Court To Hear About Vaccine Side Effects
March 10, 2010
Associated Press
The Supreme Court will decide whether drug makers can be sued by parents who claim their children suffered serious health problems from vaccines.
The justices on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from parents in Pittsburgh who want to sue Wyeth over the serious side effects their daughter, six months old at the time, allegedly suffered as a result of the company’s diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled against Robalee and Russell Bruesewitz, saying a 1986 federal law bars their claims.
That law set up a special vaccine court to handle disputes as part of its aim of insuring a stable vaccine supply by shielding companies from most lawsuits.
Wyeth, now owned by Pfizer, Inc., prevailed at the appeals court but also joined in asking the court to hear the case, saying it presents an important and recurring legal issue that should be resolved.
The Obama administration joined the parties in calling for high court review, although the government takes the side of the manufacturers.
Only one state appeals court, the Georgia Supreme Court, has ruled that families can sue in a vaccine case. The vaccine industry has fiercely opposed the Georgia ruling in the case of Marcelo and Carolyn Ferrari. They claim their son suffered neurological damage after receiving vaccine booster shots made by pharmaceutical companies Wyeth and GlaxoSmithKline that contained the preservative thimerosal.
The family has since withdrawn its lawsuit, possibly in an effort to avoid an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling, although the Georgia court’s opinion allowing similar lawsuits remains in force.
The court did not act on the companies’ appeal Monday, but the decision in the other case almost certainly will apply to the Georgia case.
According to the lawsuit, Hannah Bruesewitz was a healthy infant until she received the vaccine in April 1992. Within hours of getting the DPT shot, the third in a series of five, the baby suffered a series of debilitating seizures. Now a teenager, Hannah suffers from residual seizure disorder, the suit says.
The vaccine court earlier rejected the family’s claims.
Wyeth lost another high court fight last year over whether federal law barred lawsuits against drug makers. That case, involving a botched injection, asked whether federal law included an implicit prohibition on the lawsuits. The court said it did not.
In this appeal, however, Congress clearly laid out how claims over vaccines were to be made, and the court has repeatedly ruled against plaintiffs when Congress has explicitly sought to bar lawsuits.
Other than the Georgia court, state and federal courts have uniformly invoked a provision of the 1986 federal law, which seems to bar most lawsuits against vaccine makers.
The idea behind the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was to ensure a stable supply of childhood vaccines by shielding drug makers from most lawsuits, and setting up a federal vaccine court to handle disputes. The law would serve to block state laws that otherwise would give families the ability to sue the manufacturers.
In recent years, the legal fight has frequently come from families of autistic children claiming that mercury-based thimerosal is linked to autism. Numerous studies have addressed vaccines and autism and found no link, including with the preservative.
Thimerosal has been removed in recent years from standard childhood vaccines, except flu vaccines that are not packaged in single doses.
Last year, special masters appointed by the vaccine court concluded that vaccines aren’t to blame for autism, disappointing thousands of families hoping to win compensation and others who remain convinced of a connection.
But the vaccine court still must rule on additional cases that argue that vaccines with thimerosal are to blame, if the mercury reached and damaged brain cells.
The case, to be argued in the fall, is Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 09-152.
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Jenny McCarthy in the Center of the Autism Debate
March 2, 2010
Time
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
In person, surprisingly, Jenny McCarthy comes across as corn-fed cute rather than overwhelmingly beautiful. She has a common touch, and a woman even slightly more beautiful would struggle to connect as she does. When McCarthy meets a mom, when she spits forth a stream of profanity and common sense — the foulmouthed comedian from Chicago never far from the surface — she is there as a mother, not as a celebrity or starlet. That’s what got her there, but that’s not who she is once she’s there. She speaks to so many frustrated, despairing mothers of autistic children because she is plausible, authentic. If you needed a woman to bring hope to these mothers, you couldn’t ask for better casting than Jenny McCarthy.
We are sitting around a sushi-laden coffee table in the Sherman Oaks, Calif., headquarters of Generation Rescue, the autism advocacy group she heads. It’s a gray, one-story house with white trim and a picket-fence-enclosed yard, across the street from the home she lived in for four years with her son Evan, 7, and John Asher, who is her ex-husband and Evan’s father. She has converted the house into a state-of-the-art school for very young autistic kids, an intensive early-intervention program called the Teach2Talk Academy. The school is a model in many ways, not least because of its 1-to-1 teacher-student ratio and sparkling facilities. It’s the kind of place she was desperate to get Evan into when he was first diagnosed with autism in 2005. (See TIME’s photo-essay “A Journey into the World of Autism.”)
