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Mitochondra and vaccines – the science

23 Apr

Dozens of autism cases (and perhaps more) currently filed in so-called Vaccine Court will almost certainly be compensated this year. Why? Because a little girl named Hannah Poling with a supposedly rare mitochondrial condition was recently compensated for her own vaccine injuries, including autism and epilepsy.

But I have personally identified at least a dozen (and there are reports of many more) children with cases in the court who meet the exact same medical criteria as Hannah, and whose cases will almost surely be compensated as well — each time with the attendant media fanfare.

My prediction is that, by Election Day, few Americans will still believe there is absolutely no evidence to link vaccines to at least some cases of regressive autism.

Thus speaks David Kirby in the Huffington Post. On the last point I have no doubt that he is correct. In fact, I’ll take it one step further – few citizens of the world, let alone America ill still believe there is absolutely no evidence to link vaccines to at least some cases of regressive autism.

However, I wish, with all due respect to David, like to highlight the differences in the above statement and the subtitle of his famous book. David talks of linking ‘vaccines to at least some cases of regressive autism’.

That’s quite a tentative statement when compared with the strapline ‘Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic’

But that is really a side issue that I simply can’t resist highlighting. The main talking point was – by a strange quirk of irony – also published today as was David’s piece. The irony comes from David’s certainty that the Poling case means something in the greater scheme of vaccines/autism hypotheses. Once again, he makes the claim that her vaccines was a cause of her autism and once again he thinks this has a meaning to the science.

As my regular readers will note I have – with some frustration – been blogging the responses of some Mitochondrial heavy hitters in recent weeks. They don’t want to be unmasked on my blog but perhaps some of them are happier talking to the mainstream media.

In an article in Scientific American, Nikhil Swaminathan (whom I spent a couple of hours chatting to long distance recently) talks to Salvatore DiMauro who is perhaps the ‘heaviest hitter’ of them all when it comes to mitochondrial issues. He says:

the point mutation mentioned in Poling’s case history–published in the Journal of Child Neurology–would imply that both she and her mother carried the genetic variation in all their tissues. So, he says, “you would expect to see the same results” in both the mother and the daughter. But Poling’s mother, Terry, who is an attorney and a registered nurse, is not autistic.

That suggests the genetic defect responsible for Poling’s condition is part of her nuclear DNA, which is separate from the mitochondrial variety, says DiMauro. This means that, scientifically, from the documents presented in the vaccine court, the Polings did not make a case that deserved compensation.

And even more tellingly, John Shoffner who co-authored the case study paper on Hannah Poling had this say:

Shoffner notes that parents and advocates looking to impugn vaccines as triggers for autism—or mitochondrial disease—need direct, not just circumstantial, evidence. “If you were sitting in a waiting room full of people and one person suddenly fell ill or died or something,” he says, “would you arrest the person sitting right next to them?”

And then there is the killer quote:

Jon Poling, says Shoffner, has been “muddying the waters” with some of his comments. “There is no precedent for that type of thinking and no data for that type of thinking,” Shoffner says.

He’s absolutely right of course.

Jon Poling is in severe danger of becoming the new Andrew Wakefield. If I was going to be presumptuous enough to offer him advice I would urge him to take a step back and consider what he is doing. It is clear that he and his wife have been flirting with the vaccine hypotheses for a number of years. And now already his co-authors are disagreeing with him.

Please don’t vaccinate

18 Apr

After all, whats the death of a baby from a vaccine preventable illness huh?

The baby was 9 months old, his birth weight was 8 lbs 5 ounces. At six months he weighed just shy of 20 pounds. Today he weighed 15 pounds – he was a skeleton and he was dying.

Mom had brought him in after treatment by his naturopath had failed. Constant coughing had made it impossible for him to take in adequate nutrition and starvation, coupled with a raging bacterial pneumonia were conspiring to shortly end his very short life.

We worked feverishly. Intubation, IV boluses, major antibiotics, vasopressors. All futile.

At 9:03 pm, after 30 minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation we pronounced him dead.

This boy had pertussis. His mother choose not to vaccinate him. I won’t enter that debate. Anyone who has ever watched a child die or become permanently disabled from a preventable illness supports vaccination.

A naturopath a mother who elected not to vaccinate and decreasing herd immunity – what could go wrong there? Lets hope there’s no other people as *fucking stupid* as to go around blathering about not vaccinating, using naturopaths instead of doctors and insinuating that vaccine preventable diseases are nothing and vastly preferable to something like…oh I dunno….autism for example.

Vaccines = bad, vitamin supplements = good

17 Apr

A fascinating mini-storm has been quietly bubbling away in the UK over the last couple of months concerning the vitamin and mineral supplement industry. It has a tie in to autism these days as one of the features of the more extreme forms of biomed is an increase – sometime to megadose levels – of vitamin and mineral supplements.

