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REVIEWS: Michael Fitzpatrick Evidence of Harm. Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: Medical Controversy BMJ 2005; 330: 1154 [Full text]

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Patronising tone, but where is the science?

John Stone   (13 May 2005)

Toxic metals, mineral deficiencies and the autism epidemic

Ellen C G Grant   (13 May 2005)

Excellent summation

Kevin Leitch   (14 May 2005)

Fitzpatrick ignores the MEAT in Kirby's EOH book

Erik B. Nanstiel   (14 May 2005)

David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm”

David Kirby   (14 May 2005)

Excerpt from EOH, references from government, and children's medical tests

Nancy E. Hokkanen   (14 May 2005)

Definition of the word "quack" Mr. Fitzpatrick

Donna M Arnold   (14 May 2005)

Evidence of Harm

Elizabeth A. Birt   (14 May 2005)

Would Michael Fitzpatrick like to dispute the following?

John Stone   (14 May 2005)

Where's the Evidence?

John P. Heptonstall   (14 May 2005)

Evidence of Harm

Melissa L Bolling   (14 May 2005)

Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm”

Camille C Clark   (15 May 2005)

Re: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” (Camille Clark)

John Stone   (15 May 2005)

Facts, not personal agendas, will resolve the autism-vaccine issue

Karyn Seroussi   (15 May 2005)

Facts will resolve the autism issue

Ellen C G Grant   (16 May 2005)

Re: Re: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” (Camille Clark)

Camille C Clark   (16 May 2005)

Less Speculation - More Investigation - Please

Clifford G. Miller   (16 May 2005)

Re: Re: Re: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” (Camille Clark)

Deborah Kahn   (17 May 2005)

Re: Re: Re: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” (Camille Clark)

John P. Heptonstall   (17 May 2005)

More investigation of parents before conception to prevent autism?

Ellen C G Grant   (17 May 2005)

The background to this article

John Stone   (18 May 2005)

Declining zinc levels in harmed children

Ellen C G Grant   (18 May 2005)

The background to this article II

John Stone   (19 May 2005)

Thanks to Mr. Kirby

Eric Capri   (22 May 2005)

Re: Pots and Kettles

Stevie M Gamble   (23 May 2005)

Re: Thanks to Mr. Kirby

John P. Heptonstall   (23 May 2005)

Evidence of Harm

Deborah Delp   (23 May 2005)

Re: Thanks to Mr. Kirby

David L. Kirby   (23 May 2005)

Re: Re: Thanks to Mr. Kirby

Camille C Clark   (26 May 2005)

Similarity between symptoms does not necessarily indicate same cause

Ettina Rupelstilkskin   (29 May 2005)

1 out of 6 children disabled in America

Donna M Arnold   (29 May 2005)

Dear Ms Clark

Trevor LP Watts   (29 May 2005)

Emotional territorialism against science - and some recent data

John Stone   (29 May 2005)

Examination of hurtful words about autistics

Ettina M Satot   (29 May 2005)

Multiple causes of autism

Ellen C G Grant   (31 May 2005)

True, But belief is held by both sides.

Hilary Butler   (31 May 2005)

Language: A great Divide.

Hilary Butler   (31 May 2005)

Re: Examination of hurtful words about autistics

John P Heptonstall   (31 May 2005)

What causes the suffering?

Ettina F Ettin   (1 June 2005)

TD DMPS - popular autism "cure"

Camille C Clark   (1 June 2005)

Re: TD DMPS - popular autism "cure"

Ellen C G Grant   (2 June 2005)

Re: What causes the suffering?

John P Heptonstall   (2 June 2005)

Why the pretence?

John Stone   (2 June 2005)

"Immune system perturbations"

John Stone   (3 June 2005)

