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No such thing as a genetic epidemic

15 May

Since the Autism Omnibus started up again, I’ve been talking about how the Petitioners have pulled the tablecloth out from under the feet of the mercury militia. Its been a mainstay of the militia that there has been an epidemic of autism since the early 1990’s, caused by vaccines, most notably thiomersal and MMR (hence the strapline of mercury militia bible Evidence of Harm – Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic and the ‘M’ in SafeMinds (Sensible Action For Ending Mercury -Induced Neurological Disorders).

In fact, lets be clear, SafeMinds believe in an Autism Epidemic, Generation Rescue believe in an Autism Epidemic, the NAA believe in an Autism Epidemic, Jenny McCarthy believes in an Autism Epidemic.

And yet this week, we had petitioners expert witness (i.e. _for the families_) in the autism omnibus destroying the idea of an epidemic. According to him, the number of children throughout the 1990’s/early noughties was in the hundreds.

That’s ‘hundreds’ from a population of 40 million.

He went on to say:

Q: So if the risk is confined to that group, clearly regressive autism, are you assuming then that there is no elevated risk to any other group – any other cases of autism?

A: In the calculations I made, yes.

This is a deliberate strategy on behalf on Petitioners. They want to destroy the idea that all the epidemiological evidence regarding autism and vaccines has shown thus far – that there is no association between autism and any vaccine. They cannot challenge the quality of the science itself so they have moved the goal posts. They are now saying _not_ that vaccines cause autism, but that _some_ vaccines _may_ cause autism in a population of children so tiny it cannot be detected by epidemiology.

That is in direct opposition to the very idea of an autism epidemic which, by definition, must be large and ‘unmissable’ – a tsunami of autism.

Amusingly, the beloved science editor of the Age of Autism blog decided the best way to deal with _his own sides_ expert testimony was to pretend it had never happened.

‘You cannot have a genetic epidemic’ – that’s another mainstay of the mercury militia. The idea that there has been an epidemic is used to support the idea that genes play a small, negligible role in autism (if they play a role at all) because ‘you cannot have a genetic epidemic’ and as we all know there has been au autism epidemic right? Therefore, genees can’t have played any role _in_ that epidemic.

Except that the families in the Autism Omnibus are now relying almost totally on the idea that there never _was_ an autism epidemic.

The genetic role in autism science came to the fore again yesterday when Yale announced a new study that found Genetic links to impaired social behavior in autism:

With the help of Yale’s Autism Center of Excellence, led by Drs. Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar, and many families of individuals with ASD, we have registered a possible association between some of the genes identified in animal studies as controlling affiliative behaviors in ASD.” The strongest statistical findings of the study implicate the prolactin gene, the prolactin receptor gene, and the oxytocin receptor gene in these affiliative behavior deficits.

I haven’t read the paper yet (and I’ll probably need help to understand all the highly technical gene talk) but I’ll probably have nore to say once I have. For now, its interesting that in the week that expert witness for the families in the Autism Omnibus gutted the epidemic hypothesis, yet another study was released linking genes to autism.

Autism Omnibus – Petitioners suggest new prevalence

14 May

As noted by Ms Clark yesterday, petitioners in the current Autism Omnibus hearing are redefining the terms of the so called ‘epidemic’ to proportions that would’ve been unthinkable to any card-carrying mercury militia member at the start of this year.

And as I noted yesterday, not only is the ‘epidemic’ (so long a standard of the vaccine hypotheses) being seriously watered down, so is the very definition of who can claim status as a member of the vaccine-induced-autism club.

And this is not as a result of any utterance by anybody on respondents (HHS) side – this is all direct from the mouths of the Petitioners legal team and their experts. Truly amazing.

The audio files were posted yesterday (please note that despite everything being linked, as of right now, only Day 1 audio files are actually present for download) so I could finally hear some of what was being said for myself. I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet but I wanted to hear more about what I posted yesterday – the fact that Petitioners are now claiming that thiomersal induced autism (assuming it exists at all) accounts for such a small proportion of autism that it is not detectable using epidemiology.

