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In honor of the “Green our Vaccines” rally: facts from the Omnibus Autism hearing

4 Jun

The lawyers for the parents in the Omnibus Autism hearing (thimerosal portion) have been claiming that one cause of “clearly regressive” autism is thimerosal at vaccine doses, even the dose of thimerosal in one vaccine. One of their supports for this odd claim is that whatever DAN! docs do to help their patients deal with “mercury toxicity” makes the kids less autistic or healthier or something. It’s all pretty vague. Dr. Mumper spoke confidently of what chelation had done for autistic kids and the boys under discussion in this portion of the trial were chelated multiple times in spite of never having shown any elevated mercury levels in their urine tests (even their chelated urine mercury levels were what would be expected for a typical person being chelated).

So what about this claim? If you do any old treatment and you think it makes the patient better in some perhaps very vague, undefined way, is this evidence of anything? Eric Fombonne, expert in autism epidemiology and clinician who works with autistic children and adults says, “Mais non.” Well, actually he said the following

Ms. Ricciardella (?): Are there standards that are used by the medical and scientific community before a treatment is recommended?

Dr. Fombonne: Yes, there are different kinds of standards to evaluate the efficacy of interventions the rule is to rely on the evidence that is the most robust that stems from a randomized clinical trial which are usually double blind placebo controlled for this method there is no study which has been relying on this method for the practices and treatment that have been discussed this morning [by Dr. Mumper]

Ms. Ricciardella: Do you have experience with randomized clinical trials?

Dr. Fombonne: Yes actually, I do. I started my research career and did my thesis my first two publications, I think, have to with randomized clinical trials.
And I am currently, we have tested the efficacy in a randomized clinical trial of a treatment which is not which is not biomedical which is a language based intervention to improve communication skills in young children with autism.
And we did a randomized clinical trial. It’s a 12 weeks treatment and we allocated at random parents and their children to a group where they were immediately treated with this intervention and there was a waiting list for the control group and 36 families in each group so it’s quite powerful in terms of it’s statistical power.
I just wanted to share with you my, my, our findings that it’s an intervention that everybody likes, eh and when we did the trial we had all the impression that it was actually achieving some positive results. The parents were happy and were convinced that the methods were showing some efficacy, and we did too.
But as we did the study well we didn’t analyze the data before the data were finally collected and when we broke the blind and looked at the results and there is no difference between the two groups–which is breaking my heart, in some ways–but this also shows that our experience as clinicians and as parents can be misleading.
And I think the field of autism has been replete over the last 30, 40 years of treatments and interventions that practitioners engage in when the parents apply to their children. And the story has been that when you take these practices and put them to rigorous empirical test, that of a randomized clinical trial, usually the story is much more disappointing. And a case in point is the secretin trial.

I don’t know if it was Ms. Ricciardella asking the questions, but that’s my guess. After this portion he explained about how many parents and clinicians from all over the world had been so excited about secretin when it became popular, and how for about 5 years clinicians used it and had some great stories to support it’s use. But when the double blind, placebo controlled studies were completed it turned out to be no more effective than placebo. And if someone tells you that there were “responders” you can tell them that there were “responders” to the sterile-saline injections, too, so why not just go with those, since they are cheaper than secretin? Besides which there’s no reason to expect that secretin (much like sterile saline) ever would do anything for the symptoms of autism. Further, the Mead boy got one or two injections of it but the family didn’t continue with them, apparently they weren’t so great for that child. Perhaps they decided to go with worm eggs, maternal fecal implantation enemas or even Eskimo oil (possibly purchased from Dr. Green’s office) instead.

http://static.boomp3.com/player.swf?song=bjsb2fd<a style=”font-size: 9px; color: #ccc; letter-spacing: -1px; text-decoration: none” target=”_blank” href=”http://boomp3.com/listen/bjsb2fd/fombonne-randomized-control-trial”>boomp3.com</a&gt;

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Green Our Vaccines Eve – Dr Jeffrey Brent

3 Jun

On the eve of the ‘green our vaccines‘ rally, I thought it might be interesting to share a ten minute or so segment from the Autism Omnibus.

Giving evidence is Dr Jeffrey Brent:

Jeffrey Brent, M.D., Ph.D. is a sub-specialty board certified medical toxicologist. He is an active member of the medical school teaching faculty and is an attending physician on the clinical pharmacology/toxicology consultation service at the University Hospital. Currently he holds the rank of Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. Dr. Brent has a long list of publications, virtually all related to clinical toxicology. He is senior editor of Critical Care Toxicology: The Diagnosis and Management of the Critically Poisoned Patient and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Toxicological Reviews, a major international state-of-the-art review journal devoted to human toxicology.

Dr. Brent is the former President of the American Academy of clinical Toxicology, the largest organization in the world devoted to this discipline. Currently he serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the American College of Medical Toxicology.

