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North American Journal of Medicine and Science
Vol. 6, Issue 3
July 2013

ADVANCES IN AUTISM 2013
A Special Issue of NAJMS

http://najms.net/wp-content/uploads/v06i03.pdf#page=34

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Editors-in-Chief: Xuejun Kong, MD
Guest Editor: Christopher J. McDougle, MD ( http://www.massgeneral.org/about/pressrelease.aspx?id=1402 )
Published: Boston, MA, USA
Distribute: Worldwide


Editors-in-Chief
Xuejun Kong, MD Harvard Medical School, Boston

Advisory Editors
Richard E. Frye, MD, PhD University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock
John Halamka, MD Harvard Medical School, Boston
Ursula Kaiser, MD Harvard Medical School, Boston
Kenneth K. Kidd, PhD Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven
John Tomaszewski, MD State University of New York, Buffalo

Associate Editors
Mitchell Albert, PhD University of Massachusetts, Worcester
Robit Arora, MD, FACC, FAHA, FSCAI, FACP Chicago Medical School, North Chicago
Frank Chen, MD, PhD State University of New York, Buffalo
Jason Chen, PhD University of Massachusetts, Worcester
Ke-Qin Hu, MD University of California, Irvine
Edmond Kabagambe, DVM, PhD University of Alabama, Birmingham
Tamara Kalir, MD, PhD Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York
David Lee, PhD Harvard Medical School, Boston
Calvin Pan, MD Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York
Yiqing Song, MD, ScD Harvard Medical School, Boston
George C. Tsokos, MD Harvard Medical School, Boston

Specialty Editors
See PDF

Strategies Utilized at Advocates for Children that Might Impact Autism Prevention

1) Minimizing environmental toxicant exposures...
2) Maximizing breastfeeding prevalence...
3) Recommending probiotics...
4) Nutritional counseling...
5) Antibiotic stewardship...
6) Minimizing use of acetaminophen...
7) Allowing/implementing a modified vaccine schedule

http://focusautisminc.org/letter-from-cdc-whistleblower-to-cdc-official-julie-gerberdile/

The following is a letter from Dr. William Thompson, epidemiologist with the CDC, to Dr. Julie Gerberding, former CDC Director and current head of Merck’s vaccine division. Dr. Gerberding led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as director from 2002 to 2009. The letter was written in 2004, one week before the Institute of Medicine (IOM) meeting addressing the link between vaccines and autism.

This letter confirms that lead officials at CDC had knowledge of safety issues regarding vaccines at least ten years ago, but did nothing to address these safety concerns. After Dr. Thompson wrote the letter, he was reprimanded and removed from the 2004 IOM speaker schedule. Subsequently, in March, he was put on administrative leave.

Thompson highlights his concerns, stating, “I will have to present several problematic results relating to statistical associations between the receipt of the MMR vaccine and autism”. He openly criticizes Dr. Gerberding’s silence on the subject of vaccine/autism causation, and requests a written response to Representative Dave Weldon’s questions surrounding the “integrity” of the scientists in the National Immunization Program.

February 2nd, 2004

Dear Dr. Gerberding,

We’ve not met yet to discuss these matters, but I’m sure you’re aware of the Institute of Medicine Meeting regarding immunizations and autism that will take place on February 9th. I will be presenting the summary of our results from the Metropolitan Atlanta Autism Case-Control Study and I will have to present several problematic results relating to statistical associations between the receipt of the MMR vaccine and autism.

It is my understanding that you are aware of several news articles published over the past two weeks suggesting that Representative David Weldon is still waiting for a response from you regarding two letters he sent you regarding issues surrounding the integrity of your scientists in the National Immunization Program. I’ve repeatedly asked individuals in the NIP Office of the Directors Office why you haven’t responded directly to the issues raised in those letters and I’m very disappointed with the answers I’ve received to date. In addition, I’ve repeatedly told individuals in the NIP OD over the last several years that they’re doing a very poor job representing immunization safety issues and that we’re losing the public relations war.

On Friday afternoon, January 30th, 2004, I presented the draft slides for my IOM presentation to Dr. Steve Cochi and Dr. Melinda Wharton. The first thing I stated to both of them was my sincere concern regarding presenting this work to the Institute of Medicine if you had not replied to Representative Weldon’s letters. I have attached the draft slides for your review. I have been told that you have suggested that the science speaks for itself. In general I agree with that statement, but as you know, the science also needs advocates who can get the real scientific message out to the public.

