposedly done for exploring every angle of safety and concern, why do vaccine schedules change? Why are things taken out and why are some vaccines reformulated? Why won't the medical community listen to findings such as when Dr. Wakefield found the measles virus in the gut wall of children with autism (which was also independently confirmed by Dr. O'Leary and then again by Kawashima) instead of attacking Dr. Wakefield?
Why is every other drug administered to a person calibrated by weight when vaccines are "One size fits all?" Why do we give a 6 lb at-no-risk newborn half of the same dose of the same Hep B vaccine that we give to a 400lb at risk Sumau wrestler? Why does it take less time to approve a vaccine than a shampoo for lice? It took the FDA 5 months to approve the Recombinant Hep B vaccine and 13 months to approve NIX lice Shampoo.
What Safety and Efficacy studies have been before recommending the administration of vaccines together? Why do we have to give so many vaccines together when we know that they work better singly? If you are going to say that: parents aren't likely to return for a visit if a shot is needed, or if you want to spare the children the pain of repeated injections... just ask a mom of a child with autism who wouldn't have gladly returned to get one vaccine at a time.
When the combination of three vaccines Measles Mumps and Rubella (previously given singly) occurred into one triple vaccine, the MMR, the prevalence of autism also increased. The MMR was introduced in the US in 1972-1973 but its wide use really started in around 1978 and was clearly followed by an increase in autism. A parallel increase was noted in the UK starting in 1988 when the MMR was introduced over there. Was that just some coincidence?
Why does Japan have so little autism now after stopping the MMR. "Of the 3,969 medical compensation claims relating to vaccines in the last 30 years, a quarter had been made by those badly affected by measles, mumps and rubella." Dr. Hiroki Nakatani, director of the Infectious Disease Division at Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare said that giving individual vaccines cost twice as much as MMR, "but we believe it is worth it".
During the Congressional hearings on the autism-vaccine connection in April of 2000, why were there responses such as:Congressman Dan Burton asking the same question to Dr. Wakefield, Prof O'Leary, Dr. Singh,
Dr. Taylor: "Would you be willing to release your methodology and data to an independent panel of researchers?" Dr Andrew Wakefield "Yes of course" Prof. O'Leary "Without hesitation" Dr. Vijendra Singh "Absolutely" Dr. Brent Taylor "Uhhhh, I'd have to check with my superiors." By the way, he is the first author in the history of the Lancet to refuse to let anyone see his raw data.
How confident would parents and pediatricians be if they learned that: -Members, including the Chair of the FDA and CDC advisory committees who make decisions to approve a vaccine own stock in drug companies that make the vaccines; -Individuals on both advisory committees own patents for vaccines under consideration or affected by the decisions of the committee; -Three out of five of the FDA's advisory committee who voted for the rotavirus vaccine had their "conflicts of interest" waived; -Seven of the 15 member FDA advisory committee were not present at the meeting, two others were excluded from the vote, and the remaining five were joined by five temporary voting members who all voted to license the product; -CDC grants "conflict of interest" waivers to every member of their advisory committee a year at a time, and allows full participation in the discussions leading up to a vote by every member, whether they have financial state in the decision or not; -CDC's advisory committee has no public members-no parents have a vote in whether or not a vaccine belongs on the childhood immunization schedule. The FDA's committee has only one public member.
Why don't you have independent researchers on your approval and development panel concerning vaccines? Why not invite Dr. Singh, Dr. Wakefield, Dr. O'Leary?
Where was the information on the vaccine information sheet that lists the levels of Mercury (the 2nd most deadly substance on this earth) that my child is being exposed to, among other questionable ingredients? There are ingredients on every bit of food that goes into our bodies, why not on the vaccine information sheet? If I had known that my child was being exposed to a level of Mercury that exceeded the EPA guidelines, I would have questioned the vaccine. Some infants have received in one day as much as 100 times the amount of mercury the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says is the maximum allowable daily exposure for an adult. Mercury damages the immune system so the child becomes unable to protect itself against the damage from the viruses in the vaccines.
HEPB: Where was it listed on the vaccine information sheet that my child would only be exposed to Hepatitis sexually or by IV drug use (dirty needles)? And if my child wasn't exposed, the vaccination would be unnecessary at just 4 hours of life? So that I might have had the chance to say, "no, I don't think this is necessary at this time". How can you justify the mandatory Hep. B vaccine to infants and children when there has been no risk/benefit analysis? Why isn't the Hep. B vaccine mandatory for teachers, other school workers, day care staff employees when it is mandatory for school kids? If HepB Vaccine is safe then why has it been investigated by the US House? (Rep Mica; May'99)? Why is HepB vaccine given to an infant or child when we know that it is ineffective after 10-11 years and the average age of diagnosis of hepatitis B is 30-35 years? Why was the HepB vaccine tested on only 37 Merck employees before recommending it for all no risk children? How come the vaccines in later studies were only observed for 5 days? Are their any peer reviewed studies on the safety of the Recombinant HepB vaccine?
POLIO: Why is the reason that polio vaccines manufactured between 1955-1964 may be linked with certain kinds of cancer? What is SV40 and does it belong in vaccines?
PREVNAR: The only testing for Prevnar is by an HMO group financed by the manufacturer who compared the Prevnar group to another group receiving another vaccine (which is very unusual)? The Prevnar group had four times more seizures, four times more gastritis than the control group, significantly more developed asthma, and one death. The big push for Prevnar came from its supposed prevention of otitis media, even though it had not been approved for this use. Otitis media is viral in 60% of the cases and bacterial in less than 40% In only 20-25% it is due to pneumococcus (there are 90+ serotypes of pneumococcus and Prevnar has only 7; even in theory, it would not affect more than 2-3% of cases); In two days, 90% of the otitis cases resolve by itself without treatment.
MMR: Why did my child have another MMR vaccination 18 months after the first MMR? Why aren't a titres offered first? Why would a simple titre not be performed to check the status of my child's immunity? Titre testing only costs about $3.00. Testing titre levels after a first vaccination may show an additional vaccine is NOT needed - so why give a repeat triple vaccine when 95% of the recipients are already immune?
If there is scientific evidence showing that:
1. Measles virus can cause brain inflammation, encephalitis.
2. The vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) is known to have caused
encephalitis. And Then, couldn't it be quite true that
3. Infantile autism might be the chronic continuation of the acute inflammation and damage of the brain?
Is it true that a Japanese author reported culturing rotavirus in children with intussusception in 1978? Why was the first rotavirus vaccine released when it was known that there were several cases of intussusception during the clinical trials? Why did you abstain from voting on its withdrawal?
Where are the statistics of exactly how many children in the last decade have died from Measles Mumps or Rubella or anything else we are so aggressively vaccinating against? If I had the chance of knowing that this answer would be less than 1:1000, I would have taken the chance of my child being that 1:1000 risk rather than developing Autism (a disease worse than death) which is now 1 in every 150.
By the time children are ready for school we have given them nearly 22 vaccinations with multiple viruses. As the number of vaccinations grows, so do the profits for the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture them. A new vaccine that is added to the universal use list has an assured stable market of 3 ½ to 4 million babies born in this country every year. The manufacturer (as of 1986) has virtually no liability for adverse events that may occur, as do the doctors who administer them. No liability. A stockholders dream. Prevnar is approx $60 per injection. What is the motivation to test safety issues short and long term if you are immune from being held accountable?
If you are sure that your product is safe, that all short and long term testing was done, administration guidelines are appropriate, ingredients aren't harmful, multiple vaccines at once don't knock out a child's immune system for some of them to develop autism, if all the research that needs to be done has been done, and if the government decided to take away the shield that protects you from lawsuits, would you still state that "There is no scientific evidence today that links vaccinations to autism?" THERE IS NO LONG-TERM SAFETY RESEARCH PROVING THAT MMR DOES NOT CAUSE AUTISM, IS THERE? And please do not mention the Finnish studies, which were terminated in 1996 before Wakefield even published his paper on MMR and Autism in 1998.
Whose job is it to protect our Nations children? Why doesn't anyone listen to parents and just consider the possibility that vaccines may cause autism? Why do we give "mad cow disease " our immediate attention when 67,000 new cases of autism (in 1999 alone) aren't comprehensive enough to merit an independent investigation? Is it because you are afraid of what you may find? Is it because vaccines represent a $2 billion industry annually? Is it because vaccines are big business?
