Watch Your Words When the Subject is Autism, and Vaccines
Last Sunday a group of experts on mitochondrial disorders met for a meeting in Indianapolis to discuss the case of Hannah Poling, whose underlying mitochondrial disorder was found to have been aggravated by vaccines, after which she developed symptoms of autism. A June 30th New York Times article announced the meeting and noted the case of Hannah Poling and of a 6-year-old Colorado girl who also had a mitochondrial disorder and who, after receiving the FluMist vaccine, had to be hospitalized and died.
Both the NYTimes article and an ABC News report did not make it sufficiently clear that the 6-year-old girl did not have autism. A July 4th story in the Commercial-News (Danville, IL) reports on the Indianapolis meeting, and almost makes it seem that the Colorado child had autism, as she did not.
Right now, [Dr. Robert] Elghammer [a pediatrician and DAN! practitioner] believes strongly that the routine vaccinations young children receive may be responsible for the increase in autism.
Elghammer pointed to a story in the June 30 Chicago Tribune about the link between autism and vaccines.
“Studies have failed to show any link between vaccines and autism,” the Tribune story said, “but many parents are convinced that the vaccines — usually given around the time autism becomes apparent — are to blame.”
But recent cases involving a 9-year-old girl who developed autism following numerous vaccinations and a 6-year-old who died after a FluMist vaccine led experts to speculate that some link may exist.
The notion that vaccines or something in vaccines is linked to autism is a topic of much (and often heated) debate—one has got to be very careful, and precise, with the language one uses.
Tags: asd, asperger, autism, autism blog, disabilities blog, disability, Family, family blog, flu, flumist, mercury, mitochondrial disorder, Parenting, pdd-nos, Vaccines
24 opinions for Watch Your Words When the Subject is Autism, and Vaccines
Liquid Zeolite
Jul 4, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Well, Merck themselves say that certain vaccines can cause brain damage, even death. The trace amounts of Mercury still in vaccines is still well above what is safe for an infant or young child. Mercury is a neurotoxin. The first cases of Autism were all tied to mercury exposure. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that vaccinating (or not vaccinating) is akin to playing Russian Roulette with your childs health. If you vaccinate, you risk death (very rare) and brain damage (1-100 or less, especially if you call ADD brain damage) and for sure damage to the immune system (99%). If you don’t vaccinate, you might get some skin rash type of disease that is cureable (1-2% risk) that is only deadly in third world countries (doesn’t apply to us). Those who weight the risks don’t vaccinate, unless they work for the drug companies or trust the medical establishment. Those who do however do at their own peril, in my opinion, as the medical establishment is a for profit business that makes more money when we are ill (weakened immune system).
dkmnow
Jul 4, 2008 at 2:55 pm
“The first cases of Autism were all tied to mercury exposure.”
Hello? Excuse me? Citation please!
“If you don’t vaccinate, you might get some skin rash type of disease that is cureable [sic] (1-2% risk) that is only deadly in third world countries (doesn’t apply to us).”
Oh, PLEASE!
Independent studies indicate a 99.976% probability that Liquid Zeolite’s “facts” are deliberately fabricated out of thin air in a callous and brazenly transparent attempt to peddle snake-oil to intellectually challenged parents.
Kassiane
Jul 4, 2008 at 2:59 pm
So now Spokane, Washington is a third world country? Last March a child died there from pertussis caught from unvaccinated kids. The infant who died was too young for the DPT.
Kristina, WHY do you let such an ignorant spammer continue posting here? I know that you love freedom of expression, but all he is here for is to shill his product and spread ignorance and hate.
daedalus2u
Jul 4, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Mike, you are dangerously ignorant and spreading dangerous lies.
60 years ago when children were teething they were routinely given teething powders which contained a grain of calomel. That is 65 mg of HgCl. 55,000 micrograms of elemental mercury.
http ://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=10645305
How does that compare to the ~15 micrograms of mercury that was in some vaccines (and isn’t any more)? It is only about 4,000 times more per dose. Over 1,000 children died from real mercury poisoning from the mercury in teething powders.
Hmmm, many tens of millions of children (one company sold 30 million mercury containing doses in one year) received many thousands of times more mercury from teething powders than any child has ever received from any vaccine. Many cases of identified mercury poisoning, over 1000 mercury poisoning deaths.
Hmmm, not a single case of demonstrable mercury poisoning from vaccines, not a single case of elevated blood, urine or hair mercury level from vaccines, not a single case of death from mercury poisoning from vaccines.
Hmmm, many tens of millions of children exposed to many thousands of times more mercury and no cases of autism?
Hmmm, looks like mercury doesn’t cause autism.
Spreading dangerous lies to sell useless crap to gullible parents. What a slime you are.
Mike
Jul 4, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Proof first cases of Autism tied to Mercury exposure, from a piece by the Venerable one Mr Olstead:
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=13317
In 1943, a child known only as Frederick W. became part of the first medical report of a strange new disorder. Frederick was Case 2 of 11 children whose behavior “differed markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far,” wrote Dr. Leo Kanner, the psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who introduced the syndrome to the world and named it “autism.”
