Throwing Children into Oncoming Traffic: The Truth about Autism
by Kenneth Stoller, MD, FAAP with Anne McElroy Dachel
From the Townsend Letter
October 2007
http://www.townsendletter.com/Oct2007/EDautismstoller1007.htm
Online publication
only
I have been a practicing pediatrician for over 20 years. I saw my first child
with autism in the early 1990s. Before that, I had never seen an autistic child,
nor had I seen an autistic child in all my years at school. The boy was four
years old, and you could see the frustration in his face as he wanted to speak,
but nothing intelligible would come from his mouth except shrieks of anguish. As
I studied his tortured face, it was as if there was an old-time telephone
switchboard operator inside his head trying to plug in the correct phone cables
but not being able to complete the call. This family had known me from an old
practice in another city, and they had traveled to see me because they trusted
me and were looking for answers that no one seemed to have for them. Yet I too
had no answers, and I could see the mom was greatly disappointed. After the
family left my office, I poured over a few dusty textbooks and wondered if I had
just seen a very rare disorder, a disorder that affected one child in 10,000
children: autism.
I had been involved in pediatrics for a decade by the time I saw this boy, and
it wasn't as if I had no experience working with rare disorders. For example, I
had been able to identify a boy with Fragile-X syndrome, and his mom ending up
starting the Fragile-X support group at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles. I
had noticed there was a strange upswing in children with attention disorders and
impulsivity problems. I wasn't a neurologist, but had studied with one of the
finest at UCLA. While I was still a pediatric resident, I spent time in his
office where he helped me study the parade of unusual maladies that was starting
to afflict children. I considered myself a closet neurologist, because that was
what I had really wanted to specialize in – not pediatrics – but during my
neurology rotation in medical school I learned some discouraging news. The
attending neurologist, whom I greatly admired, had taken me on rounds for the
first time, and I watched him brilliantly explain to the family of a stroke
patient how he had figured out where in the brain the blood clot had lodged.
Then he stood up and walked out of the room, and I asked him what therapy he was
going to prescribe for the patient so he could recover from his stroke.
"Therapy?" he said. "There is no therapy."
Well, I scratched neurology off my list. Diagnosis was only meaningful if you
could offer a treatment, and it seemed neurology had few treatments to offer. My
second patient with autism came to me in the mid-1990s, but to my relief, the
purpose of the visit was only to treat worms. I dutifully prescribed the
medicine for pinworms and went on to my next patient. Later that afternoon, I
received a call from the autistic boy's mom who wanted to know what was that
medicine I had given her son for pinworms. Her boy was starting to make eye
contact, show affection, and communicate with his family. She said it was
amazing! I told her I didn't really didn't know what was in the pinworm pill but
immediately prescribed enough pills for her son to take every day for a month
(normally you only take one or two pills to treat pinworms).
I called up the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the pinworm pill and
spoke to one of their technical staff. They told me the pill worked by blocking
the transport of molecules of a certain size from crossing cell membranes, so in
the case of the hapless pinworms they were unable to absorb the sugars they feed
upon in the lower intestines of their victims.
What did that have to do with this boy's newly found improved behavior? Either
one of two things were going on: 1) the drug was either blocking a molecule that
shouldn't be passing across the gut to the blood, and then the brain and that
molecule was having a drug-like effect on the brain; or 2) the drug was blocking
a molecule that normally crossed from the gut into the blood; however, in
certain children, these molecules had a strange drug-like effect.
I made several calls across the country to find a researcher who might be
interested in this serendipitous finding that could be an important clue into
this disease, because I had not found any studies or information regarding the
involvement of the gut in this disease. Unfortunately, no one I talked to was
interested.