I have learned that being left out and ignored your whole life is worse than dead. I have learned that being sick and in pain your whole life while doctors dismiss you is worse than dead.I have learned that a lifetime disability is harder than dying. As bad as death is, and it is often hideous, it is temporary and then there is peace. I do not know how long my autistic child will suffer. No one knows.
Lorenzo's Trial
A 10-year study has finally proved - after all the doubts and ridicule -that Augusto and Michaela Odone's home-made treatment for their son Lorenzo's genetic disorder really does work.
[Lucy Atkins reports in The Guardian.]
http://www.guardian.co.uk>
Lorenzo Odone was only five years old when his parents noticed that he kept bumping into the furniture. A horrifying diagnosis followed: Lorenzo had a rare, incurable genetic disorder that affects only boys, known as adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). He would lose all his bodily functions and die within two to three years. If you've seen the 1992 Hollywood film Lorenzo's Oil, you'll know what happened next. The Odones, neither of whom had medical training, were not going to sit around and watch their son deteriorate. "We were not prepared to believe that there wasn't a cure," says Augusto Odone. So they set out to find one, ignoring doctors who said the literature would be too "complex" for them to understand. The result was, says Odone "a case of man bites dog": after two years immersed in medical texts and journals, badgering specialists across the globe and wrestling with neurogenetic theories, they discovered a blend of plant oils that they believed would delay their son's disease. On May 29 this year, Lorenzo, now severely disabled, turned 24. To say there has been scepticism among doctors, scientists and support groups about the efficacy of "Lorenzo's Oil" would be an understatement.
They scoffed at the idea that an oil invented by novices could halt the disease. They put the boy's survival down to a combination of superlative care and luck. Parents of ALD boys who found that the oil did not save their sons accused the family of offering false hope. But now the Odones, who have been called anything from quacks to prophets, finally seem to have been vindicated. A clinical trial of the oil led by a world authority on ALD has just been published. It shows that Lorenzo's oil works. Dr Hugo Moser, a leading expert in ALD and director of neurogenetics at Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute conducted the 10-year-long trial, set partly in the US and partly in Europe. It followed 104 boys with the ALD gene, all less than six years old and symptom-free when the trial began. The results were dramatic: the boys who were not scrupulously given the oil were nearly three times as likely to develop symptoms as boys who were given the oil without fail. As Moser puts it, Lorenzo's oil may not be "an absolute preventive" but it certainly "reduces the chances of developing the symptoms".
The oil is a combination of two fats extracted from olive oil and rapeseed oil. It works, it is thought, because of the way it affects the "very long chain fatty acids" in the boys' bodies. In boys with ALD, the enzyme that breaks down these fatty acids is impaired. They can't properly metabolise these acids, which then build up and begin to damage the central nervous system. Specifically, they destroy myelin - the white matter that insulates the nerves and allows impulses to be conducted from one part of the body to another. This is why some of the early signs of ALD include memory loss, emotional instability, difficulty with vision, hearing and motor function.
This devastating process of gradual brain damage is known by specialists as demyelination. Usually, boys who have the childhood form of ALD will be bedridden, blind and unable to swallow by the age of 10. They will die soon after. Sadly, Michaela Odone is not here to see these results. Having given up work, social life, entertaining and all other interests to care for her son, she died of cancer in June 2000. Augusto Odone, though, sounds matter-of-fact about their public vindication. "For me, this isn't ground-breaking," he says. "I already knew it worked." He describes how, at the end of the film about his family, there is a shot of some young boys "jumping up and down". These are all boys with the ALD gene "I knew those children," Odone tells me, "I put them on Lorenzo's oil. I have followed those children as they are growing up. None that I know of have got the disease".
That the oil came too late to stop his son from developing the symptoms must be hard to bear. Lorenzo lost most of his bodily functions and has been bedridden for 18 years. His mind, however, is "still there" - his father says he communicates by blinking and raising his fingers; he loves music, and being read to. "If I'd invented Lorenzo's oil two years before, it would have been different. Most probably he would not have got the disease," says Odone. "Still, it will save the lives of many children who are destined to have the childhood form of ALD". Until now, the main treatment for childhood ALD has been a bone marrow transplant. Many specialists believe this still offers the best hope of survival. Some are saying that the trial only proves that Lorenzo's oil delays the symptoms and none are saying that Lorenzo's oil should now be used to the exclusion of all other treatments. Moser's trial was, after all, relatively small, and for obvious ethical reasons there could be no placebo group. None the less, says Dr Ian Duncan, professor of neurology at the University of Wisconsin, the consensus among specialists is that "this is an extremely important finding". Most, he says, now "acknowledge that this therapy can work". Moser, who was a doubter in the beginning is now recommending that every presymptomatic boy with ALD is given it. It's not yet clear what will happen to the boys who have taken the oil and reached the age of 10 (by which time the disease has normally shown itself) without symptoms. ALD comes in two main forms - Lorenzo's kind and an adult type, which shows up in the late teens or early 20s and acts more slowly ("you can," says Duncan, "live for long periods" with the adult form). The boys studied are still teenagers, so nobody knows yet whether they will develop the adult type. Indeed, says Duncan, we don't even know whether these boys will be at a higher risk of developing the adult form of the disease.
Sadly, for the boys who did develop symptoms, there is still no cure (though Odone certainly believes the oil has played a part in his son's survival this far). In a message to parents of boys with ALD, Odone told the New Scientist: "Give the oil as soon as you know your son carries the genetic defect. If you wait, the symptoms might come and then you are in a different ballpark." Duncan, who specialises in "re-myelination" in childhood disorders, confirms this: "The oil does not promote myelin regeneration."
This, for Odone, is the next challenge. 'What I want to do," he tells me, "is to restore functions in Lorenzo." He now runs an organisation called the Myelin Project which funds research that will "increase the odds that a way will be found to bring back myelin". If this were to happen, the implications would go far beyond ALD boys. Several other diseases destroy myelin - multiple sclerosis (MS) is perhaps the best known. About 85,000 people in the UK suffer from MS, and the Myelin Project estimates that "demyelinating" diseases affect about a million people in industrialised countries alone. The Myelin Project is currently financing Yale University doctors to do pioneering surgery that will see whether it is possible to rebuild myelin.
Three MS patients so far have had myelin producing cells taken from their ankles and transplanted into the right frontal lobe of the brain. This, Duncan explains, will eventually show whether you can "promote the brain to repair itself". It is too early to tell whether these cell transplants will work - whether they will multiply so that the patient begins to regain lost bodily functions. But for many people who hope desperately for a cure for diseases like ALD and MS, the very fact that such experiments are under way is positive. "The drive and determination behind the Myelin Project is our best and brightest hope for the future," says Diana McGovern, who has multiple sclerosis, and is honorary secretary of the British Trust for the Myelin Project. Odone is certainly a tireless ally to have. His favourite aphorisms are "Fortune favours the brave" and "You never know until you try." He will, he says, repeat these to the doctors he works with until the Myelin Project
has put itself out of business.
The Myelin Project is at www.myelin.org <http://www.myelin.org> To
contact the British Trust for the Myelin Project, call 0131 339 8424.
* * *
_________________________________________________
A fabulous letter from Deborah Delp, moderator of
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/autism_and_vaccinations:
Mr. Crawford,
My name is Deborah Delp, I am the mother of a 5 year old boy who suffers from Autism Spectrum Disorder, better known in the autism community as ASD. I tell you this because I suspect you will become VERY familiar with the autism community. The reason? There was a report that I have sent to my group on yahoo and several others that I am a member of.
You see Mr. Crawford we as parents/victims know when someone in the government has "set their cap" to damaging us/our children even farther. Here we have a company Kirkman Labs that has done nothing for over 30 years but try to help the autistic by researching, developing and manufacturing vitamin supplements for those whose immune systems have been damaged by the effects of environmental assaults and vaccinations.
After my son's last (very last btw) round of vaccinations at 15 months of age (December 1998) he began to regress developmentally. Losing speech, eye contact, imaginary play skills and social skills. It was August of 2000 when he was diagnosed with autism. In January of 2001 we began to suspect and investigate vaccines as a possible cause.
As it turns out we learned that not only was there no non-biased independent testing done on vaccines waiting for approval but the testing that was conducted by the pharmaceutical companies was what the FDA based their approvals on! The first thing that came to my mind after discovering this little tidbit of information was CONFLICT OF INTEREST! That phrase has been firmly seated in my mind ever since.
Now if that's not bad enough your department in the FDA, headed by you is on a witch hunt against a company that has done nothing but try to help those suffering from an epidemic rise in a disorder that is third only to spinal bifida and mental retardation in childhood developmental disorders. Third and climbing fast.