Here’s a video from BBC News yesterday. And if you can’t get the video, here’s the online report.

A review of 67 studies found “no convincing evidence” that antioxidant supplements cut the risk of dying.

Scientists at Copenhagen University said vitamins A and E could interfere with the body’s natural defences.

“Even more, beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E seem to increase mortality,” according to the review by the respected Cochrane Collaboration.

The report reported a neutral finding for Vitamin C but it already established that mega-doses of Vitamin C:

….can cause nausea, diarrhea, kidney stones and inflammation of the stomach lining (gastritis).

These vitamins and minerals are routinely recommended by extreme biomed practitioners for autistic children. There is no scientific evidence of any kind that they do anything to alleviate any autistic symptoms.

I blogged yesterday about a paper called ‘Trusting blindly can be the biggest risk of all’: organised resistance to childhood vaccination in the UK which whilst fascinating in its own right, makes mention of attitudes towards vaccines as risks ‘of the unknown’.

The Vaccine Critical groups rely heavily on a discourse of unknowns in order to challenge and undermine the rationality of vaccination. For example, a majority of the groups make the argument that we do not know the effects of vaccination because of insufficient safety trials, both pre- and post-licence.

And yet, these same groups are more than happy to ply themselves and their children with supplements that have also had little to no safety trials.

There is a huge cognitive dissonance at work here that is worth a sociological study in its own right. Why is it OK to administer some things with no trials and not others? Another idea that anti-vaccine groups tend to espouse is the idea that because ‘we’re all different’ we need to tailor what we’re given to us individually.

We’ve got to actually make sure that what we’re giving is right for the individual child. The Department of Health are not good at determining whether a child shouldn’t have something. They treat them all as exactly the same (JABS).

And yet, once again, we seem to have non-individualised plans (such as the so called Yasko diet, or the GFCF diet or the recommendation to take huge doses of mineral supplements) when it comes to biomed. Why is it OK for one set of treatments and not others?

I think there is more going on here than the authors of the ‘Trusting blindly…’ paper realise. I genuinely believe that for some people it really is a pathological hatred of vaccines . There is no rhyme or reason for it but I’m sure it is there.

An Open Letter To The Poling’s

12 Apr

Dear Poling family,

Let me first start by saying that your little girl is beautiful. I am father to two girls (as well as one boy, young man now actually) so I know how great it is to have such wonderful little people around.

I read Jon Poling’s commentary in the AJC and I have to say that I was very disappointed by the level of accuracy in the piece. For example, he says:

On Nov. 9, 2007, HHS medical experts conceded through the Department of Justice that Hannah’s autism was triggered by nine childhood vaccinations administered when she was 19 months of age…

Now I have taken a keen interest in your families case since it became clear what the situation was. I _think_ I have read most of the newspaper reports available online as well as (more importantly) the HHS document itself and (even more importantly) the case study co-authored by Andrew Zimmerman and Jon Poling.

Nowhere, I repeat, nowhere, have I seen anyone from either the HHS, CDC, US Government, or even the Zimmerman/Poling case study say that ‘Hannah’s autism was triggered by nine childhood vaccinations’.

I have seen David Kirby refer to this several times. I have heard lots of people refer to these statements as if they are true and now I hear you doing it too.

But where is this concession?

In what legal, scientific or medical document does it state unequivocally that ‘Hannah’s autism was triggered by nine childhood vaccinations’?

You are a family on the cusp of storm. You need to take more care with your statements. People all over the world are listening. The *fact* as of right now is that no one has conceded ‘Hannah’s autism was triggered by nine childhood vaccinations’. Simply stating it as if it were true does not make it true.

The HHS expert documents that led to this concession and accompanying court documents remain sealed, though our family has already permitted release of Hannah’s records to those representing the almost 5, 000 other autistic children awaiting their day in vaccine court.

Now this confuses me on two levels. Firstly, Special Masters have already said that:

….in the case that is the subject of the media reports, if the parties who supplied documents and information in the case provide their written consent, we may then be able to appropriately disclose documents in the case.

It sounds to me like Dr Poling is trying to turn something around onto the HHS without justification. Maybe your legal team haven’t told you about this news. I understand they’re very busy of late.

The second part of Dr Poling’s statement that confuses me is the allusion to the records being released ‘to those representing the almost 5, 000 other autistic children’.

I thought that you wanted your documents to be made entirely public? Are you now saying you only want the legal teams of the other omnibus lawyers to have access to them?

I would also like to draw your attention to the email I sent to Terry Poling on March 5th asking why the Poling family had not cleared Dr Andrew Zimmerman from speaking publicly about the case. Does the Poling fmaily have any intention of lifting that embargo any time soon?

