Reprinted with the authors
permission.
The increase in autism may be
related to the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal.
According to officials in the
nation's regulatory agencies, the main obstacle to demonstrating a link
between autism and the mercury-based preservative thimerosal has been
the inability to find a large enough group of people who have never
been vaccinated to compare with people who have. Thimerosal was a
component of childhood vaccines until a few years ago and is still in
flu vaccines.
A few months ago, Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) officials claimed that such a study would be
nearly impossible. On July 19, 2005, the CDC held a media briefing on
the topic of vaccines and child health. During the briefing a reporter
asked CDC Director, Dr Julie Gerberding, "Are you putting any money
into clinical studies rather than epidemiological studies, to verify or
disprove the parents' claim about a particular channel, a particular
mechanism by which a minority of genetically susceptible kids are
supposed damaged?"
Gerberding replied, "To do the study that you're suggesting, looking
for an association between thimerosal and autism in a prospective
sense, is just about impossible to do right now, because we don't have
those vaccines in use in this country so we're not in a position where
we can compare the children who have received them directly to the
children who don't."
Dr. Duane Alexander, of the National Institute of Health, agreed and
said, "It's really not possible...in this country to do a prospective
study now of thimerosal and vaccines in relationship to autism. Only a
retrospective study, which would be very difficult to do under the
circumstances, could be mounted with regard to the thimerosal
question."
However, Dan Olmsted, investigative
reporter for United Press International, and author of the "Age of
Autism" series of reports, appears to have solved this problem when he
thought of checking out the nation's Amish population, where parents do
not ordinarily vaccinate children.
He found a family doctor in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who had treated thousands of Amish patients
for over a quarter-century, and who said he has never seen an Amish
person with autism, according to the "Age of Autism's" report "A
glimpse of the Amish" on June 2, 2005.
Olmsted also interviewed Dick
Warner, who has a water purification and natural health business and
has been in Amish households all over the country. "I've been working
with Amish people since 1980," Warner said.
"I have never seen an autistic
Amish child—not one," he told Olmsted. "I would know it. I have a
strong medical background. I know what autistic people are like. I have
friends who have autistic children," he added.
Olmsted did find one Amish woman in
Lancaster County with an autistic child but, as it turns out, the child
was adopted from China and had been vaccinated. The woman knew of two
other autistic children, but one of those had been vaccinated.
Olmsted visited a medical practice
in Middleburg, Indiana, the heart of the Amish community, and asked
whether the clinic treated Amish people with autism.
A staff member told Olmsted that
she had never thought about it before, but in the five years that she
had worked at the clinic she had never seen one autistic Amish.
On June 8, 2005, Olmsted reported
that the autism rate in the Amish community of Middlefield, Ohio, was 1
in 15,000, according to Dr Heng Wang, the medical director at the Das
Deutsch Center (DDC) Clinic for Special Needs Children.
"So far," according to the "Age of
Autism," reports, "there is evidence of fewer than 10 Amish with
autism; there should be several hundred if the disorder occurs among
them at the same 1-in-166 prevalence as children born in the rest of
the population."
In addition to the Amish, Olmsted
recently discovered another large unvaccinated group. On December 7,
2005, "Age of Autism" reported that thousands of children cared for by
Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two
things in common with Amish children—they have never been vaccinated
and they don't have autism.
Homefirst has five offices in the
Chicago area and a total of six doctors. "We have about 30,000 or
35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't
think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who
never received vaccines," said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's
medical director who founded the practice in 1973.
Olmsted reports that the autism
rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to state
Education Department data. In treating a population of 30,000 to 35,000
children, this would logically mean that Homefirst should have seen at
least 120 autistic children over the years, but the clinic has seen
none.
It looks like the problem is
finally solved. Thanks to autism's Dick Tracy, the government now has
thousands of unvaccinated people to compare to people who were
vaccinated.
Questions or comments,
please contact evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net
About The Author
Evelyn Pringle is an
investigative journalist and a columnist for
Independent Media TV. This article appeared in OpEdNews.com and is
reproduced with permission of the author.