We pick up testimony around five and half hours into day 15. I’ve transcribed directly from the audio, so please forgive minor errors. Emphasis is Brent’s, inserts are marked [].

Q: Dr Mumper discussed today some key aspects of chelation therapy….as a medical toxicologist do you see any reason for the chelation to remove mercury from either Jordan King or William Mead in these cases?

Absolutely not….there is no test in medicine that is more valid for for assessing mercury toxicity than an unprovoked urine mercury concentration.

[For Jordan King and William Mead]…their unprovoked urine concentration is exactly in the normal range.

On the other hand, they have been chelated. And the justification for that chelation with regard to mercury comes from what you see in the right hand column where in both cases, 4 out of 5 provoked examples have been…uh…increase urine mercury. Well, you’re supposed to have increased urine mercury with provoked examples! Therefore there is absolutely no indication based here or anywhere else I saw in the medical records that suggest that there is any mercury effect in these children and therefore that was absolutely no reason to chelate them for any mercury related reason.

Q: Dr Mumper also testified today to seeing an increase in lead levels in children and that chelation may help with the adverse effects from lead. Is there any scientific or medical basis for that statement?

It is true that chelation therapy is the appropriate therapy for lead toxicity. However, the records do not reflect any lead toxicity in the case of either of the two children at issue here, Mead or King. Neither of them have had an elevated blood lead level and a blood lead level is the ‘gold standard’ test for lead toxicity. Because, contrary to testimony that was given earlier today [Dr Mumpers – KL], blood lead remains elevated and it will be elevated for years in children that have lead toxicity. It equilibrates with tissues and if there’s high tissue burden there will be high blood burden.

Q: So you disagree with Dr Mumper that the blood levels would only test for acute toxicity?

Thats absolutely wrong. So there was no indication therefore for treating these two children with a chelator for any lead effects.

Q: Is there any other accepted tests for lead toxicity, other than blood?

Blood is the ‘gold standard’ and there are no other accepted tests in medicine now that we can routinely get blood/lead levels.

Q: Was there anything about the levels you observed in the medical records [of either King or Mead – KL] post chelation that would cause you to think that these were extraordinarily high levels of excretion upon chelation?

No. You always expect to see levels in the urine bump post-chelation. It would happen to any one of us. There are no validated reference ranges post chelation, thats why they’re not used in medical practice – there is no valid way of using them and in fact if you look at these two children they had mild increases in urine/lead excretion as I recall but they were nothing different than what you would normally expect to see if you gave a chelator to them.

Q: And you’ve given chelators to a lot of children?

I’ve chelated a number of children.

A: There’s nothing here that would be out of the ordinary – from your experience – absent, even in the absence of a standard reference range.

Well, in truth we don’t (?) urine/leads because the ‘gold test’ is blood/lead so I haven’t looked at many urine/leads in children that I have chelated. So I can’t speak to that in my experience. But I have seen a number of patients now come to me because of these ‘doctor’s data‘ type of laboratories which are based on urines – chelated urines – and they always have high leads in their chelated urines and I tell them ‘well, lets just do the gold standard test, lets get a blood/lead level and so far, 100% of the time they’ve been normal.

Q: Are the post chelation mercury levels in either of these two boys in excess of what you would see…or in excess – I take it there’s no standard reference range…?

No standard reference range. You do tend to see small increases, they’ve had minor increases in their mercury excretion over the reference ranges over the non-provoked. It was certainly not very dramatic and certainly well within the range of what you would expect to see. For example if you look at the studies that I cited where they were studying chelators and they were looking at the effect of the chelator on urine/mercury excretion.

Now thats a valid time to do a post chelation mercury – if you want to study the effect of the chelator. And if you look at the normal controls in those studies, when they give them a chelator you do see some increase in the urine/mercury excretion and its a moderate increase and its really not very different than what we saw in these children [King and Mead – KL]

Q: Have you chelated children for lead or mercury toxicity?

Actually, both.

Q: And under what circumstance did you chelate for mercury toxicity?

I’ve had a number, but probably the most common and the most dramatic relates to the fact that I live in Colorado and in the Rocky Mountain area there people who are still panning for Gold…..[they extract the gold from ore using liquid mercury]…and to get rid of the mercury [afterwards] they will heat it. In their house. In their kitchen. When you volatilise mercury like that [it gets into the air]….and I’ve had a number of families have become profoundly mercury poisoned.

Q: So when Dr. Mumper said that she saw ‘mobilisation’ of heavy metals by chelation and then assumed that the chelation was beneficial – do you agree with that statement?

No, I think what you see is – you give a chelator, you look in the urine and there’s more than in the non-chelated reference range is for the metals in the urine and its what you would normally expect. It tells you nothing about mobilising stores of heavy metals.