Now onto the specific topic at hand here. The use of Taurine capsules and your role in all this. According to the article that was released yesterday the 17th of October, the headline reads: "FDA's Senior Veternarian Lester Crawford Sics US Marshalls on popular supplier" Maybe you can explain what exactly your title and role actually is.
Also I don't understand why the comment: ""Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, a physician in Palm Bay, Florida who treats autistic patients reports good success in treating autism with Taurine." has your shorts in a knot. If the comments are true, (and I have no doubt that they are) and can be verified (obviously they can be as Kirkmans would not print anything that can't be verified) then I don't see a reason why the FDA is taking valuable man hours that would be better spent investigating the rise in autism and making a target of a company that has done nothing but try to aid those suffering from this developmental disorder.
I find it very insulting to my intelligence that you; as a representative of the FDA feel you have a need to be telling me; as the parent of an ASD child what is best for MY child. I have researched long and hard BEFORE (something the FDA still doesn't do an example being the vaccines) deciding to put my son on the supplements that he was using. I introduced each supplement separately for a week at a time to gauge any reactions to them and found that he had none to any of the products that Kirkman produces.
I personally find Kirkman products to be the best available due mostly to the fact that they are preservative free with no sugars, fillers, gluten or casein added. The capsules are made of plant cellulose instead of the typical animal byproducts.
My son no longer uses most of the supplements he was on. He has decided (about 6 weeks ago) that his body doesn't need them anymore (btw he is a non-verbal high functioning autistic so I guess you're insulting his intelligence as well). I must admit that I had a few sleepless nights over this but I will say that he has shown no signs of regressing to his former state of no eye contact, no pupil reactions to light (a sign btw of mercury poisoning), no social interactions and no imaginary play. He is doing so well now and I contribute a great deal of the credit to the Kirkman company and their ever diligent quality control specifications.
In closing I would like to say; spend more time investigating the pharmaceutical companies and their quality control standards and maybe there will be less of a need for vitamin supplements for our kids. Anyone who doesn't think the vaccines have something to do with this epidemic rise in autism over the past 10 to 20 years is either a fool or is a contributor to the cover-up.
Good Day,
Deborah Delp
Mother of Samantha (NT) & JR (ASD)
What we do with our lives depends on our
motivation to do something with our lives.
D.A.Delp
"Lethal injections are for criminals. We need to keep it that way."
Homepage:
http://the_delps.tripod.com/
Yahoo Group Moderator of:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/autism_and_vaccinations
Dear WebMD:
I am writing regarding Richard Bruno's article, Taking a Shot at Vaccines. He describes, "...anti-vaccination Internet sites rely more on emotional appeals than solid scientific evidence...." It is true that anti-vaccine arguments are not based on solid scientific evidence. But neither are pro-vaccine arguments. The fact is, there has never been ANY solid scientific evidence about anything vaccines do, whether it be preventing diseases or causing side effects. Naturally, medical professionals claim that evidence on their side is solid and scientific, while they slur any evidence on the other side as junk science. Show me an independent study on vaccines with rigorous scientific methodology with NO ties to financial gain from either the government or vaccine manufacturers, and I'll show you the an honest report about cigarette smoke conducted by the tobacco industry.
NOBODY has any solid scientific evidence to rely on, so we parents have to do the best we can with the anecdotal and junk science evidence that IS available. If some parents want to lend more weight to one side of the junk science than the other, that is their prerogative and their choice. No parent need to be condemned for concluding that the dangers of vaccines outweigh any benefit instead of agreeing with vaccine profiteers that the "benefits of vaccines outweigh any danger." There is no need to take cheap shots at parents who DARE to judge the evidence for themselves.
Sincerely,
Helen Tucker
Morgantown, WV
May 28, 2003
Autism: Has this mother found the key?
By Chris Ayres
In a lawsuit with worldwide implications, a British woman in Los Angeles is fighting drugs companies to prove her claim that a mecury-based preservative in vaccines caused her children's autism CLAIRE BOTHWELL wears a big badge on her jacket with “The rate of autism” written on it in bold type. Underneath, in smaller letters, it says, “Twenty years ago: 1 in 10,000; five years ago: 1 in 500; today: 1 in 250. At the bottom are another two words, again in bold type: “Scared Yet?”
Above it, Bothwell wears another badge. It looks like a No Smoking sign, but with the lit cigarette replaced by a single, unusual word: Thimerosal. “It’s pronounced thigh-mare-o-sal,” says Bothwell, tapping the badge with her finger.
We are sitting in Bothwell’s half-decorated kitchen, the protective plastic wrapping barely off the state-of-the-art stainless steel appliances. Her nearly-posh English accent (she’s from Coventry, the daughter of a special forces captain-turned-software entrepreneur) seems rather out of place here in Long Beach, a lush, affluent Los Angeles suburb where huge mock-Tudor homes overlook a pristine golf course.
Bothwell’s effortless pronunciation of Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in children’s vaccines, is the result of more than two years of study. During this time, Bothwell — the mother of three children, two of them autistic — has become an English Erin Brockovich, claiming a link between Thimerosal and her children’s disabilities and inspiring a legal crusade that has made national headlines in the US.
Indeed, the anti-Thimerosal chorus has reached such a crescendo that some predict it will become a key issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. It is already a subject of intense debate in California, where a study was released earlier this month showing that the number of autistic children in the state had doubled to more than 20,000 in four years. Ron Huff, the Californian psychologist who conducted the study, says: “I remember in the mid-1980s, when a child came in with autism, it was an event. You would get one or two in a year. I soon ended up getting one or two a month.
“I believed that every quarter the numbers would go down, but they just simply did not drop off. We’re now counting 800 new individuals with autism in California each quarter. And these are just the ‘classic’ cases; it doesn’t include the ones with difficult types of autism.”
Huff’s findings are not unique to California. All over America and in other countries, including Britain, the same autism epidemic is causing panic among parents. If Bothwell and her fellow campaigners can prove a link between Thimerosal and autism, Eli Lilly, the American pharmaceutical company that developed Thimerosal — along with several other drugs companies that manufactured the ingredient until the late 1990s — will be forced to pay billions in compensation.
Bothwell says this is not just opportunistic litigation by trial lawyers with big mortgages desperate to find the next Big Tobacco, and says she doesn’t want to put drug companies out of business: “They make things that help people.” But she accuses them of suspecting since the 1930s that the mercury in Thimerosal could poison children, bringing on autism in those with existing genetic weaknesses. The introduction of several new Thimerosal-containing vaccines in the 1980s, effectively doubling most children’s exposure to mercury, is the most likely reason why levels of autism began to spike at about the same time, Bothwell argues. Several thousand other plaintiffs across America agree with her.
Eli Lilly, unsurprisingly, does not share the view that they have been negligent, saying that the allegations are not based on scientific proof and that, besides, it has not made Thimerosal since 1974. Edward Sagebiel, a spokesman for the company, points out that the US Government took Thimerosal off the market in the late 1990s. “If the theory holds, wouldn’t you begin to see, from 2000, a decrease in the levels of autism?” he asks. The answer, according to Huff at least, is no: American doctors are still working their way through old stockpiles of Thimerosal vaccines. Also, it can take up to four years to come up with an autism diagnosis. However, Huff agrees that, ultimately, time will tell. “Because I’m a scientist, I don’t speculate until I’ve seen hard data,” he says. “There’s enough attention being given to Thimerosal that I think we’ll get a definite answer within five years.”
Bizarrely, Thimerosal remains virtually unknown among the general public in Britain, even though it is still used in DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) jabs. British attention is still more focused on the infamous MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination, which has never contained Thimerosal. BY RIGHTS, Claire Bothwell should be living the American dream, not fighting multinational pharmaceutical companies. She left England when she was 19, after marrying staff sergeant Ronald Miller of the US Air Force, who had been stationed at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.
The young couple moved to the former Wild West railroad town of Alamogordo, New Mexico, and made a down payment on a small two-bedroom family home. Bothwell says she remembers feeling giddy with excitement as she drove to the mall in her wood-panelled Ford Pinto station wagon and brought home groceries in stiff brown paper bags. Then one day in the spring of 1985 her husband went fishing near a New Mexico town called Truth or Consequences. He never came back.
Ron’s boat, it emerged, had capsized in choppy waters. A fisherman discovered his remains a month later. At the age of just 22, Bothwell was a widow. With encouragement from her father and friends, she decided to move to San Diego, California. She didn’t like it, so kept on driving in her Ryder van up Interstate 405 until she reached the southern suburbs of Los Angeles. Her journey came to an unscheduled end when she stopped at a petrol station in Long Beach. It was home.
