The Internet Doctor is In

Patty here…

Several years ago I was outside on my deck, watering a potted ficus tree, when I felt something in my hair. I reached up to brush it away and felt a sting on my hand. A moment later, I saw a spider fall to the deck and scurry away.

I don’t generally kill spiders, not even in my house. Someone once told me it was bad luck, and the last thing I need is the Ayatollah Arachnid putting out a fatwa against me. However, I killed his one, because my hand hurt and that didn’t seem fair.

A short time later, my niece called. I told her about my encounter with the spider.

“OMIGOD!“ she said. “If it was a brown recluse spider, you're going to die!”

I didn't want to overreact, but my hand was becoming red, swollen, and very painful. So after we hung up, I went out to the deck to conduct a follow-up investigation. The spider was lying inert, legs pointed to the sky in that dead bug repose. I took a closer look and here’s what I saw:



Overreaction aside, I raced to by computer to consult Dr. Internet:

The female black widow gives the more serious bite, but its bite is rarely lethal. You can identify this spider by the red hourglass marking on its belly. The bite feels like a pinprick. You may not even know you've been bitten. At first you may notice only slight swelling and faint red marks. Within a few hours, though, intense pain and stiffness begin. Other signs and symptoms of a black widow spider bite include:

* Chills
* Fever
* Nausea
* Severe abdominal pain

(Here’s where I’d normally show you pictures of people with grotesque, flesh-eating spider bites, but I’ll spare you in case you’re eating breakfast.)

I waited to sense the debut of symptoms and fantasized about shooting spidey webs from my fingertips.



In fact, nothing happened. It took a few days, but the swelling receded and life went on.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I woke up with a series of seven bites along the right side of my body. They were about the size of shirt buttons and looked like the work of mosquitoes. I got up and showered, but as I was toweling off, I noticed the bites were now painful and swollen. They had also grown to the size of quarters, compelling me to again consult Dr. Internet.

The Mayo Clinic had this to say:

In some cases, hypersensitivity to mosquito bites may be associated with an underlying medical condition, such as chronic lymphocytic lymphoma or certain viral infections, such as Epstein-Barr virus.

That was more than I wanted to know.

The problem was I hadn’t seen a mosquito in my neighborhood in decades. In addition, the bites were now the size of Montana. All I could think of was fatwa.



Again, I consulted Dr. Internet and was relieved to find that:

Spiders get a pretty bad rap in the world of first aid. Plenty of red, raised welts have been identified, either correctly or incorrectly, as spider bites. Despite the belief by many victims that spiders are responsible for their pain, spider bites are often harmless. Indeed, most spider bites go unnoticed and untreated…Almost all spiders are poisonous. That's how they hunt. Most spiders are too small, or their poison too weak, to be dangerous to humans.

That produced a breathy whew! Still, I consulted a flesh-and-blood doctor who advised me to wait and see. That was even a bigger relief.

With so much information only a mouse click away, have you ever used the Internet to diagnose a medical problem? Did you find all that information comforting, confusing, frightening?

Happy Monday!

Just Paying Attention

from Jacqueline

Phew, what a week on the blog we’ve had, especially with Cornelia’s impassioned and to-the-point piece on the link between autism and childhood vaccinations. If you didn’t read it, go right back there before you read another word of this post. Then send it on to everyone you have ever emailed in your entire life.

I’ve been thinking of that bumper sticker this week, you know the one, we’ve all seen it:



Cornelia’s post had me steaming, and came hot on the heels of two features on the news this week.

The first was from Zimbabwe. OK, so there’s a lot to get outrageous about right there. The news from Zimbabwe is bad at the best of times – it’s hard to believe it was once the bread-basket of Africa – and I think we sometimes become more than a little immune to the news of starving people in lines waiting for food, or families trying to make do with a tin roof over their heads in the teeming rain. Many – myself included – send checks to aid organizations and hope they’re not spending the money on junkets or “fact-finding missions.” You do what you can when those pictures prod you again. But a few nights ago I was watching a special BBC report on the way in which so many women have been pressed into prostitution, crossing the border into Zambia for their work, so that their children could be fed. Now, I know that some people’s eyes glass over when we bring prostitution into the conversation – there’s still a lingering sense that we’re talking about those scarlet women who won’t get a real job, rather than women and girls (and young men and boys) for whom there is no other option if they want to survive – but it broke my heart to listen to these women, including a former bank executive and another women who had her own hairdressing business, both now without work due to the Mugabe regime. They talked about the path to prostitution, about their shame, about the hollow grief that life brings to them with each new dawn. One woman wept as she said, “I pray to God to forgive me.” Forgive her? Forgive her? What a tragedy. I want to tear my hair out when I hear these stories, and at the same time feel just powerless. I want to know what is being done, what is happening to ease this collective pain other than “sanctions.”




