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By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   July 18, 2007 at 12:47 PM

WASHINGTON, July 18 (UPI) — This is my 113th and final Age of Autism column. United Press International, which has been the hospitable home for this series, is restructuring, and I’m off to adventures as yet unknown — although I intend to keep my focus on autism and related issues.

Why? Because it is the story of a lifetime.

“Autism is currently, in our view, the most important and the fastest-evolving disorder in all of medical science and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future,” says Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Columbia University’s school of medicine.

Most mainstream experts believe autism is a genetic disorder that’s “increasing” only because of more sophisticated diagnoses. But based on my own reporting, I think autism is soaring due to environmental factors — in the sense of something coming from the outside in — and that genes play a mostly secondary role, perhaps creating a susceptibility to toxic exposures in certain children. As the saying goes: Genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.

So to me, the issues autism raises — about the health and well-being of this and future generations, about the role that planetary pollution, chemical inventions and medical interventions may have inadvertently played in triggering it — are so fundamental that by looking at autism, we’re looking very deeply into the kind of world we want to inhabit and our children to inherit.

It is impossible to summarize all the issues I’ve raised in my columns, but to me, four stand out:

— The first question I asked when I started looking at autism in late 2004 was this: What is the autism rate among never-vaccinated American children? Vaccines are the leading “environmental” suspect for many families of autistic children. So I was stunned to learn that such a study had never been done, given that it could quickly lay to rest concerns that public health authorities say are dangerously undermining confidence in childhood immunizations.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., introduced — and just reintroduced — a bill to force the Department of Health and Human Services to do just that (generously crediting this column for finding enough never-vaccinated children to show that such a study is indeed feasible). She calls it “common sense,” and it is an example of ordinary people — through their representatives — telling the experts they want better answers, and fast.

Recently, such a study was in fact done with private funds. It was a $200,000 telephone survey commissioned by the advocacy group Generation Rescue that, as limited as it is scientifically, suggested a disturbing trend: Higher rates of autism in vaccinated vs. never-vaccinated U.S. children, along with similar ratios for other neurodevelopmental disorders like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

I reported the same possible association in the Amish community. That’s been criticized as inherently unscientific and undercut by the fact that Amish genes may differ from the rest of us and that increasingly, the Amish do receive at least some vaccinations.

All true, but intriguing nonetheless. I also found a family medical practice in Chicago called Homefirst that has thousands of never-vaccinated children as patients. According to its medical director, Mayer Eisenstein, he’s aware of only one case of autism and one case of asthma among those kids — not the 1 in 150 and 1 in 10 that are the national averages for those disorders — and he has the medical records to prove it.

I wrote about that in 2005, yet when I met again with Mayer in Chicago last week, he told me not one public health official or medical association has contacted him to express any interest. Nor has any other journalist — not a one.

— That brings me to my second theme. I am sorry to say my colleagues in the mainstream journalistic community have, in the main, done a lousy job covering this issue. They, of course, would disagree — two were quoted (anonymously!) in the Columbia Journalism Review saying, “Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions.”

Actually, my mind is made up about only one thing: Both vaccinations and autism are so important that definitive, independent research needs to be done yesterday — and the fact that it hasn’t should be making more journalists suspicious.

I think Big Media’s performance on this issue is on a dismal par with its record leading up to the Iraq war, when for the most part it failed to probe deeply into the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and the assertions about Saddam Hussein’s link to al-Qaida. And it’s bad for the same reasons — excessive reliance on “authorities” with obvious conflicts of interest; uncritical enlistment in the “war on terror” and “the war on disease” without considering collateral damage or adverse events; a stenographic and superficial approach to covering the news, and an at-least-semiconscious fear of professional reprisal.

In the case of Iraq, that fear included being cut off — like my exemplary fellow ex-Unipresser Helen Thomas — from precious “inside sources” in the government; in the case of autism, fear of alienating advertisers lurks silently in the background.

To see how squeamish and slow-on-the-uptake the media can be in the face of an urgent health crisis, look no further than the early days of AIDS, as chronicled in Randy Shilts’ “And the Band Played On.”

— Another angle I explored intensively involved a group of families in Olympia, Wash., who noticed their children regressing into autism after getting four live-virus vaccines — mumps, measles, rubella (MMR) and chickenpox — at an early age and in close temporal proximity. These cases seemed to have little or nothing to do with the mercury preservative in other vaccines, called thimerosal, that many parents blame for autism (it was phased out of most routine immunizations starting in 1999).

That raises an ominous prospect: The still-rising autism rate might be related to some other aspect of the immunization schedule as well — timing, age, total load or other ingredients. (I didn’t invent that idea; the head of an expert panel mandated by Congress expressed it to me in an interview — and again, her comments were largely ignored.)

One focus of that seven-part Pox series last year was a case of autism following a small clinical trial of a new vaccine called ProQuad, which contains the live-but-weakened MMR and chickenpox viruses in one shot. The chickenpox virus in ProQuad is about 10 times the amount in the standalone chickenpox shot, a boost needed to overcome “interference” among the four viruses (and a possible sign of trouble right there). Manufacturer Merck says the vaccine is safe and not related to autism.

Earlier this year the company announced it was suspending production of ProQuad — barely a year after its introduction — because supplies of chickenpox vaccine had run unexpectedly low. The company, however, will keep producing its other products containing chickenpox virus: the standalone chickenpox shot and a new vaccine for shingles.

A Merck spokesman told me the suspension of ProQuad had nothing to do with any safety concerns, that it had been selling well and would be reintroduced as soon as chickenpox vaccine supplies were replenished. As I’ve written before, I found Merck to be quite accessible and forthcoming when I asked questions about this issue — much more so than the Food and Drug Administration, in fact.