She found a job as a legal secretary working for a lawyer called Bruce Bothwell, ten years her senior. Within two weeks they had begun a relationship and by 1990 — Bothwell was now 27 — they had married. Two years after that, Bothwell’s first child, William Fisk Douglas Bothwell II, was born. Tragedy, it seemed, was behind her. Like all American children, Fisk was given a cocktail of 24 vaccines in the first two years of his life. Many of them, including his four DTP shots, three hepatitis B shots and four Hib shots (haemophilus influenzae type-B), contained Thimerosal. Like most parents at the time, however, Bothwell had no idea what Thimerosal was — or that she could use a relatively inexpensive skin patch to test her son’s sensitivity to mercury.
By the time Bothwell was pregnant with her second child, Katrina, it was clear that there was something wrong with Fisk. He was obsessed with letters and numbers; he couldn’t look people in the eye; he threw violent tantrums; and he was terrified of the vacuum cleaner. As time went on, Fisk grew worse, to the point where Bothwell became reluctant to take him out in public or share her concerns with other mothers. He had no spontaneous conversation; his co-ordination was terrible; and he became engrossed in bizarre mantras and rituals.
Her husband refused to accept that there was anything wrong. “I was in denial, ” Bruce, now 49 and a typical father figure in his brown cords and lumberjack shirt, admits. “Part of me still is.” Bruce’s mother was even less understanding and still, to this day, struggles to accept any talk of the A-word. This lack of understanding by grandparents is, according to doctors, normal. They are, after all, part of the generation who believed Bruno Bettelheim, the now-discredited Austrian psychologist who blamed autism on a lack of love and support at home: parental refrigeration, he called it.
Eventually, in 1994, the Bothwells decided to consult a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) about Fisk. Then came the news they had been dreading: Fisk, then nearly three, was autistic.
Tragically, the Bothwells’ luck didn’t get much better. Katrina, although less troubled than Fisk, was also a problem child. At two years old, she too was found to be autistic. At about the same time, Bothwell had her third and final child, Jillian. She turned out to be a normal, healthy little girl. By the end of the decade, Bothwell became aware of the international controversy over MMR and the claims that it could cause autism. As a precaution, she refused to give Katrina her booster MMR jab. Jillian, meanwhile, was given no MMR at all. Bothwell also held back giving other vaccines to Jillian, who, to this day, has shown no signs of her siblings’ autism.
Then, out of the blue, Bothwell’s old boss called and said he had something she needed to see. Andy Waters had left Los Angeles to set up his own law firm, Waters & Kraus, in Dallas. But he had kept in touch over the years and knew that Frisk and Katrina had autism. The document Waters wanted to show Bothwell was a report called Autism: A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning. It claimed that children were being exposed to unsafe levels of mercury because of an ingredient called Thimerosal used in vaccines. “She was the first person I thought of when I saw it,” Waters says. He went on to ask Bothwell to help him open a new Los Angeles office. She agreed, but on the condition that Waters take on the Thimerosal case. Within a few months he had filed the first Thimerosal lawsuit in civil court.
Another 300 or so claims followed, with Bothwell appearing as a plaintiff in one of them. More than 2,000 other claims also soon made their way to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme. For Eli Lilly and the other drug manufacturers, Thimerosal was turning into a public relations nightmare and a multibillion-dollar legal headache. The company argued that it was the victim of a legal loophole: American law protects vaccine manufacturers from being sued. It does not, however, provide similar protection for the makers of vaccine ingredients.
“That programme was developed because the US was losing vaccine manufacturers at an alarming rate, in great part due to liability issues,” says Sagebiel, the Eli Lilly spokesman, adding that the likes of Waters are “abusing a loophole ” with their lawsuits.
The issue became highly politicized last year when a clause was inserted into the Homeland Security Bill giving drug companies immunity from legal action over Thimerosal. But the clause was repealed amid accusations of cronyism, with Congress agreeing to come up with a compromise by this summer. Eli Lilly has already offered to increase the statute of limitation on Thimerosal cases from three to six years, but only if the cases are heard through the vaccine injury programme, not in civil court.
Waters, however, says he is convinced that nothing much will happen until next year when the vaccine injury programme holds a hearing on the “probable causation” of autism. “There will be an election three or four months away, and this will be a significant issue,” he says. And if a link between Thimerosal and autism is found? “People will freak out. They’ll be asking what all this means and how many kids have been involved. There will be such a groundswell of public opinion on the issue, because it will become apparent that we have poisoned a generation or two of our children. At this point the Republicans will probably jump on the bandwagon and say, ’yeah, we need compensation’.” His guess is that if the link is proven, each family could be awarded a few hundred thousand dollars to ease their suffering.
Back in Long Beach, Bruce Bothwell says he was left speechless when he heard about the Homeland Security Bill. “I have never been so angry with my government,” he says. “The fact that it could disenfranchise, in such a fashion, disabled children . . .” He trails off.
Both the Bothwells agree that, despite their campaigning, they hope the vaccine injury committee finds no evidence linking Thimerosal to autism: otherwise, Fisk and Katrina’s conditions were avoidable. At this point, Fisk, looking like any American 11-year-old in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap, blusters into the room.
His behaviour, Bothwell explains, has been much improved by applied behaviour analysis, an intensive (and hugely expensive) therapy programme overseen by UCLA. Still, Fisk makes eye contact as though he is trying to force together the polar opposites of a magnet. He is able to explain, however, that he likes to be called Will, not Fisk, because it’s easier to say. “Will’s okay, but not Willy, that’s not okay with Mom,” he says in a short staccato burst.
“We’ve been so lucky that he’s responded as well as he has,” says Bothwell, after Fisk has left the room to play on his GameBoy. “But is it enough?” As well as the UCLA therapy, Fisk is on a course of chelating agents and supplements to try to reduce the toxic heavy metals, including mercury, that have been found inside him. Dramatic results are not expected, however, given Fisk’s age. “I don’t know if he’ll be able to turn up to a job every day, balance a chequebook, pay his rent and get married,” confides Bothwell.
“As a parent, you want to tell your children, ‘you can do anything, you can be anything’. But with Will, we can’t do that. He can’t see someone else’s point of view. He doesn’t get sarcasm. He’s still bullied a lot, and those bullies end up moving into the workplace. But I think we’ve done all we can do.”
Firstcoastnews.com
Families believe illnesses may be caused by generating plants
Katheryn Hartigan
Timothy Hartigan
According to reports put together by the EPA in 1997 nearly 3,000 pounds of mercury were emitted from the facility JACKSONVILLE, FL - More than a dozen families believe the city and the Jacksonville Electric Authority may be responsible for their children's illnesses.
An I-Team investigation by First Coast News has uncovered a lawsuit against the city and the JEA. The families claim that their children have been exposed to high levels of mercury and other toxins from JEA's Northside, Kennedy, and Southside Station generating plants.
For mother Katheryn Hartigan, the health of her son Conner is a big concern. She says of her son, "At about 18-20 months of age he started to show signs of withdrawl from his dad, sisters, and myself. He stopped progressing and actually started going backwards."
A year after his first birthday doctors diagnosed Conner with autism.
"I just thought how can this be happening to us. This little boy that was healthy in the beginning and was the light of our lives was just slowly starting to be taken away from us."
Doctors told Conner's parents the boy's disease was brought out in part by a childhood vaccine. According to Hartigan, "We discovered that Thimerosal that was put in the vaccines that were given to him on a rigid vaccine schedule."
The vaccine contains 49% mercury, a chemical that can cause neurological disorders in high doses. But Conner's parents believe the vaccine wasn't the only thing exposing their child to mercury.
Conner's dad Timothy Hartigan says that the JEA plant by his house is, "causing not only harm to my son but hundreds of others. Thousands actually in all surrounding areas." The Hartigan's live near the Northside generating station.
According to reports put together by the EPA in 1997 nearly 3,000 pounds of mercury were emitted from the facility. The reports also indicate that the two other stations the Kennedy plant in Talleyrand and the now defunct Southside Station plant also produced high levels of mercury.
Because of the reports, the Hartigan's have decided to file suit. And they are not the only ones. First Coast News has learned that nineteen other families claim their children were also exposed to high levels of mercury.