Q: Dr Mumper also talked about supplements. And those supplement were referred to increase Glutathione to treat mercury toxicity. Do you agree that that therapy is warranted in cases?

Glutathione? No. Supplemental glutathione to treat mercury toxicity has no validity at all.

The Great Autism Rip-off

1 Jun

I had to pinch myself to check I was actually awake and not dreaming when this landed in my inbox this morning.

This is a truly excellent piece of journalism on autism and the growing CAM (Complimentary and Alternative Medicine) industry (Small Pharma?) that surrounds it. And its in the Daily Mail.

I can imagine many people choking on their cornflakes this morning. A little JAB of reality.

In this burgeoning market, private doctors and clinics have sprung up across the UK claiming they can treat or even ‘reverse’ the disorder.

Recent research published in the Journal Of Developmental And Behavioural Paediatrics found that a third of parents of autistic children have tried unproven ‘alternative’ treatments.

Worryingly, the study claims one in ten has used what the experts class as ‘a potentially harmful approach’.

I’d personally say the figures were a little lower than that now. As MMR fear in the UK has tapered off, parents turning to CAM has (I think) dropped off. One only has to take a look at the slackening number of posters on the various anti-vaccine pro-CAM autism websites such as JABS to see this in action.

Parent to four autistic children, Jacqui Jackson explained how many of us try something silly before coming to our senses:

‘I bought enzymes and supplements from America, which cost a fortune. I even paid thousands for a special mattress, blankets and pillows with magnets sewn into them that the sales people promised would do wonders but, of course, didn’t work.

‘Autism is seen by some people as big business.

‘I meet parents who want a cure and spend money in the hope they’ll have a normal child. I try to warn them that there is no evidence any of these things work, but they’ll often go ahead.’

I hold my hands up and admit we tried a bit of quackery – fad diets and even homeopathy (its all on this blog somewhere) – because we didn’t know any better basically.

In his exposé the Mail reporter claimed to have an autistic child so he could ask some CAM autism practitioners over here what to try:

During my investigation, I was recommended expensive tests, vitamin supplements and special diets, ointments, suppositories and injections to ‘flush out toxic heavy metals’, bizarre-sounding high-pressure oxygen chambers and intravenous infusions of hormones – and told in each case that they could bring about a complete recovery from autism.

Yet medical experts say there is no evidence to support their claims, and in fact many of the treatments I was offered were potentially harmful, and even possibly fatal.

The experience left me disturbed at the lack of regulation surrounding these practices.

Its nice to hear someone from the mainstream media stating what some of us have been stating for the last few years!

The report mentioned how:

This week, new legislation aimed at protecting consumers from ‘rogue traders’ came into force, prohibiting businesses from making ‘false claims’ that a product is able to cure illness.

Its about time. Hopefully, some of these CAM artists will be investigated under the auspices of this new law.

The reporter went to see a few DAN! registered UK docs. The experience wasn’t pretty. One made outlandish claims for Secretin but didn’t ask for any medical records. One pushed chelation and never mentioned Tariq Nadama. Another said the reporter would have to commit to a year of rubbing in a skin cream chelator of dubiouis eficacy. Dr Lorene Amet failed to disclose that she wasn’t actually a doctor of medicine (its not uncommon for DAN! ‘doctors’ to not actually be doctors).

Its a highly revealing piece of a grubby, grasping little world that preys on the parents of autistic people. Thanks are due to the Mail for reporting on this so accurately and thoroughly.

Dr. Rust testifies in the Autism Omnibus Hearing

22 May

Today Dr. Robert Rust testified in the thimerosal-only causation portion of the Autism Omnibus Proceedings. Dr. Rust also testified in the Hazlehurst case regarding the combined MMR-thimerosal causation hypothesis. You can find Dr. Rust’s testimony in the Hazlehurst case in the Day 3 transcript from that case. Today is “Day 8” of the thimerosal portion so you can look for the “Day 8” mp3 files on the US Federal Court website.

Dr. Rust has some impressive credentials. He is the Thomas E. Worrall, Jr. Professor in Epileptology and Neurology, and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Virginia. He had a residency in Pediatrics at Yale University and in Child Neurology and neurochemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. He also had a fellowship in Neurochemistry, Neonatal Neurology, and Brain Metabolism, at Washington University. A University of Virginia website says that he has clinical interests in epilepsy, headache, neonatal neurology and degenerative disorders.