Patronising tone, but where is the science? 13 May 2005
John Stone, none London N22 Send response to journal: Re: Patronising tone, but where is the science?	Where is the science here? The disdain was exemplified by the title of Michael Fitzpatrick's book 'MMR and Autism: what parent's need to know', or just perhaps what he wants to tell us. But in this article he tells us nothing about why we should believe the IOM and no one should believe its critics: it is all done at the level of assertion: big science is good science. The doctors who were not there are better witnesses than the parents who were. Or could it just possibly be the case that the doctors were taking unacceptable risks with our children and cannot bear to have it pointed out to them? Since when, after all, did the medical profession own up to its errors? In Fitzpatrick's universe everyone else are knaves and fools: we are directed to bow before the Pharma and US Government science and no ordinary citizen should have the temeritiy to think for themselves - it is all apparently to be done for us. We should continue to accept uncritically that the medical profession stick needles into our children and inject substances that no one fully understands and virtually all of which are toxic. Well I certainly disagree with Michael Fitzpatrick about medical ethics but I cannot help thinking there are even wider philosophical issues here as well. It is fair to point out given the furore of Andrew Wakefield's alleged competing interests that Michael Fitzpatrick is a trustee of the science lobby organisation Sense About Science [1]. The website used to disclose that it was funded by vaccine manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline [2], and this fact is also recorded by Richard Horton in his book on the MMR controversy [3]. [1]http://senseaboutscience.org.uk/about.htm [2]http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/328/7455/1571#64919 [3] Richard Horton, 'MMR Sience and Fiction - Exploring the Vaccine Crisis' p. 155. Competing interests: Parent of an autistic child
Toxic metals, mineral deficiencies and the autism epidemic 13 May 2005
Ellen C G Grant, physician Kingston-upon-Thames, KT2 7JU, UK Send response to journal: Re: Toxic metals, mineral deficiencies and the autism epidemic	General practitioner Dr Michael Fitzpatrick writes that, “The same parents are pursuing a range of esoteric investigations and treatments for their children, including chelation therapy to eliminate mercury, injections of vitamin B-12, and various dietary exclusions and supplements”. The BMJ considers that the subject of toxic metal exposures, in particular mercury in vaccines, and autism increases is controversial. Why is the subject not being treated with impartiality based on scientific knowledge rather than merely relying on the blunt tool of epidemiology to denigrate the experience of parents and their affected children?1 Mineral and vitamin and essential fatty acid deficiencies are real causes of impaired brain function, especially zinc and copper imbalance. High levels of toxic metals in blood, urine, hair and sweat are real causes of impaired brain function. Food and chemical allergies are real as are the effects of a high allergy and therefore of poorly nutritious diet causing headaches and poor concentration.2-4 Lymphocyte sensitivities to raised toxic metal levels are real, as are confirmable improvements with monitored chelation using vitamin C, chlorella and nutritional supplements. I have already detailed the normalisation of an extensive range of toxic metal sensitivities and the highest levels were for dental mercury. Lymphocyte sensitivity tests (results below 100 are regarded as normal) are more sensitive than serum levels for detecting harmful effects of metals. The mother of two dyslexic children had definite sensitivities to inorganic (dental) mercury and nickel (380 and 220) and mild sensitivities to vitallium (dental Cr/Co) silver, cobalt, and tin (165, 160, 155, 115) before the removal of all dental metals. Organic mercury (from fish) lymphocyte sensitivity was 90 but fell to 17 after chelation. All the metals retested for lymphocyte sensitivity produced low normal results (86 -1) after chelation. 5,6 The damaging effect of dental amalgam fillings in early pregnancy is potentially a real cause of severe irreversible brain damage to children. This dental practise is now being discontinued hopefully. The commonest toxic metal in autistic children causing DNA-adducts in a screening study of 61 autistic children was cadmium, presumably from parental smoking. Three children had DNA-adducts in leucocytes to mercury, 16 to malondialdehyde, 12 to cadmium, 9 to nickel and one to lead.7 There are now thousands of research papers confirming the importance of basic investigations and fundamental treatment for an extensive range of conditions. 1 Grant ECG. Limits of epidemiological studies in autism without clinical tests. http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/325/7373/1134/a#78315, 14 Oct 2004 2 Grant ECG. Increases in childhood allergies and asthma may relate to an increasing prevalence of zinc deficiency http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/329/7464/489#72482, 29 Aug 2004 3 Grant ECG. Psychologists ignore treatable biochemical abnormalities in dyslexia. http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/313/7065/1096#102157, 31 Mar 2005 4 Grant ECG. Children with psychiatric disorders and learning disabilities have biochemical abnormalities http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/330/7494/742#102754, 5 Apr 2005 5 Grant ECG. Mercury damage to IQs and lives is incalculable http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/329/7466/588-b#98780, 3 Mar 2005 6 Grant ECG. Dental mercury is too toxic. http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/329/7466/588-b#99309, 6 Mar 2005 7 Grant ECG. McLaren-Howard J. Re: The effects of toxic metals in autistic children http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/329/7466/588-b#74117, 13 Sep 2004. Competing interests: None declared
Excellent summation 14 May 2005
Kevin Leitch, Web Designer/Parent of Autistic The Black & White Group WS15 1UZ Send response to journal: Re: Excellent summation	As the parent of an autistic daughter I'd just like to say that not all of us are gullible enough to fall for the latest round of quack cures and litigation led conspiracy theories. I wrote a lengthy article here (http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/wp/index.php?p=174) on the fallacies involved in EoH (Evidence of Harm) and the thimerosal link as well as the very profitable chelation industry which you may find interesting. Thank you for writing this article and making the position of the BMJ clear. This is a clear victory for science and even more importantly a notable step in the aim to rid the world of autism research of quacks. Competing interests: None declared
Fitzpatrick ignores the MEAT in Kirby's EOH book 14 May 2005
Erik B. Nanstiel, Administrative Director Foundation for Autism Information & Research, Inc., 60195-3515 Send response to journal: Re: Fitzpatrick ignores the MEAT in Kirby's EOH book	While Dr. Fitzpatrick picks on the surface strata of the book, he ignores the meat of the science chronicled therein. I received the impression that he merely "skimmed" through its contents and never took the time to fully digest the "Evidence of Harm" detailed throughout, or has taken any time whatsoever investigating any of the source material referenced by Kirby. If I may, I would recommend he visit the following website and watch a few video interviews of the very doctors (researchers & clinicians) Kirby writes about and who are on the front lines of treating autism biomedically. Many of these kids are getting BETTER, with a number of them RECOVERING from their Autism. I have personally met six or seven children who have recovered from a severe state of autism to losing their diagnosis and being mainstreamed in the educational system. http://www.autismmedia.org/media2.html Competing interests: Erik Nanstiel has a child who was injured by her vaccines and is now Autistic
David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” 14 May 2005
David Kirby, Author P.O. Box 847, Pearblossom, CA 93553 Send response to journal: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm”	How I came to be involved in “Evidence of Harm” I was doing some research for freelance magazine articles and someone had told me about some mothers in Los Angeles who were researching alternative treatments for their children with autism. I was writing for women’s magazines and thought it sounded interesting. So, I talked to some of the women out in Los Angeles. One of them rather casually mentioned that she thought, or some people thought, that the cause of autism might be the mercury in vaccines, and I had never heard of such a thing. I thought maybe she was a little, not crazy, but mistaken, and I put it in back of my mind. Still, I thought it was interesting, and then a week later, the Homeland Security Bill passed and I found out there was a secret rider in there to dismiss lawsuits against Eli Lilly. And that’s when the journalist in me said, “I think there is more to this story.” I had never met a person with autism in my life and I had never heard of Thimerosal. And I had certainly never heard of any connection between any form of mercury and autism, although I did know mercury was not good for you. But I don’t think I realized the extent to which it could do damage in your body. So, I was 100% unfamiliar with this story right up until November of 2002. In school I had not know any autistic children People who insist or say that there is no autism epidemic—that it is just better reporting and better diagnostics—I really would like to pose the question to them that Mark Blaxill, from Safe Minds, asks: Where are all those people in my generation, in my school, with autism? Where are the 1 in 166 autistic adults? We can’t find them. So, they have either been institutionalized, or they passed away, or they somehow had a miraculous recovery because they don’t seem to be around. And Mark calls that the “hidden horde” and I think it’s a really good point. On July 9th of 1999 when the Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a joint statement announcing that they had added up mercury burden in children’s vaccines and found out they were over the EPA limit. Up until that time, parents were certainly researching alleged connections between vaccines themselves—particularly MMR, but also DTP—but not necessarily mercury. With one notable exception, a man named Albert Enayati out of New Jersey. He was the head of Cure Autism Now in New Jersey. And he started researching this on his own—even before the joint statement was issued. But he was not entirely convinced, and couldn’t get a lot of information on it at the time. But then when the joint statement was issued, he put it all together. Rates of Autism in the U.S. and Denmark The rate of autism in the U.S. is about 60 per 10,000 children, or 1 in 166. Now, that is for ASD, not full-blown autism. However, in other countries in Europe where they have done extensive studies, and where Thimerosal use has not been a common practice for the last decade or so, the autism rates are considerably lower—particularly in Denmark because that’s where it has been studied, probably, more than anywhere in Europe. I believe the rates are about 7 per 10,000 children. In the U.S. mercury exposure exceeded Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines At the peak of exposure, if a child had received all mercury- containing vaccines, that is, vaccine brands that contained mercury, they would have received many, many times over the EPA limit on those particular days of the visit