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Vaccines, Autism and the Concession

1 Mar

1) Concession Report (This document has been removed due to the possibility of it being illegally obtained). If people really wish to read the document for themselves it can be founf here, at the Huffington post
2) Zimmerman Case Study

When David Kirby wrote his piece in the Huffington Post, I’ll admit I read it with my jaw on my chest. Here was evidence I was wrong. I emailed David Kirby to get the whole report from him and he was kind enough to provide not only a PDF version but a plain text version as well.

This enabled me to contact a few people that I know are medical people and/or scientists and/or closely connected to this case. For example I contacted Dr Zimmerman and learned that it was not possible for him to offer any sort of opinion on this case due to the fact that his patients parents had not allowed him to discuss his thoughts and opinions with anyone except the court. I was told however that ‘the comments on your site with questions raised and loopholes pointed out about the way others are interpreting the facts of the situation, are right on track.’

It is clear to me then that there is some wordsmithing going on – either deliberately or unintentionally. What we need to do is look closely at the wording of two documents. The concession report and the case study performed by Dr Zimmerman.

The claim by David Kirby et al is, in essence, that the US Government have conceded that vaccines cause autism in this one case. Lets look at the so-called concession report in relation to what it says about autism.

Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, evaluated CHILD……on February 8, 2001. Dr. Zimmerman reported that after CHILD’s immunizations of July 19, 2000, an “encephalopathy progressed to persistent loss of previously acquired language, eye contact, and relatedness.” He noted a disruption in CHILD’s sleep patterns, persistent screaming and arching, the development of pica to foreign objects, and loose stools. Id. Dr. Zimmerman observed that CHILD watched the fluorescent lights repeatedly during the examination and would not make eye contact. He diagnosed CHILD with “regressive encephalopathy with features consistent with an autistic spectrum disorder, following normal development.”

Features consistent with. He did not diagnose her with autism. What were these features?

1) encephalopathy progressed to persistent loss of previously acquired language,
2) eye contact,
3) relatedness
4) disruption in CHILD’s sleep patterns,
5) persistent screaming
6) arching,
7) the development of pica to foreign objects,
8) loose stools
9) CHILD watched the fluorescent lights repeatedly during the examination
10) would not make eye contact

Of these ten, one is repeated (eye contact issues) so I make nine clear separate symptoms there. Which of these appear in the DSM (IV)? Green equal matches, red equal misses.

1) Loss of previously acquired language
2) Eye Contact
3) Relatedness
4) disruption in CHILD’s sleep patterns,
5) Persistent screaming
6) Arching
7) the development of pica to foreign objects,
8) loose stools
9) CHILD watched the fluorescent lights repeatedly during the examination

To meet the DSM(IV) criteria a person must meet no less than 6 of the criteria. So, as described perfectly exactly by the Dr Zimmerman in the concession report, this child has features consistent with an ASD. But its clear she does not meet the criteria for autism.

Later on,

CHILD was evaluated by Alice Kau and Kelley Duff, on May 16, 2001, at CARDS. The clinicians concluded that CHILD was developmentally delayed and demonstrated features of autistic disorder.

Almost the exact same phrasing. Consistent with. But no one has said thus far that the child has been diagnosed with an ASD.

The concession report concludes with:

the vaccinations CHILD received on July 19, 2000, significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder….

This is the phrasing that caused the uproar. But when looked at in light of the previous, it is clear that far from suggesting that vaccines cause autism via a mitochondrial disorder, the vaccines worsened an occluded or underlying mitochondrial disorder which took on a few of the symptoms of autism _but was never actually diagnosed as autism at all_ . Because it wasn’t autism.

Before we switch to Dr Zimmerman’s Case Study, lets clear up a few things.

No one, I repeat, no one is saying this child wasn’t autistic. She may well have been. What we are doing is looking at the science reported in the concession report and Zimmerman’s paper and seeing if what the _science_ says in these two papers means that it was the vaccines that caused any autism. The concession report clearly says that no it wasn’t. Thats why this case was uncontested. She was affected by her vaccines but autism was not the result.

Zimmerman’s case study is entitled ‘Developmental Regression and Mitochondrial Dysfunction in a Child With Autism’ – this is further evidence against the case presented that it was the vaccines that caused the autism. This child is reported as being one with autism. Not one who develops autism as a result of vaccines.

However, it is clear that this child _does_ develop autism:

We describe a female patient in whom developmental regression and autism followed normal development…..Evaluation at 23 months showed …..[t]he Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) score was 33 (mild autism range), and she also met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for
Mental Disorders-IV criteria for autism

and yet this autism was so mild that at that exact same period (23 months):

the patient began speaking again at 23 months old

which means that expressive language was lost for a sum total of one month (it is reported being lost at 22 months). It should also be noted that CARS is _not_ designed for diagnosis but is an indicator only. Overall, we get a picture of a child who had an underlying mitochondrial dysfunction exposed by the illnesses following her vaccinations which caused developmental regression. This developmental regression presented with some features of autism.