So I take Merck at its word. But — in the spirit of trust-but-verify — I’ll be watching for the return of ProQuad.

— The Age of Autism columns that may mean the most over time (IMHO, of course) are about the first cases of autism, reported in 1943 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore among 11 children born in the United States in the 1930s.

With crucial observations from Mark Blaxill of the advocacy group SafeMinds, I’ve suggested a pattern in some of those early cases: exposure, through the father’s occupation, to ethyl mercury in fungicides. That’s the same kind of mercury used in vaccines, and both were introduced commercially around 1930, right when those first autism cases were identified.

This is only a hypothesis, and critics have suggested it is a classic case not of connecting the dots, but of finding what I went looking for. That may be, but put yourself in my place when — more than a year after publicly proposing the mercury fungicide idea in a column — I identified the family of autism’s Case 2 and located an extensive archive for the father, a distinguished scientist.

I sat down in the North Carolina State University library and opened the first box, took out the first folder and opened it to the first page. It was a yellowed, typewritten paper from spring 1922 summarizing a fungicide experiment the father conducted as a grad student in plant pathology — an experiment in which mercury was the main ingredient (and in the title). By the time his son was born in 1936, he was working with the new generation of ethyl mercury fungicides — yes, the kind used in vaccines.

Though others will disagree, I find that just a bit outside the parameters of chance, given the timeline of the disorder and the independent belief of so many of today’s parents that the same kind of mercury, in a totally different context, triggered their children’s autism.

It also suggests that whatever is causing autism could be coming at us from several directions — our increasingly mercury-toxic environment as well as any medical interventions that may be implicated. Check out “Mercury Link to Case 2” in the series to get the full picture.

So thanks to UPI for supporting this work. And thanks for reading, responding to — and critiquing — this column. Truth is, you haven’t heard the last word from me. Not by a long shot.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   June 26, 2007 at 4:39 PM

WASHINGTON, June 26 (UPI) — A new, privately funded survey finds vaccinated U.S. children have a significantly higher risk of neurological disorders — including autism — than unvaccinated children.

In one striking finding, vaccinated boys 11-17 were more than twice as likely to have autism as their never-vaccinated counterparts.

The telephone survey of parents representing a total of 17,000 children appears to be the first of its kind — and contrasts starkly with several government-backed studies that have found no risk from vaccines.

“No one has ever compared prevalence rates of these neurological disorders between vaccinated and unvaccinated children,” said J.B. Handley, father of a child with autism and co-founder of Generation Rescue, which commissioned the $200,000 survey conducted by SurveyUSA, a respected marketing firm. “The phone survey isn’t perfect, but these numbers point to the need for a comprehensive national study to gather this critical information.

“We have heard some speculation that unvaccinated children would be difficult to locate,” Handley said. “But we were able to find more than enough in our sample of more than 17,000 children to establish confidence intervals at or above 95 percent for the primary comparisons we made.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., reintroduced a bill first submitted last year calling for the National Institutes of Health to conduct such a study.

“Generation Rescue’s study is impressive and forcefully raises some serious questions about the relationship between vaccines and autism,” Maloney said. “What is ultimately needed to resolve this issue one way or the other is a comprehensive national study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

“The parents behind Generation Rescue only want information. These parents deserve more than roadblocks, they deserve answers. We can and should move forward in search of those answers.”

Both Maloney and Handley said their efforts were sparked by Age of Autism columns that found anecdotal, unscientific evidence of less autism among the Amish, who have a lower vaccination rate. The column also reported on Homefirst Health Services in Chicago, whose director said there is no autism or asthma among several thousand never-vaccinated children who were home-delivered and remain patients of the family practice. The U.S. autism rate is 1 in 150 children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A spokesman for the CDC, which recommends the childhood immunization schedule and has conducted studies that found no link to autism, said the agency has not seen the Generation Rescue data.

“We look forward to learning more about the survey,” spokesman Curtis Allen said. “It’s important to note that self-report surveys on topics like this often have significant limitations, so one must be cautious with respect to interpreting the findings.

“It’s also important to note that previous studies involving hundreds of thousands of children have failed to find an association.”

Generation Rescue’s Handley, however, said those studies never compared vaccinated with unvaccinated American children. He also said his survey took its cue from the CDC’s own phone-survey approach to estimating the incidence of such disorders among American children.

“Listening to the CDC talk about the reliability of parent reporting, we thought there’s a quick way to get a proxy for whether or not there’s any truth to the hypotheses that vaccines and all these neurological disorders are related,” Handley said. His organization believes that mercury, including a type used for decades in routine childhood immunizations, is a major factor in the ten-fold increase in reported autism cases over the past 20 years.

Handley said the survey, conducted in nine counties in Oregon and California, asked parents “whether their child had been vaccinated, and whether that child had one or more of the following diagnoses: attention deficit disorder, ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, Pervasive Development Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, or autism.”

Results highlighted by Generation Rescue:

— “Among more than 9,000 boys age 4-17, vaccinated boys were 2.5 times (155 percent) more likely to have neurological disorders, 224 percent more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 61 percent more likely to have autism.”

— “For older vaccinated boys in the 11-17 age bracket, the results were even more pronounced. Vaccinated boys were 158 percent more likely to have a neurological disorder, 317 percent more likely to have ADHD, and 112 percent more likely to have autism.”

Handley said he believes the higher results for the older boys are probably more complete because not every child in the younger age group would have received a formal diagnosis.

Concern that vaccines are linked to the rise of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders has been largely dismissed by public health officials and mainstream medical groups, especially since a 2004 report by the respected Institute of Medicine found no such evidence — and suggested research money go to more “promising” areas.

But parents — some of whom say they watched their children regress into autism immediately following physical reactions to vaccines — have continued to press the issue. A U.S. vaccine court in Washington is currently hearing argument over whether nearly 5,000 such claims should be paid by a federal vaccine injury compensation fund.