Attorney Paul Pickert says, "We're not talking one or two children here. We are talking about twenty, thirty, or forty children that we just know about." The city and JEA attorney's told First Coast News they would not comment on the accusations because of pending litigation. Another six lawsuits will be filed next week. Eight other families are waiting to similair lawsuits against the city and JEA.
Families believe illnesses may be caused by generating plants
Katheryn Hartigan
Timothy Hartigan
According to reports put together by the EPA in 1997 nearly 3,000 pounds of mercury were emitted from the facility JACKSONVILLE, FL - More than a dozen families believe the city and the Jacksonville Electric Authority may be responsible for their children's illnesses.
An I-Team investigation by First Coast News has uncovered a lawsuit against the city and the JEA. The families claim that their children have been exposed to high levels of mercury and other toxins from JEA's Northside, Kennedy, and Southside Station generating plants.
For mother Katheryn Hartigan, the health of her son Conner is a big concern. She says of her son, "At about 18-20 months of age he started to show signs of withdrawl from his dad, sisters, and myself. He stopped progressing and actually started going backwards."
A year after his first birthday doctors diagnosed Conner with autism.
"I just thought how can this be happening to us. This little boy that was healthy in the beginning and was the light of our lives was just slowly starting to be taken away from us."
Doctors told Conner's parents the boy's disease was brought out in part by a childhood vaccine. According to Hartigan, "We discovered that Thimerosal that was put in the vaccines that were given to him on a rigid vaccine schedule."
The vaccine contains 49% mercury, a chemical that can cause neurological disorders in high doses. But Conner's parents believe the vaccine wasn't the only thing exposing their child to mercury.
Conner's dad Timothy Hartigan says that the JEA plant by his house is, "causing not only harm to my son but hundreds of others. Thousands actually in all surrounding areas." The Hartigan's live near the Northside generating station.
According to reports put together by the EPA in 1997 nearly 3,000 pounds of mercury were emitted from the facility. The reports also indicate that the two other stations the Kennedy plant in Talleyrand and the now defunct Southside Station plant also produced high levels of mercury.
Because of the reports, the Hartigan's have decided to file suit. And they are not the only ones. First Coast News has learned that nineteen other families claim their children were also exposed to high levels of mercury.
Attorney Paul Pickert says, "We're not talking one or two children here. We are talking about twenty, thirty, or forty children that we just know about." The city and JEA attorney's told First Coast News they would not comment on the accusations because of pending litigation. Another six lawsuits will be filed next week. Eight other families are waiting to similair lawsuits against the city and JEA.
http://cgi.citizen-times.com/cgi-bin/story/buncombe_news/46077
Women's billboard campaign takes aim at vaccine dangers
By Leslie Boyd, Staff Writer
Dec. 3, 2003 10:06 p.m.
ASHEVILLE - Amy Carson hopes drivers along Biltmore Avenue will enjoy her Christmas present. It will be hard to miss. Carson and her friend Angela Medlin of Raleigh asked their families for money this Christmas so they could each put up a billboard with a message. Carson's, on Biltmore Avenue north of Mission Hospitals, will be unveiled Monday.
Many vaccines contain Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that the women believe poisoned their sons. Both have become activists against its use in vaccines, although it's no longer used in new vaccines. Carson and Medlin met in January while protesting a rider in the Homeland Security Bill that would have taken away their right to sue the manufacturer of Thimerosal.
They won that battle, but neither will rest until they have proved their case to the court and to the public. "We're tired of people lying about this," Carson said. "We just want people to know there's still mercury in a lot of children's vaccines and in flu vaccines." "I don't want any money out of this," Medlin said. "All I want is help for my son and maybe acknowledgement that they did this."
Advertisement
The billboards will say, "Mercury: It's deadly. Flu shots, vaccines. It's in there. Why?" At the bottom is the Web address for the women's campaign, www.momsagainstmercury.com.
The women will pay about $800 for the two billboards. "Some people think I'm a little too passionate about this," Medlin said. "But nobody else is going to tell this story. Certainly not Congress or the doctors, and certainly not the pharmaceutical companies. It has to be the parents." Carson has put the information on the back window of her Saturn SUV: "My child was poisoned by the mercury in his vaccines ."
When she first learned about Thimerosal and started campaigning against its use, Carson felt as though she was screaming into the wilderness and no one was listening. But the movement has grown, she said, and she believes her message is getting out to people. Still, the more she can get her word out there, the happier she is, Carson said. So, she and Medlin are planning a third billboard in Winston-Salem.
"It's just an educational campaign, that's all," she said.
Contact Boyd at 232-2922 or LBoyd@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.
Women's billboard campaign takes aim at vaccine dangers
By Leslie Boyd, Staff Writer
Dec. 3, 2003 10:06 p.m.
ASHEVILLE - Amy Carson hopes drivers along Biltmore Avenue will enjoy her Christmas present. It will be hard to miss. Carson and her friend Angela Medlin of Raleigh asked their families for money this Christmas so they could each put up a billboard with a message. Carson's, on Biltmore Avenue north of Mission Hospitals, will be unveiled Monday.
Many vaccines contain Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that the women believe poisoned their sons. Both have become activists against its use in vaccines, although it's no longer used in new vaccines. Carson and Medlin met in January while protesting a rider in the Homeland Security Bill that would have taken away their right to sue the manufacturer of Thimerosal.
They won that battle, but neither will rest until they have proved their case to the court and to the public. "We're tired of people lying about this," Carson said. "We just want people to know there's still mercury in a lot of children's vaccines and in flu vaccines." "I don't want any money out of this," Medlin said. "All I want is help for my son and maybe acknowledgement that they did this."
Advertisement
The billboards will say, "Mercury: It's deadly. Flu shots, vaccines. It's in there. Why?" At the bottom is the Web address for the women's campaign, www.momsagainstmercury.com.
The women will pay about $800 for the two billboards. "Some people think I'm a little too passionate about this," Medlin said. "But nobody else is going to tell this story. Certainly not Congress or the doctors, and certainly not the pharmaceutical companies. It has to be the parents." Carson has put the information on the back window of her Saturn SUV: "My child was poisoned by the mercury in his vaccines ."
When she first learned about Thimerosal and started campaigning against its use, Carson felt as though she was screaming into the wilderness and no one was listening. But the movement has grown, she said, and she believes her message is getting out to people. Still, the more she can get her word out there, the happier she is, Carson said. So, she and Medlin are planning a third billboard in Winston-Salem.
"It's just an educational campaign, that's all," she said.
Contact Boyd at 232-2922 or LBoyd@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.
Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush's America
By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
from Powells from Amazon
---------------------------------
We are talking about the rollback announced last week in regulating mercury pollution. Except, of course, it wasn't announced as a rollback, it was announced as a great step forward. This raises the always timely question, "How dumb do they think we are?" and this time the answer is "profoundly dumb," because it is real hard to get fooled by this one. You look at the numbers and tell me. Mercury is a neurotoxin that damages the brains and nervous systems of fetuses and young children, and probably affects adults as well. It is one of the suspected, though not proven, causes of recent increases in autism, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. It is known to cause learning and attention disabilities and mental retardation.
Eight percent of American women of childbearing age already have mercury in their blood above the EPA's "safe level." Mercury emissions from power plants get into rain clouds and come down in lakes and rivers, there poisoning fish and the people who eat them. Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury, spewing 50 tons a year into the air, about 40 percent of the total. In December 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a finding requiring the maximum amount of technically achievable reduction in mercury. This was expected to result in a 90 percent mercury reduction by 2007. Instead, the new EPA proposals downgrade mercury emissions -- particularly mercury emissions from the utility industry -- by taking it out of the "hazardous pollutant" category. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Simply by implementing the laws already on the books, annual mercury emissions from power plants could be reduced to 5 tons annually by 2007. But Bush's EPA last week introduced a new plan to cap emission at 34 tons a year by 2010 and then 15 tons by 2018. This means hundreds of more tons of mercury discharged over the next 15 years, and that many more children born brain-damaged. I'd really like to know if John Graham, Bush's cost-benefit guru at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, factored in the cost of special ed, health care and caretaking for those kids.
The good news is this will save the utility industry hundreds of millions of dollars -- worth every retarded child, eh? Besides, the coal industry contributed more than $250,000 to Bush's last campaign, and you didn't. John Walke, clean air director of the Natural Resource Defense Council, called it "a grotesque giveaway."