Dr Poling goes on:

Emerging evidence suggests that mitochondrial dysfunction may not be rare at all among children with autism. In the only population-based study of its kind, Portuguese researchers confirmed that at least 7.2 percent, and perhaps as many as 20 percent, of autistic children exhibit mitochondrial dysfunction. While we do not yet know a precise U.S. rate, 7.2 percent to 20 percent of children does not qualify as “rare.” In fact, mitochondrial dysfunction may be the most common medical condition associated with autism.

This is very disingenuous Dr Poling. I am not sure if you are purposefully distorting the truth or simply not as knowledgeable as you think. In point of fact the figure of 7.2% is from a 2005 study ‘Mitochondrial dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders: a population-based study‘. This is _not_ (as you state) ‘the only population-based study of its kind’. It was in fact a precursor to a _second_ follow up study by the same lead researcher correcting his own data.

This second study (published October 2007) is called ‘Epidemiology of autism spectrum disorder in Portugal: prevalence, clinical characterization, and medical conditions’.

This study declares a 4.1% figure. It is disingenuous in the extreme to refer to old science when newer, more accurate science exists on the subject (and by the same author no less!).

Further, as far as I can tell, the figure of 20% has but one source – a non published summary for attendees of a 2003 LADDERS conference in Boston, USA. Therefore it has not been subject to any kind of peer review. That’s not to say the figure is wrong, merely that it hasn’t been verified or undergone any kind of the usual scientific checks and balances a published piece of work must undertake to ensure quality. This is not ’emerging science’ Dr Poling. Its a set of program notes.

Further, as I understand it from talking to people involved in all three of these different items, the percentages you talk about are expressed percentages _of regressive autism only_ . Now I might have that wrong but I’m pretty sure that’s what was communicated to me.

Taking this into account, when Dr Poling states that:

In fact, mitochondrial dysfunction may be the most common medical condition associated with autism..

and he goes on to suggest population numbers between 10,000 (1%) , 72,000 (7.2%) and 200,000 (20%) of the autistic population he estimates at one million in the US, he is incorrect.

However, if I have understood what is said to me then we need to look at regressive autism numbers only, which are estimated to account for 25%-30% of autistic people. Therefore we are looking at not 7.2% or 20% (one is incorrect, one is not scientifically justified) of one million. We are actually looking at 4.1% (the only scientifically valid number) of between 25 – 30% of one million. Lets take the upper figure of 30%. This gives us a population of 300,000 for regressive autism. Applying the 4.1% estimate we can see that – at best and only if this data is all correct – mitochondrial autism may affect about 13,000 autistic people – 1.3%. If we took the lower range of 25% for regressive autism, we barely get over 1% (10,250).

Secondly, it should be noted that approximately 40% of autism can be accounted for genetically. This already makes it the single largest established cause(s).

Dr Poling goes on to say:

Today there is no doubt that mitochondrial dysfunction represents a distinct autism subpopulation biological marker.

This is true. However, prefacing this sentence with the word ‘today’ gives the highly misleading impression that autism has been associated with mitochondrial disorders and/or dysfunctions only since Hannah Poling came into out collective conciousness. This is far from the case. I can find instances in the scientific literature going back to 1986, over 20 years ago discussing mitochondria and autism and a PubMed search for ‘mitochondrial autism’ yields 34 quality papers published over a 20 year period. This is hardly a new thing Dr Poling.

As a neurologist, I have cared for those afflicted with SSPE (a rare but dreaded neurological complication of measles), paralytic polio and tetanus. If these serious vaccine-preventable diseases again become commonplace, the fault will rest solely on the shoulders of public health leaders and policymakers who have failed to heed the writing on the wall (scribbled by my 9-year old daughter).

I fear that this is projection. You are very close to pushing an anti-vaccine agenda Dr Poling and indeed Terry Poling was active an the Yahoo Group ‘Recovered Kids’ from at least Summer 2001 where she says things like:

Really, the only way to obliterate a disease is to vaccinate everybody – or at least so “they” say

Sept 2001.

Had I told the hospital staff she was autistic they would not have believed me. The same held true for a (sic) educational consultant who came to evaluate hannah the day before the fever started. She said in her report she saw absolutely no autistic behaviors.

Nov 2001.

She has mitochondrial disease which causes her autism.

March 2004.

I do know docs that speak for drug companies but they cover all the meds for a particular disease in their talks with other docs. If they do not agree that the drug is best for certain conditions on the whole they say so.

Feb 2003.

…it [autism] is a DSM set of symptoms. When the symptoms disappear you cannot say the child still has autism…..

Oct 2001.