The lacerating pilgrimage that parents of autistic children know all too well, lugging their child from specialist to specialist, from program to program, seeking help, answers, a cure — catalyzed her mission. First McCarthy was a mother “finding a window” into her son. Then she became a mother who felt she needed to tell other mothers how she found that window. Those mothers have become her flock. She greets them all, here in Sherman Oaks, on her way through airport terminals, in restaurants, on talk-show sets; she will stop, nod, listen, proffer advice, give a phone number and tell these mothers, these families, to never give up hope. “Hope is the greatest thing for moms of autism,” McCarthy says. “Hope is what gets us out of bed in the morning. I’m on a mission to tell parents that there is a way.” (See Karl Taro Greenfeld’s story about growing old with autism.)
McCarthy’s way, however, is one that flies in the face of all credible research on what does and does not cause autism and whether it can be treated. McCarthy claims Evan was healed through a range of experimental and unproved biomedical treatments; even more controversially, she blames the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine for giving her son autism. And yet research conclusively shows that vaccines are safe for children; just last month, the U.K. scientist who had published a study linking the MMR shot to autism was found by a British medical panel to have acted unethically. McCarthy says she does not believe all vaccines are bad — though she swears she will never allow Evan to receive another — nor is she saying you shouldn’t vaccinate your child. Her position is more slippery but just as heretical to prevailing medical wisdom: do everything necessary to cure your child, no matter what the doctors tell you.
This message has won her a wide audience, based on her three best-selling books on autism. She has just completed shooting the pilot for a daytime talk show for Oprah Winfrey’s TV network to begin airing later this year — which will be, she promises, yet another platform for her message. But her profile has also made her, among pediatricians, other doctors and many parents, a deeply polarizing figure. Though close to 80% of American children receive the standard battery of vaccinations, skepticism about their safety remains widespread, in part because of the antiscientific clamor of the McCarthy camp. Enough parents are refusing to vaccinate that some long-dormant maladies, like measles and meningitis, have re-emerged. Nonvaccination rates among kindergartners in some California counties have been reported at 10%. To McCarthy’s opponents, from the public-health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the pediatricians of the American Academy of Pediatrics, this makes McCarthy much worse than a crank: she’s a menace to public health. (See six tips for traveling with an autistic child.)
But she can’t be ignored. If the debate about vaccine safety is settled — vaccines don’t cause autism; they don’t injure children; they are the pillar of modern public health — then why are so many parents reconsidering vaccinating their children? The answer has to do with our era’s strained relationship with scientific truth, our tendency to place more faith in psychological truths than scientific ones. McCarthy’s emergence — the Playmate turned pseudoscientist, the fart-joke teller cum mother warrior — can make one feel nostalgic for the time when celebs turned up on talk shows only to hawk their flicks or books, not to promote explosive public-health ideas. But McCarthy says she is speaking the truth — her truth.
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Another Drug for Socializing of Autistic Children
February 15th, 2010
ABC News
By John Gever
Social function improved in autism-spectrum patients treated with the hormone oxytocin, according to a small study.
Following oxytocin inhalation, adults with Asperger’s syndrome or high-functioning autism were more inclined to play with the most socially responsive partner in a video ball game, reported Angela Sirigu of the CNRS lab in Bron, France, and colleagues.
Also, when participants were shown pictures of human faces, they were more likely to focus attention on the eyes, an important marker of social interaction, the researchers found.
These behaviors are important markers of social function, Sirigu and colleagues explained in their report, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study compared the effects of oxytocin in 13 individuals with autism-spectrum symptoms. Another 13 age- and sex-matched normal controls also played the video ball game without oxytocin.
“Under oxytocin, patients respond more strongly to others and exhibit more appropriate social behavior and affect, suggesting a therapeutic potential of oxytocin through its action on a core dimension,” the researchers asserted.
Oxytocin is best known for its actions in prompting childbirth and lactation, but it is also produced throughout life. Previous research has suggested roles for the hormone in emotional regulation and social behaviors. One study found that inhaled oxytocin made adults more trusting of others in a game situation.
