Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

I have been a practicing pediatrician for over 20 years. I saw my first child with autism in the early 90's - before that I had never seen an autistic child, and I never saw an autistic child in all my years at school. The boy was 4 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 I worked at in another city, but they had traveled to see me because they trusted me and were looking for answers that no one seemed to have for them, but 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. 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 1990's, 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 everyday 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 affect on the brain, or; 2) the drug was blocking a molecule that normally crossed from the gut into the blood but in certain children these molecules had a strange drug-like affect.  

I made several calls across the country to find a researcher who might be interested in this serendipitous finding which could be an important clue into this disease, because no where had I found anything saying that the guts of these children were involved in their 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. Hyperbaric oxygen is where oxygen is given under pressure in chambers that are used to treat scuba divers who get the bends. I and several other physicians had found that hyperbaric oxygen was returning functionality to the brains of affected children.  

Sitting next to me was a physician who told the story of his son who had become autistic after receiving vaccine 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 1990's I had known there was a problem with many of the vaccines because they contained the preservative Thimerosal (50% mercury) and I had discouraged many parents from getting vaccine 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, but I 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 I and my physician colleagues 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 was running interference. The question was 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 breath-taking one in 150 kids is autistic in the U.S. If you go to the CDC website on autism (http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism) you'd 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 where 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 U.S., 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 where over 50 individuals from the CDC, WHO, 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 1990's 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 hen house 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 the motivations of those that are critical of any part of the vaccine program are because they really want to destroy the vaccine program.