Handley said the fact that his organization could produce such a study on a relative shoestring while the U.S. government has not suggests it is hesitant to confront the possible ramifications.

Two years ago CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding told UPI that “such studies could and should be done” but offered several reasons why they might prove difficult, including the variability of autism diagnoses, possible genetic differences in the Amish and the small number of never-vaccinated children in the United States.

“They haven’t lifted a penny since then,” Handley said.

Full results of the study are at generationrescue.org.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   May 31, 2007 at 4:48 PM

WASHINGTON, May 31 (UPI) — It’s amazing the coincidences one comes across while reporting about autism:

The autism rate rises in tandem with increasing numbers of vaccines that contain a known neurotoxin, ethyl mercury.

Public health authorities say that’s coincidence.

Parents say their children became autistic after receiving mercury-containing vaccinations, sometimes several shots in one day.

Pediatricians call that coincidence, too.

Another remarkable fact that caught my attention: Autism was first identified in both the United States and Europe at almost exactly the same time. Child psychiatrist Leo Kanner published his landmark paper at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1943; pediatrician Hans Asperger published his — about a slightly less severely affected group of children — in Vienna in 1944. Cut off by a world war, neither knew of the other’s work.

Coincidence, say the experts, who attribute the timing to improving diagnostic techniques in both countries.

What else can the experts say, literally invested as they are in massively funded genetic research to find the presumed cause? If it’s not a coincidence that autism arose simultaneously on separate continents, that suggests something happened in two places at once to trigger the disorder. And that would suggest genes are not the fundamental factor, though they certainly could be implicated in making some children susceptible to whatever the new exposure was.

The first Age of Autism column in early 2005, titled “Donald T. and Fritz V.,” made this point, noting that the first Austrian case report and the first American case report “were born within four months of each other, Fritz V. in June of 1933 and Donald T. that September.”

Because Kanner’s kids became known as “autistic” and Asperger’s as having “Asperger’s disorder,” the overwhelming commonalities have not been fully appreciated; Kanner’s study of Donald and 10 other children was titled “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” and Asperger called his study of Fritz and three other children “‘Autistic Psychopathy’ in Childhood.”

At different times in different places, they were seeing the same remarkable disorder. These kids were all “on the spectrum,” as we say today, and that raises a question I put this way in that first column: “Was it coincidence the first few cases of these strikingly similar disorders were identified at the same time, by the same term, in children born the same decade, by doctors thousands of miles apart?

“Or, is it a clue to when and where autism started — and why?

“The question reflects a huge, and hugely important, debate. If autistic children always existed in the same percentages but just were not formally classified until the 1940s, that would suggest better diagnosis, not a troubling increase in the number of autistic children.

“If, however, autism had a clear beginning in the fairly recent past … then the issue is very different. That would suggest something new caused those first autism and Asperger’s cases … something caused them to increase, and something is still causing them today.”

At that time, I had no clue about a possible connection. But now, after reporting and writing more than 100 Age of Autism columns over the past two years, I do.

The clue could be the simultaneous arrival of ethyl mercury — but not, necessarily, in the vaccines that some parents blame for the huge rise in reported cases over the past two decades. What I’ve learned is that this especially dangerous form of organic mercury also was used starting around 1930 in fungicides. Morris Kharasch, the same American chemist who patented its use in vaccines — where it is called thimerosal — also pioneered its use as a seed disinfectant.

Remember, this type of mercury didn’t exist in nature; it’s man-made, and Kharasch is the man who made it marketable.

Two companies, one German and one American, built their ethyl mercury fungicide, called Ceresan, on those patents. In a joint venture, they sold it in both Europe and the United States. (Mercury-containing agricultural products were phased out decades ago after their effects on humans and the environment were recognized — though ethyl mercury still remains in most flu shots given to pregnant women and young children. Go figure.)

So what might have happened — warning, hypothesis ahead — is that some early exposures to ethyl mercury came from inhaling or otherwise coming into contact with it via that agricultural route. And some of the children exposed to this novel and neurotoxic form of mercury developed a novel neurological disorder called autism.

Speculative, yes. But everything about the cause of autism at the moment is speculative. And as I showed in a column earlier this year titled “Mercury Link to Case 2,” the first three cases diagnosed in the United States can plausibly be linked to such exposures.

Case 2, in particular, is compelling, because documents show that the father of that child was a plant pathologist experimenting with ethyl mercury fungicides for the U.S. government at the time his child was born in 1936. The father of Case 3 was a forestry professor — not a very different occupation from plant pathologist — in the South, and Case 1 lived in a town called Forest, Miss., near sites where ethyl mercury was first tested as a lumber preservative.

Plants, forests, timber, the South.

Now check this out: Among the earliest cases seen in Europe were 10 identified by a Dutch researcher named D. Arn Van Krevelen. One of the 10 fathers was a horticulturalist; another was a florist’s salesman.

Other early studies in the United States found a clear “chemical connection” via the occupations of a similar percentage of parents, a connection overlooked as the gene-hunting juggernaut gained steam.

Maybe that’s no coincidence.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   May 3, 2007 at 1:05 PM

WASHINGTON, May 3 (UPI) — Finding a treasure trove of documents about the family of one of the earliest cases of autism has led this column to offer two observations: Mercury may be associated with the disorder from the beginning, and cutting-edge research near the nation’s capital may help explain why it was first discovered at Johns Hopkins University in nearby Baltimore.

There is another possible clue from that early case, and it bears directly on the observation by many parents that restrictive diets seem to improve autism symptoms in affected children.

