Dr. Johnson testifies in the Autism Omnibus Hearing

24 May

Dr. Johnson’s testimony was fabulous and I think it’s safe to say that it wreaks more devastation on the petitioners'(the parents) case. As of this moment, I can’t give you a lot of detail about Dr. Johnson’s qualifications, unfortunately. For some reason a portion of the audio recording (MP3) that would have included Dr. Johnson’s statement of his qualifications is missing.

One thing I think is important to point out here is that the respondents experts’ (written) reports, and even the list of the respondents’ experts has not been posted to the Autism Omnibus docket. The parents’ lawyers (the Petitioners Steering Committee, or PSC) do have their experts list posted to the docket. Some time ago (I think it was more than a year ago) the Department of Justice attorneys asked the Special Master if the Federal Court would refrain from posting the lists of the respondent’s experts for fear that their experts would be subjected to harassment. That request doesn’t seem to be on the docket now, but it used to be. It’s likely that after the experts were listed the first time the experts for the government were harassed. This would be in keeping with the way different experts, and even parents such as myself and Kevin Leitch and others, have been harassed by “mercury parents” or their friends. You can see from the Autism Omnibus Proceedings Docket Here: http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/2718 that the there are no more postings of lists of respondents’ experts after mid 2006. There’s an entry from March of 2007 that is called, “Respondent’s Notice of Expert Witnesses,” but there’s no document now linked to that entry.

The point I’m trying to make about the missing expert list is: I can’t pull up the list of expert witnesses for the respondents (the US government, essentially) for this hearing because it’s not available. So I can’t find out easily who Dr. Johnson is, though he is a professor at university, and has a lab, and has published on neurophyisology and neurodegenerative diseases, and he uses tissue slides and tissue cultures. Worse, “Johnson” is a very common name so if you go looking for experts named Johnson who publish in neurodegenerative diseases, you’ll find 3 or 4 of them in pubmed. The DoJ lawyer here is one of Mr. Matanoski’s team of attorneys. As far as I can tell the junior attorneys on the team are Bo (Beau?) Johnson, Ms. Ricciardella, Ms. Renzi and Ms. Espinoza (Espinosa?).

I don’t know which lawyer is examining Dr. Johnson. From her voice, I’m guessing (again) that it’s Ms. Renzi. Again this is my transcribing of what was said, some of it is word for word, some of it is a close paraphrase of what was said you can find the following somewhere around 8 minutes 43 seconds on the second MP3 file from Day 7 (May 20). Here is some of the very interesting testimony from Dr. Johnson:

Ms. Renzi: Dr. Deth cited a paper by Mady Hornig in support of his arguments. You mentioned that the mouse strain Dr. Hornig used was selected because it had a stronger immune response, but took issue with Dr. Deth’s explanation of the rationale behind the use of the strain. … Deth said hers was a mouse strain harboring genetic deficits in redox related enzymes… What strain of mouse was used?

Dr. Johnson: It was an SJL-J mouse. (Dr. Deth) was inferring that there was a redox enzyme differential, or some kind of differential (in this strain) and that’s absolutely not true. The mice have a this increased immune response and that’s why they were selected. … There’s absolutely no data supporting the fact that there is a redox enzyme differential. Now I can understand the reason that it’s in there because it supports his hypothesis… but it’s not an accurate representation of these mice.

Renzi: Do you have confidence in Dr. Hornig’s reported results?

Johnson: Uh, no.

Renzi: Part of that has to do with the hippocampal sections, correct?

Johnson: The quality of the images,… I’ll point this out, (the sections from the Hornig paper) .. What you can see is when you look at these images–to me these images are absolutely awful, now the staining here is hematoxylin and eosin, and it’s supposed to stain for architecture and cell integrity and a variety of other things. The pictures are diffuse, there’s no clear neuronal fields. Right here there is weak staining. … If you look here, the cells that are dark right there, those are the neuronal fields. The quality is just extremely low. … Quality of the sections themselves are low. … Let’s put it this way, I’ve seen this in my lab before. I’ve seen people come to me with sections stained like this. I’ll say: Something’s wrong. OK? The tissue wasn’t prepared right. There’s something definately wrong here. Because these do not maintain the nice cellular architecture that you should see if the experiment is done right and the tissue is harvested correctly.

Renzi: Problems with these slides led you to doubt the findings of the Hornig paper? Has a recent paper contradicted Hornig’s findings? …

Johnson: The… comparable fields in the Berman paper. To me they are absolutely beautiful. … It looks very, very, very good.

Renzi: … What dose of thimerosal was used in the Berman paper?

Johnson: …They also used a does that was 10 times higher…

Renzi: Did both studies (stain with antibodies)?

