"We MUST find the real reason so many people have autism"

WHAT ABOUT THE SCIENCE THEY REFUSED TO DO? WHEN WILL IT FINALLY BE DONE?

On February 15th the UK Daily Mail published a story with the title, With 700,000 cases in Britain alone, we MUST find the real reason so many people have autism - like my son David

It was written by a parent of an autistic child. Christopher Stevens is the father of David Stevens who has severe autism, and I’m sure his views are shared by vast numbers of American parents of autistic children.

In the article, Stevens outlined the history of autism going back 80 years to the work of Dr. Leo Kanner, a pioneer in autism research. Back then autism was “an extremely rare condition.”

The psychiatrist who studied Elaine, Dr Leo Kanner, was born in Austria but lived on America's east coast. After three weeks of observations, he informed her parents that their daughter was suffering from an extremely rare condition – so rare that in five years of intensive research, from New York to Boston, he had been able to discover only ten other cases.

Dr Kanner coined a word for this condition: he called it autism.

That was the mid-1940s. Today, a psychiatrist could go into virtually any school in Britain or the US and find at least ten children with autism. Some would have learning difficulties as profound as Elaine's or more debilitating. Others could show a variety of less obvious developmental delays.

Twenty-seven years ago Stevens and his wife were told their son was autistic, and that autism was a very rare disorder. Stevens wants to know why there is so much more autism today.

How is this possible, that less than a century ago autism was unknown? And a generation ago, GPs were unaware of it? Yet now, nearly every parent knows of families with autistic children, even if their own kids don't have it. . . .

According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in 36 American children now have a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a four-fold rise since 2000.

Stevens pointed out that there are people who believe that there really isn’t more autism.

Others will dismiss the statistical increase as irrelevant. They'll say the rise is all due to better diagnosis, better screening, increased awareness among doctors and teachers and changes to the definition of what ASD actually is.

Steven described how David would have meltdowns in public and how people reacted.

My son was a screamer. He could hit a note of ear-piercing intensity and hold it indefinitely, barely breaking for breath – and no amount of pleading, cuddling or bribing could stop him.

Members of the public have threatened me with violence if I failed to make him stop – or even threatened to hit David. Complete strangers, hearing one of his meltdowns, have banged on our front door and tried to intervene. On one occasion, we were ordered out of the waiting room at Bristol Children's Hospital and told that, if we wanted to see a doctor, we'd have to wait in the car park because David's screaming was so unbearably intense.

No one who ever heard that sound could ignore it. They knew something was terribly wrong with my child, something that was not explained by 'better diagnosis', 'increased awareness' or 'broader definitions'.

Children like David were unusual in the 1990s, and tragically they are not nearly as unusual now. But what should really alarm us is that they were all but non-existent before the 1940s.

Stevens is asking the right question, but he won’t get the right answer.

He noted that the newly elected US President, Donald Trump, “sounded the alarm last week” over autism, but Stevens is convinced that Trump’s pick to look into the increase in autism, Robert Kennedy as head of HHS, is a mistake.

Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who has linked the epidemic of autism to vaccines.

All the science indicates that he's wrong. So does the timeline: vaccines have been around since the end of the 18th century, 150 years before the first cases of autism were identified.

. . .Regardless, we must forget the conspiracy theories and pay no attention to the attention-seekers. Medical science urgently needs to discover what causes autism.

Because, in Trump's own words: 'Something's really wrong.'

‘Something’s really wrong’

And it’s not going to be fixed until everyone wakes up to the facts about autism.

Christopher Stevens is like so many speaking out about autism. He’s convinced that yes, there is more autism, and yes, something in the environment is causing this increase—but it isn’t vaccines.

Stevens pointed out that vaccines have been around for more than 150 years, long before anyone ever heard about autism, but he didn’t take into account how many more shots kids get today, an increase that directly parallels the increase in autism.

CDC schedule

This increase followed the enactment of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 after which the vaccine makers enjoyed total immunity from any injuries their vaccines might cause. This was a great incentive to add more and more to the schedule.

Stevens pointed to air pollution, pesticides and plastic particles as the culprits causing autism.

Actually his is a very simplistic view of the situation, but it’s the one health officials and industry insiders want us all to believe: It’s anything but vaccines.

Stevens, obviously a dedicated father who want answers, has been all too willing to accept that all the science shows no link between vaccines and autism. He’s satisfied that vaccines have been thoroughly and reputably researched. He doesn’t ask who funded “all the science” nor is he worried about any conflicts of interest because of financial ties between health officials and the industry they regulate.

