Scarlet Letter

A new study on possible environmental triggers for autism is in the news. A research team from the University of California at Davis will enroll 200 pregnant women who already have at least one child with autism. They will take blood samples from the mother, the fetus, the umbilical cord, and the newborn child. They will collect dust from their homes. They will question them about possible exposures to nail polish, pesticides, and mercury contaminated fish. They will look for every conceivable source of poison save perhaps one. Their news release doesn’t mention vaccines. The study is good news. It is evidence of a sea change in the attitudes of a scientific community that is finally acknowledging autism as epidemic. It cannot be explained away by genetics and improved diagnosis. But this community, and I include the American Pediatrics Society, should have a mark of shame branded on its collective forehead. For years now they have not only refused to investigate potential causes beyond genetics, they have actively obstructed any such attempt. Public funding has been routinely denied. Any scientist who has taken a serious look has been dismissed as a charlatan, his reputation publicly trashed. Any physician who tried to treat autism was ostracized by his colleagues as a quack. Those few who offered hope to desperate parents were themselves almost always parents of children with autism. Reports have experts now beginning to suspect that autism is more than a neurological disorder. It may somehow affect the immune system. Experts my foot; anybody who has ever bothered to notice has known that autism is a whole body disease, if you can call poisoning a disease. It presents itself in digestive and immunological problems as well as nervous system dysfunction. My grandson has all of those issues. Every child with autism I ever heard of has more than one. Specific symptoms differ but they all have multiple problems. Who are these people who come late and only suspect the obvious? Why on earth do we call them experts? That a few more scientists are no longer trying to blame it all on parents is the most positive development in autism research since they stopped using the term “refrigerator mothers,” that horribly offensive term in common professional use a generation ago. But they are going to have to look at the elephant in the room. The startling correlation between increases in the number of vaccines administered to pregnant women and babies in the last twenty years and the rise in incidence of autism is just too marked to ignore. Immunologists continue to insist that studies don’t point to vaccines as the culprit. Partly true, but as logicians like to say, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. The few studies that have been done are subject to challenge on a number of points. That seems to be changing, partly from increased public pressure. When senators like Joe Lieberman start threatening to sponsor legislation relieving the CDC and NIH of oversight responsibilities, as he and a group of colleagues did last year, it’s time to pay attention. It can’t happen fast enough. We need to know what’s causing this so we can do something about it whether it’s PCBs from smokestacks, contaminated food from feed lots, some new ingredient in women’s cosmetics, or a combination of things. We need to know if vaccines are involved and I hope they aren’t. When we do know maybe we can stop it. Maybe we can even find ways to treat it. Until very recently scientific and medical intransigence have been serious obstacles. It’s time to get moving.