Testifying to Congress
In May 2004, I had been invited to testify in front of the Government Reform
Committee to discuss new developments in treating children with Autism Spectrum
Disorders. I had been invited because of the work I was doing with hyperbaric
oxygen in treating brain-injured children, including fetal alcohol syndrome. In
hyperbaric oxygen treatment, oxygen is given under pressure in chambers used to
treat scuba divers who get the bends. Several other physicians and I had found
that hyperbaric oxygen returned functionality to the brains of affected
children.
Sitting next to me was a physician who told the story of how his son become
autistic after receiving vaccines and how he discovered his son was retaining
toxic heavy metals, specifically mercury. Over the course of a year, this
physician had given his son a chemical to pull out the mercury, and his son
began speaking again and, in fact, jumped on his dad's lap and addressed the
Committee members, having been restored to be a healthy boy without any signs of
his autism.
In the 1990s, I had known there was a problem with many vaccines because they
contained the preservative thimerosal (50% mercury), and I had discouraged many
parents from having their children vaccinated with vaccines containing
thimerosal. There is no safe level of mercury, and it didn't make sense to
inject the most toxic non-radioactive element on the planet into children. Still
I had never made the connection between autism and mercury. (I knew what
thimerosal was because while I was in college, my brother had a very bad
reaction to the thimerosal that used to be used in contact lens solution.) I was
taken aback that something so obvious had not registered with me, but I didn't
realize that my physician colleagues and I had been subjected to a
disinformation campaign to make us think there was no connection between mercury
and autism. It has been known for sometime that mercury was causing autism, but
someone has been running interference. The question is, who was running
interference?
In February 2007, the watchdog agency on America's health, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), made the official announcement that a
breathtaking one in 150 kids is autistic in the US. If you go to the CDC website
on autism (http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism),
you will see lots of pictures of smiling happy children with autism, and we'd be
told that autism spectrum disorders are "a group of developmental disabilities
defined by significant impairments in social interaction and communication and
the presence of unusual behaviors and interests." You won't be told that, for
many parents, autism is a nightmare from which they never wake up. "Significant
impairments" can mean that a child is violent and self-abusive, non-verbal, and
physically sick. You won't be told that this is a medical disease in which most
autistic children have significant inflammation in both gut and brain including
colitis, super-infections, and severe food allergies.
Even though autism affects one in 90 boys (four boys affected for every girl) in
the US, the CDC can't seem to tell us exactly why. The CDC states, "We still
don't know a lot about the causes of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs).
Scientists think that both genes and the environment play a role, and there
might be many causes that lead to ASDs." The site also doesn't mention that only
one in 10,000 children in the 1970s and one in 2,500 in the 1980s were autistic.
The CDC site also doesn't tell us about a secret meeting that was held in June
of 2000 in which over 50 individuals from the CDC, World Health Organization
(WHO), National Institutes of Health (NIH), American Academy of Pediatrics, and
many representatives from pharmaceutical interests discussed data from the CDC
Vaccine Data Sets showing that the increase in mercury exposure from the
stepped-up vaccine schedule in the 1990s caused an 11-fold increase in
neurobehavioral disorders (www.autismhelpforyou.com/Simpsonwood_And_Puerto%20%20Rico.htm).
What you will see on the CDC website is "Several studies have looked at whether
there is a relationship between vaccines and autism. The weight of the evidence
indicates that vaccines are not associated with autism."
Evidence? Someone at the CDC was "cooking the books," and what they told the
public was not what they knew to be the case. You see, the CDC was put in the
untenable position of helping to develop vaccines, mandate the vaccines, promote
the vaccines, pay for their administration, and be responsible for their safety:
ye olde fox watching the henhouse scenario with the inevitable untoward result.
There will always be a problem with vaccine safety until this responsibility is
moved out of the CDC. Today, the CDC and its vaccine public-relation front
group's answer to any criticism is that those who are critical of any part of
the vaccine program are motivated solely by a desire to destroy the vaccine
program.