Johnson: There is a distinct difference between Berman and Hornig studies’ slides… If you look at the architecture of the tissue in the Berman study…. (there is) nice staining in the hippocampus….

Special Master:… (interrupt for clarification)

Johnson: … Berman sections are the two sections on the left side… What you can see is there’s very nice staining in the field, the neuronal field are not staining intensely (which is what they are expected to show)

Now if you look at the upper 4 panels on the right side these are from the similar panels from the Hornig study. The first thing that I want to point out is that if you look at the tissue, it’s full of holes… Look at this enhanced image right here, the bottom two panels C and D from the Hornig. You can see that the tissue almost looks like it’s disintegrating, It’s breaking down. There’s holes all over in the tissue.

I know from experience when you see tissue like this the amount of nonspecific staining by antibodies could be intense.

Basically, if someone came to me with this kind of staining in my laboratory I would say to go back and do the whole experiment again,… I would not want… for one these are unpublishable to me, and two the potential for artifactual data to be generated from this kind of (poor quality tissue) is extremely high. … This is very important. You know, you can do whatever you want after you’ve got the tissue, but it’s the process of getting the tissue so that the quality is extremely good. You need to start with high quality tissue.

… The Berman tissue was absolutely perfect. … The sections are beautiful.

One thing I took away from Dr. Johnson’s testimony is that there’s no way that the Hornig paper should

have made it past a competent peer review and into a “peer reviewed” publication. The Hornig paper has a few other problems that have been discussed before, but these problems never been reported in into a letter to the journal that published that paper, Molecular Psychology, as they should have. (Click here to download a copy of that paper from the SAFE MINDS website.)

Hornig wrote that paper with her main squeeze, Ian Lipkin, and with David Chian. This research was funded by the UC Davis MIND Institute, SAFE MINDS and by part of an NIH grant of Ian Lipkin’s. Surely someone knew how bad those tissue slides were even before it was submitted to the journal. Surely someone at the journal should have had a person with some kind of expertise review the article. Surely in 2004 some person with expertise would have noticed the problems with the degraded and uninterpretable tissue slides in the Hornig paper. I didn’t notice any problems with the slides when I read the paper because I don’t know what stained tissue of mouse hippocampus is supposed to look like and neither would most of the mercury parents who have tried to use this paper to show that their own child was made autistic by vaccines containing thimerosal.

The MIND Institute scientists must have seen the problems with Mady Hornig’s study, but they invited her to come speak about her thimerosal-causes-susceptible-mice-to-become-mindlessly-violent-killers hypothesis at the conference I call the “MIND’s mini-DAN!”. Video of her speaking at that conference is still available on the MIND’s website here: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/events/toxicology_recorded_events.html

And you can see video of John Green speaking there, too. He was described in the most glowing terms by Dr. Robert Hendren. Maybe Dr. Hendren didn’t know about the “earthworm eggs” and “fecal implantation enemas” that Dr. Green had prescribed to some of his patients. After Green spoke, Dr. Hendren knew about the problems with Green’s citing of a provoked urine toxic heavy metals lab result from Doctor’s Data Inc that was in Dr. Green’s slides, because I told Dr. Hendren about the problem with that lab report. As far as I could tell, Dr. Hendren wasn’t particularly worried about that. The video of Dr. Green “explaining” what that lab test meant to him is still on the MIND’s website. I have a problem with that, since parents can watch those videos and make poor treatment decisions for their children based on them. On the other hand, those videos seem to stand as a testimony to something less than scientific that seems to be going on at the MIND Institute. To UC Davis’ credit however, the Berman (2008) study that totally contradicts the Hornig (2004) study was also conducted at UCD.

Dr. Johnson has plenty of interesting things to say about Dr. Richard Deth and his neuroblastoma cell line experiments. Apparently, Dr. Deth will be back to testify again in the autism omnibus. Perhaps he will explain why he seemed to cut his experiments short (time-wise) and why he called neuroblastoma cells “neronal cells” when they should not be called neuronal cells, and why he didn’t show critically important “dose response curves”.credit: taminsea

I may have to devote a separate post to the issue of Deth taking data from (but not citing) a 1958 paper (pdf) that reported the level of cystathionine in duck brains (besides duck, also, human, cat, rat, guinea pig, horseshoe crab, chicken, cow and monkey).

Dore UK and Australia are now both in administration

23 May

As noted on this blog and elsewhere, Dore has been marketed as a treatment for ASDs (not to mention dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD) based on extremely limited evidence. Dore UK and Australia have now both gone into administration. In Australia, it is unclear whether clients and staff will get what is owed; in the UK, Dore has stated that they “are presently exploring alternative arrangements to ensure every client is cared for” without (as far as I can see) making clear whether staff will get paid. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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.