Some investigators have also found that oxytocin levels are depressed in autistic individuals. One of the hallmark symptoms of autism is social withdrawal and impaired responsiveness to other people, marked by such behaviors as greatly diminished eye contact.
Participants in the study were 17 to 39 years old, with an average age of 26. Ten had received clinical diagnoses of Asperger’s syndrome, and three were considered to have high-functioning autism.
Patients received either a nasal spray containing oxytocin or an ineffective dummy nasal spray and participated in behavioral experiments 50 minutes later. In the video ball game, participants played a game of toss-and-catch with three cartoon characters whose interaction with the player could vary. Initially, each character sent the ball to the player 33 percent of the time, passing it between themselves the rest of the time. After awhile, the percentages changed such that one character would send the player the ball 70 percent of the time, the second sent 30 percent of balls to the player, and the third sent just 10 percent of balls to the player. The player was promised a payment for each ball he or she received.
Click here for the full report
Reclassifying Mental Disorders
February 15, 2010
The New York Times
By Benedict Carey
Far fewer children would get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “Binge eating disorder” and “hypersexuality” might become part of the everyday language. And the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated would be sharply revised. These are a few of the changes proposed on Tuesday by doctors charged with revising psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders, the guidebook that largely determines where society draws the line between normal and not normal, between eccentricity and illness, between self-indulgence and self-destruction — and, by extension, when and how patients should be treated.
The eagerly awaited revisions — to be published, if adopted, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due in 2013 — would be the first in a decade.
For months they have been the subject of intense speculation and lobbying by advocacy groups, and some proposed changes have already been widely discussed — including folding the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome into a broader category, autism spectrum disorder.
But others, including a proposed alternative for bipolar disorder in many children, were unveiled on Tuesday. Experts said the recommendations, posted online at DSM5.org for public comment, could bring rapid change in several areas.
“Anything you put in that book, any little change you make, has huge implications not only for psychiatry but for pharmaceutical marketing, research, for the legal system, for who’s considered to be normal or not, for who’s considered disabled,” said Dr. Michael First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who edited the fourth edition of the manual but is not involved in the fifth.
“And it has huge implications for stigma,” Dr. First continued, “because the more disorders you put in, the more people get labels, and the higher the risk that some get inappropriate treatment.”
One significant change would be adding a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it.
The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes.
“The treatment of bipolar disorder is meds first, meds second and meds third,” said Dr. Jack McClellan, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington who is not working on the manual. “Whereas if these kids have a behavior disorder, then behavioral treatment should be considered the primary treatment.”
Some diagnoses of bipolar disorder have been in children as young as 2, and there have been widespread reports that doctors promoting the diagnosis received consulting and speaking fees from the makers of the drugs.
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia, said he and his colleagues on the panel working on the manual “wanted to come up with a diagnosis that captures the behavioral disturbance and mood upset, and hope the people contemplating a diagnosis of bipolar for these patients would think again.”
Experts gave the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the manual, predictably mixed reviews. Some were relieved that the task force working on the manual — which includes neurologists and psychologists as well as psychiatrists — had revised the previous version rather than trying to rewrite it.
Others criticized the authors, saying many diagnoses in the manual would still lack a rigorous scientific basis.
The good news, said Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry who has been critical of the manual, is that most patients will be spared the confusion of a changed diagnosis. But “the bad news,” he added, “is that the scientific status of the main diseases in previous editions of the D.S.M. — the keystones of the vault of psychiatry — is fragile.”
To more completely characterize all patients, the authors propose using measures of severity, from mild to severe, and ratings of symptoms, like anxiety, that are found as often with personality disorders as with depression.
“In the current version of the manual, people either meet the threshold by having a certain number of symptoms, or they don’t,” said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, the psychiatric association’s research director and, with Dr. David J. Kupfer of the University of Pittsburgh, the co-chairman of the task force. “But often that doesn’t fit reality. Someone with schizophrenia might have symptoms of insomnia, of anxiety; these aren’t the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, but they affect the patient’s life, and we’d like to have a standard way of measuring them.”
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. Regier, Dr. Kupfer and several other members of the task force outlined their favored revisions. The task force favored making semantic changes that some psychiatrists have long argued for, trading the term “mental retardation” for “intellectual disability,” for instance, and “substance abuse” for “addiction.”