So Dr Poling when you try to lay the blame for vaccine preventable injuries increasing at the foot of those agencies assigned to try and stop them reappearing I think that is farcical. To me it is clear that the main responsibility lies with those who shun what are by and large safe safe vaccines on the strength of a hypothesis that is nowhere _close_ to scientific truth. I urge you to read this article and the comments left by readers. Its clear who they see as responsible. For example:

Don’t want to vaccinate your kids? Fine with me. Just don’t send them to school where they then put my kids at risk because of your decision.

You are deluding yourself if you think you can turn responsibility for shunning vaccines back on health agencies Dr Poling.

All in all Dr and nurse Poling I think that your public use of misinformation and erroneous science to make your point will serve you no good in the long run. I also continue to be puzzled by your refusal to ‘ungag’ Andrew Zimmerman. I hope you can start to realise that what has ‘happened’ to Hannah is far from remarkable. Best wishes from one autism parent to another.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

8 Apr

I got email from Ginger Taylor today. She’d read one of my posts on the ongoing Poling/HHS scenario.

I wanted to make sure you had see this from the VICP table.

It is part of the description of what vaccine induced encephalopathy is:

(1) A significant change in mental status that is not medication related; specifically a confusional state, or a delirium, or a psychosis;
(2) A significantly decreased level of consciousness, which is independent of a seizure and cannot be attributed to the effects of medication; and
(3) A seizure associated with loss of consciousness.

(D) A “significantly decreased level of consciousness” is indicated by the presence of at least one of the following clinical signs for at least 24 hours or greater (see paragraphs (2)(I)(A) and (2)(I)(B) of this section for applicable timeframes):

(1) Decreased or absent response to environment (responds, if at all, only to loud voice or painful stimuli);
(2) Decreased or absent eye contact (does not fix gaze upon family members or other individuals); or
(3) Inconsistent or absent responses to external stimuli (does not recognize familiar people or things).

As a matter of fact, I _had_ seen the table. Why Ginger wanted me to read it again I’m not sure. It doesn’t add anything new to the list of symptoms that both the HHS document and the Case Report document and thus we’re still no nearer a diagnosis of autism.

Anyway, after that she carried on:

That is an exact description of what most of us observed in our children when they regressed. When I went into my peds office with my son hanging limp in my arms and not responding to external stimuli, with absent eye contact, and dramatic change in mental status and a very marked decreased level of consciousness, and told him it all started after his vaccines, he should have diagnosed him with encephalopathy. A medical condition, that my medical doctor was charged with diagnosing.

But pediatricians are not taught to look for vaccine injury. Only autism. Because no one is responsible for autism. So instead he sent him to a speech therapist and a psychologist that diagnosed him under a DSM IV code of autism. He passed the buck because if he had done his diagnostic job correctly, he would have indited himself and the vaccine program.

And my doctor was a good doctor. He was not a shlub.

He would’ve indicted the vaccine program for what? Indicating a known vaccine injury was present? Huh?

This to me is the crux of the title of my post – meet the old boss, same as the old boss. People such as Ginger are not interested in _autism_ . They are not interested in being advocates for _autism_ . What they want is either a recognition that their docs screwed up and diagnosed their kids with the wrong thing (this is fine by me. The sooner these people are off the autism communities back the better) or for autism itself to be redefined to meet their own children’s symptoms. This is not fine with me.

This is nothing new. Way back in 2001, Bernard et al published Autism: A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning which attempted the same ‘trick’ as is being attempted here – redefine autism to meet your own beliefs rather than see if what you believe fits the already established facts. As we have all been witness to, time has not been kind to the thiomersal hypotheses. Neither has it been kind to the MMR hypotheses.

Anyway, Ginger carried on:

Things are changing VERY quickly Kevin. The atmosphere here is much different than from what i understand is happening in the UK. Major networks are not ready to report on it yet, but they are listening to us now. Calling and asking questions even. Main stream docs were talking to me about integrating DAN methods into their practices before the AAP’s announcement last week. All of the sudden parents are getting their phone calls returned very quickly from sources that have blown them off for a long time. And I can’t keep up with my email.

I thought this would be a decade or more of fighting all this, but it looks to be more like the cascade of events when the Soviet Union fell. It is gaining speed. The Polings were the first major crack in the dam and now huge chunks are coming out faster and faster.

Kirby was right, the debate is over.

I had a quick grin at the sheer arrogance of comparing the autism/vaccine hypotheses to the collapse of communism in the old Soviet block but really, this again is nothing new. If I had a pound for every time someone had posted on here that ‘this is it, its all over’ I’d be richer by a fair few pounds. Of course, they always come to nothing.

The devil is in the details. And in the science. Mito connections to autism are nothing new. Attempts to ‘talk up’ and muddy the wide picture whilst failing to look at the details are nothing new. The media talking to people is hardly anything new (I had an interview myself recently and have had several in the past). Attempting to twist autism away from what is already known about it into something new to make it fit into yet another set of beliefs is not new.