In contrast to NIP’s failure to be proactive in addressing immunization safety issues, you have done an amazingly effective job addressing the press on a wide range of controversial public health issues including SARS, Monkey Pox and Influenza. The CDC needs your leadership with respect to the IOM meeting because I may very well be presenting data before a hostile crowd of parents with autistic children who have been told not to trust the CDC. I believe it is your responsibility and duty to respond in writing to Representative Weldon’s letters before the Institute of Medicine meeting and make those letters public. Otherwise, you give the appearance of agreeing with what has been suggested in those correspondences and you’re putting one of your own scientists in harms way. This is not the time for our leadership to act politically. It is a time for our leadership to stand by their scientists and do the right thing. Please assist me in this matter and respond to Representative Weldon’s concerns in writing prior to my presentation on February 9th.

Sincerely,

William. W. Thompson, PhD
Epidemiologist
Immunization Safety Branch
National Immunization Program
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/09/leslie-manookian-the-greater-good-movie-on-dr-melinda-wharton.html

September 26, 2014

Leslie Manookian & The Greater Good Movie on Dr. Melinda Wharton
By Anne Dachel

On Sept 16, 2014, http://www.greatergoodmovie.org released a video of Dr. Melinda Wharton, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (CDC), explaining why there was no research comparing the health outcomes and vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

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Leslie Manookian wrote,

The fact that this study has never been done is not only sad and frustrating, it is also unscientific, as this study might answer once and for all whether vaccines improve our children’s health, or harm it.

In making The Greater Good we asked CDC‘s top vaccine official, Dr. Melinda Wharton, why CDC wouldn’t just do the study and put all the questions and worries to rest. Dr. Wharton’s answer may surprise you and leave you wondering whether the problem is truly the difficulty of the study, or perhaps something more frightening, like the answer they might find.

Dr. Wharton:

"It seems like it ought to be possible to compare the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children and address some of these questions. It's got a kind of intuitive appeal. ...

"I don't know of any way we can do it, and it's for a couple of different reasons.

"In the first place, it would be pretty hard to find those 50,000 unvaccinated children to do the study comparing the health outcomes..."

Leslie pointed out, "The CDC's own data says there are over a million unvaccinated children in the United States."

Wharton had more to say about why UNVACCINATED CHILDREN would be hard to study:

"They're almost certainly very different than other children because their parents have made this decision not to vaccinate--and they probably made other decisions that are different than the decisions other parents have made....

"Let's just pretend for a moment that autism is actually caused by pesticides residues on broccoli. ...And we think about this group of 50,000 vaccinated children and this group of 50,000 unvaccinated children. What's their exposure to pesticide residues on broccoli? Is it the same? And it's probably not, because probably those people who made the choice not to vaccinate their children have other things they're concerned about as well. And maybe they're not that concerned about pesticide residues on vegetables and they buy their fruits and vegetables at different stores than these other people do."

Leslie ended the video by telling us how ridiculous it is that Wharton blames different diets for the failure of officials to conduct this needed research.

This wasn't the first time Dr. Wharton has made excuses for not studying vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Seven years ago, I wrote about her explanation during an interview. (Back then the autism rate was one in every 150 children.)

"Dr. Wharton said that because of the high vaccination rate in the U.S., it wouldn't be possible to do a comparison study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children for autism rates. She didn't say anyone at the CDC had even looked for kids who haven't been vaccinated."

In 2007, Wharton said that it was impossible to do the study because there weren't enough unvaccinated kids. Today, it's because unvaccinated children probably aren't eating vegetables laced with pesticides.

I really have no response to what Wharton said in the video. How do these people imagine they're credible to the public?

http://www.pressherald.com/2014/09/02/maine-voices-breakdown-in-accountability-at-heart-of-decline-in-vaccinations/

September 2, 2014

Maine Voices: Breakdown in accountability at heart of decline in vaccinations
Opposition to the current U.S. vaccination program is based on its failures, denial and bad law and policy.

By Ginger Taylor

BRUNSWICK — I was interviewed for an Aug. 9 front-page article by Joe Lawlor, titled “More Maine families are skipping or delaying childhood vaccines.” What was published was a complete misrepresentation of the interview I gave him.

As I told Mr. Lawlor, I’m neither anti-vaccine nor opposed to vaccination, and I vaccinated my children. My opposition is to the current U.S. vaccine program, which has become corrupted by bad law and policy, the failure to disclose known risks to families, the failure to pre-screen children who are showing symptoms that they are at risk for vaccine reactions and the denial of vaccine injury cases – rather than the proper recognition, diagnoses and treatment of vaccine-injured children.

In 1986, Congress gave liability protection to all vaccine interests – pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, doctors, nurses, etc. – so no one in this country can sue for vaccine injuries or deaths. As a result of this disregard of Americans’ Seventh Amendment rights, a vaccine injury case hasn’t been brought before a jury in almost 30 years, there is no longer accountability in vaccine safety and the vaccine program has fallen into massive corruption.

The effectiveness of vaccines is overstated, safety claims made are overstated and parents no longer get accurate risk information. Instead, vaccine consumers are offered a single sheet of information in the doctor’s office that leaves out almost all of the side effects listed on the vaccine package insert, on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Vaccine Injury Table and the disorders that HHS has concluded can be caused by a given vaccine.