Did the vaccinations cause her developmental regression? Seems likely. It is an undisputed fact that vaccines do cause injury, that is why after all there is a compensation program to claim from in the US and the UK.

Was her developmental regression autism? No. At no point in either the concession report is it claimed that the developmental regression the child went through _was_ autism. However, in the same way that Leukemia (weakness, paleness; fever and flu-like symptoms) can have the same symptoms as flu (weakness, paleness; fever and flu-like symptoms) but be totally different, this child’s developmental regression shared certain features of autism.

So was this child autistic. She might well have been. However, her autism was not caused by a vaccine.

Update

This column was forwarded to me by a friend. Thanks to him.

The practice of calling certain things near-autism, or even autism itself is not new. Here’s a quote from a Science article regarding HIV in 1989:

The signs of AIDS dementia in children are clear and, Pizzo says, “very painful to watch. Very young children lose words.” Words like “mommy” and “daddy” and “bear” are too hard to remember as the AIDS virus multiplies in the young child’s body and penetrates the central nervous
system.

An 8-year-old boy, once normal, was rendered practically autistic by HIV, Pizzo said. He stopped speaking. Asked to trace a simple
outline of an elephant, the boy could not. Painfully, he knew what a simple task it was, and he knew he was failing it. But he could not cry even though his doctors could see tears welling up in his eyes.

Pizzo has seen children lose IQ points one boy lost as many as 28-as AIDS ravages their brains. “Kids who used to do well in school really deteriorate,” says Pizzo who has “before and after” IQ data from school-age children.

But in a series of remarkable studies, Pizzo has seen AZT (azidothymidine) reverse these symptoms. The child who lost words like “mommy” and “daddy” “got them back,” Pizzo says. The boy who lost IQ points is restored to his former capacity.

The 8 year old cries. After just a couple of weeks of continuous AZT therapy, the boy who could not trace an elephant is successful at tracing a horse.

Now, we all know that ‘tracing an elephant’ and losing IQ points are not symptoms of autism but it is intriguing to see a doctor describe a regression as ‘practically autistic’. Note also, just like in this case, in Zimmermans case study, the child quickly loses, then very quickly regains aspects of their former regression. But HIV didn’t cause autism any more than vaccines did.

US government concededs vaccine/autism case

26 Feb

As per this story from David Kirby in the HuffPo.

I have some doubts about it but lets see. I’ve emailed David Kirby to ask him to provide me with a full copy of the concession. His willingness to provide this information as well as the information itself should tell us more about what this concession report contains.

New mercury/autism paper to misrepresent

22 Feb

A new study on autism and mercury has been published:

Autism is a highly heritable disorder, however, there is mounting evidence to suggest that toxicant-induced oxidative stress may play a role. The focus of this article will be to review our animal model of autism and discuss our evidence that oxidative stress may be a common underlying mechanism of neurodevelopmental damage. We have shown that mice exposed to either methylmercury (MeHg) or valproic acid (VPA) in early postnatal life display aberrant social, cognitive and motor behavior.

Some people have reported on this study thusly:

New Study Implicates Mercury In The Development Of Autism

Um, right.

These same people, well known for their anti-vaccine beliefs, fail to note anywhere that this study says:

…., it is important to note that autism was not found to be associated with either pre- or neonatal exposure to organic mercury.

One form of organic mercury being, of course, thiomersal.

Might it be very uncharitable of me to suggest that this was a deliberate obfuscation? I guess it might but I still think it was. Especially when this same person says:

….will they all continue to proffer the lie that there is no convincing evidence linking vaccines to autism, while ignoring all the studies that are piling up on the hard drives of parents across the country?

Hmmm, so this study quite categorically states there is no link between organic mercury and autism and yet this person calls others liars? Projection is a terrible thing.

There will be more to say on the quality of this study – especially its references – but I wanted to get this clear as soon as possible.

Wakefield, Baird, Archives

20 Feb

This is a Guest Blogged post, written by an author with a keen interest in Wakefield related issues. My gratitude to Nigel for writing the post which follows.

Wakefield and his colleagues were fast off the mark (http://www.thoughtfulhouse.org/pr/020608.htm) to criticise the study by Baird et al which recently appeared in Archives of Disease in Childhood. This was a well conducted study which failed to detect measles virus (MV) or elevated measles antibodies in the blood of autistic children. There is a general feeling that even if the almighty Jehovah himself, collaborating with the top researchers at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, and with an advisory board of all recent Nobel laureates in medicine, produced a negative study on measles virus in autistic children, Wakefield would still find flaws in the work; remarkably rich from the single largest purveyor of junk science in the last 20 years.

As a criticism of the study Wakefield states “It is a major error to have presumed that peripheral blood mononuclear cells are a valid ‘proxy’ for gut mucosal lymphoid tissues when searching for persistent viral genetic material” and later states “ We are increasingly persuaded that measuring things in blood many years down the line tells us very little about the initiating events in what is, in effect, a static (non-progressive) encephalopathy unlike, for example, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a progressive measles encephalopathy” .