to the doctor. That would be a ‘bolus’ exposure—a peak, intermittent exposure, as opposed a chronic, low-dose exposure. So, these children would have received at birth 12.5 micrograms of mercury and, depending upon how much they weighed, for an 8 pound child that would be about 35 times over the EPA limit, but for a 4 pound child it would be double that—so, it would be 70 times over the limit. At 2 months the children were brought back, that’s when they were still relatively small and when many important systems inside the body are still developing. And that’s when they received the most amounts of mercury, 3 shots, 62.5 micrograms of mercury. For a 10 pound kid, it’s about 137 times over the EPA limit. And then of course, at 4 months they came back, at 6 months, and then a year. So, in that first year most kids who were receiving mercury got about 212 micrograms. The FDA realized bolus exposures were occurring in 1999 It would appear the U.S. FDA (Food and Drug Administration) never looked at the issue of bolus exposures until 1999, when they were ordered by Congress to do so. We know that company officials at Merck did the math way back in 1991, thanks to an excellent report in the Los Angeles Times about two weeks ago. The company never bothered to tell the government or the public that they had done this math. When I talk about the ‘math,’ I mean the simple conversion of percentage of volume into actual micrograms of weight. And no one at the FDA as far as we know did that until 1999. When they did do that, that’s when they got the statement out and urged companies to start removing mercury from the childhood shots. The public health insititutions did some very clever mathematical footwork, I would say. They took the first six months of exposures—so, that’s 4 bolus exposures—birth, 2 months, 4 months, 6 months—added them up, computing it was 162.5 micrograms of mercury exposure over a period of 180 days. So, they simply averaged that out and came up with a figure of 0.9 micrograms of exposure per day—on average. That completely discounts the days of exposure where the bolus dose is obviously much higher. The analogy I use—there are a couple of them. I quote Lyn Redwood, who is of course one of the lead, if not the lead characters in the book and went to great lengths to try to prove this theory. You can take two Tylenol® a day for 60 days and you will be fine. But if you took 120 Tylenol® in one day, that’s a lethal dose and you’ll probably die. Symptoms of mercury poisoning vs. symptoms of autism There are many, many similar symptoms that cross over and they are quite remarkable, broken down into various different categories. Again Safe Minds were the first people to really pioneer this work looking into these similarities. They published a paper, authored by Sallie Bernard, et al., called Autism: A novel form of mercury poisoning. And in it, they literally went down and compared symptom by symptom, and found in the literature references to behaviors and neurological problems, speech disorders and sensory problems and the list goes on and on, that were virtually identical between mercury poisoning and autism. But then also, we must remember that mercury poisoning does not always manifest itself in the same way nor does autism. So, that then left them open to attack by their opponents who said you can’t make that comparison. Probably most famous historical case of mercury poisoning is Mad Hatter’s disease. And of course, people who made hats up until not too long ago, were exposed to large amounts of mercury vapor used in the making of the felt. Mad Hatters were prone to outbursts of emotion, at the same time they would withdraw from social venues. They would have lack of eye contact, they would be very irritable, huge bouts of depression. And of course, it was exposure to mercury that made them “mad.” Pink disease is even more interesting, probably less known in this country. It appeared in the western world, mostly in Europe, Canada, and Australia, in the 1930’s up until about the 1950’s. And for a long time people suspected that it was inorganic mercury in the teething powder that was put in the teething rings for their children. And indeed, in the end, it did turn out that was the cause. The symptoms, the reason it was called Pink’s disease, is the peeling of the skin, a rash that was red in color, and that’s how the word came about. Now, autistic children generally don’t have that symptom. So, Pink disease obviously is not the same thing as autism. But many, many of the other symptoms overlap remarkably. And I discuss them in the book. There is an actual adult survivor of Pink disease who describes her symptoms from the inside out. And they are identical. I think any parent of an autistic child reading what this woman went through, or reading the general symptoms of Pink disease, (knows) they equally match autism. And of course, finally, industry very reluctantly in the 1950’s, did not want to remove the mercury but thought they might have a problem and potential law suits on their hands, so they did. And within years, Pink disease disappeared, and today it’s virtually unheard of. American and European agencies begin to assess the risks of Thimerosal in pharmaceutical products European agencies, I think, got a head start on the U.S. And if you go even a little further east to the Soviet Union, Russia, they took mercury out of vaccines apparently back in 1982. There is a paper that was published that’s in my book, it was published saying mercury was completely inappropriate for use of this kind and it was toxic. Scandinavia removed mercury from vaccines in 1992. And the Europeans started looking at this issue. Well, actually, back in 1985 also there was a paper published by, basically, the equivalent of the head of the FDA in the United Kingdom saying the same thing, “Thimerosal is not safe and should not be used.” That document, one has to assume, was in the library of the FDA, but they never bothered to look at it. Right around 1998, the European Union started moving to propose banning Thimerosal in vaccines in Europe. And of course in this country it started in 1999. FDA thinks there might be a cause for concern with Thimerosal in vaccines Dr. Patriarca, just before the joint statement was issued—so, back in July of 1999 when he knew this was coming out and he had seen the math—updated his colleagues and sent out a couple of e-mails to them. The first one saying, “How did this happen? This is 9th grade algebra. Anybody could have sat down and done these conversions—why didn’t we?” In the second e-mail he writes that he is afraid that “the perception when this all comes out will be that the FDA, CDC, and others were asleep at the switch.” Which seems like that’s what they were. As far as recall is concerned, Safe Minds attempted repeatedly, over and over again, both in person and in letter form, to have the FDA recall these Thimerosal- containing vaccines, as did Dan Burton, chairman of the Government Reform Committee, several times, and the FDA simply refused. Joint Statement recommends delaying the birth Hep B vaccine? One of the recommendations in the Joint Statement in 1999, was to move the birth dose of Hepatitis B back at least until 4 to 6 months. And they did in the statement say that the schedule allowed that flexibility. There was resistance apparently in a Hepatitis Control Report published on the part of the CDC. They were afraid that if people didn’t get the birth dose, they might not start the Hepatitis B series at all. The American Academy of Pediatrics, to their credit, fought very hard to have the recommendation included to postpone the birth dose. Was Thimerosal ever studied for safety by the FDA or anyone else? Thimerosal safety studies not conducted by the FDA The only safety study on record and on file at the FDA actually predates the FDA. It concerns a 1929 trial by Eli Lilly & Company, shortly after Thimerosal was first invented. They decided to test it on a group of 22 patients who were dying of acute meningitis. So, they injected the patients and followed them for about 3 days, after which time most of the patients had died from meningitis. And in that period they noted no adverse effects from the Thimerosal. So, that was the safety study and that, to this day, sits in the FDA as the only proof of safety of the substance. Warning to Eli Lilly Warnings were issued to Eli Lilly over the decades, beginning in the 1930’s and going right up to 1990’s from scientists, from medical academies, and even from their own employees. And this has all been produced through the discovery process by Andy Waters, the main attorney in a lot of the civil cases. A lot of parents all started on their own, I think without even knowing that other parents were doing the same thing—just looking into this all over the country. My book follows the story of mostly, but not entirely, the Safe Minds parents, in particular Lyn Redwood, Sallie Bernard, Liz Birt, Albert Enayati, Heidi Roger, and Mark Blaxill. And of course more parents come into the story as it progresses. Safe Minds I think gets credit for really spearheading this and really taking on the government and the drug companies. They’re the ones, a group of parents, with the exception of Lyn a nurse practitioner, with very little medical experience. They wrote their paper and they got it out there and they banged down the doors of government to get in, to get meetings, to talk to these officials to present what they found. And they really thought that, once they had done that, the government would take their concerns seriously and get on the ball and try to figure this out. And that’s not the response that they received at all—which I think is very disheartening for them. “It just won’t go away.” At one point I actually toyed with the idea of making that the title of my book, because “evidence of harm” of course occurs many, many times as a phrase in my book. But so does the term, “It won’t go away.” Thomas Verstraeten, who was hired by the CDC, came over from Belgium and his first assignment was to sort through the Federal Vaccine Safety Datalink database and look for adverse outcomes among children who were vaccinated with mercury – to see if there was a higher rate among children who had higher levels of exposure. At his first run of the numbers, he came up with some extremely high and very statistically significant associations, including autism outcomes and Thimerosal exposures. He then went back and re-cut the numbers—literally. He stratified them. In the first round, basically there was this large group of kids broken down into exposure/no exposure. Then he broke them down by different ages and by different exposure rates, and really started to break them down. And the relative risk for autism and other disorders came down considerably, but they did not come down all the way. Many of them were still extremely elevated—alarmingly elevated—and many of them were statistically significant. At this time, when he wrote the memo, the relative risk of autism was at 2.48. Anything over 2.0 is considered causation in a court of law, however it was not completely statistically significant—it is a little complicated to explain the reason why—but it was still high and it was close to statistically significant. The CDC still won’t admit that it has a grave problem. I think they knew they had a PR problem. At the same time, they were fully informed by the people of the FDA what was going on in 1999 as the e-mails will attest. I think when Thomas Verstraeten, then in November/December of 1999, first ran the numbers, that’s when the NIP, the National Immunization Program officials, I think must have known they had a problem. But they will not to this date admit that there was a problem Generations 0 through 4 Generation 0 is so-called because it was sort of discovered after the first 4 generations were discovered. Of these 5 generations, by the way, the only generations that were ever meant to see the light of day were generations 3 and 4, the last two. The last one being published in the Journal Pediatrics. What is called ‘Generation 0,’ again was the first run of the numbers. I am not a biostatistician, so, I don’t know how valuable this data is, but it does exist, it is CDC data. And Verstraeten basically took kids at 1 month of age who had received more than 25 micrograms, and then kids who had received 0 micrograms at 1 month of age, and compared them. And he found out that for the kids in the exposure group, the rates were astounding. For autism it was 7.62, for ADHD it was even a little bit higher, for ADD it was a little bit lower—but they were all way up there and statistically significant. That’s when he cut the numbers again and came out with what is now referred to as the ‘Generation 1’ numbers, when autism fell to 2.48. VSD Phase 1 study The VSD Phase 1 study is also referred to as ‘2/2000.’ There was a paper that Verstraeten wrote for his colleagues in February, 2000—so, it was his second run of the numbers, and that document, which was produced for it, is stamped, every single page, “Confidential. Do not distribute.” That was never meant to see the light of day. That then became ‘Generation 1.’ Only people inside the CDC knew about it. What then became ‘Generation 2’ was in June of 2000, at a top-secret meeting outside of Atlanta, held at a resort called Simpsonwood, where the CDC invited people from the FDA, other government agencies, the medical academies, and the vaccine-producing drug companies to come review the data that Verstraeten had analyzed. By this time, when Verstraeten presented, he was now on ‘Generation 2,’ and the relative risk for autism had since dropped to 1.69. The other risks had dropped, although there were some that were still elevated, particularly speech and language delay. And an umbrella category that they did—they took all of the disorders, including autism, and put them into something called NDDs, neurological developmental disorders. And they took them and grouped them together and looked at them. They were elevated, and they were statistically significant, and there was a dose response curve. In other words, for every increment—for every increase—in mercury exposure, there was a relative increase in risk for one of these outcomes. That got presented. Shortly thereafter Verstraeten presented more or less the same numbers in a public meeting—at a CDC meeting in Atlanta, a vaccine committee meeting. That was entered onto the record, however to this day his report is not posted online. The only way I got to see it was because Lyn Redwood was there and somehow got an early transcript. Verstraeten did present findings where the risks were lower than in the Phase 1 study, but they were still elevated and many of them were still significant. At that point, I think the drug companies were aware that there was potentially at least a PR problem out there, and that did eventually start lobbying activities on Capitol Hill to protect the companies from liability. Eli Lilly is connected with legislators, political appointees, and pending legislation In terms of the Bush administration, and at the time of, particularly, the Homeland Security Bill, Bush had installed Eli Lilly vice-president for corporate strategy, Mitch Daniels, as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget—a highly powerful position within the White House. He also named Mitch Daniels to the National Security Council and the National Homeland Security Advisory Counsel. The CEO and President of Eli Lilly, Sidney Taurel, was likewise named to the president’s Homeland Security Advisory Counsel. Only, I think, 13 positions were made open—highly coveted spots for people in industry because, as the government started to formulate its terrorism response after 9/11, it needed to incorporate the private sector into its plan. And for a pharmaceutical company to be in there was very beneficial for them. The list goes on. Of course George Bush Sr. sat on the Board of Directors of Eli Lilly for many years, and other Eli Lilly company officials have been appointed to different Homeland Security advisory panels within the bureaucracy. And of course, Eli Lilly is a very generous donor to political campaigns—historically, about 80% of which has gone to Republican candidates. In the 2000 election they were one of the most generous donors of all, and they have also donated to the campaigns of Senator Bill Frist and also the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. Washington has looked into the influence of large industries on Congress, and also in the bureaucracy, as a matter of fact, in terms of writing regulations. And again the pharmaceutical industry is among the most generous of donors. Now the soft money ban has reduced that somewhat and large contributions are not as large as they use to be. But the amount of influence that drug companies and others seem to get in return for their investment is well documented. So, tell us about the different bills that have been introduced and the Homeland Security Bill riders. How did that get in there and what do disabled kids have to do with Homeland Security anyway? Dan Burton ran to the House floor to ask how Eli Lilly got into the Homeland Security Bill rider as soon as he found out that the rider had been inserted. This is a very complicated web of intrigue, in terms of all those different bills, and also the Homeland Security Bill. As far as the Homeland Security Bill is concerned, that was inserted by Representative Richard Armey, Republican of Texas. He was the House Majority Leader at the time and about to retire. He retired at the end of the year. At first he said that the order to do it had come from the White House. The White House denied this, I believe. The White House said it may have come from Senator Frist’s office. Senator Frist denied that, and later Dick Armey retracted his statement that it had come from the White House. He insisted he had acted alone to protect the nation and our bioterrorism response system. It’s hard to know if Dick Armey himself would have known exactly which passages from a many, many page bill of Senator Frist, to cut and paste into the Homeland Security Bill. Either he knew exactly which language, or someone in his office knew which language, or of course it was furnished to them by sources unknown. That provision, which was inserted into the bill and passed in November and signed by the President, was then rescinded when Congress came back in 2003. The new Majority Leader, Senator Bill Frist, to his credit, honored a pledge made by the outgoing Majority Leader of the Senate, Trent Lot, to revisit the issue— and he indeed did. And the unsettling language was removed—I say unsettling in terms of the way it was put into the bill—but he vowed and Eli Lilly vowed, and others vowed to fight to get most of that language back in. Now, the language basically gets very complicated and technical and is explained in the book. The language of the Homeland Bill was basically to proclaim Thimerosal a vaccine ingredient and therefore Eli Lilly would be a vaccine maker and therefore protected under the Federal Vaccine Compensation Program. In other words, plaintiffs could not file private cases in private court, they would have to go into the Federal program, which happens to have a 3 year statute of limitations. So, if your child was injured more than 3 years ago, you’re not eligible—leaving most parents in a terrible “catch 22”—they couldn’t file in civil court, and yet they can’t file in the vaccine court either. Ever since then, Frist and others have introduced several different versions of similar bills, and none of these passed, obviously. Most recently Senate Bill 3, which is rather Draconian in its reach. Not only would it prevent families from filing in state courts—it does not include the Homeland Security Bill provision of proclaiming Thimerosal as an ingredient, however—there is now a version in the House that does do that. And eventually if these pass, they’re going to have to work together as one bill. But some of the other things that the Senate bill does that are really quite alarming and possibly unconstitutional includes things like prohibiting the states from passing their own individual bans against mercury in vaccines. And, as we know, this is already happening in Iowa and California. It is not clear if the Senate and Federal government can tell the states what laws they can pass in terms of federal health policy. So, that will be an interesting debate if the Senate bill were to pass. I can assure you that parents are out there right now, from Safe Minds and other groups... And particularly, I want to give note to Laura Bono, at the National Autism Association, because she has really led the fight against Frist. But there are many, many people in the fight, and they all contribute equally. The Mercury in Medicine Report This report showed reasonably there might be collusion between the drug companies and the federal health bureaucracy. It showed varying conflicts of interest among people who sit on these panels and decide which vaccines get approved by the FDA, and which vaccines get put on the childhood list by the CDC. And incidentally, there is an astounding article in the New York Times today (February 28, 2005)—well there are two. One concerns the National Vaccine Program and Thimerosal—I urge everybody to read it. And the other one concerns the Vioxx® scandal. And last week an FDA panel rather controversially voted to basically give the green light to Vioxx® and other cox-inhibitor drugs to go back on the shelf. The vote was close. There were several votes—there were, I think, two to three votes on each drug and The Times did the math. They did a great job, and they looked into these people and what kind of ties they had to Merck and other drug companies. And sure enough, all the people voting to re-approve the drug, or approve its sale back on the market, were the ones receiving contributions and funding from the drug companies. Those panelists who were not receiving funding, tended to vote against these drugs. When they finally did the math, and they looked at how many times that the money-receiving people had voted for the drugs compared to people who weren’t receiving money, the ratio was 10 to 1. So, if you were receiving money and you sat on this panel, you were 10 times more likely to vote in favor of the drug companies than if you weren’t. It appears that when it comes to drug safety, ‘Just give me my check and tell me what to do.’ It’s pretty blatant. That could not possibly happen by chance. So, I’m hoping that this Times article really sparks some further investigation—not just for what’s going on at the FDA, but what’s going on at CDC. So, anyway, the Burton report also categorized and catalogued these conflicts. It was a far-reaching report. I encourage everyone to read it—it’s an excellent document, worked on very hard by people like Beth Clay, Elizabeth Birt, and others, and of course, Chairman Burton. It looked into the history of Thimerosal, everything that went on at the FDA in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and of course the entire CDC study with the vaccine data, access to the vaccine data, which is what the other New York Times article is about today. Getting into the VSD is like getting into nuclear secrets—the most heavily guarded data, certainly in the public health realm, I would think, and still fairly off limits to outside researchers, although that seems to be changing. And what the Times is reporting on today, is that a new panel set up by the IOM (Institute of Medicine) to review access to Federal data, especially this vaccine data, and also the preservation of data that has already been analyzed, datasets that have already been constructed. And the report is a scathing rebuke of the CDC by this IOM panel, which basically advises the CDC to seek legal counsel, because they did not properly maintain datasets. The language they used is that they were ‘not archived in a standard manner’—meaning they were lost or destroyed. And now, nobody can try to replicate what Thomas Verstraeten and his colleagues did. Nobody knows where these datasets are. The technicians were ordered to remove them from the computers at the CDC center, put them on to CD-ROMs and send them back to headquarters in Atlanta. So, we don’t know where those datasets are. They were supposed to be preserved; they were supposed to be made available to other researchers that could come in and then replicate the work of the government scientists—as any hallmark of good science would allow. And the fact that they were lost or destroyed is a violation of the Federal Data Quality Act. That is a federal law, and if someone is responsible for the loss or destruction of these datasets, they could conceivably face criminal prosecution. The IOM is not a government agency, it’s an independent agency. It’s a quasi-government agency in that it is hired by the government and does work for the government, but it is actually independent. If you go back to 2001, when the IOM issued its first report on this issue, they came down pretty much in the middle. They said there was not enough evidence one way or the other; that it was biologically plausible; and that experimental treatments, like chelation therapy, should probably be looked into. So, I would say at least in 2001, the IOM was taking a more open-minded view than say the CDC or pediatrics’ academies. Leaving the IOM aside for a minute, if you look at FDA, CDC, the American Academy, and certainly the drug companies, they all have a very strong interest in proving this theory wrong. So, for many, many different complicated reasons, it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the parents to extract any kind of confessions out of them—or any kind of admission of wrongdoing, or guilt, or even just simple human error. The IOM more recently says there was no causal relationship There was the second report issued in May of 2004, based on a hearing held in February, 2004 which the IOM panel, the immunization panel, listened to evidence of data presented basically from both sides of the controversy. The data presented to refute the Thimerosal theory was almost exclusively large population studies—epidemiology. IOM’s epidemiological proof is based on study authors being connected to the Statens Serum Institut Mark Blaxill and Sallie Bernard really investigated the tangled web. The Statens Serum Institut supposedly call themselves a non-profit, quasi- government agency out of Denmark, responsible for developing, producing, and selling vaccines, not only in that country, but overseas. They still claim that they’re non-profit, although there might be evidence to suggest otherwise. People who were on staff at that institute, or consulting with that institute, and who worked on several of the major studies that were done in Denmark, do have ties to drug companies and they certainly have ties to the CDC. And there is now evidence surfacing showing that a lot of these overseas studies done in Denmark and the U.K., even though they didn’t officially receive CDC funding to be conducted, it would appear the CDC was calling a lot of the shots. I just now saw some information that Brian Hooker out of Washington just received a few days ago—very revealing e- mails between the head of the study in the U.K. and Robert Chen and Thomas Verstraeten here in Atlanta, indicating that the CDC was basically deciding whether this study should proceed or not and deciding who at the World Health Organization (WHO) should give its funding to and worrying that because they found out that exposures in the U.K. were lower than they thought they were, they thought they might not have enough exposure to show a significant number of outcomes—which also would suggest that they knew that with higher exposure you do get outcomes. Anyway, Elizabeth Miller the head of the U.K. wrote to Bob Chen and was so upset she wrote, “Do I have to give my grant back to WHO?” In other words, she was asking the CDC, “Do I have to give my money back to the World Health Organization?” And in another e-mail Vertraeten wrote to Chen and said, “I don’t think this is a good study; I don’t think we should do this. I think the money should go to researchers in Sweden.” So, the CDC was obviously having influence over the funding of these studies that, in theory, they had nothing to do with. CDC also wrote letters in support of some of these studies to be published in the Journal of Pediatrics. The science substantiating the link between Thimerosal and the autism epidemic When I mentioned the IOM meeting, which I was at in February of 2004, the evidence presented to refute the theory was all epidemiology, for the most part. And most of the evidence presented to support the theory was biological evidence, done in the clinic, in animal models, in the test tube, and in children themselves. This was given a lot less emphasis and importance by the IOM panel than the epidemiology—they themselves admit that. And a lot of these studies had not yet been published when they were presented in February. Of course now, many now have been published, but because they weren’t published at the time, the IOM decided to discount them even further. The most important ones among them are the work of Jeff Bradstreet, Jill James, and Dr. Richard Deth, who was on NBC news last night, and others looking into this: Boyd Haley, of course, from the University of Kentucky. Mark and David Geier have looked more into the epidemiology than the biology of this. The bottom line of what their studies are showing is that autistic kids retain heavy metals at a much greater rate than normal kids; that they seem unable, in fact, to actually excrete it. Following chelation, autistic children excrete far higher levels of mercury than normal kids. And yet, in their baby haircuts, we’re finding that normal kids have much higher levels of mercury in their hair than the autistic kids. And that would then make sense, because they were excreting it properly; the autistic kids were holding onto it. What Jill James and Richard Deth have found are mechanisms by which mercury exposure can interrupt very important processes in the body, and particularly in susceptible individuals, and the effect this can have on the production of ‘thiols,’ sulfur-based proteins, also referred to as ‘mercaptans’ or ‘mercury capturers.’ Jill James has shown that autistic children have much lower rates of these proteins—glutathione, cysteine, things like that— in their system, which would naturally chelate the body, that would naturally bind with the heavy metals and help eliminate them from the system. So, working with the theories of Richard Deth about what is interrupting this process, she and others are trying to restore the process, particularly through the use of Methyl B-12. Once she started giving a cocktail that included Methyl B-12 to these children, she noticed that their levels of thiols, their sulfur- based proteins, their ‘mercury capturers,’ if you will, returned to normal levels. And now, she is at least anecdotally seeing clinical improvement, as are other people who have given their children or their patients this therapy. The work of Mady Hornig, at Columbia [University], basically took different strains of mice—one strain which was genetically predisposed to have auto-immune disorders—and exposed them all to the same level of vaccines, at the same schedule, roughly, that children would have received. In the sensitive group of mice, then, she noticed autistic-like behavior. She noticed physiological development such as increased brain size that you see in autistic children. Of course, she has been attacked for the study. And people said, ‘How can you tell if a mouse has autism or not?’ And I’m not quite sure that was the point of the study. I think the point of the study was to show that certain members of the same species, with a genetic difference, will react differently to the same level of mercury exposure due to a genetic variance. But there’s never been reported a genetic epidemic. This could then implicate an environmental factor (a trigger), probably on top of a genetic predisposition. One thing I neglected to mention about Pink’s disease: only 1 in 500 children exposed to the mercury developed the disease. So, that would therefore indicate a minority of children were genetically predisposed to develop hypersensitivity to the metal. Scientific progress is being made I think there is cause for tremendous optimism. Despite the obstacles these parents have, I have seen kids get better with my own eyes and with my own ears, and heard them get better, and speak more clearly, and be more attentive, and have better eye contact. I have to say whether it turns out that Thimerosal is absolutely fingered as the culprit or not, the mere fact that some kids, when you remove heavy metals from their body, seem to improve clinically—that in itself is wonderful and in a way, again I am not a lawyer and have no personal interest in these lawsuits, who cares what the cause is? If the kids are getting better, the kids are getting better—or at least some of them. And I don’t mean to be flip about that, but I think people need to keep their eye on the goal—which is these children getting better, and perhaps even recovering some, if not all their cognitive abilities. So, I think that everyone deserves to take 5 minutes off and pat themselves on the back and look at how far they’ve come since even I started reporting this book 2 or 3 years ago. Particularly in terms of public awareness of Thimerosal and mercury; in terms of legislation in Congress; in terms of the investigations; and in terms of the media coverage. Even if you were upset at what NBC was doing, NBC did the autism community a service, because the debate has begun. Even if you were opposed to what Bob Bazell or anybody said, this was not being said on national television even a year ago. Some people would say, ‘No publicity is bad publicity.’ And there is a certain amount of wisdom in that. An interview with David Kirby is available in Medical Veritas 2(1):447–445 [Manuscript #00059; doi: 10.1588/medver.2005.02.00059, www.vaccineveritas.com/pages/6/index.htm]. Competing interests: Author of "Evidence of Harm"
Excerpt from EOH, references from government, and children's medical tests 14 May 2005