Specifically, those parents have found that a so-called GF/CF diet — one free of gluten-containing grains and casein-containing dairy products — helps clear up both behavioral issues and physical maladies like disrupted intestinal tracks. The grains in question are cereals — gluten is a protein in wheat, rye, barley and most oats.

What does that have to do with the information this column recently uncovered about Case 2 — a child known only as Frederick W. in the original medical report on autism published in 1943?

Well, we identified his father as a prominent plant pathologist named Frederick L. Wellman, who at the time his son was born in 1936 was a senior scientist at the U.S. Agriculture Department’s main research center in Beltsville, Md., a suburb of Washington and only about 30 miles from Hopkins.

Wellman was trying to stop fungi from killing plants, and his resume shows that he was working on fungicides at that point in his career — including newly developed organic mercury compounds. We found this especially interesting because Wellman had sales brochures in his archive for fungicides made with ethyl mercury. That is the same species of organic mercury used in a vaccine preservative called thimerosal, which some parents and a minority of researchers blame for triggering the recent rise in reported cases of autism.

In the 1920s Morris Kharasch, an organic chemist at the University of Maryland adjacent to the Beltsville research center, filed a barrage of patents that paved the way for both compounds. His dual focus was evident in his “Who’s Who” entry: “awarded patents along pharmaceutical lines, and treatment of fungus diseases of small grains.”

Both thimerosal and ethyl mercury fungicide first came on the market about 1930; the first autism case in that original medical report dates from 1931. We also identified Cases 1 and 3 and found plausible connections to fungicide in those cases as well.

Of course, this is speculation, and some readers have understandably challenged it as highly hypothetical. And that is admittedly true — these are not answers we’re offering, but questions. For example: Would a review of those early cases find environmental links overlooked in the earliest reports? Does the idea that mercury might be associated with autism, but not necessarily via vaccines, suggest mercury could be a factor even now, after thimerosal has been removed from most pediatric vaccinations? There is no question our planet — our air, our streams, our fish — is increasingly mercury-toxic and, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, putting thousands of American children at risk of developmental disorders.

Those amount only to hypotheses — but they are testable ones; my suggestion all along has been that reasonable tests have been ignored, perhaps even avoided. A classic example is whether autism is less prevalent in never-vaccinated Americans such as many of the Amish. After I raised that issue and cited anecdotal and unscientific reports that it might in fact be, the critics howled — but two U.S. representatives, a Democrat and a Republican, introduced a bill ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to find out.

So on to the diet question. Frederick L. Wellman’s archive, at North Carolina State University, has brochures for those two ethyl mercury fungicides. The most interesting is New Improved Ceresan, which is for use on “wheat, oats, barley, rye, sorghums, millets and flax.”

Wheat, oats, barley, rye … where have we seen that list before? In the gluten-free autism diet, that’s where.

“Gluten is a protein and is contained in foods, such as wheat, barley, rye and oats,” according to autism.org. “At the present time, we do not know why the gluten/casein-free diet helps many autistic individuals.” One theory is that they release opioid-like substances in the gut that can migrate to the brain.

Well, here’s another hypothesis — could some of those grains be grown in places where residual toxins — ethyl mercury, say, but in fact any environmental toxin — are getting into them and thus into our kids? And if some child’s body burden or susceptibility is already at the tipping point, could that aggravate or even induce physical and mental symptoms that go by the name of autism?

Sounds fantastical, but one thing we learned about mercury by researching Case 2 is that this stuff can stick around. A government study in the 1990s at Beltsville, where Frederick W.’s father was experimenting with mercury fungicides in the 1930s, found concentrations of mercury 2,000 times the U.S. average. And that was presumably decades after anyone messed with mercury there — mercury fungicides were phased out in the 1970s after scientists recognized their toxicity extended well beyond fungi.

This is speculative, yes. But so is the idea touted by serious scientists that autism is triggered by excessive “maleness” in the developing brain; so, for that matter, is the belief that autism is a genetic disorder with no environmental trigger at all.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   April 26, 2007 at 12:17 PM

WASHINGTON, April 26 (UPI) — This column has long made the controversial case that autism had a beginning, a “big bang” if you will. That moment was 1930 — no U.S. cases before then fully match the classic description of the disorder.

Now let’s take the next logical step: Not only did autism have a big bang, it also had a ground zero — a place where many of the first cases concentrated before the disorder exploded nationwide. Ground zero was the nation’s capital, in particular the Maryland suburbs where cutting-edge government research in the 1930s and 1940s exposed families to the chemical that first triggered the baffling disorder.

The foundation of this argument was laid out in the most recent Age of Autism column, “Mercury link to Case 2.” Case 2 was known only as Frederick W., but we identified him as the son of a prominent plant pathologist named Frederick L. Wellman. At the time “Frederick W.” was born, we showed, the senior Wellman was doing advanced work at the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Beltsville research center in suburban Maryland, just outside the nation’s capital.

Wellman was experimenting with plant fungi and ways to kill them, and his extensive archive makes clear one compound he studied was ethyl mercury fungicide — the exact kind also used in the controversial vaccine preservative thimerosal, which many parents blame for the recent rise in reported cases (mainstream experts say it has been ruled out as a cause).

Ethyl mercury in both vaccines and fungicides was pioneered and patented in the 1920s through the work of Morris S. Kharasch. When Kharasch filed the first relevant patents, he was a chemistry professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, which actually adjoins the Beltsville research center.

More links to Washington are evident in other early cases described in 1943 by Johns Hopkins University child psychiatrist Leo Kanner, who first diagnosed the disorder in Frederick W. and 10 other children born in the 1930s. Reading between the lines of his landmark 1943 paper, the very first autistic child seen at Hopkins (in 1935) was “Alfred L.,” whose father was a lawyer and chemist at the U.S. Patent Office. Also a clear connection to newly patented chemicals, the federal government and the nation’s capital.