I’ll say it again as I have before. Its a very exciting time for the media and bloggers as we have lots of cool stuff to talk about. However, none of that stuff is new science. And when it comes to vaccines causing autism that’s what is needed. Science.

David Kirby is right (and wrong)

6 Apr

David Kirby has an excellent title for his blog post: ‘CDC Has Lost Control of the Autism Argument’.

I happen to to think he is 100% gold-plated correct. In fact I would go even further than that – the CDC, the FDA and the AAP have become, on this issue, little short of a laughing stock. They have bungled, mismanaged, failed to address and not known how to retort at just above every step of the process.

Controversially perhaps I think a lot of it has to do with the bureaucratic nature of these monoliths – they need to reform their way of working. They’re slow and outdated in their PR and media handling. That is not to say that the people working within these systems are terrible useless people – clearly they are not – but they operate within a system that cannot seem to effectively communicate the scientific truth behind the various vaccine hypotheses.

And now we truly _do_ have various vaccine hypotheses. Once it was ‘….nothing more than mercury poisoning.’. Then it was the MMR too. Then it was a combination of both. Then it wasn’t _just_ mercury in vaccines it was all the other ingredients too.

Now we have another twist: the mito/autism/vaccine hypothesis which I have no doubt has sent scores of parents all over the Western world forking out for yet another set of tests and will no doubt prompt yet another set of questionable treatments repackaged and rebranded for autism.

I think its worth while remembering at this point that, despite the furore over the last few weeks, one thing has not changed: *the science* .

All the talk shows and Larry King appearances and cloak and dagger leaked reports are all very exciting and good blogger fodder for people like me and David but the bottom line is this: no new science has been added to the equation regarding any vaccine/autism hypothesis. So, when I read the Larry King transcript and saw David snapping ‘the debate is over!’ I raised an eyebrow as I couldn’t recall any new science being brought along that night (or any other night) that had caused the debate to be over.

Anyway, back to David’s HuffPo entry. Now, I’ve swapped very courteous emails with David Kirby and whilst I have also posted quite angrily about him too I think he cares about people. Which is why when I read a paragraph such as the following I get perplexed. Here’s David:

A recent government decision to award nine-year-old Hannah Poling taxpayer dollars for her multiple vaccine-induced autism, has left parents anxious and alarmed….

A recent government decision. Hmm. Lets see what the Special Masters who are overseeing the Autism Omnibus (of whom Hannah Polings case was until recently a part of) said:

….reports have erroneously stated that the Office of the Special Masters has recently issued a “decision,” “opinion,” or “ruling” concerning the issue of whether a Vaccine Act claimant’s autism symptoms were caused by one or more vaccinations. The OSM has not issued any such decision, ruling or opinion.

No decision.

And David Kirby also refers to Hannah Poling’s ‘multiple vaccine-induced autism’. Lets see what the OSM says:

this court has issued no decision on the issue of vaccine causation of autism

But maybe by ‘government’ David means the HHS? Not the courts? If thats so, can David – or anyone else – point out to me where in any HHS statement they note that have decided to award Hannah Poling money for ‘vaccine-induced autism’?

Or maybe David means someone else when he refers to ‘government’?

And lets also be clear. Not only has the OSM _nor_ the HHS referred to ‘vaccine-induced autism’, neither has any aspect of the medical literature written about Hannah Poling (or any other claimant).

So yes, I find David’s over-exuberance perplexing on occasion. I am also concerned that paragraphs such as the above are muddying waters that need to be crystal clear right now. We serve no one by misleading them either intentionally or not.

Kathleen Seidel

5 Apr

There’s no point at all in my rehashing what has happened to Kathleen. We all know. The blogging communities response has been swift and fierce – rightly so. I don’t imagine the lawyer in question has made many friends in his profession over the last couple of days.

I wanted to write a blistering, thundering post too because, believe me, that’s how I felt after reading the subpoena Kathleen received. I consider her a friend and ally of a good many years now – as I do Dave. They both do what they do because they care. They care about their own autistic children and they care about all of our autistic children and they do what is right – they question what is suspicious and they support what is worthwhile.

But I can’t write a blistering, thundering post. The last few weeks have been something of an education for me on how the world works. I am even having to be incredibly careful about how I write this post, a tribute to the tenacity of my friend Kathleen.

Where my American friends can rest easy in the knowledge that their law supports them in their right to speak freely, mine does not. Where Kathleen can put together such an excellent response, I – and all other British bloggers – cannot. Unless we are very rich, or insured or employed by a paper that is insured, we are totally stymied.

Please rest assured that I have very recent knowledge of this process. To the extent that whilst I can say that I have first hand knowledge I cannot discuss it, I cannot (and will not) name names. I don’t like this but I have no option. This is modern Britain. Bloggers can be silenced. I hope that Kathleen is never, ever silenced. The world needs truth and integrity.