They haven’t done “all the science”

Health officials and mainstream medicine point to easily flawed and manipulated population studies as proof of no link between vaccines and autism. In truth, they’ve never wanted to do legitimate science when it comes to autism.

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO the late Dr. Bernadine Healy, a cardiologist, former head of the American Red Cross and former head of the NIH, called on health officials to honestly look into the link between vaccines and autism after the concession made in the case of Hannah Poling. Hannah was the child whose autism was recognized by the government as linked to the vaccines she received.

Back in 2008 this is what Dr. Healy said about the case:

April 10, 2008, US News and World Report: Fighting the Autism-Vaccine War, by Bernadine Healy, MD

One of the most vitriolic debates in medical history is just beginning to have its day in court.

One of the most vitriolic debates in medical history is just beginning to have its day in court—vaccine court, that is. Without laying blame, the independent Office of Special Masters of the Court of Federal Claims—with a 20-year record of handling vaccine matters—recently conceded that the brain damage and autistic behavior of Hannah Poling stemmed from her exposure as a toddler to five vaccinations on one day in July 2000. Two days later, she was overtaken by a high fever and an encephalopathy that deteriorated into autistic behavior. Even though autism has a strong genetic basis, and she has a coexisting rare mitochondrial disorder, I would not be too quick to dismiss Hannah as an anomaly.

. . .But the rise of this disorder, which shows up before age 3, happens to coincide with the increased number and type of vaccine shots in the first few years of life. So as a trigger, vaccines carry a ring of both historical and biological plausibility.

Medicine has moved ahead only because doctors, researchers, and yes, families, have openly challenged even the most sacred medical dogma. At the risk of incurring the wrath of some of my dearest colleagues, I say thank goodness for the vaccine court.

And on September 4, 2008, CBS News also covered Dr. Healy

CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson interviewed Dr. Healy. Their conversation should have raised lots of red flags. A prominent member of the American medical community had questions. She was poised and serious. She publicly admitted that the science wasn’t in on vaccines and autism. She said the correct studies haven’t been done.

We’ve never studied the kids who got sick

According to the government’s own data, a third of autistic children regress. These are children who seemed to be normally developing but then lose learned skills and end up somewhere on the autism spectrum.

This is the time when we have the opportunity to understand whether or not there are susceptible children, perhaps genetically, perhaps they have a metabolic issue, mitochondrial disorder, immunological issue that makes them more susceptible to vaccines plural, or to one particular vaccine, or to a component of vaccine, like mercury. So we now, in these times, have to take another look at the hypothesis, not deny it.

. . . Maybe there is a group of individuals or children shouldn’t have a particular vaccine or shouldn’t have vaccines on the same schedule. I do not believe that if we identify the susceptibility group, if we identify the particular risk factor for vaccines, or if we found out that maybe they should be spread out a little longer, I do not believe the the public will lose faith in vaccines.

What Dr. Healy asked for was reasonable. It made sense. It could be a way to restore rapidly eroding confidence in the vaccine program. What she didn’t consider was how this would play in the medical community.

Hadn’t health officials and doctors been adamant for years that there was no possibility that vaccines were in any way related to autism?

Didn’t they preach that they had the conclusive studies proving there was no link?

How could they suddenly change their position?

There were a lot of children out there with an autism diagnosis. Even intimating that there was the possibility that for some kids, it was the vaccines, would be disastrous and doctors knew it. After years of saying there is no link—vaccinate your kids, it was way too late to alter the message.

Dr. Healy called for this research seventeen years ago, but it has never been done. No official wants to look at children who regressed into autism to see what might have preceded that decline.

Instead, every child is subjected to the same battery of vaccines regardless of what hidden susceptibility to injury they might have. We just pretend there is no danger, no need to look into this.

Just like the refusal by health officials to do a simple, easy-to-understand comparison study of fully vaccinated and never vaccinated children to see if unvaxxed kids are equally plagued with autism, ADD, ADHD, diabetes, dyslexia, seizure disorder, asthma and life-threatening allergies, no one in charge of health care in the US cares why children stop developing normally and end up with autism.

And if those in charge stonewall against doing the research, who’s left to do it?

Who regulates the regulators?

It would be great to see the study Dr. Healy called for in 2008 finally done today with Robert Kennedy at HHS.

In 2008, the autism rate was one in 150 children, one in 92 boys. Healy thought it was important to do this research back then. If she were here today, I wonder what she would think about the fact that her colleagues in federal health care do absolutely nothing to address the exploding rate of autism except to fund endless dead-end studies that never give us an answer.

And I wonder if Christopher Stevens in the UK, who wants to know what’s behind all the autism, would still be convinced that “all the science” has been done if he knew about the science they refused to do.

YOUR THOUGHTS?