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·        Silent Epidemic: Autism

 

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·        Autistic Brain Not Damaged Where Researchers Expected

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Silent Epidemic: Autism

Louisiana doctor blames immunizations for dramatic increase in autism cases

[By Ted Griggs, Advocate Online.]

http://www.theadvocate.com/enter/story.asp?StoryID=5494

Shelley Reynolds’ son Liam was perfectly normal from birth. He rolled over, he crawled, he walked, he talked, all on schedule. At 13 months, Liam learned the “Hokey Pokey.” He knew the words to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

Every morning on the way to daycare, he and Shelley sang “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.” Liam’s part was the animal sounds. At daycare, he practically lived in the sandbox.

And then virtually overnight, Liam’s personality changed. He stopped making eye contact. His words twisted and turned around on themselves. When he tried to say “fish” it came out “sheee.”

Liam stopped singing. He stopped talking. He stopped sleeping. The touch of certain fabrics or textures tormented him. He ripped off his clothes as soon as his parents dressed him.

When the Reynolds took him to the beach that summer, Liam screamed bloody murder every time his feet touched the sand.

Eventually, Liam was diagnosed with autism. It’s a life sentence.

There is no cure.

Now Shelley Reynolds, like thousands of other moms with autistic children, lives with a nauseating possibility: that the shots Liam got, the regularly scheduled vaccinations designed to protect his health, may have caused his disability.

Reynolds is one of many who believe childhood vaccinations and autism spectrum disorder are linked. Jeana Smith of Walker is another. Smith has identical twin sons. One is autistic.

“Everybody thinks that if they ignore it, somehow it’s going to go away, or this is going to stop happening, and that is simply not the case,” Smith said.

The numbers of autistic children are rising. U.S. Department of Education records show the number of autistic students increased nationwide by more than 11,000 from the 1998-99 to the 1999-2000 school year. A similar increase was reported between 1997-98 to 1998-99. Recent studies in New Jersey and Sweden showed prevalence rates for autism spectrum disorder as high as 1 in 150 to 170 children.

“There’s enough people for this to be a national emergency,” Smith said. And it’s going to be expensive. Education costs for autistic children can run $40,000 a year or more.

For now, the vaccine-autism link remains a controversial and scientifically unproved theory. And the Baton Rouge area continues to be the home of some of the theory’s fiercest defenders. Local doctor Stephanie Cave’s success in treating autistic children is probably the reason.

Her clinic cares for more than 1,000 autistic children. Parents swear by her treatment plan, which removes toxic metals from her patients and balances their body chemistry.

Smith and Reynolds credit Cave’s treatment regimen for their sons’ recovery.

Cave has written a book that lays out some of the possible connections between childhood immunizations and increased rates of autism, asthma, diabetes and learning disabilities. In What Your Doctor May Not Be Telling You About Children’s Vaccinations, Cave attempts to answer parents’ questions about vaccine safety and immunization schedules. The book also spells out steps families can take to ensure their children’s safety.

Cave and others say the rise in autism coincided with an increase in the number of required childhood vaccines. The recommended childhood immunizations tripled in the 1980s and ‘90s. Many of the vaccines contained high levels of mercury.

The premise’s backers believe it’s no coincidence that behaviors common among autistic children closely resemble the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

The theory goes something like this:

Until recently, many childhood vaccines contained thimerosal, a preservative that’s 50 percent mercury. Mercury is highly toxic. An infant less than 4-6 months old can’t get rid of it. The poison builds up in his body, unleashing a host of complications.

Mercury lodges in, and damages, the exact areas of the brain affected by autism: the cerebellum, amygdala and hippocampus. These areas affect coordination, emotions and memory.

Mercury also alters a child’s immune and digestive systems. In these children’s damaged bodies, something as simple as an ice cream cone or a bowl of spaghetti can produce the same effect another person would get by injecting morphine.

Some researchers also believe that injecting the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine into a child with a weakened immune system causes more digestive problems, and may even trigger autism.