Jenny McCarthy on Larry King Live

3 Apr

Well, she’s just an actress…and unfortunately, we place too much value on the opinions of actors in this country.

~ Erik Nanstiel, Feb 2006

Now Erik was discussing Sigourney Weaver (the future Mrs Leitch if she ever stops stalking me) and her role in Snowcake but I thought it might serve as an interesting comparison for how another actress, Jenny McCarthy, is currently viewed.

In point of fact, I entirely agree with Erik, we _do_ place far too much importance on what acctresses and actors say. For example, on Larry King Live last night jenny McCarthy spoke quite a lot but didn’t actually _say_ much at all.

For example:

It’s a global epidemic…

Really? Where is the science that supports that position? Because there is an _awful_ lot of evidence that entirely refutes it.

I went online and I found a community called Defeat Autism Now……I believed enough — even though my pediatrician at the time said it’s all bull — and followed this treatment and my son got better

Yeah, that and all the ABA, and the Indigo/Crystal beliefs:

The day I found out I was an adult Indigo will stay with me forever. I was walking hand in hand with my son down a Los Angeles street when this women approached me and said, “You’re an Indigo and your son is a Crystal.” I immediately replied, “Yes!” and the woman smiled at me and walked away. I stood there for a moment, because I had no idea what the heck an Indigo and Crystal was, but I seemed so sure of it when I had blurted out “Yes!” After doing some of my own research on the word Indigo, I realized not only was I an early Indigo but my son was in fact a Crystal child.

A what?

The Indigo child concept was first publicized in 1999 by the book The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived, written by the husband-and-wife team of Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. Carroll insists that the concept was obtained via conversations with a spiritual entity known as Kryon.

Wikipedia

Except, the website that carries all her beliefs has been quietly vanished. If you want to find this info now, you have to look in Google Cache.

Onwards,

I’m not, nor is the autism community, anti-vaccine. We’re anti-toxin and we’re anti-schedule.

The autism community? Who _is_ this woman with the ego to think she speaks for the entire autism community? Good grief. And as for the section of the community she speaks for not being anti-vaccine? Try these on Jenny:

!http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/images/eoh/PowerOfTruthRallySign.jpg!
!http://www.autismrally.com/IMG_5365.jpg!
!http://www.autismrally.com/IMG_5426.jpg!

All taken from the sort of rally you’re promoting later on in the show.


JM:

And isn’t it ironic, in 1983 there was 10 shots and now there’s 36 and the rise of autism happened at the same time?

Ironic like this?

No, its not ironic. Its another example of correlation not implying causation – you can see another graphic example on the ‘canards’ page of this very website.

JM:

I believe that parents’ anecdotal information is science-based information

Yeah. Its not.

JM:

environmental toxins play a role. Viruses play a role. Those are all triggers. But vaccines play the largest role right now

No evidence of any kind was presented to back this up. Later on McCarthy sneered at the AAP for talking about studies that weren’t ‘independent’ (what she meant by that is anyone’s guess) but in short succession she said that parental anecdote was good science and that vaccines play ‘the largest’ role in causing autism.

David Kirby was sitting right next to McCarthy and yet neither of them mentioned his HuffPo entry in which said:

And, if 20% of autism cases are mito related, and 6% of those cases regressed because of vaccines, that would mean that at least 1% of all autism cases were vaccine related.

1%.

Lets compare that to the approximately 40% already genetically accounted for. I don’t think its difficult to process which is the larger number.

And after that Dear Reader I simply can’t carry on ploughing through the rest of McCarthy’s contributions. They range from the offensive to the inane.

But here’s an offer for Ms McCarthy – and David, I know you’re a reader so feel free to pass this on:

Come and pay my family and me a visit Ms McCarthy. Just you and maybe your son – no media, no journos, no cameras, no Hollywood bullshit. You and I can have a proper well mannered debate whilst our kids play and see if we still feel the same afterwards. What about it? Got the balls?

Paul Offit causes a stir

1 Apr

On 31st March, Dr Paul Offit wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled Inoculated Against Facts in which he discussed the recent Poling situation.

In response to this, David Kirby wrote a blistering response entitled Lies My New York Times Told Me (Or, Why Trust a Doctor Who Says 10,000 Shots Are Safe?).

Offit says:

An expert who testified in court on the Polings’ behalf claimed that the five vaccines had stressed Hannah’s already weakened cells, worsening her disorder. Without holding a hearing on the matter, the court conceded that the claim was biologically plausible.

To which Kirby responded:

no one “testified in court” in this case, as confusingly stated by Dr. Offit, who also writes that, “Without holding a hearing… the court conceded.”