Nancy E. Hokkanen, Writer Self-employed Send response to journal: Re: Excerpt from EOH, references from government, and children's medical tests	Mr. Fitzpatrick's review said more about himself than the book Evidence Of Harm. Review readers deserve fact, not emotionalism. Read this excerpt from pages 281-282 of EVIDENCE OF HARM by David Kirby (130 words, reprinted with permission). It describes the October 2003 visit by Dr. Mark Geier, David Geier and Vale Krenik to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Vaccine Safety Datalink in Atlanta, Georgia. The VSD monitor gave the Geiers access to more data than her superiors intended: "The risk for autism increased significantly with each additional 25 micrograms of mercury. When they finally calculated the relative risk for autism at each exposure level, the Geiers were shocked to find that children who received three mercury-containing DTaP shots had an increased risk of autism nearly 27 times that of children who got three preservative -free vaccines. "The woman did not seem surprised. She told the Geiers that she had been running VSD data on thimerosal for quite some time. She knew these numbers inside out. ... "She was assigned to look at the most recent data, checking to see what the rates for autism were doing. She was asked to determine if the numbers of diagnoses had begun to decline, especially in the younger children. If so, this would implicate thimerosal, which began to be phased out in 2000. "'The autism numbers are going down,' she said. 'We're watching them drop.'" _____ Imagine my surprise when in November 2002 my little boy's medical tests showed toxic levels of mercury. Imagine my dismay when I learned that his routine childhood vaccines had contained bolus doses of Thimerosal, a vaccine sterilizer that is 49.6% mercury. Understand my profound disappointment that some in the medical community have written off children like my son as collateral damage in the war on disease. Because I accepted the unthinkable concept that a vaccine ingredient had caused harm, my son received prompt medical treatment and his mood, behavior and abilities improved drastically. He has lost most of his autistic symptoms, but an attention deficit remains. Other children deserve this chance at a near-normal life. In September 2004 William Egan of the U.S. Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research stated before a government committee, "Prior to this initiative to reduce or eliminate thimerosal from childhood vaccines, the maximum cumulative exposure to mercury as ethylmercury via routine childhood vaccinations during the first 6 months of life was approximately 187.5 micrograms." http://www.fda.gov/ola/2004/vaccine0908.html For an 11-pound infant, 187.5 micrograms is 125 times the EPA’s “safe” level of mercury. Study after study shows that damage occurs at nanomolar levels, where the toxic heavy metal strips myelin sheathing off neurons, sets off autoimmune disorders and intestinal dysbiosis, and lodges in brain tissue where it disrupts cognitive processing and motor activity. http://www.altcorp.com/DentalInformation/thimstudys.htm A recent NIEHS primate study by Thomas Burbacher et al showed that ethylmercury from vaccines binds to brain tissue 2 to 4 times more than methylmercury found in fish. http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/7712/7712.pdf The 2001 study “Autism: a novel form of mercury poisoning” describes about 100 shared symptoms. http://www.safeminds.org/research/library/Bernard-et-al-2001.pdf Emerging research by Jill James, Richard Deth, Richard Baskin, Mady Hornig, Boyd Haley and many others shows that a genetic subset of the population is less able to excrete toxic heavy metals. Testosterone and aluminum worsen the effects of mercury. http://www.ewg.org/reports/autism/execsumm.php Overloaded? New science, new insights about mercury and autism in susceptible children The American public would feel far more reassured if vaccine policymakers were open to parental reports of vaccine problems, and made quick changes to accommodate genetic diversity. Instead, the U.S. vaccination program has not always been forthcoming with the public. Read through the minutes of a closed door 2000 meeting of 52 vaccine policymakers at the Simpsonwood resort in Georgia. http://www.autismhelpforyou.com/Simpsonwood_And_Puerto%20%20Rico.htm http://www.autismhelpforyou.com/simpsonwood.pdf But the vaccine injury statistics read at Simpsonwood had actually been watered down by CDC researchers Thomas Verstraeten, Robert Chen and Frank DeStefano. http://www.safeminds.org/Generation%20Zero%20Syn.pdf Many people working for the CDC erroneously cite the May 2004 Institute of Medicine report on autism and mercury as reason to stop investigating the issue. However the IOM admitted that “the committee cannot rule out, based on the epidemiological evidence, the possibility that vaccines contribute to autism in some small subset or very unusual circumstance.” U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, MD has criticized the CDC and IOM for weakening the nation’s vaccine program by mishandling the autism/mercury issue. http://www.ewg.org/reports/autism/statement_weldon.php In February 2005 the U.S. National Academies of Science's IOM Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention issued a report, “Vaccine Safety Research, Data Access, and Public Trust.” The report was made after a committee review of the National Immunization Program's Research Procedures and Data Sharing Program. http://books.nap.edu/books/0309095913/html/index.html The day after the NAS report came out, the CDC reassigned Robert Chen to the HIV/AIDS department. Also, vaccine program was split so that the people promoting vaccines were not the same ones monitoring safety. Health Agency Splits Program Amid Vaccination Dispute By ANAHAD O'CONNOR and GARDINER HARRIS, New York Times - February 25, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/politics/25vaccine.html?ex=1112673600&en=5de8c6c7deb972ba&ei=5070&pagewanted=print&p&oref=login U.S. Congress has investigated the issue of mercury in vaccines and tooth fillings. Here is testimony from June & December 2002 House Government Reform Committee hearings on mercury-based vaccine preservative Thimerosal. Chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana), whose grandchildren suffered neurological injury after vaccination. http://www.house.gov/burton/autism.htm Maternal body burden of mercury contributes to in utero exposures via RhoGam shots and outgassing mercury amalgam tooth fillings. With each round of mercury-laden vaccines a child’s mercury level reaches the toxic tipping point. http://www.altcorp.com/DentalInformation/amalgam.htm http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/CRNR_notices/pdf_zip/hgbayer1.pdf No children should be needlessly brain-injured by mercury. In 1991 a warning about mercury by the late vaccine researcher Dr. Maurice Hilleman went unheeded, and a generation of children was overdosed on mercury. http://www.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2005-02/16191308.pdf 1991 Merck Memo Describes High Mercury from Vaccines In the U.S.’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, $1.5 billion has been paid out since its inception, and currently 4,800 cases are waiting. http://www.hrsa.gov/osp/vicp/ganda.htm Most vaccine injuries can be prevented by removing the toxic ingredient mercury, and by adjusting the administration schedule. http://www.drjaygordon.com/faqs/vaccschedule.htm Parents also need to learn that most cases of autism are treatable. DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) is a project of the Autism Research Institute, California and its founder, Bernard Rimland, PhD, has researched autism for more than 50 years. Last year Rimland kicked off his “Autism Is Treatable” campaign, but only a small percentage of the mercury -damaged population is being treated. http://www.autism.com/ari/ Please consider the words of Martha Herbert, MD, PhD, pediatric neurologist, Harvard Medical School: “That human actions, rather than genetics, might be responsible for compromising the health of a significant proportion of a whole generation is so painful as to be, for many, unthinkable. … To cling to a purely genetic explanation of autism is a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion that one lives in a comfortable and rational world where new chemicals and technologies always mean progress, experts are always objective and thorough, corporations are honest, and authorities can be trusted.” The autism/mercury issue may seem incredibly complicated, but when a child’s medical tests indicate mercury toxicity, the concept suddenly becomes very, very clear. We now need to create a followup phrase to “primum non nocere” – a translation into Latin for “repair what you have damaged.” If Ford Motor Company can take responsibility for exploding Pinto gas tanks, then perhaps the American Medical Association and Federal Emergency Management Administration can tackle a generation of children overdosed on mercury. ### Competing interests: Parent of a child recovering from mercury-induced autism.
Definition of the word "quack" Mr. Fitzpatrick 14 May 2005
Donna M Arnold, MOM NC 28110 Send response to journal: Re: Definition of the word "quack" Mr. Fitzpatrick	Mr. Fitzpartick..... Its funny you use the word "quack" in your reveiw on mercury poisoning... I think you need to realize one thing, and that is the definition of where the word "quack" came from. Quack originated during the Renaissance when quicksilver or mercury was a popular remedy for syphilis. Wandering peddlers known as "quacksalvers" sold mercury ointment. They would claim that their agents would cure all diseases. The term was later shortened to "quacks," who became a symbol of evil medical practice. In 1984, the late Congressman Claude Pepper and his staff defined "quack" as "anyone who promotes medical schemes or remedies known to be false, or which are unproven, for a profit." Yes, the word "quack" came from those who use mercury as a remedy. I agree with this 100% anyone who uses MERCURY in medicine is a "quack". And this includes mercury compounds. [1]OEHHA (Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assesment) reports; "The scientific evidence that PMA and Thimerosal cause reproductive toxcitity is CLEAR and VOLUMINOUS. The evidence for its reproductive toxcitity includes severe mental retardation or malformations in human offspring who were poisoned when thier mothers were exposed to ethylmercury or thimerosal while pregnant." Yes, I am one of the moms that was injected with mercury while I was pregnant, And let me tell you Mr. Fitzpatrick, Im not too happy with any person in the medical field that can say injecting mercury into pregnant women and infants is safe. [2]We recently had a 18 year old child bring mercury to school, they had to shut all the schools down in the district and have enviromental people come in to clean it up. The 18 year old boy, If charged, he'll be charged as an adult.. I wonder how they are going to decide punishment on the ones who injected mercury into my body while I was pregnant??? Oh, Thats right Big Pharma has a "legal" right to inject mercury into pregnant women and infants. [3] NIH-funded Burbacher and his colleagues show that more inorganic mercury accumulates in the brain after thimerosal exposure through injection than after exposure to methylmercury in food. The accumulation of mercury in the brain after injection with thimerosal occurred even though ethylmercury is cleared from the blood faster than methylmercury. [4]Thimerosal inhibits DNA methylation. The ethylmercury-containing preservative thimerosal inhibited both IGF-1- and dopamine-stimulated methylation with an IC(50) of 1 nM and eliminated MS activity. Our findings outline a novel growth factor signaling pathway that regulates MS activity and thereby modulates methylation reactions, including DNA methylation. [1]http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/CRNR_notices/pdf_zip/hgbayer1.pdf [2]http://www.wzzm13.com/news/grmetro_article.aspx?storyid=39762 [3]http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/7712/7712.pdf [4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=14745455&dopt=Abstract Competing interests: Mother to a mercury poisoned child
Evidence of Harm 14 May 2005