One of the most controversial proposals was to identify “risk syndromes,” that is, a risk of developing a disorder like schizophrenia or dementia. Studies of teenagers identified as at high risk of developing psychosis, for instance, find that 70 percent or more in fact do not come down with the disorder.
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Age of Mother Affects Child’s Autism Risk
February 8th, 2010
reuters.com
They found that a 40-year-old woman’s risk of having a child later diagnosed with autism was 50 percent greater than that of a woman between 25 and 29.
But being an older father — 40 or older — only contributes significantly to autism risk when the mother is under 30.
“The older the mother, the more the risk that the child will develop autism, regardless of whether the father is young or old,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto of the University of California Davis MIND Institute, who worked on the study published in the journal Autism Research.
The findings contradict a 2006 study of children born in Israel that suggested paternal age played a much larger role.
“There has been a debate over whether it is maternal or paternal risk. A lot of people were thinking it’s not really mom’s age,” Hertz-Picciotto said in a telephone interview.
Researchers and policymakers are increasingly looking for causes to explain the growing numbers of children diagnosed with autism, which affects 1 percent of U.S. children.
There is no cure for autism, a spectrum of diseases ranging from severe and profound inability to communicate and mental retardation to relatively mild symptoms such as with Asperger’s syndrome.
The current study, which incorporates data on 4.9 million births and 12,159 autism cases in California, helps to clarify the contribution of age from both parents.
“We have such a very large database we were really able to disentangle the mother’s age very well,” Hertz-Picciotto said. This can be a challenge because older mothers and fathers tend to have children together.
“We found it does vary for the father, but not for the mother,” she said.
For example, among babies born to mothers under 25, children whose father was over 40 were twice as likely to develop autism as those whose father was between 25 and 29.
This could be because when both parents are older, the risk conferred by the father is outweighed by the risk from the mother, Hertz-Picciotto said.
OLDER PARENTS
She said the point of the study is not to blame parents, but to gain clues about what is going on in older parents that could increase a child’s risk of developing autism.
Older parents, for example, are more likely to have infertility problems and have used fertility treatments; the mothers are more likely to have autoimmune conditions, including gestational diabetes; and both have accumulated more toxins over their lifetimes, so the sperm and egg are more likely to have some changes that could increase risk.
“We see these age findings as clues for where to look next,” Hertz-Picciotto said.
Autism researchers are looking at a broad range of potential environmental factors, including household products, medical treatments, diet, food supplements and infections.
And the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the National Institutes of Health, is looking at potential genetic causes of autism and has plans to sequence the entire genomes of hundreds of children and their parents to gain a better understanding of the role genes play.
Click here for the full report
Major Celebrities Backing up Dr. Wakefield, Fighting Against Vaccines
February 8, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
When it comes to vaccines, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey get it. They see how the pharma industry is engineering a campaign to silence Dr. Andrew Wakefield in order to suppress the publication of startling new evidence linking vaccines to severe neurological damage.
At great risk to their professional careers, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have found the courage to dare to tell the truth about vaccines and autism. Despite the vicious attacks by the pro-vaccine zealots who will stop at nothing to destroy anyone who challenges conventional vaccine mythology, McCarthy and Carrey have issued a powerful, inspired statement that reveals the truth behind the Big Pharma smear campaign that is intent on destroying the reputation of Dr. Andrew Wakefield before he can publish the final results of this important new study.
NaturalNews reprints that statement here, unedited:
A statement from Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey
Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being discredited to prevent an historic study from being published that for the first time looks at vaccinated versus unvaccinated primates and compares health outcomes, with potentially devastating consequences for vaccine makers and public health officials.
It is our most sincere belief that Dr. Wakefield and parents of children with autism around the world are being subjected to a remarkable media campaign engineered by vaccine manufacturers reporting on the retraction of a paper published in The Lancet in 1998 by Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues.
The retraction from The Lancet was a response to a ruling from England’s General Medical Council, a kangaroo court where public health officials in the pocket of vaccine makers served as judge and jury. Dr. Wakefield strenuously denies all the findings of the GMC and plans a vigorous appeal.
Despite rampant misreporting, Dr. Wakefield’s original paper (http://www.generationrescue.org/pdf…) regarding 12 children with severe bowel disease and autism never rendered any judgment whatsoever on whether or not vaccines cause autism, and The Lancet’s retraction gets us no closer to understanding this complex issue.