Dr Greenland says (and this is all on Day 1 File 1 – I ain’t going to transcribe it exactly!) that the figures Petitioners are talking about represent a sub-group of regressive autism he terms ‘clearly regressive autism’ (this is also mentioned in his report which I linked to in the post I made yesterday). And of course regressive autism itself is a sub group of autism. According to Greenland, the figures are:

Regressive autism: 28% of autism1.
Clearly regressive autism: 20% of regressive autism
Therefore, clearly regressive autism: (approx) 6% of autism

Now, when we translate this to what the vaccine hypothesis believers like to call ‘proper’ autism (by which I assume they mean classic/low functioning) we get this:

Classical/LF autism: 33% of ASD (based on Fombonne data again).
So, ‘clearly regressive autism’ is 6% of 33% of ASD.

Or in other words, Petitioners ‘clearly regressive autism’ accounts for approx 2% of all ASD.

I can’t say it often enough. This is the expert report of an expert testifying for petitioners. Amazing.

And lets also bear in mind that Greenland is not claiming that *all* ‘clearly regressive autism’ cases are caused by thiomersal. He’s saying that this is the numerical size of the group Petitioners claim *contain* those injured by vaccines, resulting in autism.

So, when we translate that to actual numbers what do we get?

According to CDC, we can estimate that 560,000 children (0 – 21) have an ASD. Using Greenland’s data we can see that:

2% of 560000 = 11,200 people aged between 0 and 21 have ‘clearly regressive autism’.

Based on the data on the front page of census.gov, there are 304,079,911 American citizens as of right now. The child population of which is 25% or 76,019,961.5.

Therefore, according to Petitioners expert witness, the ‘clearly regressive autism’ (aka autism-caused-by-thiomersal) population percentage of the US is *0.015%*.

Tsunami? Hardly.

1] interesting point to note – this is based on Fombonne’s work. Who would’ve thought we’d ever see Fombonne’s data being used to support Petitioners?

PS – maths is not my strong point. Feel free to double check and point out errors/fixes.

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?

Autism Omnibus and shrinking hypotheses

13 May

The number of people who have made confident assertions about thiomersal causing autism over the last four years or so is astounding.

It’s now 2005…..[W]e should see fewer cases entering the system this year than we did last year.

– David Kirby

if the total number of 3-5 year olds in the California DDS system has not declined by 2007, that would deal a severe blow to the autism-thimerosal hypothesis…..total cases among 3-5 year olds, not changes in the rate of increase is the right measure.

– David Kirby

“Late 2006 should be the first time that rates go down” said Handley. “If they don’t, our. hypothesis will need to be reexamined.”

– JB Handley

…I would like to make a virtual wager that within the next 18-24 months scientific evidence will make the thimerosal-autism link a near certainty.

– Richard Deth, March 22, 2006.

All these statements have one thing in common, they promote the idea that mercury (thiomersal in particular) causes autism in either all, or the vast majority of cases.

However, listening to the Autism Omnibus yesterday provided a very interesting change from this perspective:

In some kids, there’s enough of it that it sets off this chronic neuroinflammatory pattern that can lead to regressive autism,” said attorney Mike Williams.

ABC.

Note the new language: ‘some kids’….’regressive autism’…..’can lead’.

It seems the days of ‘all autism is mercury poisoning’ are long gone.

Petitioners presented a very interesting expert witness yesterday – a Dr Sander Greenland from UCLA who is a Professor of Epidemiology.

Dr Greenland argued some strange facts for the PSC but completely in line with this new tack that I can’t even remember being argued in the Cedillo hearing (thiomersal may cause regressive autism in some kids).