In the same news broadcast came the story that France had threatened not to send athletes to China unless Tibet is free of violence from the occupying Chinese regime. Now, we know how Tibet is the elephant in the Chinese stadium this year, but my first thought was, “So, why aren’t we stepping up to the plate and making that same threat?” Where are all the other nations, where is the outrage? Well, of course, there are a slew of athletes who have been training for years for the opportunity to compete for an Olympic medal (I do understand what is at stake here) and we wouldn’t want to give up the chance to show the rest of the world what we can do – but more than anything it’s clear that we don’t want to get touchy with China do we, because China has been holding up the dollar by buying our currency, and of course they are trading partners.


But I’m outraged. I’m frustrated because one of the reasons we went into Iraq (other than the illusive WMD) was supposedly Saddam Hussein’s track record in human rights abuse. Not that he didn’t commit terrors, but where is the outrage, the demand for something better from those non-oil-bearing countries? Why aren’t we holding their feet to the fire, instead of just looking on while more women are raped, more are pressed into prostitution, and not so far away, while Buddhist monks are beaten to a pulp?



I guess the thing I am most upset about is the feeling of powerlessness. I sign petitions, I send donations, I have written letters and of course, prayed (that loving kindness meditation saves me from cardiac arrest, I am sure). I remember asking that almost unanswerable question before on the blog: What can we, the people, do? It is the collective voice that rises up and is heard, and it’s about time more of us asked the question of our government – such as it is – what are you going to DO, and WHEN? Trouble is, half of them are on those junkets and fact-finding missions paid for by the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies, the energy companies ....

I remember, when I was about eight, sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper, and becoming very upset about the starving children in Biafra. I was raised by parents who were proponents of the, “There are children in Africa who would give anything to eat that broccoli, and you’re turning your nose up at it?” school of guilt, but it was a threat without substance, because I didn’t know what it was to starve, to be so hungry your stomach swelled out and you shed tears even though you were beyond crying. That week I emptied my coin savings bank into the Biafra collection box in our classroom, and even as my horse money went into that box, I knew there was a hunger in the eyes of the child on the poster that I could never dent.



I never want to get used to the images of suffering. I never want my eyes, the windows of my soul, to become immune. I want to be outraged by injustice, because acceptance is unacceptable to me. If I shrug my shoulders and say, “But there's nothing I can do," then I am complicit, and that scares the heck out of me.



And to give you a break from my ranting, I’m back on my book tour again (see you in Virginia this weekend, Jim) and next week will be off across the pond, so have asked James Grippando to sub for me – it’s always great to have him back at nakedauthors.com.

Adam-12

James O. Born

What American male between the ages of thirty-nine and fifty-five doesn’t smile at the phrase, “One Adam 12, One Adam 12, 211 in progress.” Yes, that’s one of the signature lines from the classic TV show Adam-12 and I’ll admit that it holds a special place in my heart. It may even be one of the reasons I turned to a career in police work (Although I can point specifically to Police Story as being the main reason I became interested in the field).

Created by Jack Webb, Adam-12 ran from 1968 through 1975 and aired 174 episodes. It was a simple premise; follow the lives of two uniformed LAPD cops, veteran Pete Malloy, played by Martin Milner and rookie Jim Reed, played by Kent McCord. The show was a drama without a lot of gun play. There were long conversations between the cops while on patrol and encounters with all sorts of odd and interesting characters off the street. A lot like real police work.

Adam-12 is listed as writer Stephen J. Cannell’s first permanent writing job when he joined the show in its fourth season. I remember it as the first TV show I watched and cared about. In fact, when the local NBC station changed the airing time to past my bedtime I was moved to write a letter to the station. Back then there were only three channels and we were a long way from VCRs, not to mention DVRs. You watched a show when it aired and 9:30 on Thursdays was not a time I was allowed to be in front of the TV. The irony of it is that 9:30 at night is once again past my bedtime. At least now I have the flexibility of just touching a button on the DVR to watch something at my convenience. If not for the DVR I would not have seen a Saturday Night Live in a couple of years and thought Dana Carvey was still hilarious on it.