The hypocrisy of this statement is quite breathtaking, but unsurprising from someone whose relationship with scientific honesty and integrity is somewhat elastic. For those who don’t have long memories, the first “alleged “ evidence of MV in autism came from Wakefiled’s collaboration with Kawashima where using standard methodologies which were highly effective at detecting MV laboratory contaminants, Wakefield claimed that blood cells from 3/9 autistic children gave positive results ( Dig Dis Sci 2000 45:723-9). This paper formed a key part of the UK MMR litigation from 2000-2003 driven by Wakefield himself until it was mysteriously dropped from the final claimants witness reports by Wakefield himself. Perhaps the realization that blood is a poor proxy for gut came to him in 2003, or more likely, that he knew the Kawashima data were junk and would not stand up in court.

Even more staggeringly, the vast majority of samples from autistic tested for MV by O’Leary in the Unigenetics lab in Dublin were from blood; including the now infamous blood samples taken from healthy children at Wakefield’s own child’s birthday party. Steve Bustin in his testimony on the US Cedillo case comprehensively shredded all of the work that came out of that lab. All of this data on blood has never appeared in the public domain although the junk science on MV in the gut did appear in the Uhlmann paper, in a low impact factor journal which promptly rolled over and died.

As always however, you cannot believe anything Wakefield says as being scientifically valid. In the blood there are cells which are representative of the gut lymphoid tissue. This is very well established and non-controversial. When T and B cells are activated in the gut associated lymphoid tissue, they acquire the alpha4beta 7 integrin and migrate via the mesenteric lymph nodes, and the thoracic duct into the circulating blood and then home back into the rest of the gut using the mucosal addressin, MAdCAM-1.. This happens in all healthy people constantly and it is possible to identify these gut-homing cells in blood. Since Wakefield claims that MV persists in the allegedly large lymph nodes in the gut wall, cells should be infected with MV at source and carry the virus with them into the blood. So come on Andy, with O’Leary’s supersensitive PCR, you should be able to detect at least some of these cells migrating to the gut via the blood. After all, the PCR is so sensitive it can detect MV in samples of distilled water, now that is really amazing!

I suppose one should always rejoice in the repentance of a sinner, and if Wakefield has now come to the conclusion that blood is not a proxy for gut lymphoid tissue, we should be happy he is now happy to recant on all his previous claims about blood cells being positive for MV in autism. I have a sneaky feeling however that this is just another “wriggle” to keep the show on the road. If one of his acolytes claims to find MV in blood of autistic children, you can bet that blood will once again become a valid proxy for gut lymphoid tissue.

New Stuff

19 Feb

Couple of bits and bobs – two new pages on the site, both at the top. ‘Stuff’ takes you to some downloadable goodies for your browser and/or blog. ‘Timeline’ takes you to a timeline (oddly) of events surrounding the vaccine/autism hypothesis.

Enjoy.

In other news, the AAP Day went well yesterday. Along with the 60+ emails I got to send on to Dr Minshew last week, over a dozen blogs, as well as mine, posted about the AAP thing:

Marla Baltes
One Dads Opinion
Telstra
RunMan
Mom Not Otherwise Specified
Whiterer on Autism
Club166
Autism News Beat
Respectful Insolence
AutismVox
Maternal Instincts
Good Math, Bad Math
Grey Matter/White Matter
Aspie family
Terra Sigillata
Andrea’s Buzzing About
Mike the Mad Biologist
I Speak of Dreams

Its good to see the autism, autistic and science blogging communities getting together on this issue.

AAP needs help of rational parents

18 Feb

As part of the welcome addressing of the needs and concerns of the real autism and autistic community in regards to science and as part of their efforts to address the pseudo-science and quackery of the anti-vaccine agenda of certain autism related groups, the AAP are looking for rational parents to help them. I will certainly be offering my details should they be of service and I would urge any parent of an autistic child who is sick of hearing the unscientific and self serving agenda of such groups – groups who not only belittle autistic people but also gladly and readily place the health and well being of others at risk for absolutely no purpose to contact the AAP to offer their details also.

If you wish me to pass on your details, please either leave your name and email address in the comment section of this post, or email them to me or you can email the author of the AAP letter reproduced below.

Hello,

As part of our ongoing response to media stories regarding autism and vaccines, the AAP communications department is compiling a list of parents who support the AAP and are available for interviews. We are looking for two types of parents who could serve as spokespersons:

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorders who support immunization and who do not believe there is any link between their child’s vaccines and his or her autism.

Parents of children who suffered a vaccine-preventable illness. This could be a parent who declined immunization, whose child became ill before a vaccine was available, or whose child was ineligible for immunization.

We are asking for your help identifying parents who would be good spokespersons. They do not need to be expert public speakers. They just need to be open with their story and interested in speaking out on the issue. We will contact candidates in advance to conduct pre-interviews, to offer guidance on talking to reporters and to obtain a signed waiver giving us permission to release their name.