Greenland essentially argued that all the current epidemiology regarding autism and thiomersal was not good enough to detect thiomersal causation in regressive autism – this is from his submitted report:

A simple example may clarify this point. If a vaccine is not associated with any type of disorder in the category, we should expect to see the same risk when comparing vaccinated to the unvaccinated. Suppose, however, that in reality the vaccine is associated with a two-fold increase in the risk of a type of disorder in the category, but not associated with any other type. Suppose also that, without the vaccine, the associated type represents only one-tenth (10%) of the disease category, and that the total number of cases in the category would be 100. Then, without the vaccine, the number of cases with the associated type would be 100/10 = 10. With the vaccine, however, the number of cases with the associated type would double, to 20, an excess of 10 cases over the original 10 with the associated type. This excess produced by the vaccine would result in a total of 100+10 = 110 cases over the full category, which is only a 10% increase in the risk of any type in the category. Thus, the risk ratio for getting any type in the category would be only 110/100 = 1.1. Such a small risk ratio cannot be reliably distinguished from 1 by ordinary epidemiologic studies.

In other words, the amount of autism caused by vaccines is in fact too small to be detected by epidemiology. If, of course, it is associated with it at all – a point made later by Dr Greenland:

The brief overview given above supports the idea that the association of MCV (mercury containing vaccine) with autism is small or nonexistent.

But really his point is that if thiomersal does cause autism (and whilst he professes to have ‘no opinion’ on the matter it may be telling that he refers to the idea as a hypothesis throughout his report, not a theory) it causes it in very, very small numbers indeed.

Dr Greenland passed no opinion the validity of the hypothesis itself. Rather, he was there to study epidemiology. We have to respect his opinion even if we disagree with it.

The more telling aspect for me was this sudden conversion from ‘vaccines cause autism’ to this suddenly tiny percentage – so small to be undetectable by epidemiology up to this point. That’s quite a step back. What will become of the Omnibus cases that are not considered’ regressive’? Or the ones (like Michelle Cedillo) who were claimed to be regressive but were, upon viewing the video evidence, clearly not. Are the PSC really throwing cases away?

Green our vaccines?

21 Apr

Jenny McCarthy:

I am surely not going to tell anyone to vaccinate. But if I had another child, there’s no way in hell…….for my next kid — which I’m never going to have — there’s no way.

Thus speaks the woman who claims she is not anti-vaccine and not intending to spread an anti-vaccine agenda.

In June this year she will be spearheading a rally to carry the message of ‘green our vaccines’. Said message is apparently all about making vaccines ‘cleaner’ (???) reducing the number of them and spacing them out. No scientific reason for this of course.

When asked, the ‘green our vaccines’ leadership claim that they are not _anti_ vaccine – just pro _safe_ vaccine. Uh-huh. And which vaccines are ‘safe’ according to the ‘green our vaccines’ committee? Well, it seems that Jenny McCarthy thinks that answer to that is ‘none’. She will never vaccinate again. No way in hell.

Some people think that the ‘green our vaccines’ message is a trojan horse.

I’m against vaccines, but I feel that “greening our vaccines” is a step in the right direction. Because I realized that more people will be open to hearing the message “green our vaccines” rather than “no more vaccines”. In the beginning I couldn’t imagine scrapping vaccines altogether, but in time I transformed. I think the public
needs to digest this one bite at a time.

Greening of the vaccines is only half of the issue, people need to wake up and see that there is no such thing as a safe vaccine…

I agree with you that there will never likely be a “safe” vaccine, but the only good thing I see about talking about “safer” vaccines, is that this makes it more “palatable” for some and more likely that this news gets out into the mainstream. People are more comfortable dealing with “too much, too soon”, rather than with “none at all”. It gets the vaccine issue a foot in the door, so to speak, into the mainstream media

………..

Hopefully, the “Green Our Vaccines” campaign will get the ball rolling and get this info to more people, to get them thinking and talking about vaccine safety issues. Whether there is such a thing as “safe vaccines” will need to follow after that initial discussion.

….parents do need to come to the conclusion that vaccines are useless and harmful, on their own, through their own thinking and research

I agree that “Green the vacines” is more palatable to the general populace and that is the ‘message’ Jenny and TACA have chosen. I think the approach is ingenious and fits right into the times of global warming and greening everything.

……………

I think green the vaccines ultimately leads to NO vaccines but agreed it must be done in steps.

…………..

We could hopefully all agree that the goal is to STOP damaging children whether that will take greening or incinerating vaccines, that is still the ultimate goal.

These messages are from an active discussion on the EoH Yahoo Group. And after all, why wouldn’t this be the message? Jenny McCarthy quite obviously does _not_ believe in vaccination.

