SCHAFER AUTISM REPORT "Healing Autism:

No Finer a Cause on the Planet"

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November 07, 2002 Promote Your Event - Free! -

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Autism? 'Required' Watching: NVIC Conference Live on CSPAN2 Today!

ALSO MORE COMMENTARIES:

* CAN's Response to Danish Study:

Forget MMR Vaccine, Autism's First In the Genes

* Autism – a Hit and Run Epidemic

by Lenny Schafer

Autism? 'Required' Watching: NVIC Conference Live on CSPAN2 Today!

Today history maybe being made in Washington D.C. The opening day of National Vaccine Information Center's Third International Conference TRUTH IN SCIENCE: The Right to Know, the Freedom to Decide will be broadcast live on CSPAN2 from 1:00-6:00 p.m. EST (12-5 CST).

Please tune in and spread the word.

The conference agenda that coincides with the broadcast time is as

follows:

1:00 WELCOME AND ORIENTATION "Anecdotal Evidence Shows the Way"

1:15 - 1:45 Major Sonnie Bates (Ret.) "Anthrax Vaccination in the

Military: One Pilots Story"

1:45 - 2:15 Karen Vanderhoof-Forschner "Lyme Disease and Lyme

Vaccine: A Mother's Perspective"

2:15 - 2:45 Stanley Kops, J.D. "Polio Vaccine, Neurovirulence and SV-40"

2:45 - 3:15 Kihura Nkuba "Polio Vaccine Campaigns in Africa"

3:15 - 3:45 . BREAK

3:45 - 4:30 Dr. Andrew Wakefield "Regressive Autism and Vaccination"

4:30 - 4:45 Rick Rollens "My Son's Regression into Autism after Vaccination"

4:45 - 5:30 Paul Shattock, MRPharmS "Measles, Chickenpox and Neuroimmune Dysfunction"

5:30 - 6:00 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS WITH AUDIENCE

* * *

CAN's Response to Danish Study: Forget MMR Vaccine, Autism First In the Genes

'Now we need to turn our attention to other environmental factors,² says Iversen.

[CAN Foundation released the following statement today in response to the New England Journal of Medicine¹s November 7, 2002, article 'A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism² based on the Danish study regarding MMR and Autism. By Portia Iversen, co-founder, the CAN Foundation.]

In a major study, appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine today, at least one suspected environmental factor appears to be an unlikely cause for the recent dramatic rise in autism. Like asthma and diabetes, autism is thought to be a genetic disorder, which may be increasing due to gene-environment interaction. But because neither the genes contributing to autism, nor the possible environmental factors, have yet been identified, there is no way to predict which young children are at risk. This is made even more ominous by the recent California report of an alarming increase in the disorder. Intensive research efforts are underway in the genetics of autism and the Danish study published today represents the first major research effort investigating environmental factors which could play a role in autism.

The Danish study, which followed more than 500,000 children, over 7 years, found no association between the MMR vaccination and autism. Now we need to turn our attention to other environmental factors, which could be contributing to the recent increase in autism.

When my husband and I founded CAN seven years ago, after our two-year-old son was diagnosed with autism, the federal government was spending almost nothing on autism research,² Iversen continued. 'Starting an organization to speed up autism research was the only thing we could do to help our child and the million other kids like him. So it seems fitting that on the anniversary of the founding of CAN, we are seeing the results from the first really large-scale study of a potential environmental factor suspected in autism.

This collaboration between the CDC and the Danish Epidemiology Center certainly reflects the deepening concern of our federal government about the increasing number of autism cases across the country. Autism has become a huge public health crisis that is only getting worse, with a recent study reporting nine new cases of autism being diagnosed in California every day. An epidemic of this magnitude can¹t be solved by private foundations alone. It will require the NIH and CDC to act rapidly, to increase funding, and to attack this situation with everything they¹ve got.

* * *

Autism – a Hit and Run Epidemic

By Lenny Schafer

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

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Lenny Schafer, schafer@sprynet.com Kay Stammers Edward Decelie

CALENDAR EVENTS@doitnow.com Michelle Guppy Ron Sleith

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