Elizabeth A. Birt, Lawyer 60201 Send response to journal: Re: Evidence of Harm	Dear Readers: I am the mother who is referred to in the above article. Every word in Evidence of Harm is true; I had a completely normal child who had 30 words of language and after the MMR/Hib shot my child was lost. Within a few hours my son had a fever and developed a rash on his body; shortly after he developed a persistent, chronic diarrhea and stopped sleeping through the night for three years. He lost all of his language and didn't know who I was from a doorknob. I am an educated woman and took him to the very best specialists in Chicago. Until I met Dr. Andrew Wakefield at a conference in Chicago I did not know that my child could be helped. Dr. Wakefield examined my child and told me as a physician that he thought that he could help my son. I took my son to London and found out at the Royal Free Hospital that he was and is very sick. He had a fecal impaction the size of a melon and had colitis. The progression of my son's disease has been stopped through the use of a drug called 6MP; this drug is used with individuals who have organ transplants; I am thankful for the work done at the Royal Free and by Dr. Wakefield; thimerosal is not only neurotoxic but it causes damage to the immune system. This has been known for years. What is going on is a smear campaign by those individuals and companies that have the most to lose financially. Parents are angry because they have been lied to. The truth will come out and eventually the families will get compensation in financial terms; this said, nothing will make them whole for the loss of the child that they once had; there is no greater loss than this. No parent is in this for money only; it is for the truth and for justice. Sincerely, Elizabeth Birt, Matthew's mother. Competing interests: Founder, Medical Interventions for Autism; Founder SAFEMINDS; former Staff Attorney Government Reform Committee
Would Michael Fitzpatrick like to dispute the following? 14 May 2005
John Stone, none London N22 Send response to journal: Re: Would Michael Fitzpatrick like to dispute the following?	In the recently abandoned UK DPT programme each child received 25 micrograms of ethyl mercury at 2, 3 and 4 months. Against the US Environmental Protection Agency figure (the only available point of comparison at the time) this, according to my computations, was 40-66 the reference dose for a 2 month old, 35-56 for a 3 month old, and 30-48 for a month old? [1]. Can he explain what possible justification there could have been for this? And can he explain why we should believe that the people who did this - without telling anyone - really had the best interests of our children at heart? [1] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/eletters/114/3/577#1346 Competing interests: Parent of an autistic child
Where's the Evidence? 14 May 2005
John P. Heptonstall, Director of The Morley Acupuncture Clinic and Complementary Therapy Centre. Practitioner of TCM -acu LS27 8EG Send response to journal: Re: Where's the Evidence?	There is no consensus from epidemiological studies as one cannot evidence cause that way, and all the studies so far published have been criticised scientifically leading to yet another epidemiological study. None have stood the test of time. The US IOM did not confirm that the vaccines are safe, they left the matter open as they could not reconcile the biological plausibilities with epidemiological evidence. To evidence his lack of objectivity, or perhaps his lack of knowledge about autism, the following statement by Fitzpatrick is clearly untrue.. "Mercury poisoning causes ataxia and dysarthria, visual field disturbances, and peripheral neuropathy. In mild cases it produces a non- specific anxiety and depression; in more severe cases, a toxic psychosis can result. None of these features is characteristic of autism". All of these features are characteristic of some autistic persons; my son suffers several of these at various times -sometimes initiated by dietary triggers - and ASDs manifest extreme diversity amongst sufferers. This diversity in manifestation of ASD characteristics is one reason why epidemiological studies tend to fail as none can confound for that great diversity, epidemiology is incapable of addressing so diverse a population so studies tend to depend on the vague generalisations created by psychiatric pigeon-holing of a very diverse population of people. I am perplexed as to how a physician, having an autistic child, seems so out of touch with how ASDs manifest although I know from my own experience that a parent of one autistic child may have little experience of the diversity amongst the population of autistic children. I would suggest, as I have done, he speaks to a variety of carers of autistic persons as they tend to be nearest to that diversity on a day to day basis; all the carers I ever spoke to on this aspect say that every autistic person is different, some very different, from every other though there are certain characteristics that can be pronounced amongst many autistics such as aloofness, lack of empathy, mild to severe anxiety, visual and audio field distortion either fixed or intermittent, psychotic episodes (autism used to be referred to as juvenile schizophrenia), fine motor problems (either physically or visually driven) and awkward gait or ataxia. One can see that mercury poisoning might clearly be one of the causes of some ASDs. Regards John H. Competing interests: None declared
Evidence of Harm 14 May 2005
Melissa L Bolling, Student, Mother to three Not currently employed Send response to journal: Re: Evidence of Harm	"He seems to take at face value every claim made by campainging parents..." Funny that this was said. Couldn't the same be true of everyone else who just believes what people say about the vaccines being safe and not causing autism. We all hear what we want to hear, that is true. I was fine with the vaccines until I realized that my very normal son was gone. Gone into a world of autism. After doing many hours of research I found other parents who have children who had they same experience. Normal until vaccinated. We get blamed for taking things at face value but since that shoe can fit both sides. Others just blindly believe everything pro-vaccine because there is an authority behind it. Sure there is someone with authority-also someone who owns stock in the company. Someone who is essentially selling his own product! Would people accept a study done by a big tabacco company telling everyone that their products only have trace amounts of dangerous chemicals in them and that it is completely safe to smoke? Well by blindly accepting what everyone says you are doing exactly that. These companies are for profit. That should tell you something right there. They have their own behinds to protect. The fall out from the vaccine makers admitting they knew about the mercury and that the shots could be doing all of this to our children would be massive. Lawyers would all be dancing in the streets as everyone would be filing lawsuits. The companies would be bankrupt. And then it would be known to all the third world nations what we allowed to be injected into babies in their countries. That is something we should all think about. Nothing is more dangerous than a parent who finds out someone hurt their baby. As far as the symptoms of autism not matching the symptoms of mercury poisioning...I suspect you had not actually looked at the full list. No, not everything is an exact match, only like what 85% or more. And really, not every person gets every symptom. That is true of every disorder or disease. But every symptom my son has is also on the list of symptoms of mercury poisioning. That isn't something to just dismiss. And of course noone wants us to think that chelation works. We aren't stupid. If the process to eliminate metals is sucessful in eliminating autistic symptoms as well...it doesn't take a scientist to know that one caused the other. That is the last thing they want us to know. We do know it works though. There are thousands of us either doing it or getting ready to. And we are talking to anyone who will listen. It is only a matter of time until everyone knows. And as far as efficacy...just look at the thousands of children who are losing their diagnosis. That speaks for itself. Melissa Competing interests: None declared
Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” 15 May 2005
Camille C Clark, student University California, Davis 95616 Send response to journal: Re: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm”	Mr. David Kirby in his interview with Mr. Don Imus(1) from April of this year said that he believed that mercury might be responsible for the autistic symptoms in "a certain small number" of children. In fact he said that in a certain small number of children the thimerosol "push(es) them over the edge into this hell that is autism". I would like to know what proportion of children who are diagnosed with autism are autistic because of supposed damage by mercury. What proportion of those children actually have "milder" cases of autism (or perhaps Asperger's syndrome) and have no mental retardation? Mr. Kirby implies that all cases of autism are caused by mercury when he brings up the supposed cost of "taking care" of all of them. "We are looking at trillions and trillions of dollars in the care of these children" The majority of the increase in diagnosed children (not necessarily an increase in cases) is found in the milder cases of autism spectrum disorders. Truly "severe" autism is still fairly rare. It's the cases which before would have been called something else that are increasing. One must also realize that in the United States, according to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act statistics, the numbers of Mentally Retarded and "Specific Learning Disability" kids are dropping significantly in the past few years. It used to be that anti-thimerosol people looked into the future and said, "When the year 2005 rolls around and we see that taking the thimerosol out has lowered the skyrocketing rates of autism, that will prove we are right. Autism is really mercury poisoning." Now, they cover the fact that the rates haven't gone down, by saying it must be the mercury from elsewhere, or maybe it's the PCBs (PolyChlorinated Biphenyls). But mercury from elsewhere has been in the environment for many decades and in some cases eons. People who live near areas that are naturally high in mercury don't seem to have had any increases in rates of autism. People who bathe in hot springs or drink mineral water from those hot springs, which sometimes contain mercury, don't seem to be complaining of terrible rates of autism. People who live near historically contaminated lakes, such as are found in California, polluted from gold mining in the 1850's, don't seem to have increased rates of autism. People who used mercurochrome and merthiolate on their wounds, some of whom must have been pregant and some of whom were toddlers don't seem have become autistic at higher rates. Everyone had a bottle of mercurochrome or merthiolate in their drug cabinet when I was a child. Apparently, some brands of Epsom salts currently for sale in the U.S. have mercury in them, people have been taking Epsom salts internally for years, as well as soaking in it. Are those ones more likely to have autistic children? One imagines that it can't be the PCBs, if one follows Mr. Kirby's logic that the way we can counter good studies on the lack of linkage between autism and thimerosol is that when one chelates a child he becomes normal, some of the time. Chelation can't pull PCBs out of a child. If chelation is truly pulling mercury from the child's brain and body, then how is the brain able to rewire itself? There is no evidence that truly autistic children (or adults), those whose brains show significant differences in morphology and function, in well crafted experiments, can entirely recreate their brains. More than mere "plasticity" would have to occur in order for severe brain damage caused by mercury to be undone. In studies of children who become learning disabled because of lead exposure, the children did not improve in their learning abilities. No, the damage has been done. It is not reversible. What is seen in the cases of children with autism is development. The children are developing and improving, a possiblity intrinsic to autism, they are not improving because of chelation. The mechanism for such a miraculous brain restructuring due to chelation has never been accounted for. Mr. Kirby's book would no doubt make a interesting movie, but it's terrifically slanted and the case he makes on behalf of the "Mercury Moms" is not based on good statistics or good science. Camille Clark (1)http://evidenceofharm.com/Imus-KirbyII.mp3 (2)Dietrich et al., Effect of chelation therapy on the neuropsychological and behavioral development of lead-exposed children after school entry. Pediatrics. 2004 Jul;114(1):19-26. Competing interests: None declared