New blog worth following

20 May

I don’t usually make recommendations about new blogs. Not because I’m above all that – course I’m not – but mostly because so many people have their set ideas about what makes a good blog and they don’t need me pushing my opinions on them.

But this is a little different. Its the first blog I’ve seen that concentrates on epidemiology and is written by someone who:

…has a Ph.D. in epidemiology from an Ivy League university. Before that I got a bachelor’s degree from a different Ivy League college, a master’s degree in developmental psychology, and a master’s degree in medical sociology from another Ivy League University. I worked for more than 30 years as an epidemiology professor in medical academia and schools of public health, and in the senior biomedical research service at the Centers for Disease for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). During my career I have been the editor of two epidemiology journals and one more general biomedical journal.

Thats some pretty impressive credentials.

I wouldn’t (and I doubt Epi would either) claim that the blog is about autism or vaccines, or autism related science but the two posts I’ve read that have discussed autism have been clear, concise and easy for non-experts to parse.

So, I hope that Epi will continue to blog tangentially about autism from time to time as there are big issues surrounding autism epidemiology that we could all learn about. But more than that I plan on reading Epi’s blog on a regular basis in order to learn.

That’s not to say I expect to become an epidemiology expert simply by reading a blog! Of course not. But that doesn’t preclude me from being able to hopefully discern from an expert what is important in epidemiological studies and what is not.

I would _love_ to see Epi turn her attention to some of the Geier’s epidemiological studies for example. I think we all might learn a lot from a detailed critique of that particular body of work!

I’d also like to see Epi’s opinion on some of the epidemiological studies being utilised in the Autism Omnibus hearings. As we’ve all seen, the epidemiological basis on the autism/vaccine hypothesis seems to have undergone a substantive revision of late. I’d like to see a professionals take on it.

Best of all though? The name Epi Wonk. It reminds me of Wonko The Sane from ‘So Long and Thanks For All The Fish”. Anyone that sounds that much like a man who believes he’s living in a perpetual lunatic asylum can’t be all bad 😉

So – visit Epi Wonk, see what you think.

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.

Should Parents With a Stake in Vaccine Litigation be Disallowed From Commenting?

17 May

As I’d imagine most readers would agree, no, parents with a stake in vaccine litigation should not be disallowed from commenting simply on the basis that they have a conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter if the conflict of interest runs in the millions of dollars. Should Jon Poling, for example, be disallowed from commenting? I don’t think so in the least. In fact, some of us wish he’d be more forthcoming with information about his daughter’s case.

So why am I bringing this up? Apparently, Kim Stagliano does think it is a good idea for people with conflicts of interest in this debate to shut up, judging from a recent post of hers.

DR. OFFIT’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST SHOULD DISALLOW HIM FROM COMMENTING

(See also Orac’s take)

For those who aren’t familiar with Kim Stagliano, she’s the parent of two autistic little girls, one of whom, I understand, has never been vaccinated. Some call Kim the poster child of autism genetics. But I digress.

All of this got me thinking about conflicts of interest, though, and I’ve come to the conclusion that not all conflicts of interest are created equal. Let’s take monetary conflicts of interest, for starters. I can identify 3 groups in the autism community that do not have monetary conflicts of interest.

  1. Parents with no stake in vaccine litigation.
  2. Autistic people with no stake in vaccine litigation (which would include all autistic adults).
  3. Scientists and professionals who do not make a living from research or litigation on autism or related matters.

This is a rough characterization, of course. It’s always possible for parents or autistic adults to have conflicts of interest through their employment, for example. I doubt this is usually the case, nevertheless.

Some might say I’m biased, as I have basically identified the Autism Hub and friends as not having significant monetary conflicts of interest. Be that as it may, I believe it’s a roughly accurate characterization, and I’m willing to listen to arguments to the contrary.

But let’s face it. None of us are free of conflicts of interest in general. We might oppose attempts to stigmatize us, especially if said stigmatization is based on almost certainly false claims. We might have a huge emotional investment in the outcome of our kids. We might see litigation-motivated alt-med as a threat to the integrity of science, and so forth.

The point is that if Kim were right, then none of us, from any side of the debate, should be allowed to comment. Beyond arguments about freedom of speech, this is obviously nonsensical. Kim Stagliano should reconsider her statement.

A secondary point is that there are conflicts of interest and there are conflicts of interest. It seems to me that someone attempting to make millions in court, or someone who has been actually payed nearly millions to produce evidence of causation (which is not speculation on my part) has a much bigger conflict of interest than, say, someone who is employed by the government or someone who has served in the advisory panel of a pharmaceutical company. But again, none of this should disallow someone from commenting. It can be used to make a judgement about trustworthiness, sure.

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.

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.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →