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By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Dec. 17, 2005 at 3:59 PM

Part 1 of 3. In February, we began this ongoing series of articles on the roots and rise of autism. Now, at the end of the year, here’s a summary of our story so far:

— Something happened among children born in the early 1930s to bring autism to the attention of Leo Kanner, the eminent and experienced Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist who first described the disorder in a landmark 1943 paper. At the same time, a Viennese pediatrician named Hans Asperger was noticing a remarkably similar, though somewhat less severe, syndrome that came to bear his name.

In our first column, “Donald T. and Fritz V.,” we found it amazing that these first two patients — Donald in the United States and Fritz in Austria — were born within four months of each other in 1933. Yet these unique, impossible-to-miss children with Autism Spectrum Disorders had been around in similar numbers since the dawn of time?

Experts disagree, but our first and still-tentative conclusion is that’s just plain unlikely. Scattered cases, sure. But 1 in 166, the current U.S. autism rate in children? We don’t see it.

— Instead, it appears more likely something happened around 1930 to set off the age of autism. Clearly, there are clues in the striking commonalities among the first U.S. families stricken with the disorder. They were college-educated; many had advanced degrees; four of the fathers in the first 11 families identified by Kanner were medical doctors — psychiatrists, to be precise. There were professors, lawyers, scientists, engineers. One mother was also a doctor, and all of them were smart, accomplished women.

Some think that suggests a “geek effect,” in which gummed-up genes finally find each other and generate offspring who aren’t just brainy and distracted, they’re downright autistic. Based on our own reporting, we don’t buy that — where were all the autistic offspring of geeks before 1931, the year the oldest child ever diagnosed by Kanner was born?

Coincidence or not, 1931 appears to be the first year in which U.S. vaccines contained a mercury preservative called thimerosal, and that yields an alternate hypothesis that could explain the decisive increase in cases that we think is probable. Some parents and a minority of scientists now believe thimerosal — which is about half ethyl mercury by weight — is behind most autism cases, perhaps triggering the disorder in a genetic subset of children who lack the ability to excrete it.

Although it wasn’t fully understood at the time, organic mercury is a potent neurotoxin in even minute quantities; beginning in 1999 thimerosal was phased out of routine childhood immunizations, though federal health authorities say it is safe in that form, and they stand by its continued use in flu shots for pregnant women and toddlers.

An alternative to the “geek theory” is that those first 11 families back in the 1930s — especially the ones with links to the medical world — would have had had the information, income and access to take advantage of the latest health innovations and vaccinate themselves and their children.

A related hypothesis was proposed to us by Mark Blaxill, a director of the anti-mercury-in-medicine group SafeMinds. He suggested an association between several more of those first 11 cases and ethyl-mercury-based fungicides that came on the market at the same time, patented by the same scientist who developed thimerosal.

Case 1 in Kanner’s study — Donald T., born in 1933 — came from an area surrounded by a forest being replanted with seedlings by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Case 2’s father was a plant pathologist. Case 3’s was a forestry professor at a Southern university. Case 4’s was a mining engineer. Case 8’s was a chemist-lawyer at the U.S. Patent Office. All of them might have come in contact with mercury or other toxic compounds.

Given this intriguing though by no means conclusive set of associations, it’s possible those parents were not in fact passing on malignant mutations of the genes that made them doctors, forestry professors, plant pathologists, chemists. Rather, through their particular professions they might have exposed their children to something wholly new in commercial medical and agricultural products, something they did not know was devastatingly neurotoxic to developing brains.

That might make the age of autism, in effect, the age of organic mercury.

Not that it proves anything, but looking back recently through the groundbreaking book “Infantile Autism” by Bernard Rimland, something struck us that we hadn’t noticed before. This 1964 work is widely credited with single-handedly debunking the idea that “refrigerator mothers” or aloof fathers caused autism.

Reviewing the rare descriptions of children with autistic-type behavior prior to Kanner’s 1943 paper, Rimland noted a case that “sounds very much like autism.” That child’s father, Rimland said, “was a Ph.D.”

A professor of chemistry.

That’s the kind of detail that means nothing to the experts looking for incredibly complex gene interactions to explain autism, but it makes our layman’s hair stand on end.

As we pressed to find more about those early cases, the trail led all the way back to Case 1 himself, and to a small town in Mississippi.

We’ll go there next.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Dec. 14, 2005 at 5:41 PM

This was the year Big Media pitted parents against experts over whether vaccines cause autism — and decided the experts are right. But they may have forgotten to ask an embarrassingly obvious question.

In its new issue on medicine in 2005, Time weighs in: “The idea that childhood vaccinations might lead to autism has gained currency among some concerned parents, fueled by unsubstantiated reports on the Internet. … Most scientists are convinced that the shots are safe.”

There you have it — a more telling summary perhaps than Time intended. This was the year of “Parents vs. Research,” as the equally estimable New York Times put it in a front-page headline in June.

But beneath this seemingly intractable fault line, the earth has been shifting. One major temblor: The April book “Evidence of Harm” by David Kirby, which painted those parents as armed not just with eyewitness accounts but their own critique of the experts’ conflicts and flaws.

In our last column we summarized our take on the issue this way: If you’re going to tell those parents it’s time to shut up and leave the science to the scientists, where is the simple, straightforward study of autism in never-vaccinated U.S. children?

Given the sheer certitude of federal health authorities and mainstream medical groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, we were surprised we couldn’t find comparisons between real-live American kids who’ve gotten vaccines, and those who haven’t. Officials say such a study would be hard to do, in part because so many kids are vaccinated that you couldn’t find a “control group” of kids who aren’t.

We found tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

Our search started among the mostly unvaccinated Amish in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana; moved on to homeschooling families who choose not to vaccinate for religious religions, and wound up in Chicago, where we reported on a medical practice with thousands of unvaccinated children.

We didn’t find much autism.

That “finding” — we use quotes because we know it’s not scientific — has fallen on deaf ears, at least as far as the rest of the media is concerned. Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post — no major newspaper or magazine has so much as paused to wonder whether never-vaccinated Americans have autism at anywhere near the rate of the rest of the population.

Two exceptions: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in an article in Rolling Stone and on Salon.com, cited the Amish. And Daniel Schulman, in a groundbreaking piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, did the same thing while portraying the media as perhaps too willing to treat what the “experts” say as revealed truth.

While most journalists seem oblivious to the issue, it continues to resonate with those who suspect vaccines — perhaps via the mercury-based preservative thimerosal — triggered an autism epidemic:

— “Those of you who have been following me over the years know that my mantra has always been that there are almost no vaccine safety or efficacy studies using never vaccinated children as controls,” wrote Sandy Mintz at vaccinationnews.com. “It has long been my hope that I would somehow be able to make that point to the right person or persons, to appeal to someone who might have the ability to seriously address the problem.”

Mintz got her chance at a congressional hearing in 2002.

“Hi. My name is Sandy Mintz. I am from Anchorage, Alaska. I am lucky enough not to have a child who has been injured by a vaccine. My question is, is NIH (National Institutes of Health) ever planning on doing a study using the only proper control group, that is, never vaccinated children?”

Dr. Steve Foote of NIH responded: “I am not aware of — but note carefully what I said, that I am not aware of — a proposed study to use a suitably constructed group of never vaccinated children. Now CDC would be more likely perhaps to be aware of such an opportunity.”

Responded Dr. Melinda Wharton of the CDC: “The difficulty with doing such a study in the United States, of course, is that a very small portion of children have never received any vaccines, and these children probably differ in other ways from vaccinated children. So performing such a study would, in fact, be quite difficult.”

In her Web posting, Mintz disagreed:

“1) There are more than enough never vaccinated children in the states which allow philosophical exemptions to conduct a proper study.

“2) If children who have not been vaccinated are different in ways that prevent them from getting autism, wouldn’t we want to know that?

“Well, wouldn’t we?”

— “There have never been any large, prospective, long-term studies comparing the long-term health of highly vaccinated individuals versus those who have never been vaccinated at all,” Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center wrote in Mothering Magazine last year.

“Therefore, the background rates for ADHD, learning disabilities, autism, seizure disorders, asthma, diabetes, intestinal bowel disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, and other brain and immune-system dysfunction in a genetically diverse unvaccinated population remains unknown.”

— “Why hasn’t the most obvious research been done — that is, assess the incidence of autism in unvaccinated children?” wrote Illinois autism activist Dr. David Ayoub this fall.

— Kennedy, in a white paper called “Tobacco Science and the Thimerosal Scandal,” quotes University of Kentucky chemistry professor Boyd Haley as saying, “If the CDC were really interested in uncovering the truth, it would commission epidemiological studies of cohorts who escaped vaccination, most obviously the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists or the Amish.”

Instead, Kennedy said, the CDC has “worked furiously to quash such studies” and prevent access to its own vaccine safety database — a charge the CDC denies. Kennedy said he asked an official at the Institute of Medicine — which last year rejected a vaccines-autism link — why it didn’t encourage those studies rather than recommend research money be redirected.

“That’s a great idea, no one has ever suggested it before,” Kennedy quoted the official as saying. Kennedy commented: “That statement is incredible. … The idea of finding an uncontaminated U.S. cohort is Science 101. … In fact, Dr. Boyd Haley has repeatedly urged IOM and CDC to conduct such a study, including at two public and tape-recorded meetings.”

All these people are saying the same thing: Given the stakes, where’s the study? This winter the government wants all pregnant women and 6-to-23-month-olds to get flu shots, most of which contain thimerosal.

What’s more, as we pointed out in our last column, tens of millions of children worldwide are being injected with thimerosal-containing vaccines every year, largely due to the reassurances of U.S. public health authorities and allied experts like the IOM.

Maybe 2006 will be the year journalists ask them about the autism rate in never-vaccinated American kids. That would be the question of the year.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Dec. 7, 2005 at 2:08 PM

CHICAGO, Dec. 7 (UPI) — It’s a far piece from the horse-and-buggies of Lancaster County, Pa., to the cars and freeways of Cook County, Ill.

But thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with thousands of Amish children in rural Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. And they don’t have autism.

“We have a fairly large practice. We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we’ve taken care of over the years, and I don’t think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines,” said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst’s medical director who founded the practice in 1973. Homefirst doctors have delivered more than 15,000 babies at home, and thousands of them have never been vaccinated.

The few autistic children Homefirst sees were vaccinated before their families became patients, Eisenstein said. “I can think of two or three autistic children who we’ve delivered their mother’s next baby, and we aren’t really totally taking care of that child — they have special care needs. But they bring the younger children to us. I don’t have a single case that I can think of that wasn’t vaccinated.”

The autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to state Education Department data; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the national rate of autism spectrum disorders at 1 in 166 — 60 per 10,000.

“We do have enough of a sample,” Eisenstein said. “The numbers are too large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We’re all family doctors. If I have a child with autism come in, there’s no communication. It’s frightening. You can’t touch them. It’s not something that anyone would miss.”

No one knows what causes autism, but federal health authorities say it isn’t childhood immunizations. Some parents and a small minority of doctors and scientists, however, assert vaccines are responsible.

This column has been looking for autism in never-vaccinated U.S. children in an effort to shed light on the issue. We went to Chicago to meet with Eisenstein at the suggestion of a reader, and we also visited Homefirst’s office in northwest suburban Rolling Meadows. Homefirst has four other offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors.

Eisenstein stresses his observations are not scientific. “The trouble is this is just anecdotal in a sense, because what if every autistic child goes somewhere else and (their family) never calls us or they moved out of state?”

In practice, that’s unlikely to account for the pronounced absence of autism, says Eisenstein, who also has a bachelor’s degree in statistics, a master’s degree in public health and a law degree.

Homefirst follows state immunization mandates, but Illinois allows religious exemptions if parents object based either on tenets of their faith or specific personal religious views. Homefirst does not exclude or discourage such families. Eisenstein, in fact, is author of the book “Don’t Vaccinate Before You Educate!” and is critical of the CDC’s vaccination policy in the 1990s, when several new immunizations were added to the schedule, including Hepatitis B as early as the day of birth. Several of the vaccines — HepB included — contained a mercury-based preservative that has since been phased out of most childhood vaccines in the United States.

Medical practices with Homefirst’s approach to immunizations are rare. “Because of that, we tend to attract families that have questions about that issue,” said Dr. Paul Schattauer, who has been with Homefirst for 20 years and treats “at least” 100 children a week.

Schattauer seconded Eisenstein’s observations. “All I know is in my practice I don’t see autism. There is no striking 1-in-166,” he said.

Earlier this year we reported the same phenomenon in the mostly unvaccinated Amish. CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding told us the Amish “have genetic connectivity that would make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the United States.” Gerberding said, however, studies “could and should be done” in more representative unvaccinated groups — if they could be found and their autism rate documented.

Chicago is America’s prototypical “City of Big Shoulders,” to quote Carl Sandburg, and Homefirst’s mostly middle-class families seem fairly representative. A substantial number are conservative Christians who home-school their children. They are mostly white, but the Homefirst practice also includes black and Hispanic families and non-home-schooling Jews, Catholics and Muslims.

They tend to be better educated, follow healthier diets and breast-feed their children much longer than the norm — half of Homefirst’s mothers are still breast-feeding at two years. Also, because Homefirst relies less on prescription drugs including antibiotics as a first line of treatment, these children have less exposure to other medicines, not just vaccines.

Schattauer, interviewed at the Rolling Meadows office, said his caseload is too limited to draw conclusions about a possible link between vaccines and autism. “With these numbers you’d have a hard time proving or disproving anything,” he said. “You can only get a feeling about it.

“In no way would I be an advocate to stand up and say we need to look at vaccines, because I don’t have the science to say that,” Schattauer said. “But I don’t think the science is there to say that it’s not.”

Schattauer said Homefirst’s patients also have significantly less childhood asthma and juvenile diabetes compared to national rates. An office manager who has been with Homefirst for 17 years said she is aware of only one case of severe asthma in an unvaccinated child.

“Sometimes you feel frustrated because you feel like you’ve got a pretty big secret,” Schattauer said. He argues for more research on all those disorders, independent of political or business pressures.

The asthma rate among Homefirst patients is so low it was noticed by the Blue Cross group with which Homefirst is affiliated, according to Eisenstein.

“In the alternative-medicine network which Homefirst is part of, there are virtually no cases of childhood asthma, in contrast to the overall Blue Cross rate of childhood asthma which is approximately 10 percent,” he said. “At first I thought it was because they (Homefirst’s children) were breast-fed, but even among the breast-fed we’ve had asthma. We have virtually no asthma if you’re breast-fed and not vaccinated.”

Because the diagnosis of asthma is based on emergency-room visits and hospital admissions, Eisenstein said, Homefirst’s low rate is hard to dispute. “It’s quantifiable — the definition is not reliant on the doctor’s perception of asthma.”

Several studies have found a risk of asthma from vaccination; others have not. Studies that include never-vaccinated children generally find little or no asthma in that group.

Earlier this year Florida pediatrician Dr. Jeff Bradstreet said there is virtually no autism in home-schooling families who decline to vaccinate for religious reasons — lending credence to Eisenstein’s observations.

“It’s largely non-existent,” said Bradstreet, who treats children with autism from around the country. “It’s an extremely rare event.”

Bradstreet has a son whose autism he attributes to a vaccine reaction at 15 months. His daughter has been home-schooled, he describes himself as a “Christian family physician,” and he knows many of the leaders in the home-school movement.

“There was this whole subculture of folks who went into home-schooling so they would never have to vaccinate their kids,” he said. “There’s this whole cadre who were never vaccinated for religious reasons.”

In that subset, he said, “unless they were massively exposed to mercury through lots of amalgams (mercury dental fillings in the mother) and/or big-time fish eating, I’ve not had a single case.”

Federal health authorities and mainstream medical groups emphatically dismiss any link between autism and vaccines, including the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. Last year a panel of the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, said there is no evidence of such a link, and funding should henceforth go to “promising” research.

Thimerosal, which is 49.6 percent ethyl mercury by weight, was phased out of most U.S. childhood immunizations beginning in 1999, but the CDC recommends flu shots for pregnant women and last year began recommending them for children 6 to 23 months old. Most of those shots contain thimerosal.

Thimerosal-preserved vaccines are currently being injected into millions of children in developing countries around the world. “My mandate … is to make sure at the end of the day that 100,000,000 are immunized … this year, next year and for many years to come … and that will have to be with thimerosal-containing vaccines,” said John Clements of the World Health Organization at a June 2000 meeting called by the CDC.

That meeting was held to review data that thimerosal might be linked with autism and other neurological problems. But in 2004 the Institute of Medicine panel said evidence against a link is so strong that health authorities, “whether in the United States or other countries, should not include autism as a potential risk” when formulating immunization policies.

But where is the simple, straightforward study of autism in never-vaccinated U.S. children? Based on our admittedly anecdotal and limited reporting among the Amish, the home-schooled and now Chicago’s Homefirst, that may prove to be a significant omission.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Nov. 30, 2005 at 11:26 AM

You may have seen the brief news stories this week: A 15-year-old Canadian girl with a severe peanut allergy kissed her boyfriend — and died.

The New York Post perfectly captured the tabloid pathos. The headline: “Allergy teen’s fatal kiss.” The lead: “Her allergy to peanuts may have been the kiss of death for a Canadian 15-year-old who died after smooching with her boyfriend, who’d just had peanut butter, authorities said.

“Christina Desforges died last Wednesday in a Quebec hospital, where she was being treated for the allergic reaction to the kiss the weekend before. The fact is that even a trace amount can cause a severe reaction.”

A CNN reporter asked: “Could it really have been … the kiss of death?” (Could it really have been … a crass cliché worth avoiding?) The network quoted three people — ages 13, 15 and 20 — who all have severe peanut allergies and recounted near-death experiences as a result. It quoted a doctor as saying, “I’ve lost three patients due to anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction). They’re all teenagers. One was a baked good, one was Chinese food, one was a candy. None of them had epinephrine (antidote) available.”

Now, why are so many young North Americans suddenly at risk of death from eating common foods or kissing those who have?

“Food allergy such as peanut allergy is an immune response,” explains foodconsumer.org. “It differs from food intolerance which causes discomfort without provoking the immuno-response. What causes peanut allergy remains largely unknown. A study, published in the March 13 issue of New England Journal of Medicine, linked the acquisition of the condition with babies’ using skin preparation containing peanut oil. Peanut allergy was also found associated with intake of soy milk or soy formula.”

Other possible factors cited in press accounts include more peanut-eating by pregnant and breast-feeding women and earlier peanut consumption by young children. That, it is surmised, could predispose them to severe allergic reactions later.

Maybe. But omitted from the speculation is one other possibility, which explains why peanuts are the subject of this column about autism: There are studies and informed observations suggesting that a rise in peanut allergies — and other severe allergic and autoimmune reactions in young people, both acute and chronic — are associated with a rise in childhood vaccinations in the 1990s.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? Please bear with us. Our purpose here is not to propose this as the most plausible hypothesis, but simply to point out — yet again — how nutty the discussion of the horrifying rise in childhood medical problems becomes when it does not look squarely at all possibilities.

And vaccines are among those possibilities — certainly right up there with peanut eating during pregnancy, to say the least. We refer you to this posting on the Web: www.vaccinationnews.com/DailyNews/March2002/Anaphylaxis&Vaccines.htm.;

It is a Nov. 6, 2001, letter from Rita Hoffman of Stirling, Ontario, to the Immunization Safety Review Committee of the U.S. Institute of Medicine, part of the prestigious National Academies.

“Re: Epidemic of Children with Anaphylaxis,” it begins. “Thank you for the opportunity to submit the following information for your review of the possible association between multiple immunizations in newborns and infants and immune system dysfunction. We are writing in particular about the potentially life threatening allergic response called anaphylaxis.”

The letter, which Hoffman wrote on behalf of the group Anaphylaxis Action, sure looks like a serious piece of work to us. It cites one scientific journal study after another, beginning with the Archives of Internal Medicine, which reported in 2001 that “The occurrence of anaphylaxis in the US is not as rare as is generally believed. On the basis of our figures, the problem of anaphylaxis may, in fact, affect 1.21 percent (1.9 million) to 15.04 percent (40.9 million) of the US population.”

That’s something that should trigger urgent research and — despite the cluelessness of the press accounts about the 15-year-old’s kiss of death — it has indeed.

Hoffman quotes from a paper in the journal Pediatric Allergy Immunology from 1994 that says that “the role of immunization for the development of allergy merits further study.”

A 1997 article in Immunology Today: “Modern vaccinations, fear of germs and obsession with hygiene are depriving the immune system of information input upon which it is dependent. This fails to maintain the correct cytokine balance and fine-tune T-cell regulation, and may lead to increased incidences of allergies and autoimmune diseases.”

From the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics in 2000, Effects of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis or tetanus vaccination on allergies and allergy-related respiratory symptoms among children and adolescents in the United States: “The odds of having a history of asthma was twice as great among vaccinated subjects than among unvaccinated subjects. The odds of having any allergy-related respiratory symptom in the past 12 months was 63 percent greater among vaccinated subjects than unvaccinated subjects.”

We could go on, but we refer you to Hoffman’s excellent summary. Of course, there are countervailing studies and theories that find no such link between immunizations and allergic reactions, anaphylaxis and asthma (not to mention autism). But the point is this is a serious, ongoing debate with immediate, life-and-death consequences.

Too bad the mainstream media doesn’t take it seriously. Christina Desforges and her generation deserve better — and they deserve it now.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Nov. 19, 2005 at 1:46 PM

It’s flu shot season, and that simple fact is sharply focusing the debate over a possible link between vaccines and autism. The reason: Most flu shots contain thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative that some suspect caused a huge rise in autism cases beginning in the 1990s.

Federal health authorities say science has ruled that out. But to be on the safe side, the U.S. Public Health Service — along with groups representing pediatricians and family doctors — urged manufacturers in 1999 to phase thimerosal out of childhood vaccines as soon as possible.

Most such vaccines are now thimerosal-free or contain trace amounts. An exception is the flu shot, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends for pregnant women and for infants 6 to 23 months old.

The counter-argument: Why take a risk when thimerosal-free shots are also available and cost just three or four dollars more? The CDC has declined to express a preference for those shots on the theory that there wouldn’t be enough to meet demand.

On Monday, as this column reported, a New Mexico pediatrician appeared before the state Board of Pharmacy to urge it to immediately warn residents that most flu shots do have mercury. He also wants the state ultimately to ban it from vaccines for kids and pregnant women, something six states have already done — with bans taking effect in future years. A dozen states are actively debating the issue.

The pediatrician, Dr. Ken Stoller, said the board decided to seek an advisory opinion from the New Mexico attorney general about its jurisdiction in the matter. It meets again in two months.

“The recent meeting was, I have to confess, a little disappointing from the standpoint of truth-in-labeling as set out in the New Mexico Drug Act,” Stoller wrote the board in a follow-up letter.

“I presented clear, accurate and precise information on how a preservative that contains the known neurotoxin, ethylmercury, exists in the flu and other vaccines at a level that exceeds several safety limits as set forth by more than one Federal agency.”

Perhaps because of the growing number of state bans — which mean, self-evidently, that they don’t want their children and pregnant women exposed to mercury in flu shots — the issue is percolating this year in a way that it simply hasn’t before.

In a Chicago Tribune piece titled, “A contradiction taints flu shots among infants,” writer Julie Deardorff said that as a mom, she was concerned that health experts are now recommending a shot that in most cases contains an ingredient they suggested removing six years ago.

“It was eliminated from nearly all vaccines with one exception: the flu vaccine. Now the academy (American Academy of Pediatrics) wants us to immunize infants with a vaccine that contains an ingredient that it suggests should be removed,” Deardorff wrote.

She quotes an Illinois AAP spokesman about the apparent contradiction:

“The amount (of thimerosal) in the multidose influenza vaccine (12.5 micrograms) is well below even the most conservative standards for mercury exposure. … There’s no evidence that thimerosal in vaccines is dangerous, and the benefits kids get from being protected against the flu are substantial.”

Still, it needs to be noted that the immunization schedule calls for two 12.5 microgram shots a month apart for the 6-to-23-month olds. That total of is the same amount that was in vaccines some parents believe triggered their child’s autism. And some of them believe in utero exposure to mercury via the pregnant mother might be the most dangerous exposure of all.

Directly to the north, a senior chemist at the University of Wisconsin has been trying to get the attention of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

“Unfortunately, in the 35 days that have passed since my original letter, thousands of Wisconsin’s most vulnerable citizens have been exposed

to this material (mercury in flu shots),” Michael Wagnitz wrote the department in a letter this week.

“As I explained in my original letter, liquid waste needs to go to a hazardous site if it contains more than 200 ppb mercury. Is it really

safe to inject people with a level of mercury 250 times higher than hazardous waste?

“What exactly is the (department) working on that is more important than stopping the injection of mercury directly into the bloodstreams of its

citizens? Could you give me some examples? Again, I ask that you issue an immediate mercury warning for pregnant women and infants who plan on getting the flu shot.”

This looks to be an issue that won’t go away.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Nov. 14, 2005 at 1:01 PM

A pediatrician had an appointment Monday with the New Mexico Board of Pharmacy to deliver a blunt message: Its members need to warn state residents that the mercury in flu shots could be harmful to children — or risk being remembered for failing to do their job.

The request by Dr. Kenneth Stoller, an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, opens a new front in an escalating war over the use of a mercury-based preservative in medical products. He is medical director of the Hyperbaric Medical Center of New Mexico and uses hyperbaric oxygen to treat autism.

Six states — including heavyweights New York, California and Illinois — have banned the preservative, called thimerosal, from vaccines intended for children and pregnant women. It has been voluntarily phased out of most childhood immunizations but remains in most flu shots.

The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes an outright ban, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declined to express a preference for the thimerosal-free version of the flu vaccine.

The dynamics are complicated, but the basic issue is whether it’s reasonable to fear that thimerosal might cause autism. Stoller says it is; the AAP and the CDC say it is not.

“There is an acute public health issue that very few understand even though several states have banned or limited the use of vaccines containing thimerosal,” says a copy of Stoller’s speech he provided Age of Autism. “In the months and years to come this iatrogenic (doctor-induced) poisoning of Americans and New Mexicans will be fully understood and what you decide to do here today will be noted in the not too distant future.

“We have a responsibility to perform here and the Board of Pharmacy has the regulatory power to perform it,” he said. “I am requesting that you issue an immediate advisory so that all New Mexicans who desire to receive the current flu vaccine receive information about what is being injected as there has been a labeling omission (violation). And lastly, I request that you prohibit the use of this flu vaccine that contains thimerosal to all pregnant woman and children under 50 pounds.”

Stoller’s concern is emphatically not shared by the physicians group, which has opposed such a ban in other states. Before New York Gov. George Pataki signed a thimerosal ban in August, a state chapter of the AAP urged its rejection.

“This bill, designed to protect individuals from alleged adverse effects of thimerosal which contains ethyl mercury, is completely unnecessary,” said the AAP statement. “To legislate based on fear and misinformation is an anathema to those of us who work tirelessly for the health and welfare of our communities.

“To enact this legislation implies that the vaccines that have virtually eradicated many diseases, constituting one of the greatest public health accomplishments of the past century, are dangerous. This bill denigrates our informed scientific and medical communities while supporting all of the anti-vaccine factions in our society. This legislation potentially jeopardizes our most vulnerable communities.”

The CDC says concerns about thimerosal have been allayed by numerous studies. “As the Institute of Medicine concluded in a recent report, the vast majority of studies, which have involved hundreds of thousands of children in a number of countries, have failed to find any association between exposure to thimerosal in vaccines and autism,” according to the CDC’s Web site.

Stoller said medical groups and the federal government are misguidedly trying to protect the childhood immunization program by defending mercury as a vaccine ingredient. He also said they are afraid of massive liability if a link is shown — some quarter-million Americans have been diagnosed with autism, 80 percent of them under 18.

Careers and credibility are at stake, he added.

“Their throwing sand in everyone’s face — to protect their jobs and their reputations and status — is interfering with getting these kids the help they need,” he charged. And thimerosal-containing flu shots will create more cases, he said.

Autism diagnoses increased dramatically over the past two decades at the same time that more vaccines containing thimerosal were added to the schedule. In 1999 the U.S. Public Health Service, the AAP and family physicians recommended that manufacturers phase out thimerosal in childhood vaccines as soon as possible.

Most flu shots, however, continue to contain a full dose of thimerosal. The CDC — which now recommends flu shots for pregnant women and infants 6 to 23 months old — has declined to express a preference for non-thimerosal flu shots out of what it says is concern that parents might be reluctant to vaccinate their children unless they can find it.

“Most New Mexicans haven’t received their flu vaccines yet,” Stoller told Age of Autism. “I’m asking them to issue an urgent advisory letting them know the danger and the risk of the thimerosal flu vaccine which accounts for about 90 percent of the flu vaccine in New Mexico and the United States.”

He said that while New Mexico has ordered some thimerosal-free vaccines for infants and pregnant women, private-practice physicians are likely to order the thimerosal-containing multiple-dose vials.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Nov. 10, 2005 at 10:46 AM

A small text block on the cover of the current Columbia Journalism Review may be a lot bigger than it looks:

“Drug Test. Q: Does thimerosal cause autism? A: The press says no; the facts say maybe.”

Thimerosal is the mercury preservative that was used in childhood vaccines; some parents and researchers blame it for an astonishing rise in autism diagnoses in the past decade, but the media has tended to treat the idea as dangerous, discredited “junk science.”

“Steeped in controversy and intrigue, the thimerosal debate has all the makings of a compelling news story, yet it has been approached with caution by the news media, which, more often than not, don’t portray it as a legitimate scientific debate,” writes CJR Assistant Editor Daniel Schulman in the accompanying article.

His closing line leaves no doubt that he thinks that’s a bad idea. “(W)ith science left to be done and scientists eager to do it, it seems too soon for the press to shut the door on the debate.”

To understand why that’s a big deal, consider two stories, both running Tuesday: one on the front page of The New York Times, the other leading the Health section of The Washington Post.

“5 Cases of Polio in Amish Group Raise New Fears” was the headline on the Times article by Gardiner Harris. He reported from Long Prairie, Minn., about the discovery of polio virus in an 8-year-old Amish child.

“(T)he girl is now a wellspring for polio, a modern-day Typhoid Mary who can pass it along to others,” Harris wrote. “Anyone who has not been vaccinated is vulnerable. And though vaccination rates in the United States are at historic highs, an increasing number of parents are resisting inoculations for their children, fearing that they may cause disorders like autism, a connection scientists have almost universally discounted.”

The Post article, by Sandra G. Boodman, was headlined “Feuding Over Vaccines/Doctors Vexed by Parents’ Refusal.” It, too, mentioned the concern that vaccines are linked to autism and quotes a doctor reassuring a patient that “multiple studies by prestigious groups have found no evidence that vaccines cause autism. … His equanimity in the face of what many pediatricians say are persistent myths that circulate on the Internet — that mercury used as a preservative in childhood vaccines causes autism, that the dangers of immunizations far outweigh the benefits, and that there is a conspiracy by drug companies, doctors and vaccine makers to conceal the harm — is not shared by other physicians.”

These two stories exactly illustrate Schulman’s point: that the media is dismissing the autism-thimerosal theory as almost universally discounted Internet mythology, right up there with conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine know-nothingism. Schulman’s valuable service is simply pointing out that, inconveniently, some thoroughly legitimate scientists still say, “Maybe.”

They include members of the epidemiology department at Columbia’s own Mailman School of Public Health. The department chair, Dr. Ezra Susser, wrote The Times in June to complain about a front-page piece that made parents and researchers who remain concerned thimerosal has caused autism look ridiculous.

“Scientists pursuing research on mercury and autism are caricaturized as immune to the ‘correct’ interpretation of existing studies,” Susser wrote. “Researchers rejecting a link are depicted as the sole voice of reason. … Whether mercury in any form (or any of several factors recently introduced to our environment) has anything to do with autism can and should be resolved with rigorous studies and respectful discourse, not moral indictments and denunciations.”

About that earlier Times article, Schulman writes in CJR: “Headlined ‘On Autism’s Cause, It’s Parents Vs. Research,’ the story cast the thimerosal connection as a fringe theory, without scientific merit, held aloft by angry, desperate parents. … Readers were left with little option but to believe that the case against thimerosal was scientifically unsound.”

The Times did not run Susser’s letter and did not change its approach — its ombudsman effectively told readers who complained to pound sand, and the report from Minnesota on polio and the Amish is more of the same. As is the Post’s lumping of the issue with conspiracies and coverup scenarios that only the most equanimous pediatricians could reasonably be expected to tolerate.

We should point out that Schulman mentions Age of Autism in the article. His thesis — that a careful reading of the facts suggests it’s too soon to close the door on thimerosal as the possible cause of a horrendous affliction — is one we have put forward since beginning this column at the start of the year.

But now that critique is coming not just from “angry, desperate parents” who need to calm down and stop endangering the rest of us, or the odd reporter who can be dismissed as biased or misguided, but from a respected peer and arbiter, the Columbia Journalism Review.

That’s a big deal. It’s the kind of thing that makes journalists stop and think — or ought to, anyway.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Nov. 8, 2005 at 11:45 AM

Susan Lynn would like some information, please: What is the autism rate among people living in the United States right now who have never been vaccinated? If you have that data or know where to find it, kindly contact her by the end of the month, care of the Tennessee House of Representatives, which is considering whether to ban a mercury preservative from childhood vaccines.

Lynn, a Republican member of the House, is sponsoring the bill. Lynn’s colleagues in the state Senate already have passed it — unanimously — despite protests from the American Academy of Pediatrics and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. The pediatricians and the renowned hospital say the mercury preservative, called thimerosal, is not dangerous and not linked to autism or any other ailment.

What bothers Lynn is they can’t tell her the autism rate in Americans who’ve never been vaccinated.

“It just occurred to us, why doesn’t there seem to be a problem (with autism) among unvaccinated populations?” she said. “Of course, that’s anecdotal. There hasn’t really been a study done, but it doesn’t seem that there is a problem among unvaccinated populations.

“It would certainly be wonderful if the federal government, or a group out there interested in this, would conduct a study, or maybe there already is information out there that can be gathered.”

Lynn’s question echoes one this column has been raising for several months — where are the studies that would exonerate thimerosal by demonstrating that unvaccinated Americans have just as much autism as those who received the full slate of state-mandated, mercury-containing childhood immunizations?

“You have to ask yourself why are there no studies,” Lynn said. “We have seen an explosion in autism. If we saw increases in any other disease like we’ve seen in autism, it would be a national crisis. Why is there no funding to investigate this?

“I think it would be very useful. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get that data by December when our study committee meets again. But gosh, if you could be any help. … “

This column’s admittedly anecdotal reporting has turned up what looks like a lower prevalence of autism among the mostly unvaccinated Amish in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Federal health experts say that is not a good group to study because they might be protected from autism by their isolated gene pool.

They have not suggested an alternative.

There are other, less genetically similar groups that don’t vaccinate based on their religious, philosophical or health views. An example: a significant subset of the 2 million children of families who homeschool. One doctor who treats such families says they have almost no autism, either.

A number of readers have offered similar observations about a number of other groups. But none of it is scientific or conclusive and, unless such studies are done, it never will be.

“We’d definitely want to look at a population within the United States of America because that’s most relevant to us,” Lynn said. “When you start looking at populations from other countries, you’ve got all kinds of other factors that we can’t imagine.”

Lynn said that absent such convincing information, she is willing to err on the side of caution and ban thimerosal from childhood vaccines.

“I read the science and read the experience of these parents and I realized, you know what, there really could be something here. And thimerosal is a poison. There is a skull and crossbones on that bottle. There’s no reason to have that in there — so let’s take it out.”

Lynn’s interest in the issue stems from personal experience. Her son, Michael, was diagnosed with ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — at age 3; their doctor said they would have to wait till he was 6 to put him on Ritalin.

“I said why wait? I’m going crazy,” she recounted. Researching the subject on her own, she came across the controversial Feingold Diet that eliminates various foods including those with artificial colors, flavors or preservatives. “I put him on the diet 100 percent and in three days, to my own astonishment, I had a normal little boy.

“I was at my doctor when I showed him Michael could now sit still on the examining table instead of being under it and in all the drawers and everything. And I was totally dismissed. So we just agreed to disagree.

