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Shot down?
By Jessica Werb-contributing
writer
Five-year-old Kieran
Stark lives with his single mother, Cynthia, a psychology
student, in a cramped unit of UBC student housing. In many
ways, he's like any other pre-schooler. He can count to
12, sing the alphabet and name all the colours. He's also
learning his way around a computer, and will gladly show
off his talents. With his elfish grin and tousled blond
hair, he's the apple of his mother's eye.
But there's another side
to this affectionate, cheerful boy. He still wears
diapers. He drinks from a bottle. He speaks in sentence
fragments, and doesn't know how to play with other
children. His eye contact is fleeting, and he often avoids
it. Sometimes, he'll be gripped by rages and bang his head
against the wall.
Little Kieran is trapped
in the mystifying, isolating world of autism. And while
the medical establishment still says it doesn't know why,
or how, autism strikes certain children, Stark believes
she knows exactly what caused her son's retreat into
darkness. The culprit, she says, is something that was
meant to keep Kieran strong and healthy: vaccines.
It's not a view many
Canadian doctors will entertain, never mind endorse.
Nevertheless, Stark is just one of thousands of parents
across North America and Europe who argue the coincidence
is overwhelming: within weeks or even days of receiving
the DPT-Diphtheria, Pertussis (Whooping cough) and
Tetanus-and MMR-Measles, Mumps, and Rubella-shots, their
previously normal children lost many of the developmental
milestones they had attained.
"We noticed after his DPT
shot that he was doing strange things, like arching his
back and screaming," Stark recalls. "He had a very bad
vaccine reaction, but the doctors kept telling us he was
normal." Following this first set of shots, Kieran got his
MMR jab, at the recommended age of 12 months.
Before the shot, Stark
says, he could speak about 20 words and was walking. After
the shot, he became very sick. "I remember it was the day
before his 12-month birthday, and we had to drag him out
of bed at noon. He sat there being really sick, and then
we put him back to bed at three. He was projectile
vomiting for two months... He didn't respond to his name,
and if you tried to call him he would act like he was
deaf. We were doing things like dropping pots behind him
to see if he reacted, and he wouldn't."
A hearing test at 13
months ruled out deafness, and seven months later, Kieran
was diagnosed with autism.
Startlingly similar is
the story told by Keith Gallicano, a bioanalytical
researcher in White Rock. He and his wife Cathy are the
parents of five-year-old Giselle, who was diagnosed with
autism at age three.
Before Giselle had the
MMR vaccine at 13 months, says Gallicano, she could say
her ABCs, count to 15, sing and talk in three-word
sentences. "She was very social and had at least a 50 or
more word vocabulary. She had very good eye contact."
Gallicano said he and his wife noticed Giselle losing
speech at around age two. She began to withdraw from
interacting with other children. "My low point was when I
would come back from a conference and she wouldn't even
look at me. She couldn't understand the concept of love."
Giselle and Kieran are
just two of an ever-increasing number of children globally
diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Across
Europe and North America, the rates of ASD are escalating
exponentially. Twenty years ago in Canada, the rate of ASD
was estimated at one in every 10,000 births. Now, the
Autism Society Canada puts the rate at one in every 286
births, with some areas of the country showing even higher
rates.
B.C. doesn't keep a
central registry of children diagnosed with autism
disorders, but figures from other provinces, such as
Saskatchewan, give insight into what is being called, by
some, an epidemic. Saskatchewan Education figures show an
80 per cent increase in students with an ASD condition
from 1998 to 2000-from one in 500 in 1999 to one in 333 in
2000.
Until recently, the
increased frequency of diagnoses was dismissed by most
mainstream health professionals as the result of better,
and more widely applied, diagnostic criteria. This past
October, however, researchers at the University of
California's Children's Hospital finally gave credence to
the view that something else was to blame. A $1-million
U.S. study funded by the California government and the
Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Institute at the University of California concluded that
the exploding numbers of children diagnosed with autism in
the state could not be explained by population growth or
broader medical accounting.
California, widely
recognized as having the most accurate and longest-running
ASD registry in North America, has seen its ASD figures
increase by an average of nearly 400 every three months.
From 1983 to 1995, the state's autism caseload ballooned
more than 200 per cent, although the population only
increased by 20 per cent.
Researchers have
speculated that environmental factors have contributed to
the phenomenon, but have stopped short of blaming
vaccines. Upon the release of the California study,
Margaret Whelan, executive director of the Geneva Centre
for Autism in Toronto admitted: "We sense there has been a
real increase, but like everyone else, we don't know why."
One theory traces the
rise in autism spectrum disorders in California to the
Silicon Valley, where Asperger's syndrome-a milder form of
autism that affects social functioning-is more prevalent.
Bill Gates, for example, is widely suspected as having
Asperger's. Socially awkward but possessing analytical and
organizational skills, computer programmers working in
Silicon Valley may carry a few of the genes which
contribute to autism. When they have children with other
programmers, there's an increased chance of these children
being autistic, so the theory goes.