The truth is, the EPA is doing nothing about mercury pollution. The decrease to 34 tons a year is a byproduct of new filtering requirements for nitrogen (causes smog) and sulfur dioxide (causes acid rain), which aren't much to write home about, either. Mike Leavitt, new head of the EPA, defended the proposal as an emissions-trading program, like the one that has reduced acid rain. But the Environmental Defense Fund, which has endorsed the use of market-based, cap-and-trade systems for reducing some pollutants, is appalled by the mercury decision and apparently not comforted by the EPA's decision to change mercury's classification.
One reason cap-and-trade on mercury pollution won't work is it is pretty much site-specific. It hangs around the neighborhood it comes from, so you get dangerous pockets of it, "hot spots" like the ones in South Florida.
In a nicely dovetailed bureaucratic action, the Food and Drug Administration chimed in with a new, softer advisory on mercury-contaminated fish consumption. Consumers Union believes the new FDA advisory is so vague as to which fish are likely to have concentrations of mercury (those at the top of the fish food chain), it is largely useless. Probably the most infamous case of mercury poisoning was in the Japanese village of Minamata. Eugene W. Smith, the great photojournalist, took the picture of the Minamata Madonna, gently holding her hopelessly deformed and retarded child in a steam bath. I once heard a Texas politician being begged to consider doing something "for the children of Texas." He inquired back, "Do the little bastards have a PAC?"
Well, no they don't. But they have mommies. Their mommies can read numbers. Their mommies know the difference between 50 tons a year and 5 tons a year. Mommies know what a campaign contribution is. Mommies can tell the difference between a cynical sack of excrement and safe babies. Mommies can get very angry. You've got to watch those mommies, Karl. Read more in the Molly Ivins archive.
Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Molly Ivins Can't Say That Can She?
FROM THE EDITOR: Mother doesn't tire in mission to make vaccines safer for nation's children
By Jason Sandford
jsandford@CITIZEN-TIMES.com
published: March 8, 2005 6:00 am
Amy Carson is on a mission. Carson wants North Carolina state lawmakers to ban, or drastically reduce, the use of thimerosal in vaccines and the flu shot.
Carson has a 8-year-old son with developmental disabilities she believes were caused after he received routine vaccinations. The culprit thimerosal, an organic mercury compound used in many vaccines to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination.
Debate has been raging for years over the possible connection between thimersosal and a rise in developmental disabilities in children, especially autism. In a report last year, a U.S. government panel concluded decisively in an Institute of Medicine report that childhood vaccinations do not cause autism.
But Carson and many others are not convinced. For every study denying a connection, one can be found to argue there is one.
Carson says she has petitions signed by thousands of North Carolinians, including doctors and other medical professionals, who favor removing thimerosal from vaccines.
Carson and another mother from Raleigh recently met with lawmakers to lobby for passage of the legislation. Carson is passionate about her cause - she has put up billboards in Asheville and Raleigh, and the back of her car is plastered with information about the issue. She has got a Web site, too - www.momsagainstmercury.org.
"This is about getting neurotoxins out of vaccines and flu shots. It's not about whether or not you think thimerosal causes autism," Carson said in a recent interview.
She has a point. If there's any chance it can make us safer, why not do away with it? Carson says similar legislation at the federal level is moving slowly. Two states have passed similar legislation.
Right now, she says, "state-by-state is the way to go."
Amy M. Carson
Moms Against Mercury
828-776-0082
Amy@MomsAgainstMercury.org
http://www.MomsAgainstMercury.org
Click here: ADHD,Ritalin,ADD,ADHD Disorder,behavior,learning,sensory,autism,ritalin drug
Dr. Mary Ann Block, Medical Director
The mother who went to medical school to save her daughter now offers other families the kind of medical information and care she so desperately needed for her own.
http://tinyurl.com/3bag5l
Soldier's Mom Champions Health Screening
By GLENN ADAMS
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 20, 2007; 12:17 AM
AUGUSTA, Maine -- Barbara Damon-Day, the mother of a Maine Army National Guard captain who died of unexplained causes while serving in Afghanistan, has been on a mission of her own. Carrying a thick notebook filled with information about soldiers' health issues _ and pictures of her son, Capt. Patrick Damon _ Damon- Day worked the halls of the state House to line up support for legislation inspired by her son's mysterious death last June.
Barbara Damon-Day, mother of a Maine Army National Guard captain who died of unexplained causes last June while serving in Bagram, Afghanistan, stands in the State House chamber in Augusta, Maine, on May 2, 2007. Damon-Day is lobbying for support for legislation to improve health screening before military personnel are deployed. She wants to create a commission to improve health screening for National Guard personnel, particularly for vaccinations. (
The father of two collapsed after a recreational run in Bagram, his wife, Hildi Halley, said at the time. Damon-Day believes it was related to the extensive series of vaccinations soldiers undergo before deployment, and perhaps how the vaccinations interacted with each other.
She wants to create a commission to improve health screening for National Guard personnel, particularly for vaccinations. Her bill has 155 co-sponsors in the 186-member Legislature, and is widely expected to be approved in the House and Senate. Damon had served as chief of staff for a former House speaker before becoming administrative director for the Public Utilities Commission. The Maine National Guard did not return a call seeking comment. Gov.
John Baldacci, who oversees the Guard, has endorsed the bill. Damon, 41, had taken leave from the utilities commission when he was deployed to Afghanistan in January 2006 with the Maine Guard's 240th Engineer Group.
While the military lists the death as "sudden unexpected," Damon-Day believes it was "prolonged and preventable." "In the military, you are vaccinated, literally, to death," she said. Vaccine Healthcare Center at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington declined to release any information about Damon because of confidentially laws. Damon-Day said the center was investigating his death as possibly vaccine-related.
Her campaign has made waves outside Maine.
In Congress, an amendment calling for better medical screening of military personnel this month was attached to a federal defense spending bill. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, said the amendment was inspired by Damon-Day, whom he credits for elevating the concern over military vaccinations.
The proposal in Augusta would create a nine-member commission to review all preventive health treatment practices and protocols, vaccinations and other medications administered to members of the Maine National Guard. It would also help propose recommendations for safer health care practices and medications to the U.S. military.
"I Just Missed the Autism Bullet"
........written by my oldest son, and sent to Dr. Arthur Caplan of Children's Hospital after his irresponsible post that "mercury is not neurotoxic, even in infants."
The good Doctor never responded. Maybe he should send it to the CDC. My guess is they won't respond either.
S.
Dear Professor, Sir.
Let me start out by introducing myself to you. I am a premedical student at a college right here in the greater Philadelphia Area. I'm 20 years old, and a sophomore. My lifelong dream has been to work in medicine hopefully to become a doctor. When I read an irresponsible entry like this, it makes me think I am putting my efforts in the wrong place.
In her quest to make me an informed student and a well learned individual, my mother forwarded an email with an article that you penned. It was quite disturbing. Please allow me to tell you my family's story. Possibly my candor will make you see things in a different light.
My brother has, or should I say HAD, "something." Since every kid that now doesn't develop in a typical way has autism, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics lets for the sake of argument say that he has autism. I don't believe he was BORN with autism, I was 12 at the time and had my face pressed on the operating room door watching him come into the world. Happy healthy pink and adorable. He looks just like me. He cried like every normal baby. We took him home and loved him like every family does. He did everything that babies do, very normally. And my mom, being the diligent parent that she is, vaccinated him because that's what the medical community told her to do. My mom, by the way, is a masters level psychologist. She works, or may I correct myself and say "worked" with ADHD children. Until my brother was injected with a neurotoxin and "became" autistic. You see, I know he was not born that way and I like to think I'm intelligent enough to realize he didn't
get it from breast milk or drinking water. He spoke but you couldn't understand him. Apraxia. Dyspraxia. "They're all on the spectrum, doesn't matter what they are." He didn't have the typical regression like most kids have, and spin around and tantrum. He just hit a developmental brick wall.
Why does my mother no longer "work" with ADHD children? Because she had to give up the work that she loved so dearly to remove the mercury that irresponsible medical people injected into my brother. And then get him therapy 4 days a week so he could "catch up" on what he missed.