“Through the years I have given this information to a lot of parents and it’s worked, it’s helped them,” Lynn said. “I realized there is a tremendous amount we don’t know and there is a tremendous amount that doctors for whatever reason dismiss, even though parents will testify to them, ‘This has helped my child.’”

Michael spent 10 years on the diet and now, at 21, is doing fine, Lynn said. When the controversy over a possible thimerosal-autism link arose, she learned that some scientists suspect ADHD and autism might be on opposite ends of a spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders triggered by a toxic exposure. And she said she saw the same pattern of parents being ignored when they said their child had regressed after vaccination — and in some cases improved dramatically after biomedical treatment.

In 1999 the U.S. Public Health Service and the pediatricians group urged that manufacturers phase out thimerosal in childhood vaccines as soon as possible. But they say scientific evidence now shows thimerosal is not responsible for autism; therefore, banning it ties their hands unnecessarily and injects politics in a medical decision based on “junk science.”

Lynn says she can’t understand that argument. “I think it would be the best public policy for the state of Tennessee to remove it from children’s immunizations. Whether or not it does contribute to mercury toxicity or autism or whatever you want to call it, not giving tiny children and newborn babies a chemical that has a skull and crossbones on the bottle, injected directly into their bloodstream, can’t be a bad thing.”

Lynn also questions whether thimerosal is actually out of all routine childhood immunizations (it remains in most flu vaccines, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends for pregnant women and for infants 6 to 23 months old).

She said a Tennessee mother testified at a legislative hearing that her son received an immunization that contained thimerosal on May, 21, 2004. “He suffered immediate effects from that and was diagnosed with autism and he’s being treated now and he is coming around,” Lynn said.

Six states — including California, New York and Illinois — have banned thimerosal in childhood vaccines. Lynn said she is now canvassing them to determine whether the ban has caused problems.

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Nov. 5, 2005 at 8:00 PM

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 (UPI) — What do the experts say about the idea that genes could explain a lower rate of autism among the Amish? Well, two noted medical geneticists say it’s entirely possible.

One of them, in fact, has identified another brain disorder that has a lower incidence among the Amish — and even the gene she believes helps protect them from it.

“It’s like a ‘founder effect’ — where you’re tracing back a whole large number of people to a few ancestors,” Margaret A. Pericak-Vance, director of the Duke University Center for Human Genetics, told Age of Autism. “So if those ancestors do not carry the genes responsible for a particular phenotype (trait), then yes, you’d be less likely to see it.”

We asked Pericak-Vance and a second expert, Dr. Anne Spence of the University of California-Irvine, about the possible role of genes because we found what seems to be a lower prevalence of autism among the Amish. There has been no formal study of the Amish autism rate, but doctors who treat them say autism is very rare. The two experts were recommended by the American Society of Human Genetics, the nation’s primary professional group.

“Could you have an effect which would mean fewer of the genes that I’m personally convinced are important in autism were drawn into this population by the founder?” asked Spence. “I would say yes, that is certainly a possibility.”

Pericak-Vance studied dementia in an Amish group and reported — in a paper published in the journal Annals of Neurology in 1996 — that it is less common than in the outside Caucasian population. She found they also have a lower incidence of a gene called APO-E4.

That gene is associated with Alzheimer’s disease; in fact, “it’s the one risk factor that’s been confirmed in thousands of studies worldwide,” Pericak-Vance said.

Her deduction: Because the Amish she studied have less APO-E4, they have a lower incidence of dementia; her findings have “just recently confirmed in some updated data we have with the Amish population.

“So the answer to your general question is yes. It could be the founders of the Amish community you’re looking at didn’t have any of the risk or susceptibility genes for autism.”

It’s unclear what role APO-E4 might play in triggering Alzheimer’s, Pericak-Vance said. Both she and Spence said they don’t see evidence that the gene is linked to autism.

“I am not aware of any report ever correlating APO-E4 with autism,” Spence said. “Nor is there any evidence of tangles or placks or any of those things in the brains of these kids.”

Both said that whatever susceptibility genes are involved in autism, an environmental trigger might be needed to activate them in at least some cases.

“Gene-environment interaction could play a huge role in complex traits, and that in fact is what we think is going on,” Pericak-Vance said. “For example, the APO-E4 gene is common in the population but not everyone who has it has Alzheimer’s. It’s obviously other genes (as well) or something going on in the environment that makes people at higher risk.”

Spence said the role of genes in autism is the subject of ongoing controversy and uncertainty but that answers are coming.

“People will argue how much the genes contribute in autism. I continue to contend that as long as we say “autism is,” and we don’t say “autisms are,” we’re deluding ourselves. I believe there have to be etiologically a lot of disorders under that broad umbrella that we call the diagnosis of autism and autism spectrum.

“Some of those kids (cases) may be absolutely nothing but genes, and some may have very little to do with it, and lots of people in the mix in the middle. Some genes are very important. I cannot name them for you. I wish I could.”

By DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor   |   Oct. 29, 2005 at 2:34 PM

A specter is haunting the medical and journalism establishments of the United States: Where are the unvaccinated people with autism?

That is just about the only way to explain what now appears to be a collective resistance to considering that question. And like all unanswered questions, this raises another one: Why?

What is the problem with quickly and firmly establishing that the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated? Wouldn’t that stop all the scientifically illiterate chatter by parents who believe vaccinations made their children autistic? Wouldn’t it put to rest concerns that — despite the removal of a mercury-containing preservative in most U.S. vaccines — hundreds of millions of children in the developing world are possibly at risk if that preservative is in fact linked to autism?

Calling this issue The Amish Elephant reflects reporting earlier this year in Age of Autism that the largely unvaccinated Amish may have a relatively low rate of autism. That apparent dissimilarity is, in effect, a proverbial elephant in the living room — studiously ignored by people who don’t want to deal with it and don’t believe they will have to.

Here are a few cases in point.

Earlier this month the National Consumers League conference in Washington held a session on communicating issues around vaccine safety. I was on the panel and talked about the Amish and autism. In the Q&A; session that followed, the first question was for me.

“Is this a proper role for a journalist, or is this just a straw dog set up there with a preliminary answer? It not only showed up where you wrote it. It was all over the place. You did very, very well for UPI (at which point I said, ‘Thank you — please tell my bosses that!’) but the question is, did you do very, very well for America?