A child later profiled by Kanner was named Gary T. “Gary originally lived in Philadelphia,” Kanner wrote in 1951. “The family then moved to Greenbelt, to Chicago, and back to Greenbelt.”

Take a look at Greenbelt, Md.: It also abuts the Beltsville agricultural center in the Washington suburbs.

Recently, a mutual friend in Washington introduced me to a 58-year-old man with Asperger’s disorder, the milder version of autism. We got together for lunch, and when I asked where in the Washington area he lived, I was both startled and somehow not surprised: Riverdale, Md. That’s another Washington suburb that clusters with the College Park-Beltsville-Greenbelt dots I was already plotting. What’s more, he was born there in 1948 in the same house he lives in now.

I asked what his father did. He told me he was an engineer. That fits a stereotype of Asperger’s affecting kids of scientists and engineers — the so-called “geek syndrome,” nerdy brainiacs hooking up to somehow spawn a generation of kids with “autism lite.” I asked him what kind of engineer his father was. The answer: a mechanical engineer who tested guns for the Navy at the time he was born.

And where was that? At what is now the Naval Surface Warfare Center in White Oak, Md. — just a hop and a skip across I-95 from the Beltsville agriculture center.

I already had come across his father’s line of work. In a 1972 paper, Kanner talked about a child named “Walter P.,” born in June 1944. His father, too, was “an ordnance engineer for the federal government.”

Kanner didn’t say where Walter P. was from, but the similarity makes me wonder. Mercury fulminate was widely used as a detonator for explosives and armaments. Could those two fathers, like Frederick W., be linked to cutting-edge research involving mercury? (My Riverdale acquaintance said his father sometimes brought containers of mercury home from the weapons center for the kids to play with.)

And is that kind of research a reason Leo Kanner, at Johns Hopkins in nearby Baltimore, started seeing cases of this “markedly and uniquely” different disorder in the 1930s and 1940s?

Just last week I got an e-mail from the mother of a child with autism who lives on the other side of the country; her son was born nowhere near what I’m calling ground zero. But as I outlined this idea to her, she had a shock of recognition:

“I lived on a farm in Burtonsville, Md., while young and it is near Beltsville. The farm was surrounded by forest and abutted the Patuxent River.”

Of course, not all the early cases cluster this way. But of the two other original “Kanner kids” from his 1943 paper that I’ve been able to identify along with Frederick W., one grew up in a town called Forest, Miss., a center of timber farming and planting; the other was the son of a forestry professor at North Carolina State University. Ethyl mercury fungicides were used to treat seeds, saplings and lumber in the 1930s, and in both places (as well as in Beltsville) the newly launched Civilian Conservation Corps was hard at work planting trees, cutting timber and building things with it.

To sum up: The first cases of autism seem to radiate outward from a central point — as big bangs tend to do. As those exposures expanded, so did autism.

This suggests a new and deeply disturbing truth about the Age of Autism: our fate is not in our genes, Dear Brutus, but in the chemicals that increasingly pollute our world and our children.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Jan. 25, 2007 at 5:12 PM

WASHINGTON, Jan. 25 (UPI) — “You’re going to hate my book,” Roy Richard Grinker told me a few weeks ago when I met him at George Washington University. Actually, I don’t hate “Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism,” his newly published, beautifully written look at autism through the lens of history and culture.

I just disagree with it.

Grinker — an anthropology professor and father of a teenage daughter, Isabel, who has autism — sees a genetic brain-based disorder that, contrary to widespread belief, has not truly increased.

Rather, he says, it’s just better-recognized. Plus, the categories have expanded to include a “spectrum” of related disorders including the milder Asperger’s. “Maybe we are finally diagnosing and counting autism correctly,” he writes.

Grinker, who mentions my reporting in the book, marshals an impressive body of research to support his contention. Time magazine gave it a full-page review and found his argument “persuasive.” Regardless of one’s point of view, it’s good to have the case against an “autism epidemic” spelled out as clearly and convincingly as possible.

That said, I do suspect autism has exploded in ways that are not satisfactorily explained by Grinker’s argument — and, therefore, that some new “environmental insult” interacting with genetic susceptibility is behind the rise. My basis for that is not solely the ten-fold increase in diagnoses in the past two decades; it goes back much further.

Read the first words of the first scientific paper written about autism in 1943 by Leo Kanner, the Johns Hopkins University child psychiatrist who introduced the disorder to the world:

“Since 1938, there have come to our attention a number of children whose condition differs so markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far, that each case merits — and, I hope, will eventually receive — a detailed consideration of its fascinating peculiarities.”

Years later, he called it “a behavior pattern not known to me or anyone else theretofore.”

Does that sound like something that’s been around for ages at the same prevalence? Not to me. What gives Kanner’s comments heft is that he had just written the first comprehensive tome on child psychiatry ever published in the United States — aptly titled “Child Psychiatry.”

Of the 11 initial cases documented by Kanner, four of the fathers (accounting for more than one-third of the cases) were psychiatrists. Grinker calls this referral bias — in other words, if you’re a psychiatrist and you notice something wrong with your own child, you’re much likelier to avail yourself of the services of an acknowledged leader in the field like Leo Kanner.

But, to my mind, that raises another question about the “no epidemic” argument. Here’s a thought experiment:

When the study came out in 1943, the oldest child was 11 or 12, born in 1931. The study was published in a journal (The Nervous Child) aimed at psychiatrists. Yet as far as I can tell from his many follow-up accounts, Kanner never heard from a psychiatrist (or anyone else) with a child born before 1931 — in other words, with kids as young as 13 when the study appeared.

If four psychiatrists brought their children to Kanner before the disorder even had a name, why was there dead silence afterward from psychiatrists with autistic teenagers?