Doctors are not trained on federal guidelines for vaccine injury, nor are they required to know the side effects listed on the vaccine package insert. Therefore, few physicians know how to recognize adverse reactions in their patients. As a result, such cases are usually ignored or misdiagnosed and are rarely properly medically assessed, and patients can become victims of medical neglect for a lifetime.

Further, the vaccine schedule has tripled since 1986, so a child born today will receive more doses of vaccine by the time he’s 6 months old than I did by the time I went to college. There is almost no long-term safety testing of vaccines, and no safety testing of the overloaded schedule as a whole.

This breakdown in the U.S. vaccine program’s accountability to consumers is at the heart of the country’s decline in vaccinations, because when parents take the time to look into physicians’ safety claims, they find they’re being given incorrect and biased information.

Case in point: The claim that the vaccine-autism controversy began as the result of one debunked study is utter misinformation. In fact, more than 80 research papers demonstrate the associations between vaccines and autism, and the mechanisms by which vaccines can cause autism.

When Mr. Lawlor asked me why I believed my son was vaccine-injured, I directed him to the HHS Vaccine Injury Compensation Table and walked him through the symptoms of pertussis-vaccine-induced “encephalopathy,” the medical term for brain damage, which my son exhibited following his 18-month shots:

- Decreased or absent response to environment (responds, if at all, only to loud voice or painful stimuli).
- Decreased or absent eye contact (does not fix gaze upon family members or other individuals).
- Inconsistent or absent responses to external stimuli (does not recognize familiar people or things).

My son’s case is not unusual. Because few doctors have ever read the federal vaccine injury table, children exhibiting symptoms of vaccine-induced brain damage are often diagnosed with “autism” without ever being evaluated for this vaccine reaction.

The Press Herald has published a follow-up article and an editorial that make clear its agenda is to not investigate and report the facts on this issue, but to coerce families who have safety concerns into vaccinating according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended schedule – against their better judgment, by removing their legal right to exercise informed consent in medicine.

Parents are not declining vaccines because of Jenny McCarthy or because of a 15-year-old British research paper. Parents are justifiably hesitant because the vaccine program has become overly aggressive, dosing is one-size-fits-all, promoters don’t disclose true risks to patients and program managers are not taking responsibility for helping the countless children and adults who have serious adverse vaccine reactions. Parents like me found out the hard way that once your child suffers a vaccine injury, you are on your own.

— Special to the Press Herald

"AT LEAST WE CAN BEGIN TO LISTEN MORE CAREFULLY AND REALIZE THAT THIS IS A MULTIFACETED PROBLEM WITH PEOPLE HAVING VERY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES."

- Dr. Thomas Insel @2:23 (bottom video)

We are the experts #hearthiswell

Published on Sep 23, 2014
Thinking Moms Revolution

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

"What we're here to say is absolutely nothing new, nothing that this committee hasn't heard before from multiple public commenters over the years. There's a huge subset of individuals with the label of autism who were not born with autism. These children, young adults and adults who were born as typically developing healthy children and then regressed into autism. This is not the autism that you see in our highly functioning adults, the way that Mr. Robinson described himself. This is not what we are talking about. But we don't have another word; we have autism. So we are talking about high functioning adults, people who love who they are and should celebrate who they are. And we're talking about kids who are sick. They are two different things, and we call it all autism.

"This autism is extremely different. It's a different experience for these individuals. It's pain. It's bowel disease. It's mitochondrial dysfunction. It's seizures. It's immune deficiency. And in many cases, it is a silent plea for help through head banging, and self-injurious behaviors and aggression. Parents have been searching for treatment for these co-conditions for years. We pay out-of-pocket because insurance won't cover the staggering cost of healing the many physical ailments our children suffer from. Our kids who fall into this model of autism, the ones who are healthy and become urgently ill, need to be treated with respect and like human beings who are sick. Their physical symptoms need to be addressed by medical professionals in the same ways that they would be handled in a person without autism. Never again should a parent have to hear from a doctor or a psychiatrist that a physical problem such as diarrhea or constipation..., that it's just part of their autism. But it still happens. That is what parents are hearing. When you go to the pediatrician, they hear, 'Well, kids on the spectrum, have diarrhea. They have constipation. It's part of autism.'

"I talked about my son's regression at the pediatrician's. A regression. A typically developing child regressed into autism and I was told, 'Well that's the very definition of autism.' We need to rework how we're talking about these things in pediatricians' offices across the country. And you need to be the change for that happening.