The beauty of hundreds of cable TV stations allows me to occasionally see old shows I loved. I discovered that F-Troop was not nearly as funny as I thought when I was six-years-old. Dark Shadows is not as scary. Even my old favorite Adam-12 is a little dated, slogging through dialog that seems wooden and situations that are dull at best. But I prefer to remember it as I did as a child; exciting and fresh, pointing me to career which I have found rewarding and interesting.

What shows influenced you? Can you still see them on Nick at Night?

A Shot in the Dark

By Cornelia Read

There's a topic I've wanted to blog about here for a long time, but it's pretty heavy stuff--not exactly the bright and breezy fare most people want to skim through online while sipping their morning beverage of choice.

Over the last year or so, every time I said to myself, "hey, maybe this week, if I can just get my head around a way to make the info meaningful and compelling... to personalize it somehow so that it's not a complete drag to ingest, but yet not so bereft of necessary info that it's easy to blow off..." I'd end up scuppering the whole thing as impossible to convey.

I'm still not sure I can make a blog post out of this that won't put you to sleep, but something happened this month that makes me feel like it's really, really important that I give it my very best effort right now, okay?



I'm going to do my damnedest not to make this boring, or strident, or "you can save this child or you can turn the page"-esque.

In fact, I'm not going to start off with the topic itself. I want to just loosely float two ideas first--kind of a warmup. Anedoctal stuff.

The first thing is a story I read some years ago. I don't remember exactly when or where (the New Yorker? The Sunday New York Times?) It was just a snippet from an article about something else, but it's really stuck with me for a lot of reasons.

The gist of it is that there was this guy--a journalist--who happened to be friends with an astonishingly successful investor. This investor had made serious BOATLOADS of money in the stock market, and one day his buddy, the journalist dude, got curious about the way his own line of work might be tied into his friend's success, so asked him which news outlets he'd relied on for accurate information on which to base his buying and selling decisions. Newspapers? Magazines? Television news reports?

Here's what the investor said (I'm paraphrasing more, from here on out), "None."

How can that be? asked his friend, to which the gazillionaire dude replied, "I realized a long time ago that there are two subjects in the world about which I know a great deal. One is sailing, and the other is cabbage varieties. And about twenty years ago, it occured to me that every time either sailing or cabbages were discussed in the mainstream press, the writers got nearly everything wrong.



Well, after a while, I started to wonder why I believed them about things I didn't know about. I mean, what was the likelihood that they were conveying accurate, well-researched information on everything but boats and cabbage? So that's when I stopped relying on journalists' information as a basis for my business decisions. And I've made a great deal of money ever since."

So, my Nakeds, do me a favor and think about a subject you really know by heart--I don't care what it is: your hometown, your favorite breed of pet, or classic muscle-car engines or ham radio...


...or a medical condition that you or someone near and dear to you has battled for a long time--something you have a bone-deep, working knowledge of.




Got it?

Now ask yourself... when there's an article on that topic in Time or Newsweek, or even the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, do they get it right?

Or do you, like me, tend to read those pieces expecting to be disappointed, and sometimes skip them altogether because even the headline is idiotic, because it's just such a goddamn drag to read the fulminations of some J-school grad who skimmed the clips file and/or gave the topic a desultory Google before banging together a cursory overview of same by deadline?

Yeah, I thought so. Please file that feeling away for a bit.

Which leads us to...

Which can basically be summed up: the older I get, the less faith I have in "Miracle Medical Breakthroughs!"



I mean, let's just look at the info propounded by "the experts" on the subject of diet and nutrition since I was in my teens: low-fat one decade, low-carbs the next...eggs will kill you, eggs will save you...Italians don't have heart attacks because they eat olive oil, French people don't have heart attacks because they drink red wine...




blueberries are God, dark chocolate may save your life, monkeys live twice as long if you cut their calorie consumption in half, people in the Caucausus live to be 150 because they eat yogurt, salmon will make you smarter, pregant women shouldn't eat tuna sandwiches because they have too much mercury in them...