In my opinion the whole ‘green our vaccines’ campaign is very much a trojan horse. We all know how groups associated with this campaign really feel about vaccines. We know how Jenny McCarthy feels about vaccines and we can see what the ‘rank and file’ really think about both vaccines and what the ‘green our vaccines’ campaign is really all about.

Thankfully, the opinion of McCarthy as a less than stellar representative for science is a widely held mainstream one. On Gawker for example, her recent embarrassing performance on Larry King was described as:

Larry King had noted medical expert/softcore video star Jenny McCarthy on the program last night to talk about AUTISM. Specifically, how it’s caused by VACCINATING YOUR CHILDREN. This is patent conspiratorial nonsense, but it’s very popular conspiratorial nonsense. Of course, in a battle between concerned, credulous parents and medical experts, the media will generally frame it as, say, Debate Rages Anew on Vaccine-Autism Link. Faced with a panel of three trained pediatricians, Ms. McCarthy shouted “BULLSHIT” twice.

and Jossip said:

Jenny McCarthy believes common medical vaccinations cause autism in children. And you know what she thinks of your opinions if you disagree? Bullshit! At least that’s what she yelled last night while berating three doctors trying to reason with her on Larry King Live.

Ouch.

Now, whilst it might be mildly amusing to see how real people in the real world (those unconnected with either the vaccine, autism or vaccine/autism debates) consider the opinions of McCarthy it shouldn’t be forgotten or swept aside that its not just about the mercury. Its not even just about the autism. Its about the vaccines. When Jenny McCarthy tells you she wants to ‘green our vaccines’ then ask her exactly what that means and why she won’t ever vaccinate another child of hers.

Frustration

20 Apr

One of the most frustrating things about blogging the unfolding vaccine>mitochondria>autism hypothesis is that a lot of the doctors who are experts in the field of mitochondria don’t want to publicly comment. A lot of them feel quite rightly that there is a certain element who are not the most balanced of individuals and they don’t really want to expose themselves to these people. That I can definitely empathise with.

However it does, as one of them has admitted themselves, leave the field wide open to (and I quote directly from one of these doctors):

….legions of mountebanks eager to pad their retirement funds at the expense of desperate parents…

So when a very well respected mitochondria researcher says the following all I can do is post it and not attribute it and hope that it can be read and believed. Of course, the fact it appears on this blog will no doubt cause some to dismiss it entirely but I would urge them not to do so. Please remember that kids with mitochondrial issues are a whole new ball game. Talking their parents out of vaccinating them could very well kill them.

…..I do not know of any evidence connecting mercury and mitochondrial disease. There is no evidence connecting vaccination with mitochondrial diseases: certainly vaccinations do not cause mitochondrial diseases. Whether they may act as transient stressors, like intercurrent URIs do, remains to be determined. Clearly, energy-challenged children with mitochondrial diseases need to be protected from potentially deadly infections through vaccination.

Mitochondria, autism and thimerosal

18 Apr

The whole mitochondria/autism thing is pretty fascinating. A Dr Shoffner presented the results of a study he conducted (‘Mitochondrial Dysfunction May Play a Role in Autism Spectrum Disorders Etiology‘ – its free registration at Medscape to read the whole thing) in which he noted:

a retrospective analysis of 41 children with ASD who were being evaluated for suspected mitochondrial disease showed that 32 (78%) had defects in skeletal muscle oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) enzyme function and 29 of 39 (74%) harbored abnormalities in the OXPHOS proteins.

The numbers kind of leap out at you don’t they?

Except, we need to remember that this is a heavily skewed population. As SL has pointed out:

I can’t state it enough: this is NOT a random sample of autistic individuals. These are children who were already suspected of having a mitochondrial disorder.

Which is a bit like looking for wet kids at a swimming pool. It doesn’t really tell us anything about autism aetiology. It tells us that some kids who are autistic also have mitochondrial dysfunction. Reading anything concrete into that is just like reading anything concrete into the fact that autism symptoms become clear around the time vaccines are administered – correlation does not equal causation after all.