Dr. Wakefield is one of the world’s most respected and well-published gastroenterologists. He has published dozens of papers (http://www.thoughtfulhouse.org/publ…) since 1998 in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals all over the world. His work documenting the bowel disease of children with autism and his exploration of novel ways to treat bowel disease has helped relieve the pain and suffering of thousands of children with autism.
For the past decade, parents in our community have been clamoring for a relatively simple scientific study that could settle the debate over the possible role of vaccines in the autism epidemic once and for all: compare children who have been vaccinated with children who have never received any vaccines and see if the rate of autism is different or the same.
Few people are aware that this extremely important work has not only begun, but that a study using an animal model has already been completed exploring this topic in great detail.
Dr. Wakefield is the co-author, along with eight other distinguished scientists from institutions like the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Washington, of a set of studies that explore the topic of vaccinated versus unvaccinated neurological outcomes using monkeys.
The first phase of this monkey study was published three months ago in the prestigious medical journal Neurotoxicology, and focused on the first two weeks of life when the vaccinated monkeys received a single vaccine for Hepatitis B, mimicking the U.S. vaccine schedule. The results, which you can read for yourself here (http://fourteenstudies.org/pdf/prim…), were disturbing. Vaccinated monkeys, unlike their unvaccinated peers, suffered the loss of many reflexes that are critical for survival.
Dr. Wakefield and his scientific colleagues are on the brink of publishing their entire study, which followed the monkeys through the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule over a multi-year period. It is our understanding that the difference in outcome for the vaccinated monkeys versus the unvaccinated controls is both stark and devastating.
There is no question that the publication of the monkey study will lend substantial credibility to the theory that over-vaccination of young children is leading to neurological damage, including autism. The fallout from the study for vaccine makers and public health officials could be severe. Having denied the possibility of the vaccine-autism connection for so long while profiting immensely from a recent boom in vaccine sales around the world, it’s no surprise that they would seek to repress this important work.
Behind the scenes, the pressure to keep the work of Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues from being published is immense, and growing every day. Medical journals take extreme risk of backlash in publishing any studies that question the safety of the vaccination program, no matter how well-designed and thorough the research might be. Neurotoxicology, a highly-respected medical journal, deserves great credit for courageously publishing the first phase of this vaccinated monkey study.
The press has been deeply misled in the way The Lancet retraction, and Dr. Wakefield’s mock trial, have been characterized. Led by the pharmaceutical companies and their well-compensated spokespeople, Dr. Wakefield is being vilified through a well-orchestrated smear campaign designed to prevent this important new work from seeing the light of day.
What medical journal would want to step in front of this freight train? Moreover, why now, after 12 years of inaction, did The Lancet and GMC suddenly act? Is it coincidence that the monkey study is currently being submitted to medical journals for review and publication?
We urge the media to take a close look at the first phase of the monkey study discussed above and to start asking a very simple question: What was the final outcome of the 14 primates that were vaccinated using the U.S. vaccine schedule and how did that compare to the unvaccinated controls?
The U.S. vaccine schedule has grown from 10 vaccines given to our children in the 1980s to 36 today, perfectly matching the dramatic rise in autism. The work of Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues deserves to be shared with the world to further, rather than censor, scientific progress.
Click here for the full report.
Big Pharma Attacks on Doctors Claiming Vaccines Cause Autism
February 5, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
When I saw The Lancet’s recent retraction of Dr. Wakefield’s famous paper linking vaccines to autism, I couldn’t help thinking back to 1989 when Fleischmann and Pons were widely attacked and discredit over their demonstration of cold fusion technology. These two brilliant physicists had accomplished the seemingly impossible: They had caused fusion to take place at low temperatures, producing both excess heat energy as well as the helium artifacts proving that low-energy nuclear reactions had taken place.
The conventional physics community went berserk. They attacked Fleischmann and Pons relentlessly, attempting to destroy their character and any scientific credibility they might have held. They paraded a gang of “hot fusion” scientists through the mainstream media, telling everyone it was “impossible” to create nuclear fusion at tabletop temperatures. Through a repetition of lies, they convinced the world that Fleischmann and Pons were frauds.