Dr. Rust had a lot of material to cover in his testimony. It seemed to me that he was trying to cover a semester or two’s worth of neurodevelopment and neurophysiology in a couple of hours, trying to keep it simple enough for the needs of the court, and yet detailed enough to make some critical points about how neurons, microglia and astroglia work and discussing what is known about regression in autism and what might cause it. He also discussed some of the particulars of the medical records of William Mead and Jordan King. Their main DAN! doctor is Dr. John Green III of Oregon. Dr. Green is a favorite DAN! doctor as was made clear in the testimony by Jordan King’s mother. She said something like seeing Dr. Green was “invitation only.” No doubt. Many of the lab tests discussed were ordered by Dr. Green, and many of the therapies the boys had were ordered or administered by Dr. Green, including one very traumatic IVIG infusion Mr. Mead described his son enduring.

Bogus lab tests are a huge problem in autism “biomedical” therapies. Not that all of the lab tests used by all DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) doctors are bogus, but it sure seems like many of those that parents share with the public are highly questionable lab tests such as hair analysis for heavy metals, and urine heavy metals lab tests from one particular lab that was mentioned several times in the testimony. For instance, an image of one of these very lab tests was used as an illustration at the top of a blog entry on a certain autism hysteria promoting group blog recently.

When Dr. Mumper testified she commented about how one of the boy’s lab results had this extremely high level of tin while the other metals were in a normal range. (Keeping in mind that the “normal ranges” on these tests are nearly arbitrary and don’t have much to do with real world levels of anything in healthy or sick autistic children.) Dr Mumper acted as if this was not that weird and she said a couple of times, at least, that when they see such a high level of tin in a child she will ask the parents if the kids are eating a lot of toothpaste or drinking a lot of juice from “juice boxes”. She didn’t offer a specific therapy for “tin intoxication”, whereas if mercury had been that high they no doubt would have all been sobbing over the horror of it all. At any rate, Dr. Rust made an interesting point that high levels of tin are almost unheard of and to get a high enough level of tin to affect health, it basically takes a decade or two of working with tin every day where the tin is exposed to heat and is creating tin vapor and a worker is inhaling it. This didn’t reflect well on the quality of that lab’s tests, or on Dr. Mumper’s ability to think critically about such things as lab test results, in my opinion.

The following is a very rough transcript of one portion of Dr. Rust’s testimony that I found very interesting. I don’t know if the Dept. of Justice lawyer was Ms. Renzi, but I think it was, so I’m using her name for the time being. [Edit: The DoJ lawyer was Ms. Esposito, not Ms. Renzi. This portion of the audio transcript is found in the 2nd file on day 9 the following part is found around a 30 minutes into that recording). The words I added in parentheses are not direct quotes but gives the meaning of what was said. I can’t type that fast and so as I was taking notes I didn’t transcribe portions of it word for word, but got the gist.

Ms. Renz Esposito: I’d like to discuss some of the treatments given to these children.

Esposito:: (Can you tell us if) IVIG therapy (is helpful in autism?)

Rust: t’s been tried along with it’s cousin corticosteroids, but no improvement has been seen bahaviorally, functionally or with EEG.

Esposito:: (Can you tell us about the) supplements (given to William Mead and Jordan King?)

Rust: We don’t hear about most of them probably, to the extent that there is data (these supplements don’t help), to the extent that parents tell us what they are using.

Esposito:: Secretin?

Rust: Secretin was found not to be effective

Esposito:: Chelation?

Rust: I’ve seen no evidence that chelation is helpful in this setting…. (recalls when kids with lead poisoning were chelated in a clinic/hospital where he work) considerable pain it caused. Children would be screaming on the way into chelation.

Esposito: Saunas?

Rust: Saunas can help with headaches and stress and tensions but in autism there is nothing to sweat out except some of the notions about treatments that have been offered to the child.

Esposito:: Dr. Green’s therapies…. (for William Mead or Jordan King) included an implantation enema, ideally with a colonic delivery system, using maternal fetal [fecal?] supernate…

Rust: So far as I know that the approach has been around since Roman times, …. used to be a regular feature of childbirth.

Esposito:: Feeding a child fermented vegetables?

Rust: …(doesn’t change autism)…

Esposito: Earthworm eggs?

Rust: No known benefit that I’m aware of. (The discussion changed to something about herbal treatments.) I had a patient with seizures, the parents gave a Chinese herbal (medicine). The Chinese botanical was interesting. We were astonished (the child had a striking improvement in seizures) , we sent a sample of it to a lab and found out it was phenobarbital.

Esposito: Charcoal?

Rust: (No reason to think it would help)

Esposito: Oral baygam (oral immune globulin)?

Rust: I have no information about that.

Esposito: Valtrex?

Rust: I don’t know any reason to think it would work. (a little later he added that Valtrex is a drug used to treat herpes infections.)

Esposito:: Are you familiar with Eskimo oil?

Rust: (slightly amused) No I haven’t heard of that.

Esposito: Actos?

Rust: (I don’t know of any benefit for autism.)

Esposito: If there were a report of improvement would you extrapolate that there was a cause of autism.

…

Esposito: Is it standard practice to prescribe something to patients and then sell it to them?

Russ: (A doctor’s obligation to the patient) is to listen without repeating their problems… (not to sell the patient treatments) … to keep an office of Amway products. It trades on the prestige we have and the reliance that the patients have on us. It is one of the most grave violations of our code of ethics.

Esposito: Do you prescribe these things?

Russ: No …

Esposito: Do other neurologists prescribe these things?

Russ: No …

The “implantation enema” as I understood it, that was recommended by Dr. Green for one of the boys
was a “fecal enema“.

Specifically, again as I understood it, what was recommended was to take some of the boy’s mother’s feces and mix it with water and infuse that into the boy’s colon or something. From Dr. Rust’s response I got the feeling that he didn’t understand that this particular enema wasn’t just a water enema, but that the idea was to put the germs from the mom’s feces into the boy’s intestines.

Now I thought Dr. Rashid Buttar’s urine injections were bizarre. This one ranks right up there, though, for sheer gross-out factor. And how about those “earthworm eggs”? It’s possible that what Ms. Renzi asked about was “whipworm eggs.” Perhaps I heard what she said wrong, but it sounded like “earthworm eggs” [edit: She said “earthworm eggs”]. Taking pig whipworm eggs orally is an alternative therapy for Crohn’s disease, apparently. I remember reading somewhere that a mom asked Dr. Andrew Wakefield what he thought of giving autistic kids worms to treat their gut problems. He was quoted by that mom as saying that he didn’t think it would work for autistic children’s guts.

I encourage everyone to listen to the recordings of the autism omnibus and to read the transcripts, they are very educational. One can learn a lot about the ‘therapies’ being offered to parents of autistic children as well as some of the best of the best of the science that is known about autism. I don’t agree with everything the experts are saying, such as when Dr. Rust called autism a “disease”, but it’s still very interesting listening if you are at all interested in autism.

Autism Omnibus – Liz Mumper

21 May

Elizabeth Mumper is an expert witness for the Petitioners (for the families). She is the medical director for DAN/ARI and founder of the Rimland Centre.

She firmly believes vaccines cause autism.

On Days four and five last week, Mumper testified. Again, there’s little point me going through the Petitioners exam – you can easily guess the content. Where things got interesting was on cross exam.

Again, this is me making notes on the audio so there may be minor errors. I also didn’t get the name of the young man doing the cross exam for the Dept of Justice.

In the expert reports that Mumper prepared for the thiomersal hearings, she stated:

1 in 6 children born today is predicted to have blood levels of mercury high enough to impair neurological development.

And she referenced Stern, 2005 to support that statement.

The DoJ immediately asked her where in the Stern paper that figure was quoted. After 2mins, 01 seconds of which only the noise of someone rifling through a paper could be heard, Mumper stated:

I do not see the 1 in 6 statistic there.

To which the DoJ lawyer asked:

Q: So the Stern paper does not state ‘1 in 6 children born today is predicted to have blood levels of mercury high enough to impair neurological development.’

A: You are correct.

Ouch.

The next question that came Mumpers way was – in fact I’ll do the whole exchange:

Q: Have you ever treated a child for mercury poisoning?

A: No.

Q: What formal training have you received in toxicology?

A: None.

Now wait just a minute – Liz Mumper, medical director of DAN! is stating that _she has never treated a child for acute mercury poisoning???_ Did I miss something here?

There was a lengthy to and fro after this during which ‘autism: a novel form of mercury poisoning‘ was discussed. Mumper squirmed a bit but admitted that it was published by three non-scientists, in a non-peer reviewed journal and that as she put it ‘the science had progressed’ since its publication (which was her way of saying it was dead wrong I think).

The DoJ moved on to a discussion of some of the papers that Mumper used to support her beliefs. Key amongst them were Mady Hornig’s Rain Mouse study and the Nataf Porphyrin study.

Mumpers take on the Hornig paper was fascinating. According to her, the:

…mice got OCD behaviours and they clawed through each others skull…

Now firstly – OCD behaviours? According to every member of the mercury militia worth their salt, Mady’s mice got _autistic_ behaviours. Now, obviously, they didn’t. Everyone from the IOM down (including certain tiara wearing bloggers) pointed out that the behaviours reported by Hornig bore no resemblance to autism. Now here was Mumper confirming that.

Secondly – this skull clawing – why was that raised in court? This behaviour was certainly not part of Hornig’s paper. It smacks of second hand sensationalism.

The DoJ lawyer asked Mumper what her opinion was of the Berman paper that entirely refuted Hornig (‘the present results do not indicate pervasive developmental neurotoxicity following vaccine-level thimerosal injections in SJL mice, and provide little if any support for the hypothesis that thimerosal exposure contributes to the etiology of neurodevelopmental disorders’).