My mom's a strong woman, very intelligent. Smartest person I know. I used to sit in my room doing homework and hear her sobbing like I never heard her sob before. And then I heard her pray. She gave up her life as she knew it, left her practice - her job - to take my beautiful brother to therapy 4 days a week. Every week. She studied and read, and studied some more. She bought supplements and minerals, adjusted his diet. Called people all over the world, sent video tapes to doctors in Australia. Documented every move, every treatment, every therapy. I do suppose she will use this information for her doctoral thesis to the dismay of many. She should have it published in journals all over the world. I doubt medical people will allow that though. My parents paid over $500 a week, every week, for therapy and treatments that the insurance companies did not cover. They paid this out for 3 years, every week, after my mother lost/gave up her income. She then began biomedical interventions and the changes were amazing. Please don't attempt to tell me that all the urine/hair/blood tests that showed mercury literally pouring out of his little body over the past year was there at birth. Because I won't believe you. Three months ago he had more tests. After several months of biomedical interventions, amazingly the mercury is now in very low levels. His developmental pediatrician is amazed at his progress. Other than not so perfect eye contact and the remaining tell tale signs of apraxic speech, he's like most kids his age. "See, I told you he'd grow out of it" the doctor told my mother. Since when does someone "grow out of autism?" An excuse because as a community, the medical people don't want to see fact. Nor do they want to take responsibility for the biggest faux pas of this century.
My girlfriend died of meningitis. She was 17. I got the vaccination and never told my mother until last month because I know how petrified she is. I didn't get the shot because I really thought it would protect me from meningitis. Ironically I got the shot because it saved me a lot of anxiety and many sleepless nights worrying that maybe I was wrong. (and I checked, there is no thimerisol in menactra.)
Professor/Sir I must ask. Does anyone in your family have autism? YET? Your grandchildren? Have they been immunized? Anyone showing signs? Delays in speech, spinning around in circles, toe walking, screaming, not speaking, smearing poop on walls? YET? Well maybe its a bit too late because they say thimerisol's out, but of course it was taken out, but not for any valid reason. Maybe for one of my projects I'll get my hands on a bottle of vaccine and do a little experiment. See if there's mercury or one of it's derivatives in there. Then responsibly report it to the news. My mom just said the last batch of thimerisol vaccine expires this month. So only a few more innocent newborns and their loving families will have a heartbreak that is far beyond explanation.
I have a diagnosis of ADHD. My neurologist used to say I was on the "cusp of Asperger's". I just missed the autism bullet. Had I been shot up with neurotoxin, I feel assured it would have pushed me over the edge, and I too would have had "something" more than what I have today. Something a little more than ADHD and a bit of anxiety. Something like my brother had. And having to treat two children with autism? I feel confident in saying that my family would be flat broke.
We are lucky. My brother is what is considered "recovered." Not all families will be so lucky. He goes to our local elementary school and is not showing signs of any learning disabilities. His IQ has tested in the normal range. He has friends, even a girlfriend. I should mention that she has dyspraxia too. Same age, same pediatrician. Same vaccines more than likely from the same bottle. His best friend has been diagnosed with Asperger's. Not only do they share the same pediatrician, but they share the very same birthday. Coincidence? No matter how you twist the science, that's no coincidence. Three children born within weeks of each other more than likely immunized at the same time from the very same bottle of vaccine.That' s neurotoxin at it's finest. Delivered by a medical doctor lovingly to all his patients. The gift that keeps on giving.
In closing I must thank you for giving me a wake up call. I saw prayer give my mother the strength to heal my brother. And I pray it gives me the strength to stand tall amongst my peers and not adopt thinking and practices that I know are false and political. I hope in my career our paths do cross. I will shake your hand and remind you of this e-conversation. You surely have opened my eyes to a horrid reality.
Respectfully,
CallMe_Dr.Asperger
By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
from Powells from Amazon
---------------------------------
We are talking about the rollback announced last week in regulating mercury pollution. Except, of course, it wasn't announced as a rollback, it was announced as a great step forward. This raises the always timely question, "How dumb do they think we are?" and this time the answer is "profoundly dumb," because it is real hard to get fooled by this one. You look at the numbers and tell me. Mercury is a neurotoxin that damages the brains and nervous systems of fetuses and young children, and probably affects adults as well. It is one of the suspected, though not proven, causes of recent increases in autism, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. It is known to cause learning and attention disabilities and mental retardation.
Eight percent of American women of childbearing age already have mercury in their blood above the EPA's "safe level." Mercury emissions from power plants get into rain clouds and come down in lakes and rivers, there poisoning fish and the people who eat them. Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury, spewing 50 tons a year into the air, about 40 percent of the total. In December 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a finding requiring the maximum amount of technically achievable reduction in mercury. This was expected to result in a 90 percent mercury reduction by 2007. Instead, the new EPA proposals downgrade mercury emissions -- particularly mercury emissions from the utility industry -- by taking it out of the "hazardous pollutant" category. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Simply by implementing the laws already on the books, annual mercury emissions from power plants could be reduced to 5 tons annually by 2007. But Bush's EPA last week introduced a new plan to cap emission at 34 tons a year by 2010 and then 15 tons by 2018. This means hundreds of more tons of mercury discharged over the next 15 years, and that many more children born brain-damaged. I'd really like to know if John Graham, Bush's cost-benefit guru at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, factored in the cost of special ed, health care and caretaking for those kids.
The good news is this will save the utility industry hundreds of millions of dollars -- worth every retarded child, eh? Besides, the coal industry contributed more than $250,000 to Bush's last campaign, and you didn't. John Walke, clean air director of the Natural Resource Defense Council, called it "a grotesque giveaway."
The truth is, the EPA is doing nothing about mercury pollution. The decrease to 34 tons a year is a byproduct of new filtering requirements for nitrogen (causes smog) and sulfur dioxide (causes acid rain), which aren't much to write home about, either. Mike Leavitt, new head of the EPA, defended the proposal as an emissions-trading program, like the one that has reduced acid rain. But the Environmental Defense Fund, which has endorsed the use of market-based, cap-and-trade systems for reducing some pollutants, is appalled by the mercury decision and apparently not comforted by the EPA's decision to change mercury's classification.
One reason cap-and-trade on mercury pollution won't work is it is pretty much site-specific. It hangs around the neighborhood it comes from, so you get dangerous pockets of it, "hot spots" like the ones in South Florida.
In a nicely dovetailed bureaucratic action, the Food and Drug Administration chimed in with a new, softer advisory on mercury-contaminated fish consumption. Consumers Union believes the new FDA advisory is so vague as to which fish are likely to have concentrations of mercury (those at the top of the fish food chain), it is largely useless. Probably the most infamous case of mercury poisoning was in the Japanese village of Minamata. Eugene W. Smith, the great photojournalist, took the picture of the Minamata Madonna, gently holding her hopelessly deformed and retarded child in a steam bath. I once heard a Texas politician being begged to consider doing something "for the children of Texas." He inquired back, "Do the little bastards have a PAC?"
Well, no they don't. But they have mommies. Their mommies can read numbers. Their mommies know the difference between 50 tons a year and 5 tons a year. Mommies know what a campaign contribution is. Mommies can tell the difference between a cynical sack of excrement and safe babies. Mommies can get very angry. You've got to watch those mommies, Karl. Read more in the Molly Ivins archive.
Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Molly Ivins Can't Say That Can She?
FROM THE EDITOR: Mother doesn't tire in mission to make vaccines safer for nation's children
By Jason Sandford
jsandford@CITIZEN-TIMES.com
published: March 8, 2005 6:00 am
Amy Carson is on a mission. Carson wants North Carolina state lawmakers to ban, or drastically reduce, the use of thimerosal in vaccines and the flu shot.
Carson has a 8-year-old son with developmental disabilities she believes were caused after he received routine vaccinations. The culprit thimerosal, an organic mercury compound used in many vaccines to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination.
Debate has been raging for years over the possible connection between thimersosal and a rise in developmental disabilities in children, especially autism. In a report last year, a U.S. government panel concluded decisively in an Institute of Medicine report that childhood vaccinations do not cause autism.
But Carson and many others are not convinced. For every study denying a connection, one can be found to argue there is one.
Carson says she has petitions signed by thousands of North Carolinians, including doctors and other medical professionals, who favor removing thimerosal from vaccines.
Carson and another mother from Raleigh recently met with lawmakers to lobby for passage of the legislation. Carson is passionate about her cause - she has put up billboards in Asheville and Raleigh, and the back of her car is plastered with information about the issue. She has got a Web site, too - www.momsagainstmercury.org.
"This is about getting neurotoxins out of vaccines and flu shots. It's not about whether or not you think thimerosal causes autism," Carson said in a recent interview.
She has a point. If there's any chance it can make us safer, why not do away with it? Carson says similar legislation at the federal level is moving slowly. Two states have passed similar legislation.
Right now, she says, "state-by-state is the way to go."