This rather humble experiment, along with taking Kanner at his word, suggests to me that 1930 really was a bright line — before-and-after the age of autism. If my facts or reasoning are flawed, please let me know. Until then, I’ll continue to suspect that something new set off the disorder — and, ultimately, an autism epidemic.

Grinker makes one inadvertent error worth mentioning. Among Kanner’s original cases was a child called Richard M.; Grinker says Richard, “like many of the others … showed signs of normal cognitive development — or at least this is what the parents retrospectively argued — until he was about two. Then, as his mother wrote to Kanner, ‘It seems that he has gone backward mentally gradually for the last two years.’”

Grinker misreads Kanner. Richard regressed at about one year old, not two.

Picky? Well, consider this comment about Richard in the original study: “Following smallpox vaccination at 12 months, he had an attack of diarrhea and fever, from which he recovered in somewhat less than a week,” Kanner wrote.

To me, that’s a possible clue — a vaccine reaction — and it made me go over the timing very carefully. If you’ve discounted that idea, it’s easier to make a math error and conclude that Richard, like “many of the others,” proves the point about regression at age 2.

As the epidemiologists say, “Assume nothing. Let the evidence speak for itself.”

When Grinker visits the only school for autistic children in New Delhi, he finds more evidence of referral bias: 10 of 10 fathers and four of 10 mothers were college-educated, and half the men had advanced degrees. That confirms what he’s already concluded: “People of higher socioeconomic status tend to avail themselves of medical interventions more often than people of lower socioeconomic status.”

“I interviewed only one child there who had received a diagnosis of Asperger’s Disorder, and — big surprise — his mother was a chemist with a Ph.D. from Harvard … “

Grinker’s not surprised because advanced education fits his hypothesis. He notices the Ph.D.; I notice it was in chemistry. In earlier columns I pointed to a couple of overlooked, thoroughly mainstream autism studies from the 1970s that found a “startling” chemical connection via parents’ professions. And chemists stood out — that’s not my bias, that’s what the experts saw when they looked at their data.

I’ve proposed that several of Kanner’s first 11 highly educated fathers might also suggest an unrecognized chemical connection: plant pathologist (Ph.D.), forestry professor (Ph.D. and Richard’s father), mining engineer (college degree), chemist-lawyer (J.D.).

Even those first four psychiatrists — M.D.’s all — might signal not solely referral bias but professionals who had availed themselves of new medical interventions or medicines with “markedly and uniquely” tragic consequences. That, too, could be a chemical connection.

So that’s why I just disagree with “Unstrange Minds.” As Grinker says of those who believe there is an autism epidemic, “I sympathize with these opinions, but I think they are wrong.”

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Jan. 9, 2007 at 4:43 PM

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 (UPI) — We are all environmentalists now.

At least that’s the impression you get from reading the discussion surrounding the Combating Autism Act that President Bush recently signed into law.

Much attention — and properly so — has gone toward what the bill does not do. It does not, after the House got through amending it, set aside a specific amount of money to look into environmental causes of autism. And it does not specifically mention research into whether vaccines are involved in the ten-fold rise in diagnoses in recent years.

But here’s what it does do: It says the director of the National Institutes of Health will coordinate research into “the cause (including possible environmental causes) … and treatment of autism spectrum disorder.”

Those might be the most important parentheses in recent American history. What’s afoot is nothing short of revolutionary — a fresh attempt to find what’s causing autism without taking anything off the table.

Taking things off the table — sweeping them under the rug, in the view of many — has been tried before. People familiar with this issue know about the 2004 Institute of Medicine report that not only exonerated vaccines as a factor in autism, but suggested it was time to stop funding research into the possibility.

The question now is whether government researchers will take their cue from Congress or the Institute of Medicine, and considering who writes the checks in this town, the former is far more likely.

Plus, there are the comments by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the man who held up the bill until it was amended to his liking. Here’s what he said in a statement on the House floor:

“With respect to possible environmental or external causes of autism, some have suggested a link exists between autism and childhood vaccines. In the past several years, several major epidemiological studies have been conducted to look into the question of whether vaccines cause autism.

“Examining the published studies, the non-partisan Institute of Medicine has concluded that the weight of the available evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between vaccines and autism.

“However, I recognize that there is much that we do not know about the biological pathways and origins of this disorder, and that further investigation into all possible causes of autism is needed.”

That means, Do it.

In the Senate, several members went on record to make the same point.

“I want to be clear that, for the purposes of biomedical research, no research avenue should be eliminated, including biomedical research examining potential links between vaccines, vaccine components, and autism spectrum disorder,” said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.

“Thus, I hope that the National Institutes of Health will consider broad research avenues into this critical area, within the Autism Centers of Excellence as well as the Centers of Excellence for Environmental Health and Autism.

“No stone should remain unturned in trying to learn more about this baffling disorder, especially given how little we know.”

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., followed up with this:

“In our search for the cause of this growing developmental disability, we should close no doors on promising avenues of research. Through the Combating Autism Act, all biomedical research opportunities on ASD can be pursued, and they include environmental research examining potential links between vaccines, vaccine components and ASD.”

So what the Combating Autism Act has already accomplished is pretty impressive: putting some powerful members of Congress on record that “no research avenue should be eliminated.”

That’s part of the new dynamic that I said in my last column makes me think 2007 will be a very good year for the truth. Another reason: An expert panel requested by Congress and convened by NIH recently raised disturbing questions about one of those “major epidemiological studies” that found no link between thimerosal and autism.

“I think there’s more work to be done,” chairwoman Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine, told me last month.

“It’s an ‘open question’ whether anything about vaccines — timing, dose, preservative — is related to the rise in diagnoses,” she said.