Kanner didn’t know why the children, all born in the 1930s, acted that way but noticed the parents were college-educated and career-oriented: lawyers, psychiatrists, scientists.
Now, Frederick W.’s father has been identified by this reporter, who has written about autism for two years for United Press International, as a scientist named Frederick L. Wellman, and new information has been unearthed that suggests Wellman’s career might indeed be a clue–though not the kind Kanner detected.
In layman’s terms, Wellman collected cabbage seeds infected with a common fungus and dunked some of them in a solution of mercury salts and hot water. “The lots treated with mercuric [chloride] were shaken vigorously at first to get thorough contact with the solution,” he wrote.
Ethyl mercury is also the active ingredient in a vaccine preservative called thimerosal.
It might be just another coincidence that the father of autism’s Case 2 was working with new ethyl mercury compounds seven decades ago when his son was born.
Case 1 grew up in a town called Forest, Miss., surrounded by logging camps, lumber mills, and a national forest being planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Forest is 50 miles from the Mississippi sawmills where ethyl mercury fungicides were first tested in the United States in 1929 to preserve lumber, a practice that quickly became widespread; that child was born in 1933.
Case 3 was the son of “a professor of forestry in a southern university,” Kanner wrote. That university has been identified as North Carolina State–the same school where Frederick L. Wellman ended his career as a visiting professor. Case 3’s father began research on Southern pines when he joined the N.C. State faculty in 1935.
In 1936, he assisted in the planting of pine seedlings in the university’s newly acquired Hofmann Forest. His son was born in 1937. Organic mercury fungicides, including an ethyl mercury brand, were often used to prevent “damping off” or fungal contamination of pine seedlings during that era.
An advocate of the mercury-autism hypothesis says the pattern in those early cases strengthens his concern.
“So now we have learned that Frederick Wellman handled ethyl mercury fungicides that were first introduced to the market in 1929 and that his child was Kanner’s patient No. 2,” says Mark Blaxill, whose daughter Michaela has autism. Blaxill is vice president of the advocacy organization SafeMinds, which argues increased mercury exposure is behind the soaring autism rate. “And we know that cases 1 and 3 grew up around the first application of ethyl mercury products. If that’s not a smoking gun, I don’t know what is,” Blaxill continues.
And if the brain damage and immune system damage wasn’t bad enough, thousands of children are killed each year by vaccines (code word SIDS). Here are some facts to ponder, since you folks seem to like statistics:
1) A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association* found that children diagnosed with asthma (a respiratory ailment not unlike SIDS) were five times more likely than not to have received pertussis vaccine.
2) Another study found that babies die at a rate eight times greater than normal within three days after getting a DPT shot.
3) The three primary doses of DPT are given at two months, four months, and six months. About 85 percent of SIDS cases occur at one through six months, with the peak incidence at age two to four months.
4) In a recent scientific study of SIDS, episodes of apnea and hypopnea were measured before and after DPT vaccinations. The data clearly shows that vaccination caused an extraordinary increase in episodes where breathing either nearly ceased or stopped completely. These episodes continued for months following vaccinations. Dr. Viera Scheibner, the author of the study, concluded that “vaccination is the single most prevalent and most preventable cause of infant deaths.”
5) In another study of 103 children who died of SIDS, Dr. William Torch, of the University of Nevada School of Medicine at Reno, found that more than over 66% had been vaccinated with DPT prior to death. Of these, 6.5 percent died within 12 hours of vaccination; 13 percent within 24 hours; 26 percent within three days; and 37, 61, and 70 percent within one, two, and three weeks, respectively. He also found that SIDS frequencies have a bimodal-peak occurrence at two and four months — the same ages when initial doses of DPT are administered to infants.
I could go on with this debate but will wait to hear what the drug company lackey’s have to say first.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Jul 4, 2008 at 4:37 pm
@Mike, I know you have strong views about vaccines, but this is not a vaccine blog and the most recent comment is emblematic of the misinformation about vaccines out there. Thanks for not continuing to spread such information, at least not here.
Age of Indigos
Jul 4, 2008 at 4:47 pm
ageofindigos.blogspot.com/2008/07/dan-olmsted-out-of-antivaccine-closet.html
Also:http://scienceblogs (dot)com/insolence/2008/07/what_was_that_about_not_being_antivaccine.php
Orac on how the vulnerable Dan Olmsted outed himself as an antivaccinist. We already knew Dan and his friend Mike the Zeolit were dimwitted antivaccinists but at least Dan is more comfortable in admitting it now.
Thorton
Jul 4, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Unfortunately, we will never know if the Colorado girl would have developed Autism (or Autistic like traits). She certainly had some peculiar behaviors before she was admitted to the hospital.
She died in an attempt to avoid getting the flu.