But the University of
California study has also fuelled renewed discussion about
the possibility of the autism-vaccine link. Edda West,
president of the Vaccine Risk Awareness Network in Canada,
says the California study merely bolstered her feeling
that vaccines are to blame for the explosion in autism
cases.
"How is it possible that
[the medical establishment] can ignore it?" she asks.
"They keep talking about environmental factors. What is
this mysterious environmental factor? I hear the same
stories over and over again. A few months after an MMR
shot, a child begins to regress and to lose milestones.
That's kind of the repeated broken record that keeps being
told over and over and over. I see the MMR as the straw
that breaks the child's health."
Concern over the MMR
vaccine was first raised in 1998, when The Lancet
published a study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, then a
gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London,
England. In his now notorious study, Wakefield reported
finding the measles virus in the intestines of autistic
children who had never had the disease. He theorized that
the MMR vaccine was causing "autistic enterocolitis," a
form of autism that he said resulted from an MMR-induced
intestinal infection.
Wakefield later went on
to publish another report in the British journal Adverse
Drug Reactions in 2000, in which he claimed to have
identified nearly 170 cases of autistic enterocolitis.
Wakefield's research caused such an uproar, he was
eventually forced to leave his post at the hospital in
December of 2002 and now works as director of research at
the International Child Development Resource Centre in
Florida.
Since Wakefield's report,
the causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism has
been hotly debated, with the medical establishment on one
side, angry parents on the other-and a handful of
scientists in the middle producing studies to support
either side. A 2001 report from the Institute of Medicine,
a branch of the Academy of Science, that stated the MMR
vaccine had not been proven to be linked to autism has
done little to dissuade critics.
Scientists such as Dr.
Walter Spitzer at McGill University, Dr. Vijendra Singh of
the Utah State University in Logan and Dr. Bernard Rimland
of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego have all
continued to question the safety of the MMR vaccine. The
most recent study comes from Dr. Singh, who, in August
2002, reported in the Journal of Medical Science that his
team of researchers had found a strong association between
the MMR vaccine and an auto-immune reaction thought to
cause autism.
Dr. Singh and his
colleagues analyzed blood samples from 125 autistic
children and 92 children who did not have the
developmental disorder. They found that the children with
autism who had received the MMR vaccine had higher levels
of measles antibodies than those without the disorder.
More than 90 per cent of the samples from these autistic
children were also positive for antibodies that Singh
postulates are responsible for attacking the basic
building blocks of myelin, the insulating sheath that
covers nerve fibres. Given that the brain is made up of
nerves, it's possible that demyelination could cause brain
damage consistent with autism.
In addition to the MMR,
other vaccines have come under suspicion in recent years,
with the mercury-derived vaccine preservative thimerosal
also standing accused of triggering autism. The Pfeiffer
Institute in Illinois completed a study last year
suggesting that autism may be caused by a malfunction of a
protein that regulates metal metabolism and the growth of
brain neurons, and protects against toxic exposures to
heavy metals. "MT [metallothionein] is a family of
proteins essential for many important processes in the
body, and a dysfunction in this system can explain most of
the classic symptoms observed in autism," said Dr. William
Walsh, who led the study. "An MT disorder may affect the
development of brain neurons and may cause impairments in
the immune system and gastrointestinal tract, along with
hypersensitivity to toxic metals."
The findings may lead to
an early infant screening test for autism predisposition,
and an advanced treatment to correct the metal-metabolism
disorder.
Thimerosal, which
contains ethyl mercury, has been used as an additive to
vaccines since the 1930s because it's effective in
preventing bacterial and fungal contamination,
particularly in multidose containers.
In Canada, thimerosal has
recently been removed from most childhood vaccines; a
hepatitis-B vaccine without the preservative became
available last year, and the DPT had it until the
mid-1990s. However, it's still found in a vaccine for
high-risk infants born to hep-B-infected mothers, and in
the flu shot. It's also used in some meningitis vaccines,
and in a number of special formulations for pertussis
only.
It was never used in the
MMR shot, but current thinking about the
vaccine-autism-link is that the DPT first impairs the
immune system with mercury poisoning, allowing the MMR
shot to prompt an auto-immune response in the child's
body. This, believes Cynthia Stark, is what happened to
Kieran.
"Basically, I haven't met
a single person with autism who can't trace it to the
shots," she says. "Our stories are all the same: 'My kid
had the DPT and he started getting sick. He had the MMR
and we thought he went deaf. We gave him antibiotics for
an ear infection or something like that, and suddenly he's
going spinning and twirling and laughing for no
reason.'You'd have to be an idiot not to see the
connection."
Dr. Jonn Matsen, a North
Vancouver-based nutritionist and author of the
recently-published Eating Alive II, devotes an entire
chapter in his book to thimerosal and mercury, which he
feels are partly to blame for autism, among other health
problems such as chronic fatigue and Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome.