And does anyone else remember those ubiquitous Seventies ads in the back of Cosmo and Seventeen about the kelp/B-6/cider vinegar/fourth-ingredient-I-can't-remember miracle weightloss program? That one sounded about as good as eating



I remember one stepfather in the mid-seventies who dumped wheat bran on whatever he ate, because it was supposed to cure everything.



Then after that he wouldn't eat salt. Then it was red meat. The year following was his swiss-chard period, I think. I was thank GOD away at school when he discovered high colonics, because he was also fond of lecturing all of us at the dinner table on the importance of whichever new thing he'd become a devotee of.

He was incredibly boring--not to mention cranky--most of the time.

And guess what? He died anyway, having arrived at the exact median age of life expectancy for an American male that year.



So, you know--all those medical breakthroughs! pronouncements! miracles!...? I tend to reserve judgment.

I'm not against western medicine--I love my penicillin and Excedrin and Motrin and Celexa and suture scars as much as the next person, and it's seriously wonderful that we've got smallpox on the run and don't have a whole lot of use for iron lungs anymore.

But... I also keep in mind the fact that western medical practitioners spent several centuries touting the benefits of leeches and "a good bleeding," while pooh-poohing the radical idea that one might want to wash one's hands (or one's saw) before performing, say, an amputation.



Let's take a look at another health issue that's seen a great deal of "expert" see-sawing over the course of, say, the last seventy years. Anyone remember these ads? I'm a little young to have run across them first hand:


How 'bout we zero in on smoking for a minute, okay? I'm going to cite some stats and a bit of a timeline, briefly (click here if you want backup)



The first study linking cigarettes to lung cancer was published in 1939.

The first statement from the Surgeon General on the topic was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in November, 1959.



On June 7, 1962, another Surgeon General announced that he was establishing an "expert committee to undertake a comprehensive review of all data on smoking and health."



On January 11, 1964, after some 15 months of intensive study, this committee--half the members of which were smokers-- issued its unanimous report stating that "cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant, appropriate remedial action."

The government recommended that a warning label be printed on all packs of cigarettes sold in this country as of January 1, 1965, and in all cigarette advertising six months later.



The tobacco industry then prevailed upon Congress to change the proposed wording from "Caution: Cigarette 'Smoking is Dangerous to Health. It May Cause Death from Cancer and Other Diseases" to "Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health," with the passage of the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965.



This act also prohibited the Federal Trade Commission and state and local governments from requiring any other label on cigarette packages and any warnings at all in cigarette advertising before 1969.

Okay, got that? A reputable, peer-reviewed study links cigarettes to lung cancer in 1939, no official statement was issued by federal health officials until 1959 AND the words "may be hazardous to your health" couldn't be included in cigarette ads--newspaper, magazine, radio, and television--until 1969.

A New York Times editorial called Congress's cigarette labeling and advertising act "a shocking piece of special-interest legislation--a bill to protect the economic health of the tobacco industry by freeing it of proper regulation."



An article in the Atlantic Monthly described the political maneuvering behind the legislation under the title "The Quiet Victory of the Cigarette Lobby: How It Found the Best Filter Yet--Congress."

Now let's take a look at current tobacco-based revenues, campaign contributions, and lobbying expenditures of America's three biggest tobacco companies (citation):

Altria Group (Philip Morris)

2006 Tobacco Revenues: $66.7 billion
2008 Election cycle political contributions
by Altria Group PAC: $986,500
2007 Lobbying expenditures: $7.2 million

Reynolds American (RJ Reynolds)
2006 Revenues: $8.5 billion
2008 Election cycle political contributions
by RJ Reynolds PAC: $770,500
2007 Lobbying expenditures: $1.95 million

Loews Corp (Lorillard)
2006 Tobacco Revenues: $3.9 billion
2008 Election cycle political contributions
by Lorillard PAC: $175,250
2007 Total Lobbying expenditures: $1.96 million

Overall Tobacco Industry Political Contributions since 1997: more than $34.7 million

Here endeth the second intro topic-- a recap: medical experts often reverse themselves over time, and it took the U.S. Government nigh on thirty years after the first study linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer to officially warn citizens about the dangers of smoking.

Enter topic the third...



If you think the tobacco companies spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign donations, let's do a little comparison on how they rate compared to the pharmaceutical industry, in this country...