Believe it or not, this is all that those concerned about an environmental risk for autism have ever asked — an open mind. This looks like the year they’ll get it.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Dec. 27, 2006 at 2:48 PM

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) — As this column heads into its third year, the time is right to cite those who made 2006 a memorable year in the history of autism — and set the stage for even more remarkable ones to come.

And the winners are:

Person of the Year: Anne Dachel. This Chippewa Falls, Wis., mom and member of the National Autism Association keeps chipping away at the mainstream media’s wall of indolence and incuriosity.

She sent e-mails to just about every reporter who wrote about the subject this past year along with letters-to-the-editor of their publications, as well as penning articles of her own.

She praises, she pushes, she relentlessly raises the questions at the heart of the matter: Why have the number of cases risen so dramatically? Why aren’t journalists asking tougher questions of Important People?

A recent example: “We need the press to continue to investigate and report on the generation of affected children in the U.S. We’re being overwhelmed by a disorder that was unheard of a few years ago, yet the press isn’t calling for answers. If one in every 166 children were suddenly developing blindness, I’m sure it would be a front page story.”

Some no doubt find this a bit much. But what Dachel represents is persistence. Private citizens have every right to question elected officials and keep the media on their toes, whether the pooh-bahs like it or not. It’s an old-fashioned thing called citizenship.

Person of the Century: Bernard Rimland, who died this year, is all that. What’s more, you can pick the century — in the one just past, he made a massive contribution by demolishing the idea that parents’ behavior can make their children autistic.

In his landmark 1964 book, “Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior,” he laid out the case against the then-conventional wisdom. What’s more, he laid the foundation for all serious research on the subject when he wrote that “conviction (must be) subordinated to evidence. The history of science proves this to be the first step toward progress.”

Using that same approach, Rimland concluded that medical treatment could help many autistic kids. That’s his contribution to the century just begun and the promise it holds for both prevention and treatment.

He thus exiled himself from most of mainstream medicine, but he may have helped thousands of children. Which would you rather have as your legacy?

Because of his guts, grit — and perseverance — he’ll be remembered for leading not one, but two, medical revolutions.

Not So Hot National Magazine Story of the Year: Newsweek, which did a cover story on the looming caregiving crisis as thousands of autistic children “age out” of mandated care into an uncertain adulthood.

So far, so good. But the magazine failed to come to grips with the obvious: Why are there so many kids with autism?

Fishy Factoid of the Year Award: ABC News, which did a story much like Newsweek’s and simply asserted that “up to 1 million” adults are living with autism.

Where are they?

Quote of the Year: From Irva Hertz-Picciotto, chair of an expert panel convened by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at the request of Congress. The panel poked some gaping holes in the kind of data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses to assure Americans that there’s no link between autism and the mercury preservative in vaccines called thimerosal.

“I think there’s more work to be done,” said Hertz-Picciotto, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine.

“We know there’s a major genetic component to autism, but genes cannot explain a rise over a short time period of a few decades,” she said, sounding a lot more like Anne Dachel and Bernie Rimland than Newsweek, ABC and the CDC.

“It’s an ‘open question’ whether anything about vaccines — timing, dose, preservative — is related to the rise in diagnoses,” she said.

That’s right — an open question, one that requires an urgent and definitive answer.

Not So Hot Magazine Story of the Year, Local Division: The Washingtonian, which ran an article in its November issue titled, “Something Happened and We Don’t Know Why,” about twins with autism.

Although the twins’ mom thinks vaccine mercury did trigger their autism, she is brushed off with the author’s comment that “many large-scale studies have disproved a link between thimerosal and autism.”

Yeah, large-scale studies like the one the NIH expert panel just dumped a bucket of cold water on.

Prediction for ’07: The pace of change is accelerating in ways that are not entirely in the control of the government and its often defensive bureaucracies.

I believe 2007 will be a very good year for the truth — for the subordination of conviction to evidence, as Bernard Rimland so elegantly put it. And that would be a very good year, indeed.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Dec. 11, 2006 at 10:00 PM

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 (UPI) — For three years, the CDC has used a study conducted on its own Vaccine Safety Datalink to reassure parents that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism. Now a panel of government-appointed experts says there are “serious problems” with exactly the approach the CDC took.

“I think what we’re saying is that (study) wasn’t the last word and that things need to be looked at again and perhaps with different methodology,” chairwoman Irva Hertz-Picciotto told Age of Autism, which obtained a copy of the panel’s report.

Critics said that renders reassurances about the mercury preservative, called thimerosal, unconvincing.

“How can health authorities, with a straight face, claim they have any evidence proving no connection after this report?” asked J.B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, an advocacy group that believes autism is essentially mercury poisoning by another name.

“This is analogous to our government not finding WMD in Iraq after reassuring the world they would. It’s a loss of credibility, and we are back at square one.”

The study — often called the Verstraeten study for its principal author, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten — used the Vaccine Safety Datalink maintained by the CDC to extract information from records kept by three health maintenance organizations. On its Web site, the CDC says: “(T)he results from this study suggest there is not a ’cause and effect’ relationship between thimerosal and autism or ADD (attention deficit disorders).”

But the database has weaknesses — including different ways of diagnosing autism at different HMOs — that make it hard to draw broad conclusions, the experts said.

“The panel identified several serious problems that were judged to reduce the usefulness of an ecologic study design using the VSD to address the potential association between thimerosal and the risk” of autism, according to the report. An ecologic study — analyzing groups rather than individuals — was the approach the CDC used.

“We actually just got the report and haven’t had a chance to assess it,” CDC spokesman Glen Nowak said Monday. “Our Office of Science will be working with our Immunization Safety Office in terms of where and how this fits into our research agenda. We’ve got a couple of other studies under way.”