If a parent were placed on our list, we would offer their name and contact information to select media. We hope to build a list of parents from a wide range of geographical areas.

As the Jenny McCarthy and “Eli Stone” stories illustrate, this issue is likely to recur in the national and local media. The AAP is committed to doing all we can to counter such erroneous reports with factual information supported by scientific evidence and AAP recommendations.

The anti-vaccine groups often have emotional family stories on their side. The ability to offer a reporter an interview with a similarly compelling parent who is sympathetic to the AAP’s goals is a powerful tool for our media relations program.

Please contact me if you have any questions or to suggest a parent to interview.

Thank you,

Susan Stevens Martin
Director, Division of Media Relations
American Academy of Pediatrics

Lets take the example of just one worldwide disease that is vaccine preventable. Measles. In Jan 2007 The Guardian reported:

Between 1999 and 2005, there was a 60% reduction in annual measles deaths worldwide, from 873,000 to 345,000….

Fantastic news. But let that figure of 345,000 stay in your mind. That was how many people died all over the world from measles in 2005.

What do the countries most affected by measles think?

Urbain Olanguena Awono, Cameroon’s public health minister, described the fall in deaths as a spectacular achievement. “We are winning the fight against measles, which has long killed, sickened and disabled our children,” he said. “Our determination is stronger than ever to make measles history by further strengthening our measles control activities, working in concert with our international partners and setting aside resources.”

And who form part of their international partners I wonder? Merck? Wyeth? Bayer? SafeMinds? TACA?

There is even cautious talk of the possibility of ridding the world of measles, but while the eradication of smallpox was a triumph, the long struggle to eliminate the final reservoirs of polio in a handful of countries has shown how difficult it is to stamp out a disease.

And it is the same with measles – a handful of countries are holding back the eradication of measles.

Measles eradication could conceivably be stymied not by the developing world, but by dissenters in rich countries such as the UK

Thats right. My rich, upper middle class fellow countrymen and women. And their American rich upper middle class counterparts. Some of whom think the idea of AAP appealing for help to save kids lives is funny to the point of making jokes about the deaths of children:

From: krstagliano
Date: Feb 16, 2008 6:57 AM
Subject: [EOHarm] Re: JB, email from AAP looking for sick kids
To: EOHarm@yahoogroups.com

Can you imagine the ad campaign? Dad sitting in a confessional proclaiming his remorse and grief for not vaccinating his child, while the bell tolls in the background. Then a quick shot over to a small pink casket with a dolly on top and mother on her knees sobbing in front of the altar……[]

KS

Hilarious eh? Those whacky guys and gals at EoH really know how to make with the funnies.

Please don’t let this morally and scientifically bankrupt bunch of me-me’s keep hogging the media with their poor science. Support the AAP in the US and the NHS in the UK.

Autistic Guinea Pigs

15 Feb

During WWII a number of German doctors conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration and death camp prisoners without their consent.

……..

The second category of experimentation was aimed at developing and testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods….

josefmengele.jpg

Source

Its always a dangerous thing to invoke the spectre of the Nazi’s. There is a profound risk of undermining or belittling the full horror of what happened in Europe during the second world war. I hope I don’t do that.

However, there are times that I simply know of no other way to illustrate the sort of things that one is sent from the various extreme biomed groups that exist on Yahoo and elsewhere. Who can forget Christine Heeren’s poor son being chelated with garlic and vinegar? Or the young mother being urged to chelate her 9 month old baby because she reported he was ‘smiling inappropriately’? And of course, there’s the death of Tariq Nadama.

All these things are simply experimentation on children, pure and simple. In goal and in safety they are no different that any of Mengle’s.

Does this mean parents are too blame? I don’t know. Is Heeren ‘to blame’ for what is being done to her son? No, I don’t believe so. The practitioner performing the treatment is. He (or she) is the one milking parents who believe they are desperate. They are the ones pawing over the traits of children for clues to a big payday.

So no I don’t think parents are to blame. However – what they are is _responsible_ . At some point one cannot keep saying ‘I didn’t know’. At some point it must filter through that injecting a mix of garlic and vinegar into a child isn’t going to do a damn thing. At that point, the parent becomes complicitly responsible. This is why I have such a hard time with the Nadama’s suing. I cannot believe that they didn’t know what they were doing was quackery. It was not a case like the one I touched on yesterday where parents were misled into a dangerous and nearly fatal procedure simply to further the beliefs of a quack.

There is a Yahoo Group – a very busy one – called MB12 Valtrex which discusses these treatment options for autism. Recently a mother to a two and half year old posted, listing what he was on and what he was like:

GFCF – CF since September ’07
Diflucan
Singulair
Glutathione Cream daily
B12 injections every five days, now going to every 3
Cod Liver Oil
Vitamin A
MultiFlora Spectrum Probiotics
Enzyme Complete DP-IV
Super Nu Thera
Vitamin C – 500 mg per day

I just look at him and he seems SO MUCH worse since we started this. I understand the yeast may be acting up and causing crazy behavior but he is unhappy, unhealthy looking. He has dark circles under his very tired eyes. His stimming and behaviors are just worse than ever. My husband and I keep looking at each other and wondering why it’s getting worse when we’re suppose to be on the right track now.