Tobacco (between 1997 and 2007): $34.7 million
Pharmaceuticals (for same period): $675 million

Oh, wait, those figures aren't exactly comparable... that second amount is for lobbying alone--it doesn't include the drug companies' political campaign contributions, in the United States.



Here's another figure that might give a small idea of the pharmaceutical industry's global clout --the amount spent on marketing (and "administrative costs") by the 11 biggest drug companies in 2004:

$100 billion

And here's what they reported spending on research and development that year: $50 billion.



When Dr. Marcia Angell stepped down from her post as the edtior-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine last year, she published therein a scathing parting-shot takedown of the pharmaceutical industry's impact on contemporary medical practice.



My favorite paragraph is the following, in which she says of the pharmaceutical companies' marketing budgets:

The industry depicts these huge expenditures as serving an educational function. It contends that doctors and the public learn about new and useful drugs in this way. Unfortunately, many doctors do indeed rely on drug-company representatives and promotional materials to learn about new drugs, and much of the public learns from direct-to-consumer advertising. But to rely on the drug companies for unbiased evaluations of their products makes about as much sense as relying on beer companies to teach us about alcoholism.

It's not just doctors and consumers who may be lead astray by these expenditures, however, but the very state and federal regulatory agencies we rely upon to safeguard the public health.



Quoting from government transcripts obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in a 2005 article published in Rolling Stone that:

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy.



The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur.




All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children.



"I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Verstraeten wasn't alone in expressing concern. The transcripts record Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, as saying, "You can play with this all you want,... [The results] are statistically significant."



Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, said "My gut feeling? Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."



But the conversation didn't then turn to ways to ensure public safety. Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at Delaware's Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children was more worried about the possibility that, "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits. This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country."




Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, chimed in with the assertion that, "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands."



Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all," adding, "the research results have to be handled," that the results of the study, "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."



Adds Kennedy, at this point:

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.


Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year [2004]. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.

Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who received $873,000 in contributions from pharmaceutical companies, slipped a "rider" into a Homeland Security bill in 2002, protecting vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits brought by those who suffer vaccine injury--this despite the fact that any vaccine-injury cases ALREADY have to be brought to trial in a special federal Vaccine Court.



Eli Lilly, the company that manufactures Thimerosal, contributed $10,000 to Frist's campaign fund the next day, then bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism.



Kennedy adds:

The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist.

But wait, there's more... On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood meeting transcripts.

But what do we read about all of this in the mainstream press? Let's see, there was the study claiming that "autism is caused by drinking during pregnancy" this week, that got global play. Last year it was "autism is caused by watching television."



And there are countless articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal assuring readers that "all reputable studies prove there's no link between vaccines and autism," that "autism rates have not gone down since ALL thimerosal was removed from ALL vaccines in 2001" and a great many characterizing concerned parents of autistic children as desperate for someone or something to blame for their children's condition or as lawsuit-hungry money grubbers.



Have autism rates gone down since thimerosal was phased out of vaccines, starting in 2001? Nobody knows. Can you believe that? Seriously, there's been no effort on the part of the CDC or any other federal agency to gather national data on that front.


California is the only state that keeps records of those receiving developmental disabilities services which are categorized by specific disability. It was California's numbers, in fact, which first confirmed what parents had long suspected---and "experts" long denied--that the rate of autism among young children in this country started skyrocketing in the 1990s.

If California's rates went down, that might be an indicator that removal of thimerosal was making some kind of a difference, right?

Let's just ignore the Associated Press article published in 2005 that announced "The number of new cases of autism in California has fallen for the first time in more than 10 years in what may be a bellwether for autism rates nationwide, according to new data compiled by the state Department of Developmental Services."

Everyone else ignored it, after all. And any parent who tries to bring it up is branded a crazed Luddite, or worse.


Michelle Malkin, with whom I don't always see eye-to-eye politically except on this topic, blogged "In defense of parents with informed vaccine skepticism" on March 24th:

The New York Times published a piece today about parents choosing not to expose their children to certain vaccines. This prompted blogger condemnations of those parents as “Bobo sociopaths” and a recommendation from Glenn Reynolds that “we should make clear that parents who, with no genuine medical reason, forego vaccinating their kids are bad parents, and bad citizens.”