“Is it appropriate for a journalist — you weren’t reporting, you were investigating. And I just wonder if you think it’s an appropriate role for you to play.”

My answer: “There’s different roles for the press. That’s certainly a reasonable question. That is investigative reporting. This idea is something that’s already been discarded — that there’s any reason why you would want to look in an unvaccinated population.

“One of my favorite comments about journalism is that it’s the wild card of American democracy. The First Amendment says we can do (in the sense of reporting about) whatever we want. So one of our privileges is to get an idea in our head and go look at it.”

My questioner was not finished. “I wasn’t questioning whether you have a First Amendment right to do it. I think this is more of a question of the ethics, of what value we are bringing to the debate.”

My response: “That’s probably not a good one for me to answer. Obviously I thought it was ethical.”

At that point a fellow panelist, Dr. Louis Cooper, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a staunch vaccine defender, spoke up. “I would jump in and say I thought it was ethical and I think it was useful,” said Cooper, a courtly and unfailingly courteous Manhattan pediatrician.

“As you’ve learned, it was annoying to many people. I wasn’t annoyed by it because I thought you kept the process and the debate and the discussion going forward. And we have to do that for one another.”

That did not end the discussion. A few minutes later a public-health professor from — where else? Harvard — did her own version of Jeopardy!, offering the correct “answer” in the form of a question.

“This question is for Dan. Did you mention the outbreak of polio that happened in the Amish community in the Netherlands that caused widespread problems there, and also the fact that there’d been some context with respect to history in our country in trying to reach out to the Amish to actually encourage them to try to benefit from some of the vaccine technology to the extent that we could?

“So there’s been a long history in this country of the CDC trying to reach out to them to the extent that they could. Also with respect to polio, I think what’s really amazing is it’s such a great story, this is such an exciting time, in the sense that we are very close to global eradication. What that means is we’ve gone from 1988 when we had 350,000 estimated paralytic polio cases in the world every year to roughly a thousand. It’s very exciting that in fact we don’t have the terror or the hysteria and all of the fear that surrounded disease.

“I just want to remind everyone that one thing that’s very important in the context of reporting these stories is making sure that people do remember and also realize with infectious disease is these things can come back, and until they are eradicated they can come back and devastate us just as much as they did before, except now there are a lot more people.

“There’s some related news that people might find interesting. A headline in the Washington Post today, ‘Polio outbreak occurs among Amish families.’ So I thought people might be interested in that.”

At that point the moderator, Dr. Roger Bernier of the Centers for Disease Control, said time was getting short — why was I not surprised? — and asked for the next “question.”

One thing I’ve noticed is the more that people want to lecture instead of learn, the more they speak in breathless run-on sentences that are hard to stop, slow down or even diagram. They leave one with the unspoken idea that dialogue — opening the door to new information — is somehow dangerous.

These exchanges reminded me of the response I got from Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC director, when I asked her this summer, verbatim: “Has the government ever looked at the autism rate in an unvaccinated U.S. population, and if not, why not?”

Her answer, verbatim:

—

In this country, we have very high levels of vaccination as you probably know, and I think this year we have record immunization levels among all of our children, so to (select an unvaccinated group) that on a population basis would be representative to look at incidence in that population compared to the other population would be something that could be done.

But as we’re learning, just trying to look at autism in a community the size of Atlanta, it’s very, very difficult to get an effective numerator and denominator to get a reliable diagnosis.

I think those kind of studies could be done and should be done. You’d have to adjust for the strong genetic component that also distinguishes, for example, people in Amish communities who may elect not to be immunized (and) also have genetic connectivity that would make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the United States. So drawing some conclusions from them would be very difficult.

I think with reference to the timing of all of this, good science does take time, and it’s part of one of the messages I feel like I’ve learned from the feedback that we’ve gotten from parents groups this summer (in) struggling with developing a more robust and a faster research agenda, is let’s speed this up. Let’s look for the early studies that could give us at least some hypotheses to test and evaluate and get information flowing through the research pipeline as quickly as we can.

So we are committed to doing that, and as I mentioned, in terms of just measuring the frequency of autism in the population some pretty big steps have been taken. We’re careful not to jump ahead of our data, but we think we will be able to provide more accurate information in the next year or so than we’ve been able to do up to this point. And I know that is our responsibility.

We’ve also benefited from some increased investments in these areas that have allowed us to do this, and so we thank Congress and we thank the administration for supporting those investments, not just at CDC but also at NIH and FDA.

—

The latest response to my pesky persistence comes not from academia or government but from my own profession. Last week the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review published an article whose main thrust — with which I concur — was that a vigorous debate over a possible link between vaccines and autism was being thwarted by the self-induced timidity of the press.

Some reporters told the author, Daniel Schulman, that they have basically given up on the story because the criticism — some of it from their own editors — was so fierce, and the story was so complicated.

Schulman described Age of Autism’s efforts to come at the issue “sideways,” looking for possible clues to the cause of the disorder in the natural history of autism. And he mentioned our reporting on the Amish:

“Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing, Olmsted’s reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply reflect genetic differences among an isolated gene pool. … Both reporters believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions.”

Ouch. Being slammed by one’s peers is never enjoyable, although reporters need to have thick skins and realize they dish this kind of thing out every day. (And those anonymous sources really are annoying, especially when I am happy to be quoted by name about everything.)

What’s interesting about the reporters’ “private” remarks is the degree of presumed expertise they suggest — that looking at the Amish is misguided “since it may simply reflect genetic differences among an isolated gene pool.” Really? Where did these guys get their doctorate in genetics, Harvard?

This assertion — that the Amish gene pool could explain everything, based on no data that I’m aware of — is the kind of self-interested speculation masquerading as expertise that has beset the autism-vaccines discussion for far too long. The term I learned for it long ago is “convenient reasoning,” and it does not always have to be conscious.

The Amish have all kinds of standard genetic mental and developmental disorders — from bipolar to retardation — and a lot more genetic issues to boot from this supposedly protective “isolated gene pool.” The doctors who actually know something about the Amish have never suggested to me that genes have anything to do with a low rate of autism. They seem perplexed.

In upcoming columns, we’ll put that question to the right people — geneticists — and tell you what we find. It’s called reporting.