The flu and pertussis are vastly different on the danger scale (yes I know you can die from the flu, but it is pretty rare even for small kids).
Comparing someone who doesn’t want to vaccinate against the flu to someone who doesn’t want the DTP vaccine doesn’t add up.
socal
Jul 4, 2008 at 5:21 pm
“the medical establishment is a for profit business that makes more money when we are ill” so says LZ.
LZ profits off people who falsely believe they’ve been poisoned; some thanks to his spamming.
Regan
Jul 4, 2008 at 5:26 pm
I started to write something specific, but really, the title and the direction of this thread seems to illustrate itself as a war of rhetoric and debate with science and innuendo on an equal footing, with innuendo sometimes given greater weight.
Watch Your Words When the Subject is Autism, and Vaccines
Kristina Chew, PhD
Jul 4, 2008 at 6:08 pm
There was no mention of anything about autism in the Colorado child in the articles cited, and the articles did not seem to take any pains to clarify this. I’ve been thinking that the authors of the articles and reports perhaps just don’t see how deeply that vaccine-autism connection has gotten into the public mindset.
daedalus2u
Jul 4, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Flumist is a live attenuated flu virus. It should be less injurious that getting the flu because the virus is attenuated.
However bad a specific individual’s reaction to Flumist is, presumably getting the actual flu would be worse.
C. S. Wyatt
Jul 5, 2008 at 1:48 am
UPI as a news source? Might as well quote a reporter linked to Scientology. Moon runs UPI through his “church.”
Just not the same since Helen T quit UPI because of Moon.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Jul 5, 2008 at 2:06 am
Sigh!
donald savitz
Jul 5, 2008 at 11:49 am
Kristina; This may be a little of topic but I could cont make a small conmit on mikes post. When you make a statement it might be helpfull to add a couple more facts. It mght help to when the 9 year old was disgnosed I am sure it was be for she was 9. On the 6 year old the same question. With or without the FluMist it could have going eather way. All I can say is that I am glad that we had our boys in the 60″s and 70″ be fore they mixed all the vaccines in to one super shot. It took my boys 2 years to get all of there shots. I am not sure how long it takes today. I will see you over on the othe board for my take on the vaccines.
Regan
Jul 5, 2008 at 2:18 pm
“There was no mention of anything about autism in the Colorado child in the articles cited, and the articles did not seem to take any pains to clarify this.”
—————-
I would say for the NYT, not taking pains is an understatement. The title of the article and the content were sufficiently at odds that I wondered if it is standard operating procedure to have someone other than the author compose the title.
Without additional detail, detail not supplied by the article, I did not necessarily see how the Poling case and the Colorado one fit together, unless the common theme was that of the meeting–mitochondrial disorder.
Thorton
Jul 5, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I think the article is more making a connection between two girls with mitochondrial conditions. Yes the title is a bit misleading, but it’s a newspaper. If that’s the worst criticism of the article, then I’m sure they think they’re doing pretty good.
C. S. Wyatt
Jul 5, 2008 at 11:29 pm
@Regan
Having worked for four newspapers, I can honestly say that I have never been allowed to suggest a headline or kicker until this year. As both a reporter and a columnist, I have never had much say in the graphics that accompany my articles, either — which can be very misleading.
I am reminded of a friend of mine, a novelist, who has been shocked (horrified) by title changes and cover art that had nothing to do with the story inside.
Oddly enough, when I have edited pages at the copy desk, I have composed headlines. This is because only then do you have “line counts” to know the headline width (point sizes and columns give you a “count” to fill). Until the page is being mocked, you really can’t write a headline.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Jul 6, 2008 at 12:46 am
@donald savitz, thanks–Hannah Poling was approximately 19 months old when “symptoms of autism” were said to have started for her.
Regan
Jul 11, 2008 at 3:05 pm
I didn’t want to dredge this up again, but a comment that I saw out in the cybersphere reminded me
1. what people might take away from these stories, and
2. that game where you whisper in a circle and see if the end statement bears any resemblance to the first,
“…And if vaccines have NO link to autism then why did the SUPREME COURT say that there was and awarded a little girl a nice settlement b/c of it”
Eek.
Regan
Jul 11, 2008 at 3:14 pm
C.S. Wyatt,
Thanks for the back story. I appreciate getting the straight skinnny on how the process works.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Jul 11, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Or if the closing statement is:
“The vaccines have NO link to autism and SUPREME COURT said that there was and awarded a little girl a nice settlement b/c of it”…….
Thorton
Jul 12, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I’m not sure what people are inferring from all the “…” but I found this interesting:
http://www.talkaboutcuringautism.org/vaccines/hannah-poling-concession-analysis.htm
Regan
Jul 12, 2008 at 11:27 pm
“…”= the person’s name (at least for my comment). The post quoted was on a non-autism but public-popular blog.
Thanks Thornton.
I think we can agree that the US Supreme Court has not yet become involved.
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