Amazingly, Mumper’s response was that she hadn’t read it! I must admit that when she said that (and yes, you could clearly hear the embarrassment in her voice when she admitted that) I laughed out loud. Aren’t medical directors supposed to keep up to date with science relevant to their ‘areas of expertise’?

The next section concerned the role of the ‘new kid on the black’ – Porphyrins. I’ll quote the initial exchange as near to verbatim as I can.

Q: You order this Porphyrin test in your own practice?

A: Yes.

Q: And do you find them to be a reliable measure of mercury toxicity in autistic patients?

A: *I’m split on that now* because I think that they’re good at showing differential toxicities but the thing that is worrying us now is that we’ve not looked at a lot of control children and we’re starting to do that and *finding that some normal children have abnormal Porphyrins too* .

Again, to those of us who’ve been following these stories, this is not news. However, what _is_ news is to hear the medical director of DAN/ARI confirm that Porphyrins aren’t as useful as touted. Note that although she knows she’s getting false positives she’s still ordering the tests.

There was some back and forth at that point as to why Mumper thought that the Porphyrin test wasn’t very accurate. She says she thinks it is because the control in the Nataf paper were French and Swiss and that US kids are ‘environmentally and genetically different’.

Could be. But, as Prometheus pointed out when we talked about this via email:

Now, if Swiss and French kids are “…too genetically different…” from US (and presumably UK) children for something as simple (and reportedly reliable) as the “porphyrin profile” to work, then what about the Amish?

Which is an excellent point. Its an established fact that the Amish _are_ genetically different. They’re also certainly environmentally different. I guess that doesn’t matter though.

DoJ wrapped up day four by asking:

Q: Porphyrins do not provide any evidence that mercury is in the brain, is that correct?

A: That’s correct.

On day five, DoJ played a little dirty. Bearing in mind that Mumper had said on day four that she was ‘split’ on the efficacy of the Porphyrin test, DoJ asked her to read out sworn testimony she had given in a separate case in Jan/Aug 2007:

Probably the most helpful test to me now is the Porphyrin test….

Which direct contradiction of yesterdays testimony was embarrassing enough, but she then went on to say (in 2007) that:

….it actually looked at the impact of ethyl mercury….

When on day four she had testified that it did no such thing.

All in all, DoJ made Mumper look very unsure. They tripped her up factually any number of times and led her into making statements (never treated mercury poisoning!) that I’m pretty sure she would not really have wanted to make.

Laura Hewitson’s Stinker

18 May

Sorry about the title, I couldn’t find a word to rhyme with her last name to infer wrong-doing a la Age of Autism’s ‘Grinker’s Stinker. Anyway….

Meet Laura Hewitson. Laura is the lead and joint author of a trio of papers presented at this years IMFAR as posters.

These papers (also shredded by Orac) purport to show how it is possible to mimic the 1999 US vaccine schedule and give monkeys autism as a reult. Never mind the fact that the results reported don’t sound or present anything like autism (<em>”survival reflexes, tests of color discrimination and reversal, and learning sets”</em> huh??), lets look at Laura Hewitson a bit more closely then I managed to in a quick 10 min post last time.

As I mentioned at the time, Laura Hewitson claims affiliation with DAN! Thats enough in my book to place a rather large red flag against her impartiality.

Now I’ve learnt that her entanglement with the vaccine/autism hypotheses goes very much further than that.

It turns out that Hewitson’s partner is Dan Hollenbeck, an Age of Autism contributor. Hollenbeck owns the website FightingAutism.org and in the top right hand corner of the FightingAutism website are the words:

FightingAutism is now part of Thoughtful House Center for Children.

And we all know who is the big cheese at THoughtful House don’t we? That’s right – one Andrew Wakefield. He’s also the co-author to the three studies poster presented at IMFAR.

Hollenbeck’s asociation with Thoughtful House goes beyond just having a website affiliated with them however. He’s also an employee of Thoughtful House.

Director of Information Technology for Thoughtful House, Dan Hollenbeck received his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992

….

When their son was diagnosed with autism in 2001, the Hollenbecks relocated from Oregon to Pittsburgh in order to accept employment as an Information Technology Manager for a large NIH (National Institutes of Health)-funded medical research organization

….

He is also on the Board of Directors, as well as the Research Committee, for SafeMinds…

So, here we are with three poster presentations from a woman who has an autistic son, affiliated with DAN!, is married to the Thoughtful House IT guy (who also happens to be on the Board of Directors of SafeMinds) and these afore-mentioned poster presentations are also co-authored by Andrew Wakefield.

I wonder just how impartial this science can be?

How about when we throw one more fact into the equation?

437. Laura Hewiston (sic) and Dan Hollenbeck on behalf of Joshua Hollenbeck, Dallas, Texas, Court of Federal Claims Number 03-1166V

That’s right. Hewitson and Hollenbeck are suing HHS for vaccine injury visited upon their son Joshua.