Hot fusion, you see, is big business. Big money. Billions of dollars have been thrown at hot fusion, and the careers and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people depend on it. By demonstrating that cold fusion really worked, Fleischmann and Pons were threatening an entire industry. That industry had no choice but to do everything possible to destroy the scientists. Truth be damned… this was all about politics and profits!
Fast forward 20 years and guess what? Cold fusion is being replicated in laboratories all around the world. Even the U.S. Navy is now deeply engaged in the research, and it is recreating cold fusion experiments on a routine basis.
Cold fusion, it turns out, is indeed quite real. Fleischmann and Pons were right. The conventional scientific community was wrong. And yet they got away with destroying the reputations of these scientists because the media bought their lies hook, line and sinker. To this day, supposed “intelligent” scientists and doctors still stupidly believe that cold fusion was a hoax.
Big Pharma destroys Dr. Wakefield
Today, the same tactics of disinformation and truth destruction are now being leveled against Dr. Wakefield, the courageous scientist who was the first to prove that vaccines were linked to autism. For the last twelve years, his research provided ammunition for opponents of mandatory vaccinations — people who were concerned about the safety of injecting synthetic chemicals and methyl mercury into the bodies of infants.
The truth was getting out and vaccine skeptics were winning the information war. The H1N1 vaccination campaign was a complete failure — 80% of Americans rejected the recent H1N1 vaccine, for example. Drug companies needed to shut down the opposition as quickly as possible and put a lid on any resistance to mass vaccinations. The whole future of profits for Big Pharma, after all, depends on the public accepting more and more vaccines for “preventive” medicine. This means you get vaccinated for all sorts of things that you don’t have and may never get. The vaccines are sold to people as a kind of chemical-based health insurance program.
To ensure the profitability of that future, Big Pharma needed to destroy Dr. Wakefield’s credibility. So they paraded a long list of pro-vaccine doctors and drug pushers in front of the media to accomplish essentially the same thing that was accomplished against Fleischmann and Pons in 1989 — the obliteration of their credibility in order to suppress the truth.
The truth is dangerous to Big Pharma
The truth is a dangerous thing. Especially when profits are at stake. The truth about vaccines would destroy an entire industry. That’s why the truth must not be allowed to appear in newspapers, magazines or medical journals. That’s why the truth is meticulously redacted from these publications and replaced by pro-pharma lies as a matter of course.
Click here for the full report
Canadian Doctors Get Guillian-Barre Syndrome After Swine Flu Shot
February 3, 2010
Prison Planet
By Steve Watson and Paul Watson
Two residents of Markham in Ontario, Canada have been diagnosed with the debilitating nerve disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome [2], after both taking the H1N1 flu shot in the same doctor’s office just two days apart.
The Toronto Sun reports [3] that Donna Hartlen, a 39-year-old mother is unable to walk or chew solid food properly.
Hartlen has no history of illness and was perfectly health until the 29th December when she collapsed and was rushed to hospital.
Hartlen is adamant that the illness stems from a H1N1 shot she received two weeks before her symptoms suddenly appeared.
She became even more convinced this was the case when she encountered Don Gibson in the room next door, who received the same shot just two days before her, from the same GP. He too has been diagnosed with GBS.
“It’s way too coincidental,” insists the slight mom, her words slurred because the right side of her face will not move. “It’s either a bad batch or a lot more people are getting this than they are talking about.”
Her 80-year-old neighbour is equally convinced that the H1N1 vaccine to blame. “It must have been a bad batch,” Gibson believes. “But nobody is saying anything. I know I signed a piece of paper and there’s no liability but it’s pretty scary.”
Despite GBS’s clear historical link with the swine flu shot after more got ill from the vaccine than got swine flu during the 1976 mass vaccination program, allied with the fact that health officials last year warned neurologists [6] that they needed to look out for increases in cases of the brain disorder following the launch of the immunization program, doctors and health officials are keeping quiet on the issue.
“Not a single doctor we’ve talked with will even remotely discuss that it’s the H1N1 shot,” Hartlen tells the Toronto Star. “They almost pretend they don’t hear you. They don’t want to alarm the public and they don’t want you to stir up trouble.”
The public health agency in Canada says they haven’t seen any unusual spike in GBS.