The past few days he’s had white chunks in his stool. Loser than normal stools, very light in color, almost like mustard with dark specs. DAN doc says yeast does NOT come out in poop … then what is it?

That’s a daily list of meds by the way.

Its unutterably depressing to read this sort of thing and know that this poor kid is being experimented on by the DAN! doc and this poor mother (new to the whole extreme biomed community) simply doesn’t have enough knowledge or energy to stand up to this quack.

The community elders of course – those who have become complicit over the years, those who should know better – encourage her to push on:

I know it’s hard to watch your child get worse when you’re trying so hard. Just keep looking and you’ll find the answers. It took me several months to realize that I needed to keep looking for answers. And please, talk to your own doctor about the trouble you’re having. I know how you feel, I’ve been there (and still am some days).

Just keep looking. Right. This from a person who admits she’s still pretty much where the original poster is.

An amazing veteran Mom told me once that when her kids react poorly, it just keeps her going because she knows she’s hitting something and, although it may not be the right supplement at the right time, she’ll eventually get it right.

She’ll eventually get it right. Yeah. And at what cost?

Does it strike no one else as odd that there _are_ all these ‘veteran moms’ _at all_ if this extreme biomed is supposed to work? Why are they still around and doing treatments and pushing experimentation? Surely their kids are ‘recovered’? Or maybe they’re like Erik Nanstiel’s daughter – still ‘low functioning’ after 6 years of extreme biomed and all this extremeism is there simply to assuage mum and dads self inflicted guilt – guilt carefully nurtured by the quacks lining their pockets at these parents expense and their kids childhoods.

Andrew Wakefield Responds

14 Feb

Andrew Wakefield has responded to the latest MMR Study showing no link between the vaccine and autism.

Just to recap, the latest Baird et al study looked at whether autistic kids and non-autistic controls showed any variance in their measles antibody response. They don’t.

The measles aspect of the MMR vaccine is what Wakefield’s hypothesis relies on. He says because its a live virus its casing gastric issues and then autism in some kids. This study looked to see if there was any evidence of measles-virus in the blood of these kids. There wasn’t. They looked to see if any of the autistic kids had evidence of gastric issues over and above the average. They didn’t.

But Wakers thinks this isn’t good enough.

The study is severely limited by case definition in the context of the crucial ‘possible enterocolitis’ group………….We have over the last 10 years evaluated several thousand children on the autistic spectrum who have significant gastrointestinal symptoms. Upper and lower endoscopy and surgical histology have identified mucosal inflammation in excess of 80% of these children. Almost none of these children with biopsy-proven enterocolitis would fit the criteria set out above………….The requirement for the current presence of these symptoms, for 14 or more days continuously, shows a singular lack of understanding of the episodic, fluctuating, and alternating (e.g. diarrhea/constipation) symptom profile experienced by these children

Wakers thinks that the criteria for defining enterocolitis that Baird et al used was too strict. He says it will occlude the group he’s identified.

He’s probably right. But not in the way he thinks he is. Could it maybe be that _his_ definition of enterocolitis is too slack? His definition includes:

In our experience, ASD children with histologic enterocolitis typically have 1 to 2 unformed stools per day that are very malodorous and usually contain a variety of undigested foodstuffs. This pattern alternates with that of “constipation” in which the unformed stool is passed after many days of no bowel movements at all, and with excessive straining.

With which he claims is ‘identified mucosal inflammation in excess of 80%’ of his kids.

Thing is, a PubMed search for ‘mucosal autism’ returns 20 results. Of which only one support the idea of inflammation – One of Wakers own papers. In fact the only person I could see using the term ‘histologic enterocolitis’ was (you guessed it) AJ Wakefield.

The question immediately occurs: Of the ‘several thousand children on the autistic spectrum who have significant gastrointestinal symptoms’ why hasn’t there been any published, peer-reviewed, replicated, science written up by Wakefield? Why hasn’t anyone else managed to find 80% positive results and published peer reviewed science about their results?

Could it be that its only the team who have screwed up their results that find what they want to find? I think so. Lets quote Stephen Bustin once more.

Now, these are from samples that should have been discarded according to the SOP from Unigenetics because there was no GAPDH present, i.e., the RNA is degraded. If you look at the Cts for the F-gene which they reported as positive you can see they’re the same. Now, if this is degraded RNA yet I’m getting the same Cts for my F-gene target this can’t be RNA because it would have been degraded.

That’s what the GAPDH showed me. Now, if it isn’t RNA it has to be DNA. If it is DNA it can’t be measles virus it has to be a contaminant.

Plain English – Wakefield scoped kids. Sent samples to Unigenetics. They should’ve told Wakers the samples were rubbish. They didn’t. They analysed rubbish samples which were contaminated. What they found wasn’t measles virus.