Amy M. Carson
Moms Against Mercury
828-776-0082
Amy@MomsAgainstMercury.org
http://www.MomsAgainstMercury.org
Click here: ADHD,Ritalin,ADD,ADHD Disorder,behavior,learning,sensory,autism,ritalin drug
Dr. Mary Ann Block, Medical Director
The mother who went to medical school to save her daughter now offers other families the kind of medical information and care she so desperately needed for her own.
http://tinyurl.com/3bag5l
Soldier's Mom Champions Health Screening
By GLENN ADAMS
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 20, 2007; 12:17 AM
AUGUSTA, Maine -- Barbara Damon-Day, the mother of a Maine Army National Guard captain who died of unexplained causes while serving in Afghanistan, has been on a mission of her own. Carrying a thick notebook filled with information about soldiers' health issues _ and pictures of her son, Capt. Patrick Damon _ Damon- Day worked the halls of the state House to line up support for legislation inspired by her son's mysterious death last June.
Barbara Damon-Day, mother of a Maine Army National Guard captain who died of unexplained causes last June while serving in Bagram, Afghanistan, stands in the State House chamber in Augusta, Maine, on May 2, 2007. Damon-Day is lobbying for support for legislation to improve health screening before military personnel are deployed. She wants to create a commission to improve health screening for National Guard personnel, particularly for vaccinations. (
The father of two collapsed after a recreational run in Bagram, his wife, Hildi Halley, said at the time. Damon-Day believes it was related to the extensive series of vaccinations soldiers undergo before deployment, and perhaps how the vaccinations interacted with each other.
She wants to create a commission to improve health screening for National Guard personnel, particularly for vaccinations. Her bill has 155 co-sponsors in the 186-member Legislature, and is widely expected to be approved in the House and Senate. Damon had served as chief of staff for a former House speaker before becoming administrative director for the Public Utilities Commission. The Maine National Guard did not return a call seeking comment. Gov.
John Baldacci, who oversees the Guard, has endorsed the bill. Damon, 41, had taken leave from the utilities commission when he was deployed to Afghanistan in January 2006 with the Maine Guard's 240th Engineer Group.
While the military lists the death as "sudden unexpected," Damon-Day believes it was "prolonged and preventable." "In the military, you are vaccinated, literally, to death," she said. Vaccine Healthcare Center at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington declined to release any information about Damon because of confidentially laws. Damon-Day said the center was investigating his death as possibly vaccine-related.
Her campaign has made waves outside Maine.
In Congress, an amendment calling for better medical screening of military personnel this month was attached to a federal defense spending bill. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, said the amendment was inspired by Damon-Day, whom he credits for elevating the concern over military vaccinations.
The proposal in Augusta would create a nine-member commission to review all preventive health treatment practices and protocols, vaccinations and other medications administered to members of the Maine National Guard. It would also help propose recommendations for safer health care practices and medications to the U.S. military.
"I Just Missed the Autism Bullet"
........written by my oldest son, and sent to Dr. Arthur Caplan of Children's Hospital after his irresponsible post that "mercury is not neurotoxic, even in infants."
The good Doctor never responded. Maybe he should send it to the CDC. My guess is they won't respond either.
S.
Dear Professor, Sir.
Let me start out by introducing myself to you. I am a premedical student at a college right here in the greater Philadelphia Area. I'm 20 years old, and a sophomore. My lifelong dream has been to work in medicine hopefully to become a doctor. When I read an irresponsible entry like this, it makes me think I am putting my efforts in the wrong place.
In her quest to make me an informed student and a well learned individual, my mother forwarded an email with an article that you penned. It was quite disturbing. Please allow me to tell you my family's story. Possibly my candor will make you see things in a different light.
My brother has, or should I say HAD, "something." Since every kid that now doesn't develop in a typical way has autism, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics lets for the sake of argument say that he has autism. I don't believe he was BORN with autism, I was 12 at the time and had my face pressed on the operating room door watching him come into the world. Happy healthy pink and adorable. He looks just like me. He cried like every normal baby. We took him home and loved him like every family does. He did everything that babies do, very normally. And my mom, being the diligent parent that she is, vaccinated him because that's what the medical community told her to do. My mom, by the way, is a masters level psychologist. She works, or may I correct myself and say "worked" with ADHD children. Until my brother was injected with a neurotoxin and "became" autistic. You see, I know he was not born that way and I like to think I'm intelligent enough to realize he didn't
get it from breast milk or drinking water. He spoke but you couldn't understand him. Apraxia. Dyspraxia. "They're all on the spectrum, doesn't matter what they are." He didn't have the typical regression like most kids have, and spin around and tantrum. He just hit a developmental brick wall.
Why does my mother no longer "work" with ADHD children? Because she had to give up the work that she loved so dearly to remove the mercury that irresponsible medical people injected into my brother. And then get him therapy 4 days a week so he could "catch up" on what he missed.
My mom's a strong woman, very intelligent. Smartest person I know. I used to sit in my room doing homework and hear her sobbing like I never heard her sob before. And then I heard her pray. She gave up her life as she knew it, left her practice - her job - to take my beautiful brother to therapy 4 days a week. Every week. She studied and read, and studied some more. She bought supplements and minerals, adjusted his diet. Called people all over the world, sent video tapes to doctors in Australia. Documented every move, every treatment, every therapy. I do suppose she will use this information for her doctoral thesis to the dismay of many. She should have it published in journals all over the world. I doubt medical people will allow that though. My parents paid over $500 a week, every week, for therapy and treatments that the insurance companies did not cover. They paid this out for 3 years, every week, after my mother lost/gave up her income. She then began biomedical interventions and the changes were amazing. Please don't attempt to tell me that all the urine/hair/blood tests that showed mercury literally pouring out of his little body over the past year was there at birth. Because I won't believe you. Three months ago he had more tests. After several months of biomedical interventions, amazingly the mercury is now in very low levels. His developmental pediatrician is amazed at his progress. Other than not so perfect eye contact and the remaining tell tale signs of apraxic speech, he's like most kids his age. "See, I told you he'd grow out of it" the doctor told my mother. Since when does someone "grow out of autism?" An excuse because as a community, the medical people don't want to see fact. Nor do they want to take responsibility for the biggest faux pas of this century.
My girlfriend died of meningitis. She was 17. I got the vaccination and never told my mother until last month because I know how petrified she is. I didn't get the shot because I really thought it would protect me from meningitis. Ironically I got the shot because it saved me a lot of anxiety and many sleepless nights worrying that maybe I was wrong. (and I checked, there is no thimerisol in menactra.)
Professor/Sir I must ask. Does anyone in your family have autism? YET? Your grandchildren? Have they been immunized? Anyone showing signs? Delays in speech, spinning around in circles, toe walking, screaming, not speaking, smearing poop on walls? YET? Well maybe its a bit too late because they say thimerisol's out, but of course it was taken out, but not for any valid reason. Maybe for one of my projects I'll get my hands on a bottle of vaccine and do a little experiment. See if there's mercury or one of it's derivatives in there. Then responsibly report it to the news. My mom just said the last batch of thimerisol vaccine expires this month. So only a few more innocent newborns and their loving families will have a heartbreak that is far beyond explanation.
I have a diagnosis of ADHD. My neurologist used to say I was on the "cusp of Asperger's". I just missed the autism bullet. Had I been shot up with neurotoxin, I feel assured it would have pushed me over the edge, and I too would have had "something" more than what I have today. Something a little more than ADHD and a bit of anxiety. Something like my brother had. And having to treat two children with autism? I feel confident in saying that my family would be flat broke.
We are lucky. My brother is what is considered "recovered." Not all families will be so lucky. He goes to our local elementary school and is not showing signs of any learning disabilities. His IQ has tested in the normal range. He has friends, even a girlfriend. I should mention that she has dyspraxia too. Same age, same pediatrician. Same vaccines more than likely from the same bottle. His best friend has been diagnosed with Asperger's. Not only do they share the same pediatrician, but they share the very same birthday. Coincidence? No matter how you twist the science, that's no coincidence. Three children born within weeks of each other more than likely immunized at the same time from the very same bottle of vaccine.That' s neurotoxin at it's finest. Delivered by a medical doctor lovingly to all his patients. The gift that keeps on giving.
In closing I must thank you for giving me a wake up call. I saw prayer give my mother the strength to heal my brother. And I pray it gives me the strength to stand tall amongst my peers and not adopt thinking and practices that I know are false and political. I hope in my career our paths do cross. I will shake your hand and remind you of this e-conversation. You surely have opened my eyes to a horrid reality.
Respectfully,
CallMe_Dr.Asperger