The truth is that the CDC has been very effective in laying the foundation to
destroy the vaccine program all by themselves, and their double-speak is
analogous to someone saying you can't be against war and support the troops at
the same time – you're either for us or against us, etc. It is actually illegal
for a federal agency to propagandize the American public, but that is exactly
what the vaccine division of the CDC does. It has used the tactic of generating
fear, and it has earned billions of dollars for this agency. Once the public
loses trust in public health programs, it can take many years to regain that
trust. I am reminded of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments that are still a cause
of distrust of public health programs amongst black Americans.
Losing the Public Trust
The cover-up at the CDC surrounding the mercury preservative found in so many
vaccines (up until about 2003) has had very serious and far-reaching
implications. The children whose lives were forever changed by being injected
with thimerosal preservative were giving us a global "heads-up." They were
showing us that the background level of mercury pollution has increased to the
point that it is beginning to take its toll on the human species, but the CDC
turned its head away from this crisis because it conflicted with what the agency
was promoting in the vaccine program.
As I said before, mercury is the deadliest non-radioactive element on Earth, and
thousands of tons are spewed into the environment every year. With each
coal-fire power plant that comes on line, we are one step closer to
exterminating human life on this planet. However, mercury is politically
protected because of its connection with the fossil-fuel industry, dentistry
(amalgam dental filings), and vaccines. Thimerosal is still in the flu vaccine
for children over the age of three, and those children are receiving as much as
half the dose of mercury that the child in the 1990s received. Thimerosal was
not removed from vaccine in 1999. That was when the promise was made, but
promises weren't kept. Thimerosal is also in the meningitis vaccine.
Lower IQ levels linked to mercury exposure in the womb cost the US $8.7 billion
a year in lost-earnings potential according to a study done by the Mount Sinai
Center for Children's Health and the Environment (http://fusion.mssm.edu/media/content.cfm?storynum=252).
If it were publicly acknowledged that mercury pollution was the trigger for the
autism epidemic, this number would be in the trillions of dollars. One in six
children is born to mothers with dangerous levels of mercury in their blood –
perhaps the same one in six that the CDC admits have a neurobehavioral disorder.
Our regulatory agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have been taken over by the very
industries they were mandated to regulate. The revolving door between industry
and top-level appointees at these regulatory agencies has eliminated many of the
normal safeguards we have relied on for our protection. There is no disputing
the numbers. Last month, the Tonawanda News in
New York reported that "cases of autism in the state jumped from fewer than
2,000 in 1992 to 9,500 in 2003." Even worse was the number of affected children
in New York schools in 2005-2006, according to the Department of Education. New
York's autism total had increased to 12,257.
Maybe what we really need to be made aware of is what the eventual cost of
autism will be to the US. The Autism Society of America tells us that autism is
growing by ten percent to 17% a year. They also say that it currently costs $90
billion a year, and that number is projected to increase to $200-400 billion
annually in ten more years. A Harvard study out last year put the cost of
lifetime support conservatively at $3.2 million per individual.
April was Autism Awareness month, but why are we only asking for awareness and
not for answers? This is a glaring omission when we're talking about so many
affected children. Awareness, treatment, and identification are critical but so
is preventing autism.
If we were talking about children going blind, think how obscene the following
would sound:
The number of children diagnosed with blindness is rapidly increasing.
According to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
nearly one in every 150 US children is blind. These numbers are startling,
and this disability is affecting more and more families. Twenty years
ago, blindness was a very rare case. Today, blindness is becoming a
frightening statistic in every community. April is Blindness Awareness
Month, and I encourage everyone to take this opportunity to learn more
about this disability…
It would be absurd to relate this information about blindness without giving any explanation about what was causing it. Everyone would be demanding answers, and I dare say there would be protests in the streets to say the least.
The CDC and Autism
CDC director Julie Gerberding announced the new autism rate of one in every 150
children with a flourish. She said that while there are more kids being
diagnosed with autism, it doesn't mean autism is necessarily on the rise. No one
in the press seemed concerned that the CDC has been counting kids with autism
for years and still can't tell us if there are actually more of them. After all,
it's just "better diagnosing by doctors" and "better statistics by the Centers
for Disease Control." And now we learn that the Autism Genome Project (AGP)
recently uncovered evidence shows that autism is caused by "genetic flaws."