An alternative, scientifically proven view

Health care’s heaviest hitters—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and pharmaceutical manufacturers— disagree.

All say the same thing: Vaccines are safe.

And public health agencies continue to support this view.

Last month, the Institute of Medicine’s Immunization Safety Review

Committee concluded that the current evidence neither proves nor disproves a link between thimerosal and autism spectrum disorder.

However, the committee also concluded that the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines may be related to autism is “biologically plausible.” And the committee recommended the use of thimerosal-free DTaP, hepatitis B and Hib vaccines, despite the fact that supplies of thimerosal-containing vaccines are still available.

Backers of the vaccine-autism link see this as a crack in the bureaucratic dam. They say the vaccine committee report strengthens their position.

But Committee chair Dr. Marie McCormick said the recommendation follows an established public health policy to reduce cumulative mercury exposures.

There is no proof that the thimerosal in vaccines is dangerous, McCormick said. If thimerosal-free vaccines are not available, thimerosal-containing vaccines should be used.

The idea that thimerosal may be linked to autism is “very, very hypothetical” at best, and some basic assumptions of the theory appear flawed, McCormick said.

The vaccine-autism model assumes that an infant doesn’t metabolize any mercury for six months, McCormick said. “That’s hard to believe.”

One of the standard texts in neonatology states that bile secretion, which helps metabolize most mercury, begins at 12 weeks of gestation.

Information presented to the committee also runs counter to the idea that babies’ bodies can’t shed mercury, she said. Preliminary data from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases indicates that 2-month-olds promptly eliminate mercury after immunization.

McCormick is chair of the Department of Maternal and Child Health in Harvard School of Public Health. She and many other health officials worry about what will happen if parents grow too frightened to vaccinate their children.

The threat posed by diseases remains very real, McCormick said, as do the consequences of ignoring immunization recommendations. People will become ill and some will die if they are not vaccinated.

Public health officials also discount the jump in the numbers of children with autistic spectrum disorder and more vaccines.

The diagnosis for autism has changed drastically during the last 30 years, McCormick said. Federal laws have made educating children with special needs more important.

People are much better informed today about disabilities, and they do a better job of identifying children with autism spectrum disorder.

The idea that autism is increasing because of better diagnoses strikes Cave as ridiculous and possibly disingenuous.

“If you had a child that was developing normally for 15-18 months who lost eye contact, speech and started mutilating himself, who wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat and had chronic diarrhea, do you think the child would go undiagnosed?”

My son is not an anecdote

The issue is pitting parents against pediatricians. Part of the problem is the way scientists present their findings. The language is as precise as possible, spelling out in detail what is known and not known.

Guessing isn’t a widely admired technique in the research community.  Scientists don’t base their reputations, their very credibility, not to mention their funding, on word of mouth, on unproved anecdotal evidence (even if the number of these anecdotes/autistic children has doubled or tripled in the last decade and anecdotes are piling up at record pace).  Dozens and dozens of factors must be considered, tested, and accounted for, and other researchers must be able to reproduce these results.

But a mother who divides her day by therapies—speech, physical, occupational, behavior modification, and all the time she puts into repeating those lessons on her own—a mother who may have slept only two or three hours a night for the last two years because that’s all her baby sleeps, a mother whose child shrieks if his bare feet touch sand because he can’t stand the texture, a mother who has seen the “Hokey Pokey,” “Old MacDonald,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and finally even her name, Mama, all the milestones that marked her child’s growth, every memory she holds dear wiped away, evaporated, just gone, this woman doesn’t want her experience, her child’s disability (which she more than likely believes was preventable), casually dismissed by a researcher as an anecdote. A tale told by idiots. A sound and fury signifying nothing.

“What’s worst is when they sit there and try to pacify you and say, ‘I’m really, really sorry for what happened to you, but vaccines don’t cause autism,’” Smith said. “Don’t patronize me. Don’t tell me that I’m crazy. É I sat there and watched my kid slip away right underneath me.”

