Schafer Autism Report             “Healing Autism:

                             No Finer a Cause on the Planet”

   NOTE CALENDAR DEADLINE JULY 25 FOR AUGUST UPDATE

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Monday, July 21, 2003                        Vol. 7  No. 151

COMMENTARY

By Lenny Schafer

CDC Says No Real Increase in Autism, Reduces Research Funding

[Alternative opinions on this or any subject related to autism is

welcomed for submission to the Schafer Autism Report.  The opinions

expressed here belong only to the writer and not necessarily to anyone

connected with this publication.]

The CDC maintains that there is no real increase in the prevalence of

autism, according to a recent quote in the press attributed to CDC Director

Julie Gerberding. Consequently, the thinking would follow, there is no

particular urgency to stop an epidemic that doesn’t really exist. As if to

underscore its complacency, the CDC has reduced the amount of money it spent

on autism research, reports Lyn Redwood of SafeMinds, to 10.2 million this

year for research, down from 11.7 million last year.  Enlisting a national

autism organization to help launch a relatively inexpensive PR campaign as

reported here could however, give the public the appearance it’s doing

something about autism through raising early intervention awareness.  More

awareness is always welcome.

The CDC also announced the launching of a campaign to promote

abstinence.  The article previous to this essay reports that the Department

of Health and Human Services, CDC’s parent office, committed $18 million

over three years for abstinence education. HHS will spend an additional $2

million this year to plan more programs. Redwood reminds us that autism is

“the number one developmental disability affecting 1 in every 150 school

aged children and 1 in every 68 American families for research. Obviously

abstinence takes priority over autism.”  The CDC or their friends could

argue, however, that abstinence is one way of early intervention to prevent

autism.

But the CDC is granting $350,000 to a national autism group for early

intervention autism awareness. Our national “voice of autism” has been

conspicuously speechless about the Homeland Security, vaccine protection

gaffs that embarrassed the Bush administration and some key Republican

elders earlier this year. The political controversy stirred up national

discussion about autism, reaching into Congress and the Whitehouse itself.

Talk about scoring autism awareness points!  But if one were to rely on any

of national autism group’s publications for this relevant autism news, it

would seem as if all this never happened, since it was never mentioned, not

once.  For merely $350,000 the CDC appears to have bought silence at a real

bargain.  Now if they would only be as shrewd at finding the cause of

autism. . .

Of course, the best “early intervention” for autism would be to

identify the environmental triggers behind the disorder and eliminate them,

if possible.  This would require spending money on non-industry tainted

research instead of PR spin projects.  Thus we are left with a classic case

of bureaucratic doublespeak.  The attempt here to raise autism awareness is

in reality part of an effort to do just the opposite by deflecting public

attention away from CDC’s mercury-vaccine-autism controversy, its conflicts

of interests with Pharmco and its studied disinterest in addressing the

autism epidemic.  Who knows what other surprises and conflicts lurks inside

the CDC’s Pandora’s Box.  Can we truly trust the CDC to report itself as

even a hypothetical source of public disease?  Who guards the guardians?

It is time for President Bush to act.  There is a building movement

for his administration to take some real steps towards this tragedy that

strikes an ever-increasing number of our children.  If our moral arguments

to minister to the innocent and afflicted continue to take no hold, let us

try with practical political argument:  Roughly half of the electorate are

Republicans and conservatives.  Roughly half of the families with autism

also happen to be Republican and conservatives.  Let us warn the President

that he must not listen to the spin from his own CDC who would advise him

that our numbers are not growing rapidly.