"We don't tell our
patients not to vaccinate," says Dr. Matsen. "What we do
say is draw the line that there's no more mercury going in
your body. Make sure that any vaccine no longer has
thimerosal in it... It's very easy to inject mercury into
the body, and it's very slow to get out." The symptoms of
mercury poisoning and autism are strikingly similar-they
include social withdrawal, loss of speech, self-harming
behaviour, colitis and low IQ.
Dr. Matsen has worked
with many autistic children, administering chelation
therapy, a controversial form of therapy said to remove
heavy metals from the body through the ingestion of
sulphur compounds. Both Kieran Stark and Keith Gallicano
have undergone chelation, in addition to sticking to a
strict dietary regimen that cuts out wheat and dairy
products. Both families say these interventions have
resulted in some clear improvements for their children.
"When we took Giselle off gluten [wheat protein] and
casein [milk protein], we noticed that her eye contact was
much better," says Keith Gallicano. "Her whole awareness
and cognitive ability was improved.
This diet is based on the
premise, proposed by Dr. Paul Shattock of the University
of Sunderland's Autism Research Unit, that many autistic
children have a "leaky gut," which allows certain
incompletely digested peptides from the breakdown of wheat
and milk proteins to leak into the bloodstream and affect
brain function.
This "opioid excess"
theory contends that the peptides leaked into the
bloodstream possess an opiate-like effect akin to heroin,
resulting in abnormal opioid compounds measured in the
urine of autistic children by Dr. Shattock.
The Gallicanos are now
planning a move to California where they hope Giselle will
benefit from greater acceptance of alternative autism
theories and research.
"[In Canada] most of the
physicians either know very little about it or don't want
to get into the field. I spent quite a time giving them
literature, articles, and helping to explain what's going
on," says Gallicano, who knows of three other families who
have turned to American physicians out of frustration with
lack of autism expertise in Canada. "Most of these
families have had some problems with excessive levels of
mercury, which they think have been caused through the
preservatives in vaccinations."
Of course, there are
plenty of skeptics who see parents like Stark and
Gallicano as well-meaning but misguided, hunting
desperately for a cure that does not exist. Dr. John
Blatherwick, chief medical officer for the Vancouver
Coastal Health Authority, has little time for questions of
vaccine safety, saying no one's ever been able to
definitively prove a link between autism and vaccines.
"People theorize and they
say: 'Well, you know, the mercury compound is found in
this,' but they've never been able to show statistically
that this is making a difference... They test these kids
for everything, but they don't find anything. There isn't
a cause found for autism, so they grasp at straws."
Dr. Blatherwick insists
that vaccines, used in the "multiple millions every year,"
are safe and effective in preventing devastating diseases
like smallpox, polio and tetanus. "In every study that
ever looks at what is the most you can do in health
care-all of the things like bypass surgery, operations,
drugs, antibiotics-the number one thing that has the
biggest bang for the buck is immunization. The truth is
that the majority of B.C. families believe in
immunization, get their children protected, and these kids
do very, very well."
He adds the sooner the
MMR vaccine is administered, the better, since the
stronger immune system of an adult is more prone to an
auto-immune reaction, with higher incidents of joint
inflammation and numbness in adults following MMR
vaccinations.
"It is much better to get
it in childhood, and if you decide that your child's not
going to get a vaccine like that, you've already decided
that your child cannot probably have a career in health
care, because it will be required, and then they would
have to get it at a time when it's dangerous."
What parents like Cynthia
Stark or Keith Gallicano will tell you is that they never
realized they had a choice over whether to vaccinate or
not, or that they had the option of seeking single
vaccines for their children.
"I'm not completely
anti-vaccine, but if I had known what I know now, I would
have been very cautious in having vaccinations
administered to Giselle," says Gallicano. "If I had the
choice, I would want single vaccinations all the way
through, rather than giving triple, or even quadruple
vaccinations."
Stark adds: "I was told
there would be an epidemic if I didn't give my kid his
shots. I would tell parents to put as much research into
immunizing your child as you would into buying a house."
Asked to imagine what her
Kieran would be like had he not been given the MMR, she
allows herself to dream.
"I think he would be able
to walk up to a friend and ask them to play, and have them
play with him. Instead, he just stands there and doesn't
know what they're saying and walks away. They want to play
and he wants to interact, and it's like they're a
different culture with a different language. That's the
saddest thing that ever happens."
Useful links
ùAutism Society Canada:
www.autismsocietycanada.ca
ùNational Vaccine Risk
Awareness Network: www.vran.org
ùAutism Society of BC:
www.autismbc.ca
ùHealth Canada:
www.hc-sc.gc.ca
ùAutism Research
Institute in San Diego offers a list of practitioners who
follow the DAN (Defeat Autism Now) protocols, a set of
treatment protocols collated by researchers and
scientists: www.autism.com/ari |