Look, I could run you through the flaws in the studies routinely cited in that type of article (the Danish one, the Israeli one, etc.), or the differences in the way ethyl and methyl mercury break down in the body (not many), or the still-toxic and untested preservatives that have replaced thimerosal in multi-dose vials of vaccines, or the study performed at Columbia on the aberrant behaviors of infant mice injected with thimerosal, or the similarities in symptoms between autism and mercury poisoning,



or the fact that among thousands of Amish people in Pennsylvania (virtually non-vaccinated, as a population) only a handful of kids were found with any form of autism--one who'd been adopted in China and three who'd received vaccinations--when the expected number per that population would be around 130 affected individuals, or the hypothesis that autistic kids may lack the proper metabolic apparatus to excrete heavy metals as quickly as "typically developing" kids, or statistics on how much mercury is still in a number of shots administered routinely to infants and children and pregnant women (flu, tetanus, Rhogam, etc.)--because that's my version of the genius investor's "cabbages and sailing," these days....
(please run your mouse over the text of the previous two paragraphs to click through to studies cited--for some reason the hyperlinks aren't highlighted)

But I don't want to bore you any more than necessary, and besides, as a "bad parent and bad citizen," I'll let Kennedy speak to the history of the issue instead:

During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison."



In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."...



Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."

And now I'd like to quote some numbers recently put forth by a toxicologist named Michael F. Wagnitz, in a rebuttal letter to the editors of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Wagnitz introduced his list by writing, "Parents get angry when they see the following numbers listed on the internet. These numbers have been out there for everyone to read for years."

Here are the numbers he cited:

0.5 parts per billion (ppb) mercury = Kills human neuroblastoma cells (Parran et al., Toxicol Sci 2005; 86: 132-140).

2 ppb mercury = U.S. EPA limit for drinking water http://www.epa.gov/safewater/contaminants/index.html#mcls

20 ppb mercury = Neurite membrane structure destroyed (Leong et al., Neuroreport 2001; 12: 733-37).
200 ppb mercury = level in liquid the EPA classifies as hazardous waste. http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/hazwaste/mercury/regs.htm#hazwaste



25,000 ppb mercury = Concentration of mercury in the Hepatitis B vaccine, administered at birth in the U.S., from 1990-2001.

50,000 ppb mercury = Concentration of mercury in multi-dose DTaP and Haemophilus B vaccine vials, administered 4 times each in the 1990's to children at 2, 4, 6, 12 and 18 months of age. Current "preservative" level mercury in multi-dose flu (94% of supply), meningococcal and tetanus (7 and older) vaccines. This can be confirmed by simply analyzing the multi- dose vials.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Wagnitz has a conflict of interest: he's the father of an autistic child.

Way back near the beginning of this post, remember how I said that something happened this month which made me feel it was necessary to at long last write a blog post on, as it turns out, thimerosal?



Here's the event I spoke of: the government decided in favor of the plaintiffs in one of the first Vaccine Injury Court autism test cases to go to trial.

That's right, folks, a judge representing the United States government decided that the family of an autistic girl was entitled to a monetary award, because it indeed seens evident that her condition was caused by "routine childhood vaccinations."



The anti-vaccine-hypothesis gang got started on spinning the verdict immediately--most by claiming that the girl, Hannah Poling, wasn't "typical" of autistic children, in that she had a metabolic disorder exacerbated by vaccines, and that therefore the metabolic disorder is itself responsible for her "autistic symptoms."



There are still nearly 5,000 such cases pending in the special court. I would be cynical if I thought that might have something to do with the intensity of the spin.



And yet... the online version of Time magazine had the courage to look at the facts of the case without the disimissive attitude so many of us have come to expect from the "mainstream" media, in an article titled “Case Study: Autism and Vaccines.”

The piece opened as follows:

What happened to little, red-haired Hannah Poling is hardly unique in the world of autism. She had an uneventful birth; she seemed to be developing normally-smiling, babbling, engaging in imaginative play, speaking about 20 words by 19 months. And then, right after receiving a bunch of vaccines, she fell ill and it all stopped.


Hannah, now 9, recovered from her acute illness but she lost her words, her eye contact and, in a manner of months, began exhibiting the repetitive behaviors and social withdrawal that typify autism. “Something happened after the vaccines," says her mom, Terry Poling, who is a registered nurse and an attorney. “She just deteriorated and never came back."