Common sense would tell us that pushing children onto a busy street, observing
that some of them were injured, and then looking for a genetic reason why some
of them were hit defies credulity. No other disease in history has been
subjected to the spin that has been put on autism.
Dr. Ezra Susser, chairman of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman
School of Public Health in New York indicated that he believed the new genetic
findings would help scientists to understand how "the environment might lead to
autism by causing genetic changes."
Susser said, "It shows us that we need to think about many environmental factors
that might influence autism."
The new genetic findings on autism got a lot of coverage from major news
outlets, and reports made it look like we were on the cutting edge of a major
autism breakthrough. But let's do a reality check here, genes don't just
spontaneously and randomly mutate all by themselves. There has to be an
environmental agent affecting these genes.
Some will have you believe that autism is some medical mystery that's always
been around, one that we just have managed to get a handle on. So, show me the
30-year-olds with autism, the 40-year-olds with autism, and the 50-year-olds
with autism. Guess what? They aren't there for the most part. The explosion in
the number of children with autism is real, but most of the scientific community
has ignored this. Let's face it: they have been encouraged to ignore it, and
anyone getting close to the truth finds that they get their NIH research grants
pulled.
That's right…science is being manipulated, so that a big lie can stay alive, and
those culpable can remain unaccountable.
It seems the scientific world isn't concerned that more children will be
diagnosed with autism this year than with AIDS, diabetes, and pediatric cancer
combined. News stories about autistic kids are now beginning to reveal the
duplicity of CDC officials. These reports clearly show that this isn't something
we have all the time in the world to theorize and ponder about.
All the experts searching diligently for those elusive genetic mutations seem
blissfully unaware of the impact of autism on our schools and the impending
disaster, as these autistic children become autistic adults. Anyone looking at
the graphs and charts based on Department of Education statistics showing the
soaring autism numbers has got to be worried. The dramatic increase in children
in our schools disabled with autism is a scary preview of the impact they will
have on the Social Security System in the next five to ten years. Michael Ganz's
Harvard study last year conservatively put the lifetime care cost for one
autistic individual at $3.2 million. Robert Krakow from Lifespire gives us
estimates that put the lifespan cost at $10.125 million per autistic individual.
This figure is based on an annual rate for each person of $225,000 with a life
expectancy of 66 years. It doesn't include the cost for the period up to age 21.
One of the many questions we need to ask ourselves is if the very integrity of
the biosphere on this planet is in jeopardy unless there is an immediate
curtailment of manmade mercury pollution. Coal miners don't look at a dead
canary and blow it off or say they have just "gotten better at diagnosing dead
canaries," or "that dead canary just had a genetic defect so pay no heed." Yet
that is exactly analogous to the situation we find ourselves. We continue to
pollute the planet and ourselves (there is no separation), yet the very
governmental agency that would normally be taking the lead in sounding this
five-alarm alert has been compromised and remains less than silent. Mercury
pollution should be considered a global crime against humanity and against
mammalian life on this planet, and there should be zero tolerance.
If you want to know why more isn't being done for autistic children, why there
has been a strange cover-up of the facts, then simply follow the mercury and
those that benefit from its use.
Kenneth Stoller, MD, FAAP is medical
director of the Hyperbaric Medical Center of New Mexico (www.hbotnm.com)
and the Hyperbaric Oxygen Clinic of Sacramento (www.hbot.info).
He is President of the International Hyperbaric Medical Association. He can be
reached at info@hbotnm.com.
Anne McElroy Dachel of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin is a member of Advocates for
Children's Health Affected by Mercury Poisoning (A-CHAMP) and the National
Autism Association (NAA). She can be reached at
amdachel@msn.com.
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