Re: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” (Camille Clark) 15 May 2005
John Stone, none London N22 Send response to journal: Re: Re: Re: David Kirby concerning “Evidence of Harm” (Camille Clark)	It tells you something about the vaccine culture that for decades its proponents were happy to inject our children with ever increasing and ultimately definably gigantic doses of mercury. It is an evasion to mention that there are other sources of environmental mercury if you are not prepared to acknowledge the extraordinary levels that were attained in the US (which dwarf even the amounts in the UK) mentioned by David Kirby and myself above, and an evasion to bury the damning Burbacher study [1,2]. For this reason it is not my expectation that this will end with mercury. A programme which operates by systematic denial - not least of anyone who questions it from personal experience - and with an ever larger load of toxic substances being unloaded into the population, is inherently hazardous and unsafe. The first resort is always denial. We are told to ignore even "severe" adverse events [3]. The persecution of Andrew Wakefield stands as a marker for anyone who has the temerity to question the policy, or even medically examine the children. In this very issue of BMJ we have a study refuting a link between MMR and Crohn's disease [4], although no such claim has ever been made by Wakefield or anyone else. This, nevertheless, has been reported widely in the media with the implication that it is a further disproof of Wakefield (which of course it is not). Against this background we are enjoined to continued blind belief. But the more aggressively dismissive and hostile the system is to those who report or investigate adverse events the more inherently unsafe it becomes. Dr Fitzpatrick can scarcely contain his blistering contempt for us all but the reality is that we have left any kind of humane or cautiously conducted science behind. I find this desperately sad. [1]Thomas M. Burbacher, Danny D. Shen, Noelle Liberato, Kimberly S. Grant, Elsa Cernichiari, and Thomas Clarkson, 'Comparison of Blood and Brain Mercury Levels in Infant Monkeys Exposed to Methylmercury or Vaccines Containing Thimerosal': http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/7712/7712.pdf [2] John Heptonstall: 'Re: No report of the Burbacher study': http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/329/7466/588-b#106608 [3] http://www.mmrthefacts.nhs.uk/questions/question.php?id=79 [4] Valerie Seagroatt, 'MMR vaccine and Crohn's disease: ecological study of hospital admissions in England, 1991 to 2002',http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/330/7500/1120 Competing interests: Parent of an autistic child
Facts, not personal agendas, will resolve the autism-vaccine issue 15 May 2005
Karyn Seroussi, Writer/Author and Parent N-1719 Norway Send response to journal: Re: Facts, not personal agendas, will resolve the autism-vaccine issue	Dear BMJ Editors, As the author of a book about my son's autism onset and treatment[1], I am in the unique position of having answered over 40,000 letters from other parents. I have heard again and again what I witnessed with my own eyes: a child who developed normally until the second year of life, had adverse reactions to his vaccines, slid into autism, and then responded to treatments targeting the child's immune and metabolic systems. Even after this experience, am I certain that there is an autism- vaccine connection? No. A correlation has not been proven or disproven to any scientific level of satisfaction. As it says in the Institute of Medicine’s report[2], large epidemiological studies would not detect a relationship between autism and vaccinations in a subset of the population with a genetic predisposition to autism. The biological models for an association between vaccines and autism were not estabilished, but nevertheless were not disproved. Anyone who can say with certainty, such as Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, that there is or isn't a connection, must be guilty of having an agenda. So what would be the agenda of a doctor who has personally administered thousands of doses of mercury-containing vaccines, who is given a government “bonus” for meeting his vaccine quota, and who has a severely autistic son who has not had the benefit of the biomedical treatments that are helping so many other children? I have read Evidence of Harm, and yes, I have also found some of the arguments in the book unconvincing. It does sympathetically portray kind and dedicated parents as victims of a big bad pharmaceutical Goliath. Perhaps Mr. Kirby’s description of the Royal Free Hospital was not accurate. However, most of the facts and events in that book should raise alarm bells for any responsible member of the medical community. There are two inter-connected issues in question here. One is whether vaccines or other environmental factors have triggered an epidemic of autism. The other is whether autistic children can benefit from biomedical treatments targeting their immune and detoxification systems. A very wise doctor once said, “when in doubt, look at the patient.” Large epidemiological studies have not helped these kids, but the courageous medical practitioners who are assessing them for mercury toxicity, immune system dysfunction, nutritional and metabolic disorders, and bowel disease are finding answers, and their patients are recovering from autism. I have met hundreds of these children, and my own son is now a healthy, well- rounded sixth-grader. Dr. Fitzpatrick needs to get his head out of the sand for the sake of his child as well as his patients. Personally, I hope that there is no connection between autism and vaccines. I would be relieved to find out that I did not agree to a medical procedure that damaged my child. But rather than let my emotions affect my judgement, I would prefer to look at the facts: Science: A study at the University of Arkansas[3] has found metabolic biomarkers of increased oxidative stress and impaired methylation capacity in children with autism, which could impair their ability to excrete mercury. Observation: These children, when tested, appear to be retaining mercury at toxic levels. When treated with chelation therapy, many are getting better -- sometimes dramatically so. Science: A study at Columbia University[4] showed that when strains of mice susceptible to autoimmunity were given low doses of thimerosal as infants, they displayed autistic behaviors. Resistant strains did not. Observation: Autism rates in California rose with the increase in mercury administration to infants, and is beginning to fall in areas where it has been removed from vaccines. If the premise is that only some children are genetically susceptible to this environmental insult, then epidemiological studies showing no connection, to date, have all been seriously flawed. And in almost every case, they have been conducted by researchers with an obvious conflict of interest. I have seen the devastation wreaked by autism in thousands of families, and have watched the suffering endured by my son and my stepson. I would love to have somebody to blame, and I’d like to see someone besides parents suffer the financial consequences. I will confess that at times my pain and anger is so deep that I would like to have somebody to kick into a bloody heap. But revenge, blame, guilt, and personal agendas are totally meaningless. What matters is the truth. Book reviews like Dr. Fitzpatrick’s, which ignored the essentials and resorted to calling the author a delusional man living in “an angry and paranoid universe,” are not going to help us get to the heart of the matter – but science and observation will. And regardless of the cause of the current autism epidemic (yes, there is an epidemic -- Dr. Fitzpatrick has clearly not read the studies done by the California Department of Developmental Services [5], strongly ruling out diagnostic error), it is time for the medical authorities to look at the actual research being conducted by the “junk scientists” referred to by Fitzpatrick, and ask themselves why these doctors’ patients are getting better, while their patients are not. [1] Unraveling the Mystery of Autism by Karyn Seroussi, Simon & Schuster, 2000 [2] Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 2001, at http://www.iom.edu [3] Metabolic biomarkers of increased oxidative stress and impaired methylation capacity in children with autism. Am J Clin Nutr. 2004 Dec;80(6):1611-7. [4] Neurotoxic effects of postnatal thimerosal are mouse strain dependent. Mol Psychiatry. 2004 Sep;9(9):833-45. [5] "Autistic Spectrum Disorders: Changes in the California Caseload; An Update: 1999 Through 2002" Competing interests: Parent of a child who recovered from autism using biomedical intervention, and author of a book about this experience.
Facts will resolve the autism issue 16 May 2005
Ellen C G Grant, physician Kingston, KT2 7JU, UK Send response to journal: Re: Facts will resolve the autism issue	Both normal brain development and function depends on an adequate zinc status. Toxic metals, such as cadmium from tobacco smoking, lead from leaded petrol, mercury form dental amalgams or vaccines, and nickel from jewellery or stainless steel pans, can cause deficiencies of essential brain nutrients like zinc and increases in DNA-adducts and allergies. Depletion of copper stores by use of contraceptive or fertility hormones can result in both copper and zinc deficiencies in mothers. Essential fatty acid pathways, including the neurone feeding omega-3 series, are likely to be deficient if co-factors like zinc, copper and magnesium are deficient. Selenium and glutathione are needed for efficient anti-oxidant protection. The only way I know to discover whether brain function impairments in children are permanent or treatable is to diagnose and replete any essential nutrient deficiencies and reduce the burden of toxic metals. Monitored chelation plus avoidance of the sources of the toxic metals or removal, in the case of mercury dental amalgams, is usually effective in lowering tissue concentrations, provided clearance mechanisms are also well nourished. The chelation study by Dietrich and colleagues did not find neurodevelopmental benefits in children with blood lead levels between 20 and 44 microg/dL (0.96-2.17 micromol/L).1 The authors therefore emphasized the importance of taking environmental measures to prevent exposure to lead. However, they added a daily multivitamin supplement which does not necessarily guarantee an adequate essential nutrient status in children undergoing chelation because of very high lead levels. Chelation causes further losses of zinc and other minerals and continued severe zinc or copper deficiencies could be a reason for failure to find benefits from chelation. Unlike serum lead which is a good indicator of lead levels, serum zinc or copper levels are misleading indicators of zinc or copper deficiencies in children. The most accurate tests are of passive sweat and white blood cell zinc concentrations and red blood cell copper/zinc superoxide dismutase activity for copper stores. Many d