A frequent complaint from the Wakefield apologists is that by analysing blood samples rather than gut tissue, science teams are not comparing like-for-like. There are a number of reasons why this is questionable.

Firstly, there has to be a _reason_ for scoping children. It is not a straightforward procedure.

Towards the end of last year, an autistic child who was scoped following a recommendation by Simon Murch, a colleague of Andrew Wakefield’s, was awarded £500,000 damages after his bowel was perforated in 12 places.

An autistic boy has won a £500,000 payout after the hospital at the centre of the MMR scandal carried out an operation that was ‘not clinically justified’.

Jack Piper, then five, was left battling for life after the procedure, which his parents claim was carried out to establish links between his condition and bowel problems.

His bowel was perforated in more than 12 places during surgery at the Royal Free Hospital in North London.

…………

The colonoscopy was suggested by Professor Simon Murch. He is being investigated by the General Medical Council over allegations that he carried out invasive tests including colonoscopies on 11 other children contrary to their best clinical interests.

It is an ethical issue – is a scoping procedure ethically justified? The answer is ‘no’ – that hasn’t stopped Wakers doing ‘thousands’ though apparently.

Secondly, is there any reason why looking blood is not good enough? Awhile ago, I asked a Doctor (who wished to remain anonymous) who told me:

measles is a lymphotropic virus, even more so for the vaccine strain which has been selected to exploit the CD46 cellular receptor. If there is a persistent MV infection the most logical place to detect it is in cells that it is most adept at infecting. Lymphocytes [a type of blood cell]

(Insert mine).

So, there’s not really any reason why blood cells wouldn’t be suitable to check for measles virus, despite Wakefield’s opinion.

And in fact, at least one team _wanted_ to use Wakefield’s samples but their request was ignored:

The groups of investigators that either had access to original autism specimens or investigated them later for measles virus detection were invited to take part in the study but failed to respond. Similarly, it was not possible to obtain clinical specimens of autism cases from these investigators for independent investigations.

Now I have to wonder why, if Wakefield et al are claiming that only scoped samples are any good, or that blood is no good they didn’t hand over the samples they had harvested with the gratitude of a team expecting to be replicated.

Maybe they didn’t really want another science team looking at these samples. Maybe they feared what another team would find.

And what about this inflammation Wakefield alleges to have found? Turns out that its possible to screen for inflammation without the need for scoping.

Fecal calprotectin is a marker for a range of gastric issues, notably IBD (irritable bowel disease) and Crohn’s which it has positive results for.

A 2002 study Effect of Pentavac and measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination on the intestine looked at:

if MMR vaccination is associated with subclinical intestinal inflammation, which is central to the autistic “enterocolitis” theory

To do this, the team:

….studied 109/58 infants, before and two and four weeks after immunisation with Pentavac and MMR vaccines, for the presence of intestinal inflammation (faecal calprotectin).

The results were:

There were no statistically significant differences in faecal calprotectin concentrations at any time points (p>0.25) or when assessed in subjects studied before and after Pentavac (p>0.2) or MMR (p>0.3) vaccination

and

There was no evidence that either Pentavac or MMR vaccination provoked subclinical intestinal inflammation in any of our apparently healthy children during the four week post-vaccination period. This lack of a detectable intestinal inflammatory response suggests that the measles vaccine virus itself is not enterotoxic in healthy infants which argues against the MMR induced autistic “enterocolitis” theory.

And so we come back to the bottom line. What direction does peer reviewed published science take us in? It takes us away from Wakefield.

There are no good reasons to believe that blood samples are not good enough to compare with gut samples and if Wakefield believes otherwise, why didn’t he provide the samples to the Afzal team when asked to?

There is no good reason to justify dangerous, invasive procedures such as the one Wakefield has used on thousands of kids and which left one child fighting for life with a massively perforated bowel. Fecal calprotectin is more than adequate as a marker of intestinal issues and using this method reveals no association between MMR and autism.

Mark Blaxill Thinks Bloggers Are Mean

4 Feb

Mark Blaxill, the token man of the mercury moms at SafeMinds, has written a lip-trembling post over on Age of Autism about how mean bloggers can be. Lets have a bit of fun with it shall we?

The rapid evolution of the Internet has created a host of fascinating, exhilarating and occasionally despicable new things. The Age of Autism is a blog and we’re proud to be a part of a new phenomenon called the blogosphere……But as one might expect with any new form of cultural expression, there’s a bizarre variant of the blogosphere out there. It’s a strange hybrid: it looks like a regular low end blog, based almost entirely on opinion, a dressed up version of the typical online discussion groups and chat rooms….In a disturbing way, this new hybrid has found its way into the debates and controversies around autism science…..Often connected with the so-called “neurodiversity” movement, many of these game players seem to define themselves by their own “autism”

So if I’m understanding Marky Mark, the blogosphere is a ‘new phenomenon’ upon which the light of the countenance of the Age of Autism has charitably fallen.