My take on what Offit said was that any document submitted as part of a legal process must, by definition, form part of a courts records and thus be considered testimony. I think there’s a difference between ‘heard in court’ (heard as part of a legal proceeding) and ‘a hearing’ (discussed in open court)

Kirby also says:

It was a medical concession, not a legal decision. Dr. Offit and the New York Times know this.

Its also (as I understand it) part of the process that the Special Master could’ve refused to accept the so-called concession. This makes the fact they did a legal decision. The Poling’s could’ve elected to have their daughters case heard in a civil court (I think) in which case they really would’ve been held to a medical/scientific standard of proof. They chose not to do so.

Kirby goes on:

This statement, too, is misleading: “Even five vaccines at once would not place an unusually high burden on a child’s immune system.”……Hannah received five shots, but nine vaccines.

Which, to be fair to Dr Offit is exactly what he said:

In 2000, when Hannah was 19 months old, she received five shots against nine infectious diseases.

I think this is merely a semantic misunderstanding as to what constitutes ‘one’ vaccine.

Kirby goes on:

More importantly, Dr. Offit’s statement contradicts the second HHS concession (for epilepsy) in the Poling case, to wit:

The cause for autistic encephalopathy in Hannah “was underlying mitochondrial dysfunction, exacerbated by vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation that exceeded metabolic reserves.”

Now, lets be honest – nobody aside from David Kirby has actually _seen_ this second HHS ‘concession’. I can’t help but note that the part that Mr Kirby quotes from this second report does not contain the phrase ‘autistic encephalopathy’ (and what exactly _is_ ‘autistic encephalopathy’?). I also think its a little unfair to expect Dr Offit to be a mind reader and know what an unreleased report says.

I further think that in a piece that asks why we should just trust, Mr Kirby (with all due respect to him) asking us to do the exact same thing is a little incongruous.

We really need this issue sorted out by either releasing this document that directly ties a diagnosis of autism _directly_ to vaccines, or by applying the same rules to everyone.

Mr Kirby then goes on to challenge Dr Offits most (in)famous statement:

“Our analysis shows that infants have the theoretical capacity to respond to about 10,000 vaccines at once”

This is slightly disingenuous as this really has no bearing whatsoever on the Poling case. Its also – as stated by Dr Offit – a _theoretical_ scenario. No one is seriously suggesting any infant has 10,000 shots. The paper from Dr Offit used this calculation to respond to the idea that vaccines can overwhelm the immune system.

And lets be clear. This is science. Good science. To the best of my knowledge no-one has refuted it in any reputable journal. If anyone has an issue with the overall idea (vaccines not overwhelming the immune system) or the maths involved, then they should submit it to a reputable journal for peer review.

However, one of the most disturbing aspects of this turn of events is the response to Dr Offit’s piece on the EoH Yahoo Group. I should note that David Kirby has _no control or ownership of this group_ before I continue.

Within a few hours of Dr Offit’s piece being published, Ginger Taylor took it upon herself to send Dr Offit’s phone number to the EoH group at large, as part of an email conversation she had had with Dr Offit. Thus drew a number of responses from her list mates such as:

Oh no….. His phone number on EOH? Lord help him!

Quite. Although the group moderator was quick to ask people not to harass Dr Offit, he stopped short of deleting this very ill-considered post.

Lets not forget that Dr Offit (and his children) have been the subject of severe harassment from those who believe in an autism/vaccine hypothesis:

….as Paul Offit, a vaccine expert who served on the committee, tried to make his way through the crowd, one of the protestors screamed at him through a megaphone: “The devil—it’s the devil!” One protester held a sign that read “TERRORIST” with a photo of Offit’s face. Just before Offit reached the door, a man dressed in a prison uniform grabbed Offit’s jacket. “It was harrowing,” Offit recalls.

….

He has since received hundreds of malicious and threatening emails, letters and phone calls accusing him of poisoning children and “selling out” to pharmaceutical companies. One phone caller listed the names of Offit’s two young children and the name of their school. One email contained a death threat—”I will hang you by your neck until you’re dead”—that Offit reported to federal investigators.

Knowing this, why Taylor saw fit to do this at all is puzzling. However, when she was asked how she felt about communicating with Dr Offit, she also saw fit to comment:

The whole thing actually creeped me out and I just dropped it.

My personal opinion is that a considered reply from Dr Offit to Taylor which included a friendly invitation to contact him again is not creepy at all. What _is_ creepy (to me) is publishing the phone number of a man who has been subject to vicious abuse – as have his children. To me, it is irresponsible in the extreme.

The Next Big Autism Bomb?

28 Mar

Over on the Huffington Post, David Kirby has posted about The Next Big Autism Bomb. Its a very long post so take a sammich.