"Parents have been telling you for years that there was some trigger that sent their healthy child into a physical and developmental tailspin. They watched this happen to their kids. And we're ignored. You ignore our firsthand eyewitness accounts of damage to our children. You hold these meetings that accomplish nothing. And [you] give us the mike a few times a year and we tell you, 'Autism is medical.' This version of autism that the parents come here and talk to you about. Let me be clear on that. Our children get better when we treat the medical problems they have. Their behaviors that land them on the spectrum in the first place, improve when they get healthier. And you don't hear us. You give us fifteen minutes of your day and interrupt parents who travel on their own dime to come here and speak to you. If they go over their allotted three minutes, they get interrupted--as long as we end the meeting by five.

"I want to thank Dr. Cory for recognizing the one thing I haven't heard here in all the time I've been listening, watching and coming to these meetings. I heard the phrase, 'The parents are the experts on their children.' I heard it from other people in the room too. And the bottom line is, we are. We are the experts on our children. We see what they are living with day in and day out--the medical conditions that we are trying so desperately to find the answers for. But we receive none.

"I hope today that you hear this well, treating the co-occurring conditions is critical, but it is absolutely not enough. This committee needs to start getting serious about prevention. You need to start investigating the dangers of vaccines, pesticide exposure, antibiotic overuse, chemicals that are in our food supply that we know cause neurological dysfunction.

"We have a medical system that is run by pharmaceutical companies who don't care one bit if our kids are healthy or not. This committee needs to start working with our government to lessen the toxic burden our children are exposed to. We parents are watching and don't see this committee doing much of anything.

"The autism numbers continue to climb with no end in sight. And we have been screaming into the abyss. We've been telling you what is happening. We've given you clues to study, but you ignore us.

"Are you afraid of what you will find? Afraid of doing the right thing until it's too late? It's quickly becoming too late. How many more kids will die in ponds or in pools, because they wandered off and drowned? How many more diagnosed will it take for you act? This epidemic and the U.S. government's inaction is creating a vocal, intelligent, passionate army of loved ones that has reached a critical mass in number and will not back down. We'll be at every one of your meetings. We want to hear about what you're going to do about these co-occurring conditions and we want to know what you're going to do to prevent the rise in autism. It can't be ignored any longer. We've been telling you these things for well over ten years and what I want to know today is, who in this room is going to be a champion for this? Who will stand up and force the independent study looking at causation? Or spearhead individualized effective treatment for our sick children? If that person is in this room, now is the time to stand up.

"Thank you for your time. And on a separate note, I really would like to thank Lyn Redwood for always being a voice for the families that have been screaming this. She asks the hard questions and she's not given up on that job. So thank you."

http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/09/thats-all-there-is-folks-the-government-can-do-nothing-more-about-autism.html

THAT'S ALL THERE IS, FOLKS...

By Anne Dachel
September 30, 2014

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Megan, after your heartfelt plea to the experts in the room, did anyone respond to what you said?

The response was a general discussion about all three public commenters. John Robinson spoke first and stated again that he doesn’t believe the vaccine link to autism, but then questioned whether or not the belief that vaccine cause autism is a widely held though out the community. He admitted that as public servants, the committee should investigate vaccines if the public truly believes that there is a connection.

Lyn Redwood followed up by explaining how she learned that vaccine induced autism is biologically plausible. She discussed studies that were altered and had data changed to affect the outcomes to show that vaccines are not linked to a higher rate of autism. She then suggested that the committee bring these findings of fraud to the secretary and request special counsel to further investigate the fraud.

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Did Dr. Insel acknowledge your remarks? What was his response?

Dr. Insel did not directly address my remarks. He went on to discuss what the committee could and couldn’t do and made an analogy of autism being like a fever. That the fever could be cause by ebola or strep throat, but that it presents the same way and that we are in the ‘early stages’ of this (meaning autism) and that it is all so new, despite parents coming to the IACC for years and discussing co-occurring conditions, vaccines and treatment options.

INSEL'S RESPONSE (This was where he said, 'We have no money. We have no ability to fund anybody to do anything.')

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What is your opinion of the attitude of IACC toward autism as an epidemic and the link to vaccines?

I don’t think the IACC will ever investigate the vaccine/autism link. It is far too messy for our government have this link exposed. The vaccine program in our country continues to balloon out of control, because it is a huge money maker for the pharmaceutical industry. There are lobbyists in DC that get paid big money to make sure that no one looks too closely at what causes autism. I think that the IACC will continue to sit on their hands and do nothing with the information that Lyn Redwood presented to the committee at the meeting.

While Insel sounded like he was powerless to get anything done about autism, I found this official IACC statement from April, 2014:

The Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) is a Federal advisory committee, composed of Federal and public members, that coordinates all efforts within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) concerning autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Consider what that means. Thomas Insel just threw up his arms in response to Megan Davenhall and said he can't be expected to do anything about autism and the IACC website says that HHS has assigned ALL EFFORTS regarding autism to him and his committee...