Now, lets turn our attention to IMFAR where Hewitson made her three poster presentations. INSAR have regulations governing the papers and abstracts submitted.

INSAR requires authors to disclose their sources of contributed support (commercial, public, or private foundation grants, and off-label use of drugs, if any). INSAR also requires authors to signify whether there may be a real or perceived conflict of interest. Any potential for financial gain that may be derived from reported work may constitute a potential conflict of interest.”

Now, maybe Hewitson did note the fact that:

a) Her husband is an employee of an organisation that makes money from treating what they allege is vaccine caused autism.

b) She has an autistic child.

c) Said child has been registered for compensation for alleged vaccine damage resulting in autism (I assume they’re part of the Omnibus proceedings then?)

But if she did, then it isn’t recorded in the abstracts posted on the Age of Autism website.

Monkeying Around

16 May

Its IMFAR time again and over on Age of Autism (thanks to Kelli Ann Davies for this priceless hat tip) they’re getting all het-up:

SICK MONKEYS: RESEARCH LINKS VACCINE LOAD, AUTISM SIGNS
The first research project to examine effects of the total vaccine load received by children in the 1990s has found autism-like signs and symptoms in infant monkeys vaccinated the same way. The study’s principal investigator, Laura Hewitson from the University of Pittsburgh, reports developmental delays, behavior problems and brain changes in macaque monkeys that mimic “certain neurological abnormalities of autism.”

Autism signs? Not just ‘autism? Research hasn’t linked vaccine load to autism?

I’d love to tell you more about this (and the other two accompanying studies on the same subject) but I can’t. Why? Well, because they’re not actually _studies_ as such. They’re poster presentations.

So, what’s a poster presentation? Well, its exactly what it sounds like – its a researcher, making a poster of their research and standing beside it for an hour, hoping other people find it enough of interest to look at. A few popular ones are sometimes asked to be presented orally. There are usually at least a hundred different poster presentations at a conference. It mostly depends on teh size of the conference hall.

Age of Autism’s Dan Olmsted says:

Poster presentations must go through a form of peer review before they are presented at the conference; the papers have not yet appeared in a scientific journal.

One of those two statements is true. The other is sadly not. Here are ‘the rules’ for poster presentations at IMFAR 2008.

Posterboards will have a display area 194cm wide X 84cm high. We suggest that you produce posters in A0 landscape format (120cm wide X 84cm high). Posters will be fixed to boards using sticky-back Velcro that will be supplied on site. Poster Numbers 1-60 will be located in the Champagne Terrace room, and Numbers 61-120 will be located in the Bordeaux room. In the programme a time is allocated for each poster presenter to be standing by their poster.

The page goes on to provide some helpful tips such as: ‘Less is more’ (probably no worries on that score) and ‘Use an appropriate font’. Hopefully, the team will have taken onboard the services a real typography expert such as Dr Paul King of CoMeD.

So – I can tell you next to nothing about these poster presentations. The good folk at AoA seemed oddly reluctant to link through to the abstracts.

However, I can tell you a little about the authors. The primary author seems to be Laura Hewiston of Pittsburgh University. She is registered on that page as a DAN! Doctor. She (I think its the same person) also appears here (see 953) and here.

Also listed as an author according to AoA is one AJ Wakefield. Enough said about that!

Lastly, is Steve Walker who did a poster presentation at an IMFAR in the past (can’t recall which one) which also appeared to offer support for the MMR hypothesis. Oddly, that poster presentation never made it into any kind of peer reviewed journal.

Best comment on Age of Autism comes courtesy of David Ayoub who begins with:

someone slap me!

I tell you, if that man didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him.

Autism Omnibus – Vas Aposhian

16 May

Vas Aposhian is – like Sander Greenland – an expert witness for petitioners (the families) and a professor of molecular and cellular biology as well as a professor of pharmacology.

On Day 2 and 3 he testified as to what seemed to be the main hypothesis behind the whole thiomersal/autism idea.

The basic idea is that some people are genetically predisposed to something called _mercury efflux disorder_ (plain english, they can’t get rid of mercury as well as most people can, it crosses the blood brain barrier and triggers autism). Mercury Efflux Disorder is itself an unproven hypothesis but Aposhian passionately believes in it.

He came under heavy cross exam (I won’t go through his performance whilst testifying to his own ‘side’ – we all know the basic hypothesis), that compromised a lot of day two and most of the morning of day three (the audio is released slowly so I’m a couple of days behind). The part I’m writing about today starts about an hour and a half into day three (NB: I’ve downloaded all the MP3’s and stitched them into one file).