Dr Shoffner is unavailable right now but I have dropped an email off with him asking if he would be kind enough to make his presentation available. We’ll see.

In the meantime it should be noted that there are other highly respected mitochondrial researchers who are not pleased with the way that Dr’s Poling and Shoffner have conducted themselves. A researcher I am talking with commented:

….more harm than good has been done this time by Shoffner’s and Poling’s whipping up controversy but not providing the hard data that everyone needs….. Therefore, again, I ask that you serve the public good by not trying to ferret out partial data and incomplete statements from me or others, trust that nothing is being hidden by anyone, and wait for the full story to appear in a medical journal……offer assurance to your readers that the true story will be told and that misstatements of the legions of the uninformed and conspiracy mongers who are pursuing their own selfish aims will ultimately be revealed.

Strong words from someone who clearly feels that Shoffner and Poling are doing what they’re doing solely to be controversial.

So that seems to be the state of research regarding a mitochondrial aetiology for autism. Patchy and sensationalist with a clear agenda to serve personal interests.

However, as we all know, there are a group of people who want to take the autism/mito thing one step further and blame vaccines for triggering an occluded mitochondrial dysfunction which in turn causes autism. Its like a minor league domino effect with only three domino’s. Again, it reminds me very much of the early days of the thiomersal/MMR hypotheses – look for a direct cause and when one can’t be found, look for an indirect one and twist, twist, twist until you can argue for one.

Our old friend Ginger Taylor has, for example, been hopping from online newspaper to online newspaper saying in their comments section that:

The debate is over. Our highest health authorities have stated that vaccines are a cause of autism.

When in fact no such statement exists. Ginger is arguing that ‘features of autism’ is the same as a diagnosis of autism. Back in the real world of autism diagnostics, that is not the case.

So – what can we do to examine the hypothesis that thimerosal triggers mitochondrial dysfunction which in turn triggers autism? We could search for papers that mention thimerosal and mitochondria. When we do we get:

1: Yel L, Brown LE, Su K, Gollapudi S, Gupta S.
Thimerosal induces neuronal cell apoptosis by causing cytochrome c and apoptosis-inducing factor release from mitochondria.
Int J Mol Med. 2005 Dec;16(6):971-7.
PMID: 16273274 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

2: Humphrey ML, Cole MP, Pendergrass JC, Kiningham KK.
Mitochondrial mediated thimerosal-induced apoptosis in a human neuroblastoma cell line (SK-N-SH).
Neurotoxicology. 2005 Jun;26(3):407-16.
PMID: 15869795 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

3: Makani S, Gollapudi S, Yel L, Chiplunkar S, Gupta S.
Biochemical and molecular basis of thimerosal-induced apoptosis in T cells: a major role of mitochondrial pathway.
Genes Immun. 2002 Aug;3(5):270-8.
PMID: 12140745 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

4: Collin HB, Carroll N.
In vivo effects of thimerosal on the rabbit corneal endothelium: an ultrastructural study.
Am J Optom Physiol Opt. 1987 Feb;64(2):123-30.
PMID: 3826286 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

5: Collin HB.
Ultrastructural changes to corneal stromal cells due to ophthalmic preservatives.
Acta Ophthalmol (Copenh). 1986 Feb;64(1):72-8.
PMID: 3083641 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

6: Van Horn DL, Edelhauser HF, Prodanovich G, Eiferman R, Pederson HF.
Effect of the ophthalmic preservative thimerosal on rabbit and human corneal endothelium.
Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 1977 Apr;16(4):273-80.

Of these, studies 4, 5 and 6 are not relevant – they’re talking about eyes. Its studies 1, 2 and 3 on this list that are articulatory relevant to us in our search for papers touching on vaccines>mito>autism. If anyone else finds any, please let me know in the comments section.

Now, these three studies are not supportive of the vaccines>mito connection. Why? They use frankly massive concentrations of thiomersal, way beyond whats contained in a vaccine. A quote from a scientist about these studies:

all of the studies used “non-physiological” concentrations of thimerosal – concentrations that would not be reached even by giving three or four (or even ten or twenty) high-thimerosal-containing vaccines to a low-weight and/or premature infant.

