Autism – a Hit and Run Epidemic

By Lenny Schafer

SCHAFER AUTISM REPORT "Healing Autism: No Finer a Cause on the Planet"

The autism epidemic is like an epidemic of out-of-control hit and run accidents. Something big and dangerous collides with your child and leaves him or her devastated from the assault. We don't know the offending vehicle nor the driver nor the time of the collision. But these cars don't wreak the same damage on everyone they hit. It seems some more than others, and most not at all. Our public health detectives arrive on the scene long after the perps have fled and announce that they have no idea what caused all the damage, but decide that the main problem is that the bodies of those presenting the most damage are too weak to sustain the blows like the others because of their genes. "We do know that it's probably not a single gene behind hit-and-run-ism, but rather a few of them acting together," pronounces the chief detective.

Some noisy parents of the victims say that their kids got hit right after they saw a police car in the neighborhood. A lot of them are saying the same thing. "Go investigate police cars!" scream the parents. "My son was fine until a police car came around. You are supposed to protect, not hurt our children!"

"Hysterical mothers being driven by greedy lawyers and useless anecdotes," smirks one detective to another. "We're looking into this," assures the detective, "and we will spend some resources on research and find those bad genes," they continue, "by the time your other children grow up and are ready to have children of their own, we'll know which of them ought to consider adopting, by their genes. Problem solved."

In the meantime the detectives assure "we've looked over some traffic reports and their really isn't any increases in hit-and-run accidents. It's just more pedestrian accidents being reclassified as hit-and-run because we're spotting them better."

Like with hit-and-run research, almost all the money that goes into autism research today, both public and privately raised funding, is used for finding the faulty genes and/or faulty body parts, not the perpetrators of the assault. Almost nothing comparatively goes into treatment research for our kids already afflicted. Even the familiar parent-run autism research fundraising groups like CAN, NAAR and the parent-influenced MIND Institute spend the bulk, if not all of their funds on genetic related, or the like research.

(The exception here is the Autism Research Institute, which spends all of their research dollars on treatment-related issues. The ARI is somewhat of a maverick within the research community, willing to help parents experiment with anecdote-mostly tested treatments at first, if necessary, and often with good results. This is risky stuff, few others are willing to help parents willing to go this course. But the ARI does not spend its resources researching the cause of autism, either.)

The problem here is that if vaccines do play a role in autism, and this study doesn't eliminate a reasonable possibility for a genetic subset of the population, relying on the promoters of same vaccines, like government public health agencies, to find "the real" or even "the other" environmental factors causing this large upswing in autism and other immune disorders, is akin to asking OJ Simpson to find the real killers of his ex-wife and her friend, if not himself.

Inherent to public health is politics. And the political reality of the autism epidemic is that the watchdogs, and the vaccine pharmaceutical companies and their agent researchers have too many conflicts of interests for the issue to be settled by epidemiologic research alone. This research only looks at the results of pathology upon a population, and does not easily prove or disprove cause. This allows too much wiggle room for self-serving spin (and counter-spin). A growing number of citizen public health advocates find vaccines to be poorly tested, and sometimes dirty with toxins like mercury. Vaccine-strain measles virus is showing up in the cerebral spinal fluid of autistic children and nobody can tell us how it got there, if not via the MMR vaccine.

Genetic research and epidemiological research are not the primary tools for finding the cause of autism. The final answers will come from biomedical and clinical research. Someone better start examining these kids and soon. Until we start seeing efforts and money spent to pay for the clinics to do this research (and also, along the way, to treat our children), all other research serves as little more than alibi research.

The murky vaccine – autism connection has been effective leverage by some autism research advocates for getting the public health watchdogs and the media to sit up and pay attention to autism. Soon this leveraging won’t be necessary as the prevalence rates will reveal more and more autsim victimized sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters of congress people, movie and sports celebrities, investors in pharmaceuticals, jurists and jurors, etc. . .people not so readily dismissed as anecdotal hysterics – and who in ever growing numbers will demand answers, not alibis. Not everyone is equally willing to let vaccines off the hook just yet as are some autism research fundraisers. –Lenny Schafer