The gist (with apologies to Mr Kirby) of it is that there was a conference call to discuss the autism/mito issues:

On Tuesday, March 11, a conference call was held between vaccine safety officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, several leading experts in vaccine safety research, and executives from America’s Health Insurance Plans, (the HMO trade association) to discuss childhood mitochondrial dysfunction and its potential link to autism and vaccines.

The purpose of the call was:

“We need to find out if there is credible evidence, theoretically, to support the idea that childhood mitochondrial dysfunction might regress into autism,” one of the callers reportedly told participants.

To that end, Mr Kirby mentions four studies throughout the rest of his piece. Three are accessible but the fourth is a total mystery. This is unfortunate as it is this fourth one which the majority of his blog post relies upon for its conclusions.

The first three are discussing what the prevalence of mito _within_ autism might be. Kirby states:

CDC officials were made aware of a Portuguese study, published last October, which reported that 7.2% of children with autism had confirmed mitochondrial disorders. The authors also noted that, “a diversity of associated medical conditions was documented in 20%, with an unexpectedly high rate of mitochondrial respiratory chain disorders.”

There is a slight point of confusion to clear up here. The figure of 7.2% is from a 2005 study ‘Mitochondrial dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders: a population-based study‘.

The study (by the same author) that Kirby mentions as being published last October is ‘Epidemiology of autism spectrum disorder in Portugal: prevalence, clinical
characterization, and medical conditions‘ declares a 4.1% figure.

The reason for this is that the lead author re-examined his data from the 2005 study and adjusted it downwards in the 2007 study. So Kirby is not correct to state that the authors believe that the rate is 7.2%. The latest figure from these authors is 4.1%.

The third study that discusses prevalence is referenced by Kirby as:

They also know that some reports estimate the rate of mitochondrial dysfunction in autism to be 20% or more. And the rate among children with the regressive sub-type of autism is likely higher still.

Kirby links to a web page that is the web interface to a mail list.

Upon searching for this paper I couldn’t find it anywhere. It is not in PubMed or Google Scholar and in fact I can only find three references to it online at all.

It since transpires that this paper is not in fact a paper at all and has not been published anywhere. It is in fact a summary for attendees of a 2003 LADDERS conference in Boston, USA. Therefore it has not been subject to any kind of peer review. That’s not to say the figure is wrong, merely that it hasn’t been verified or undergone any kind of the usual scientific checks and balances a published piece of work must undertake to ensure quality.

Its also been explained to me that the percentage of “mitochondrial autism” reported by any group will vary with the percentage of regressive autism in their ASD population. So it is not true that the summary states a differential between autism and regressive autism. Rather that “mitochondrial autism” exists _within_ regressive autism.

And so we move on to the fourth study.

One doctor reported his findings from a five-year study of children with autism, who also showed clinical markers for impaired cellular energy, due to mild dysfunction of their mitochondria.

The biochemistry of 30 children was studied intensively, and in each case, the results showed the same abnormalities as those found in Hannah Poling, participants said. Each child had moderate elevations or imbalances in the exact same amino acids and liver enzymes as Hannah Poling.

All thirty children also displayed normal, healthy development until about 18-24 months of age, when they quickly regressed into clinically diagnosed autism (and not merely “features of autism”), following some type of unusual trigger, or stress, placed on their immune system.

……….

But what causes the stress? That is a very big question.

Apparently, in only two of the 30 cases, or 6%, could the regression be traced directly and temporally to immunizations, and one of them was Hannah Poling. In the other cases, there was reportedly some type of documented, fever-inducing viral infection that occurred within seven days of the onset of brain injury symptoms.

Mr Kirby makes this study the raison d’etre of the rest of his post.

I have some major concerns about this. Who is this doctor? What is this study? Where is it published? Where can we _read for ourselves_ what this study says? Without wishing to question the honesty with which Mr Kirby is posting, its obvious that – even in this post as I discuss above – errors and misinterpretations have crept in.

Lets be honest here. These are some *major* claims being made. Firstly that all 30 kids in the study regressed into clinically diagnosed autism as opposed to features of autism. All 30? That’s incredible.

Secondly that 6% of the regressions into clinically diagnosed autism are traced directly from immunisations. That’s big. That is about as big as it gets. I would really like to see this study.

I have asked (twice) in the comments section of Mr Kirby’s post to be pointed to this study. So far, no answer has been forthcoming from anybody.

However. I note that Mr Kirby states that one of the 6% is Hannah Poling. If this is so then it is not true to say that:

the…[autistic]…regression…[can]… be traced directly and temporally to immunizations

(insertions mine for clarity).

As I’ve discussed before, none of the listed symptoms attributed to immunisations can accumulate to a diagnosis of autism. So unless we can actually see this study, know who the author, see what checks and balances this paper has undergone, we’re in a bit of a limbo.

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