Hannah Poling's father, by the way, is a neurologist.

Here's one official's response to the court's ruling in the Poling case:

"Our message to parents is that immunization is life-saving," Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the CDC's director, said at a hastily convened conference call with reporters.

"There's nothing changed. . . . This is proven to save lives and is an essential component of protection for children across America and around the world."

Gerberding further commented:

“Let me be very clear that (the) government has made absolutely no statement indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism. That is a complete mischaracterisation of the findings of the case, and a complete mischaracterisation of any of the science that we have at our disposal today.”

The Time article, however, went on to say:

...there’s no denying that the court’s decision to award damages to the Poling family puts a chink--a question mark--in what had been an unqualified defense of vaccine safety with regard to autism. If Hannah Poling had an underlying condition that made her vulnerable to being harmed by vaccines, it stands to reason that other children might also have such vulnerabilities.

As blogger Kent Heckenlively wrote in response to the article "I found myself nodding along as I read, saying, 'Yes! Yes! They’re getting it!'”

"One of the final paragraphs [in the article] is a statement which shouldn’t be controversial," he continues, "but when our community has said similar things we’ve been treated like we were primitives who wanted to take public health back to the nineteenth century." (And/or "bad parents," "bad citizens," "Bobo Sociopaths.")
Here's the paragraph he's referring to:

It’s difficult to draw any clear lessons from the case of Hannah Poling, other than the dire need for more research. One plausible conclusion is that pediatricians should avoid giving small children a large number of vaccines at once, even if they are thimerosal-free. Young children have an immature immune system that’s ill-equipped to handle an overload, says Dr. Judy Van de Water, an immunologist who works with Pessah at U. C. Davis. “Some vaccines, such as those aimed at viral infections, are designed to ramp up the immune system at warp speed,” she says. “They are designed to mimic the infection. So you can imagine getting nine at one time, how sick you could be.” In addition, she says, there’s some evidence, "that children who develop autism may have immune systems that are particularly slow to mature.”

"It’s stunning to read a paragraph like the one above in a major publication like TIME magazine," says Heckenlively, "when it’s been part of the catechism of our movement for years. It’s as if we’ve been secret believers in God in some totalitarian state and the ruler just announced he’s considering a conversion."



He also cites a report titled, "Vaccine Case - An Exception or a Precedent," from the CBS Evening News broadcast that aired on March 6, 2008, in response to the CDC having stated that Hannah Poling's case is "a singular event":

While the Poling case is the first of its kind to become public, a CBS News investigation uncovered at least nine other cases as far back as 1990, where records show the court ordered the government to compensate families whose children developed autism or autistic-like symptoms... including toddlers who had been called "very smart" and "impressed" doctors with their "intelligence and curiousity" . . . until their vaccinations.

But even if all those remaining cases pending in the Vaccine Court are ruled in favor of the plaintiff families, it doesn't mean that the families of the other estimated 500,000 kids with autism in this country will be able to sue for damages, under existing legislation. The federal government has set a three-year statute of limitations, dating from the first incidence of autistic symptoms in a child.

In light of that, I'd like to close this post with one more quotation from Dr. Marcia Angell's "farewell" editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine:

The pharmaceutical industry is extraordinarily privileged. It benefits enormously from publicly funded research, government-granted patents, and large tax breaks, and it reaps lavish profits. For these reasons, and because it makes products of vital importance to the public health, it should be accountable not only to its shareholders, but also to society at large.

May that sentiment go from Angell's lips to God's ears. And possibly Julie Gerberding's.


And look, maybe it's not the vaccines or the thimerosal that made the rate of autism go from one kid in 15,000 to one kid in 116. It could be some new additive in peanut butter, or exposure to wheat bran and Sea Monkeys.

I mean, until the mid-Seventies the "experts" claimed it was caused by overly intellectual, emotionally distant "refrigerator mothers."

We know, at least, that that last hypothesis is a load of crap. But we don't know anything else.

Isn't it time we expended a little more effort trying to really figure this thing out, and a little less of same calling the parents who are doing their best to make sense of and cope with the horrors of this disorder idiots?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm pretty fucking sick of being told how stupid I am.

I won't hold my breath waiting for that to change any time soon.

Meanwhile: smoke 'em if you got 'em.



Oh, yeah... conflict of interest: I'm the mother of a child who has autism