Some things never leave you

Smith and Reynolds say will never get over the damage they believe vaccines did to their sons.

Reminders of what her son has lost surface from time to time, Smith said. The ball game Jacob can’t attend because it’s too much stimulation.  Missing the family get-together at Christmas for the same reason.

Maybe Jacob’s twin Jesse came home excited about the new sports team he’s going to join, other kids in his class and their birthday parties.

“You think, ‘Gosh, I wonder if Jacob even really has someone that’s his best friend,’” Smith said. “I wonder if they’re picking on him at recess, or do they make fun of him?”

You learn to cope, she said, because there’s no other choice.

So the women channel their anger and their energy into Unlocking

Autism, a national nonprofit they started to raise awareness about autism.

The duo has gathered nearly 6,000 pictures of autistic children.  Ultimately, they hope to round up 58,000 portraits, the equivalent of one-tenth of the United States’ autistic residents.

Reynolds said they hope more publicity about autism will translate into more research dollars and more favorable laws.

Still, Smith and Reynolds consider themselves lucky.

Jacob began making eye contact and speaking in three-word sentences

just days after Cave began treating him. Jacob is now in the first grade and doing pretty well. He eats lunch in the cafeteria with all the other kids.  He goes to P.E. and music classes. He wants to be a zookeeper.

Liam is in a class for autistic children. He is a little behind his classmates in speech skills. But Liam talks and asks questions. It’s hard to pick him out of a crowd. And the milestones are again piling up.

A few weeks ago, Liam and his mom went to the Mall of Louisiana to watch the circus. Liam asked for permission to sit up front, with all the other kids. When a clown asked audience members who wanted to come out and dance in the center of the ring, Liam volunteered.

And then Liam did something Shelley hadn’t seen in four years: the Hokey Pokey.

That’s what it’s all about.

[For a related photo of Shelley Reynolds and Jeana Smith see website below.] http://www.theadvocate.com/enter/photo.asp?ID=5494&path=/enter/images/200111 04/04mag.jpg <-- address ends here.

 

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* * *

 

Autistic Brain Not Damaged Where Researchers Expected

[From Scientific American.]

http://www.sciam.com/news/010801/2.html

Scientists have long suspected that the fascination many autistic children have with spinning objects and whirling themselves around relates to damage in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls movement and equilibrium. Indeed, much research into autism http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/autism.cfm, which affects about one in 500 children in the U.S., has focused on this brain region.

But the results of a study published recently in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders indicate that, in fact, the cerebellum is normal in autistic children. Psychiatrist Melissa Goldberg of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and her colleagues studied 13 high-functioning autistic children ranging in age from seven to 17. Specifically, they examined the subjects’ eye movements after spinning them in a chair and then tilting their heads forward when the chair stopped.

Normally the reflexive eye movements diminish once the head is tipped

forward—and the autistic children also exhibited this pattern. “This tells

us that those parts of the cerebellum that govern our ability to restore

balance operate normally in autistic children,” Goldberg explains. “Knowing

what parts of the brain do not appear damaged in these children, we can move

on to investigate other sources of the problem.” —Kate Wong

* * *

 

Reader’s Posts

My Grandson will be 8 years old soon and he will only say one word when

prompted. Absolutely no spontaneous speech, he has had ABA since he was

three and made a lot of gains, but no speech. Does any one have any

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Our 4 yr old PDD son practices “scripting” 80% of his vocabulary is

repeating phrases memorized from the conversations of others and from his

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New GFCF cookbook available: The Good Food Cookbook For Gluten-Free and

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Looking for ABA therapist for my daughter.  We live in Covina, California.  This is in the eastern part of the San Gabriel Valley, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles.  Please send several contact names if possible.

Aides needed desperately for 14 yr HFA to help him mainstream at middle school in Palo Alto, Calif. Mon-Friday, approx 8-3. Also aide for community based instruction and socialization needed after school.  Training provided.

 

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ALL INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE.  THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.