This ‘new phenomenon’ actually was first realised nine years ago Marky Mark. I await with bated breath Marky’s breathless announcement come 2017 that Age of Autism has discovered a ‘new phenomenon’ called Facebook. Truly the interweb is a wondrous thing. A piece of advice though Mark – never, ever type ‘Google’ into Google.

And these ‘low ends blogs’….my, my whomever could he be referring to? Surely not Autism Diva’s blog with a Google PR of 5 on the home page and over 1,150 Google backlinks to it? Or maybe Orac’s with a PR of 7 for the home page and which has over 6,100 Google backlinks to it? or maybe my own which has a PR 6 on the home page of the blog and over 2,700 Google backlinks to it.

Or maybe ‘low end’ might refer to a blog which has a PR of 3 on its home page and Google link operator can find no back link data for. I wonder, can anyone suggest a blog with user stats that low end?

Anyway, Marky Mark has a point to make and by god he’s eventually going to get around to making it dammit! Even if he has to rhetoricise our asses into verbal comas!!

But unlike people that engage in the blogosphere using their real names and identities, these avatars all have one thing in common.

They’re cowards.

Hmmmm, really? Is that why some people choose to blog anonymously?

I really hate to break this piece of news to Marky Mark but passing opinions online predates the web. Why go back to the old BBS’s and you’d find a whole bunch of people chatting away with (gasp!) fake names. In fact, I hear tell that some CB radio enthusiasts use fake names too!! The dirty cowards!

There’s a damn good reason why some people blog anonymously Marky Mark as I have good reason to know about – people who espouse similar views to you Marky Mark, target their children. People like John Best for example are very good reasons for preserving anonymity. Here’s what happens when one of his friends annoys him. What do you suppose he has in store for my child?

But who Marky Mark is really pouting about is Do’C and Interverbal, two bloggers who took the time out to look at a recent paper that Marky Mark was counting on to support his kook hypotheses. So annoyed by these two ‘low end’ bloggers (PR 5 on each of their blogs) that he elected to censor out the name of the blog they wrote at!

“Unfortunately, the main bloggers of [censored wackosphere site name] have taken the time to respond to almost all of the other blogs about this article

‘wackosphere’ (tee-hee!!) is the name Marky Mark has bestowed upon autism related blogs more popular than his it seems. That’s a lot of blogs.

So shocked was I at this blatant censorship that I nearly contacted the Ever So Important Editor on Age of Autism to ask if they would write a piece about this – after all they penned 10 blog entries last week decrying censorship – they must really hate it!

In fact so grasping does Marky Mark become that he actually says:

In fact, at a deeper level, there’s a widespread pattern of scientific intimidation and censorship underway in autism science that relies on a wide range of attack dogs…

Hey yeah – I know what you mean Marky Mark like what happened to Dr Paul Offit at the hands of the mercury militia:

….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.

Or Paul Shattuck, also from the mercury militia:

One person said, “Don’t be surprised if you get a knock on your door in the middle of the night and I’ll be there.” Another message said it was easy in the age of the Internet to find out where people live.

Shattuck also had various utterly untrue allegations made about him by the NAA.

Or how about Arthur Allen and Professor Roy Grinker who have also been on the receiving end of threats of violence:

these people need to be horse whipped…

Or how about Ray Gallup, Director and co-founder of the Vaccine Autoimmune Project? here’s what he had to say recently:

Dear ****:

Since you seem to follow what is going on with the Leitch list let me know if Leitch, Deer and the others get hit with a fast moving truck or bus that leaves their carcasses mangled and bloodly on the street.

I will be devotely praying night and day that something like this happens to them and their followers. Especially since these creeps say such hurtful things to parents. They deserve all the best in something terrible happening to every last one of them and I will pray daily.

I usually pray for good things for families that suffer but in their case I will make a big exception.

Ray Gallup

Or what about this Marky Mark?

A-YEAR-and-a-half ago, a vaccines expert in the eastern US received a phone call at home. The man on the line did not identify himself; he simply stated the names and ages of the researcher’s two children and the schools they attended, then hung up. The threat was shocking, but not a surprise. “I get hate mail every day,” says the researcher, who asked not to be named.

Many vaccine scientists in the US have received similar threats in recent years. They are thought to come from a hard core of parents who, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are convinced that small amounts of mercury in vaccines have made their children autistic. What’s more, they believe that researchers are complicit in the scandal.

How about what EoH member and mercury militia jackass Brian Hooker did to Dr Sarah Parker? He harasses her to the point her campus security services had to get involved and she sent this email to Hooker – which he proudly displayed online:

Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:03:17 -0600
From: Sarah Parker
Subject: Re: Sarah Parker on the show “To The Point”
To:
Cc:

I have received your phone messages (yesterday evening and today) and emails. I would like to inform you that due to your previous threat to me in November and the tone and content of these current calls and emails I consider these as threats/harassment as well and am documenting them with the campus police department. I respect your right to disagree and wish you would respect that same right with me. Please do not contact me again in the future.