You can kill mitochondria with glutamate (an amino acid found in chicken soup, among other things), salt, oxygen, and a number of other things, if you use ENOUGH of it. The studies are not relevant…..because the concentrations used are so high – by a factor of at least 100.

So we seem to be back to square one. Whilst the evidence for a mitochondrial aetiology for autism is of mixed provenance and yet seems probable at some level, the evidence for thiomersal and autism-related mitochondrial dysfunction is not good.

Anti-vaccination and autism

16 Apr

I need to reproduce this comment from Amy Tuteur, MD on Autism News Beat. Its perfect.

“How does Dr. Tuteur explain parents who fully vaccinated and trusted the vaccination policy and then became disenchanted with it only after seeing their children seriously injured?”

Disenchantment is not the standard. The scientific evidence is the standard. It is not as though this hasn’t been studied. The purported link between vaccines and autism has been studied extensively and repeatedly. The scientific evidence indicates no difference in the incidence of autism between those who are vaccinated and those who are not. There is also no difference in the incidence of autism between those who received vaccines containing thimerosal and those who did not.

We’ve looked and the link simply isn’t there. That’s not surprising when you consider that the classic descriptions of the onset of autism, elucidated long before the use of multiple vaccines, is exactly the same as the onset of autism today. Vaccines do not increase the incidence of autism. Thimerosal does not increase the incidence of autism. The natural history of autism has not changed since the introduction of vaccines. It cannot be any clearer than that.

The conspiracy theories are a bunch of baloney. In order for there to be a conspiracy, someone must be hiding information. Doctors are vaccinating their children. Vaccine manufacturers are vaccinating their children. Immunologists are vaccinating their children. Who, precisely, is conspiring to keep information from the public and are we really supposed to believe that they would sacrifice their own children just to preserve the conspiracy?

Moreover, it isn’t as though doctors, immunologist and vaccine manufacturers are denying that vaccines have risks. It is well known that vaccines can and will cause small numbers of deaths and cases of brain damage. We have set up a compensation system precisely because we know about and acknowledge these risks. If doctors, immunologists and vaccine manufacturers are forthcoming about the risk of DEATH, isn’t it a bit absurd to suggest that they would hide the risk of autism?

One thing is certain, vaccine rejectionists do not understand immunology. Immunology is extremely complicated, so it’s not surprising that many people don’t understand it. However, the fact that they don’t understand it tells us nothing about immunology or vaccines, just like the fact that most people do not understand Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity tell us nothing about whether they are true.

Autism is a very serious problem. To the extent that we waste time, money, attention and effort on something that is not causing autism, we are diverting time, money, attention and effort from finding the real cause for autism. That is the saddest aspect of this incredibly sad situation.

I also recently read ‘Trusting blindly can be the biggest risk of all’: organised resistance to childhood vaccination in the UK which has some fascinating things to say on the anti-vaccine movement and their history. Consider this:

There is a small but fascinating social history literature which looks at the birth of resistance during this period in the form of groups like the Leicester Anti-Vaccination League and critical publications like the Vaccination Inquirer . Several of the accounts demonstrate the successes of organised campaigns which inspired marches of up to 100,000 people, riots, public burning of effigies of Edward Jenner, and the celebration of martyrs (Beck 1960, Porter and Porter 1988, Durbach 2000)…..Other accounts of this period stress the impressive ability of the anti-vaccinators to harness the power of the press (Howard 2003) and the important role of key individuals in pushing forward the movement.

Sounds familiar huh?

An Open Letter To The Poling’s

12 Apr

Dear Poling family,

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

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

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

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

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

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

But where is this concession?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Poling goes on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking this into account, when Dr Poling states that:

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

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

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

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

Dr Poling goes on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

Sept 2001.

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

Nov 2001.

She has mitochondrial disease which causes her autism.

March 2004.

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

Feb 2003.

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

Oct 2001.

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

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

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

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

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

8 Apr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, after that she carried on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, Ginger carried on:

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

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

Kirby was right, the debate is over.

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

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

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

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