Nowak said that the agency is working to eliminate all remaining thimerosal-containing shots as soon as possible, “so it wouldn’t change where we want to go there, either.”

He added that limitations of the study were acknowledged by Verstraeten — who subsequently said its findings were “neutral” and required follow-up. Nowak said several studies support the safety of thimerosal, and he noted the expert panel suggested other ways to look for a possible connection using the database, including comparisons of siblings of those diagnosed with autism.

The panel was convened last May at Congress’s request by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. Congress wanted an independent opinion about whether the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink could be used to compare autism rates and vaccine mercury before and after thimerosal was phased out beginning in 1999.

That wouldn’t work, the panel said, partly because of changes over time, but also because of problems with the data.

“I think there’s more work to be done,” said Hertz-Picciotto, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine. She added it’s unlikely that autism rates will decline significantly anytime soon.

“It’s an ‘open question’ whether anything about vaccines — timing, dose, preservative — is related to the rise in diagnoses,” she said.

The study was one of five key epidemiological studies cited by the prestigious Institute of Medicine when it concluded in 2004 that the evidence is against a link between thimerosal and autism.

But Hertz-Picciotto said several of those studies had more problems than the one conducted with CDC data.

“Some studies are stronger than others. The Verstraeten study was an improvement on other studies including the two in Denmark, both of which had serious weaknesses in their designs that limit what we can learn from them,” she said.

David Kirby, author of the book “Evidence of Harm” on the controversy over thimerosal and autism, said the Institute of Medicine report — intended to bring the mercury-autism debate to a close — is on shaky ground as well.

“This is a strong blow at the very foundation of the 2004 IOM report, which builds its conclusion against causation largely on this (CDC vaccine safety) database.

“I would also point out that all the weaknesses cited by the NIH (expert panel) were highlighted long ago by members of SafeMinds,” a group that opposes mercury in medicine.

Kirby said that in 1999, while the CDC’s research was under way, SafeMinds’ Lyn Redwood met with Verstraeten and raised the same issues: “under-ascertainment of cases, misreporting of data, ignoring prenatal exposure and a 25 percent exclusion rate” of children listed in the databases.

Kirby predicted the Institute of Medicine will now face increased pressure to take a fresh look at thimerosal and autism.

The expert panel’s Hertz-Picciotto said research into autism has barely begun.

“We know there’s a major genetic component to autism, but genes cannot explain a rise over a short time period of a few decades,” she said.

“We also know that environment plays a significant part, and the scientific community is just beginning to search for what those factors and exposures are.”

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Nov. 20, 2006 at 4:12 PM

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 (UPI) — Newsweek’s cover story this week is about what happens to autistic kids when they grow up. The magazine does a good job of pointing to funding gaps and the plight of parents who can only imagine what will happen to their kids after they’re gone.

But Newsweek fails to confront a key issue, one that bedevils mainstream publications every time they write about autism: Is it really increasing? Or are we just doing a better job of diagnosing the disorder?

Newsweek, without exactly saying it, comes down on the side of better diagnosis. ” … (M)ore sophisticated epidemiology has revealed the true magnitude of the problem,” the magazine says. It also suggests the increase coincided with parents banding together “to raise awareness of a once rarely diagnosed, often overlooked disease.”

Yet in a sidebar, Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, says that as a psychiatrist in the 1970s he never saw a single person with autism. “In 1985, curiosity sent him searching; it took several phone calls to find a single patient,” the article says.

Does today’s “more sophisticated epidemiology” really square with Insel’s experience? I don’t believe it does; 1985 was hardly the dark ages of medical diagnosis. And autism was described as a distinct disorder more than 40 years before that — concern already had arisen that it was becoming a trendy diagnosis, handed out too freely.

Yet Insel, obviously well-connected to the medical and psychiatric community, had to mount a virtual search party to find a single one?

The article goes on to say that NIMH is “newly interested in environmental factors that might set off the disorder in patients who are already genetically prone to it.”

What does it mean to be “already genetically prone” to autism, yet have it triggered only after exposure to some outside factor? I’m not sure that makes sense. What does make sense is that some children might have a genetic inability to cope with that factor, triggering the “environmental insult” that leads to autism.

If such an exposure increased, it could certainly account for an increase in the autism rate. NIH officials are increasingly blunt about this, even if the media are not. At a recent meeting with a group of parents, according to several participants, the head of one NIH institute said: “There are no epidemic deniers here.”

I’m told a second institute director said at another recent meeting that autism is primarily an “environmental” disease. An audience member’s suggestion that genes alone explain the current rate was flatly dismissed by this official.

Because it doesn’t connect the dots, Newsweek misses the point: We’re in an epidemic, which is why the future of this generation is a crisis. The article’s whole premise, however, inadvertently suggests the truth: There are now so many kids with autism — “as many as 500,000 Americans under 21,” the magazine says — that caring for them as adults must be urgently addressed.

If there were already a comparable million-plus adults with the disorder, the issue would have been recognized years ago. To be sure, some autistic adults of all ages have been misdiagnosed over the years as retarded or mentally ill.

But if autism has held steady over the years, it shouldn’t be hard to find thousands and thousands of clearly autistic people in their 30s, 40s, 50s — even their 80s and 90s. The first child in the landmark 1943 study identifying autism, who was known as Donald T., is still alive at age 73. It was the striking uniqueness and novelty of such cases that prompted the study in the first place.

When NIMH’s Insel went looking for cases in the 1980s, it seems autism was still pretty rare. It’s not anymore — as Newsweek points out, disorders on the autism “spectrum” now afflict as many as 1 in 166 children. Note: children. Where are the 1 in 166 autistic adults?

Until we stop ignoring the obvious, we’re never going to stop this epidemic — and find new and better treatments for people already afflicted.

And that’s the most urgent issue of all.