Sarah Parker

How about Brad Handley of Generation rescue saying to me:

If we were on a rugby pitch, Kev, I’d put my boot in your eye and twist…

Marky Mark is quite right that there are wacko’s in the online autism community. All he has to do to find them is look to his left and right. He closes his diatribe with:

We need to defend some minimum standards for how people are permitted to participate in a public debate. At the top of the list of these standards should be this: if anyone wants to participate in a debate about autism, put your real self on the line: your real name, your actual body of work (if you have any) and your professional accomplishments and reputation. Put the things that really matter — your family’s future and your personal career prospects — out in public for everyone to see if you want to exercise the privilege of participation in civil society. If you’re willing to do that, then you have a right to be heard. If you’re not, then you should go back to your game and keep playing with yourself. Let serious people do serious work.

And he’s serious. He means it. How he:

a) Expects to set himself up as the arbiter of whats acceptable online and;
b) Expects people to be comfortable using their real names when he stands alongside the people listed above

I really can’t imagine. Believe me, if I’d known that pond scum like John Best shared a planet with me I would never have used my real identity. Its also quote clear that Mark Blaxills friends and colleagues hold no compunctions about besmirching reputations with groundless attacks and or threats of violence upon them or their children.

Look around you Marky Mark. That rarefied air you’re sucking down? Its the polluted air of the real wackosphere. A land where threats against children is fair game and where killers and paedophiles are welcomed in with no checks and open arms and the leaders of the many antivaccine kook organisations encourage and salivate after violence against anyone who disagrees with them.

The evolution of Eli Stone

1 Feb

This is a Guest Blogged piece written by new bloggers from Hollywood Spectrum.

For those who don’t know (I wish I were one of you), there is a TV show about to premiere called "Eli Stone". It was likely going to be a pretty run-of-the-mill premiere. Possibly, it was going to be a total non event.But, the plot includes autism. Not only does it include autism, but it involves a lawyer doing what has never happened in real life-he win’s a case about how mercury in vaccines caused autism in a child. This led to a number of news stories, internet discussions and blog posts.

Well, after the initial press on this, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sent a letter to ABC/Disney asking them to pull the show since it could erode confidence in vaccines.  Somehow this was characterized as big-bad AAP trying to bully ABC/Disney.  Now, Disney is a company that has revenues of nearly $9B per quarter.  Yeah, AAP was twisting their arm by giving them free publicity.

Did anyone really believe that ABC/Disney would pull the show?  I mean, really, they just got a lot of free publicity for what was likely to be a pretty forgettable show.   How can I say this was going to be forgettable?  Because the original script was something worth forgetting.  Consider when Eli Stone visits a Chinese acupuncturist (who somehow brings about visions in Stone).  The good Dr. Chen was given such amazing lines in pigeon English as:

"You go regular doctor? Dr. Chen not MRI."

and

"I have patient, you come back half hour."

and

"No good hate dead people. Relah. Think good memory father. Dr. Chen help ungrateful son" 

OK, so, the dialogue was lame.  And, believe me, this isn’t the only example.  A whole blog post could be devoted to it, but this is an autism blog not a TV critic blog.  Maybe Dr. Chen is  supposed to be "comedy".  But, is it OK to stereotype for comedy?  If so, how about stereotyping (incorrectly) autism for drama.  Let’s look at how about the "autism" part of the script is portrayed. Here is their stage direction for the William character from the script:

William doesn’t smile. His autism doesn’t permit it.

What?!?  Autism "doesn’t permit" smiling?  So, people who smile aren’t autistic?  That should bring down the autism "epidemic"!  Just reject the diagnosis for all the people with autism who smile.  My guess is that it would be a pretty rare condition then. 

In the original script, the fight is with an insurance company who won’t pay for the treatments of the young "William", who is autistic.  The first mention of the word "autism" comes when the mother is describing this situation:

My son has autism. He needs Risperidone every day..

Whoa.  Was that about mercury?  Nope.  It’s about Risperidone.  Yep, instead of mercury causing autism, the story was about how the fictional kid needed an off-label prescription for an antipsychotic drug and the insurance company wouldn’t pay.

How does that jive with the writer’s idea of autism?  Well, the mother describes the value of Risperidone as:

After a month on the drug, he actually smiled.

For the record, Risperidone is pretty serious medication.  It has been shown to benefit some people with autism.  But, "smiling"?  I guess that scripts don’t need science advisor approval before being approved.

Somewhere between first and, let’s face it, lame final draft and premiere, the story shifted to vaccine/mercury caused autism.  A story line guaranteed to generate controversy.  A story line guaranteed to get publicity.

It’s too bad.  Yes, the reliance of the original script on Risperidone might have caused some consternation amongst the autism community.  Yes, the stereotype of the kid "whose autism prevents him from smiling" was lame at best, damaging at worst.  But, insurance coverage for autism is a big deal right now.  A good presentation of how insurance companies deny claims for autism could have actually helped people and families with autism.

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