Aposhian says that the mercury efflux hypothesis is supported by six papers:

…each piece of evidence alone leaves some doubt but taken all together the evidence implicates thimerosal/ethylmercury as the likely precipitating agent in the etiology of some of the autism spectral disorders.

Respondent counsel referred to these six papers as ‘pillars’ supporting the hypothesis. Aposhians’s pillars are:

First, Adams et al. (2007) demonstrated that teeth from autistic children contain more mercury than those from non-autistic children.

Respondent counsel asked Asphosian what he thought he could criticize about these papers he says ‘implicate thiomersal’. Regarding Adams et al, Asphosian said (and I’m paraphrasing slightly after scribbling notes furiously):

1) The number of controls should’ve been increased.
2) There were too few test subjects
3) When asked if raised mercury level was an indicator of toxicity, Asphosian answered “I don’t know”.
4) When asked if he would’ve expected mercury concentrations to vary depending on gender, Asphosian answered “Yes”.
5) When asked if Adams controlled for gender Asphosian answered, “No, he doesn’t control for gender”.
6) When asked if lead concentration of a tooth affected mercury concentration of a tooth, Asphosian answered, “I don’t know”.
7) Asphosian was asked, given the fact that the thiomersal hypothesis depended on the role of _ethyl_ mercury, what type of mercury did Adams et al measure in the teeth? Asphosian’s answer was “…did not do speciation” – in other words, he didn’t separate the types of mercury out. He recorded it all.
8) When asked if mercury levels in teeth tell you anything about amounts of mercury in the brain Asphosian replied that he didn’t know as no one had ever done that study.

These are fairly damning failings in what Asphosian’s assumptions were regarding the quality of that study. Of course, there is more wrong with the Adams paper than just the above, but these points are pretty damning. The failure to control for gender, the paucity of subjects and the fact Adams et al didn’t concentrate on ethyl-mercury raise serious questions over what exactly this study can add to the so-called Mercury Efflux Disorder.

I’ll keep appending to this post as I work through the rest of the audio.

Thimerosal on trial- the incredible shrinking epidemic

13 May

The audio recordings of the first day of the thimerosal-only portion of the Autism Omnibus Proceedings hearings are now available here: ftp://autism.uscfc.uscourts.gov/autism/thimerosal.html. They are mp3 files.

Here’s some of what I heard yesterday via telephone and comments on what I think the parents’ lawyers seem to be implying now, maybe you will listen to the same discussion and take away different key points:

A lawyer for the petitioners (Mr. Williams, I think) said, as if a fact: there has been an autism epidemic, and he added that there is no such thing as a “genetic epidemic”.

They know this because no one could “miss” regressive autism in the past. I guess they might have missed other non-regressive autism and other ASDs.

The only kind of regressive autism they are interested in is the “clearly regressive” subtype, which they seem to be saying is about 2% or less of all ASD children born during the 1990s.

Apparently, they are only interested in the children of the “epidemic” era when kids got more thimerosal exposure.

There are so few of their target group that when these kids started to be “added” to the “epidemic” no one could see it happening, and likewise when the exposure to thimerosal dropped of precipitously, even though the numbers of these target group kids must have dropped off precipitously, no one could see that change in the larger epidemiological data.

So the epidemic might continue but it has nothing to do with thimerosal exposure now.

The numbers of “clearly regressive” autistics, however should be obviously diminishing. Because it’s a small group and not all of them “clearly regressed” following a vaccine containing thimerosal. These supposedly thimerosal-damaged clearly regressive kids must be disappearing by now, but maybe they’ve been replaced by kids who “clearly regress” due to another actionable agent. If they regress because of an non-actionable agent, like, say, oxygen or exposure prenatally to mom’s immune system, no one cares. Then logically, if all of the “clear regressing” autistics were caused to regress only by thimerosal, then there should be very few, or none, younger “clearly regressed” autistics in areas where thimerosal is not used for toddler age vaccines now and hasn’t been used in the past few years.

Apparently, they are claiming that thimeosal in vaccines only causes a subset of regressive autism, not including early-onset autism. So apparently there’s no way for a baby who got the birth dose of Hep B to be made autistic, since it can’t “clearly regress” shortly after birth. And if the baby only got the Hep B dose (if preserved by thimerosal), that alone couldn’t cause a regression months later. I think they are only interested in vaccines given right before a toddler regresses, at say age 12 months to 36 months.

Also, it seems that the PSC believes Eric Fombonne’s research is reliable when they want to make a point with it. They used his research to support the numbers of autistics who regress if I recall.

The transcripts will be available eventually (maybe soon), but we don’t know when. I think it would be interesting to compare get them to explain how many of this tiny group of ASD kids also have mitochondrial diseases or disorders. I wonder if they are trying to imply that the rest of the “epidemic” is caused by tuna mercury, chicken mercury or MMR, aluminum, assortative mating or what?

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?

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