Hartlen is seeking government support to help care for her two young children while she suffers from the nerve disorder, however she has hit a wall of silence:
“They’re the ones who push this vaccine. They promote it every five minutes on TV. So I do what they say and I get GBS and they’re not going to help me?” Hartlen said.
“It’s a horror story of how little Ontario will do to help patients that come down with this after the government promotes it so much,” added her husband, Wayne Burke.
Similar cases of GBS, as well as other neurological disorders [7] have been reported following the H1N1 shots in the U.S [8]., Britain [9] and France [10].
Last November, a high school athlete from Virginia was diagnosed with GBS hours after receiving a swine flu shot, but health authorities dismissed the connection as a coincidence, precisely as they resolved to do long before the H1N1 vaccination program even started.
Efforts on behalf of health authorities to claim that debilitating side-effects and nerve disorders such as GBS have no connection to the vaccine, despite the fact that they are clearly listed on vaccine inserts [11] as potential dangers, is unsurprising considering this is precisely what officials resolved to do before the swine flu mass vaccination program began.
Back In September, Reuters reported [12] on how public health officials were expecting “an avalanche of so-called adverse event reports, which are reports of death, illness or other health trauma,” in the two weeks after people receive the vaccine.
Authorities therefore resolved to dismiss any connection to the swine flu shots a host of heart attacks, strokes and miscarriages that “will be blamed on the H1N1 vaccine,” effectively performing a blanket diagnosis months in advance.
In November, the U.S. government appointed what the media ludicrously billed as an “independent” group of health advisors who were tasked with whitewashing adverse reactions to the swine flu vaccine and ‘explaining’ them to the public as mere coincidence.
The group is headed up by none other than Dr. Marie McCormick of the Harvard School of Public Health. McCormick and her affiliated organizations have routinely issued reports over the past 10 years supporting the government’s position on the link between vaccines and autism [13], dismissing a correlation entirely despite overwhelming evidence that contradicts this notion [14]. McCormick has been widely criticized by other health experts for her dogged denial of the link between vaccines and autism.
Pharmaceutical companies can be assured that they won’t face reprisals for injuries and deaths that will inevitably occur as a result of exposing millions to mercury and squalene additives that are contained in the H1N1 shot during a mass vaccination program, because the government has already acted to provide them with blanket immunity from lawsuits.
“Vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius,” reported the Associated Press [15] last summer.
Click here for the full report.
Journal Claims Study Linking Child Vaccine to Autism was False
February 2, 2010
Bloomberg.com
By Michelle Fay Cortez
The Lancet medical journal retracted a 1998 study that linked a routine childhood vaccine to autism and bowel disease after a U.K. investigation found flaws in the research.
The U.K. General Medical Council, which licenses doctors, concluded in a report last week that three researchers led by Andrew Wakefield at the Royal Free Hospital in London carried out invasive, unnecessary tests, failed to act in the best interest of the children, and misused public funds. It also said Wakefield didn’t disclose a conflict of interest as he was involved in legal claims against the vaccine makers.
“It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation,” the editors of the Lancet wrote in a statement today.
Immunization rates plunged in the U.K. to less than 80 percent by 2003, as parents concerned about the possible health risks refused the vaccine, according to the Health Protection Agency. Ten of the 12 authors, in a 2004 article in the Lancet, backed away from the suggestion that autism and bowel disease were linked to the vaccine. A panel of U.S. government advisers found the same year that childhood vaccinations probably don’t raise the risk of autism.
The original study, involving 11 boys and one girl aged 10 and under, found bowel disease and developmental disorders in the previously normal children. The parents reported symptoms in eight of the children after they were vaccinated for measles, mumps and rubella.
‘Outrageous’
“It was outrageous,” Jeffrey Boscamp, a pediatrician at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, said by email. “Most of the authors asked for their names to be removed from the study. It’s unfortunate that it undermined confidence in vaccines when in fact it wasn’t true at all.”
With today’s action by the Lancet, the paper was retracted from the published record, stripping it of its scientific claims.
Wakefield oversees the research program at Thoughtful House, a treatment center for children with developmental disorders, in Austin, Texas.
“The allegations against me and against my colleagues are both unfounded and unjust, and I invite anyone to examine the contents of these proceedings and come to their own conclusion,” Wakefield said in a statement provided by Thoughtful House today.
Study Finds Autism in Regional Clusters
January 13, 2010
ABC News
By Julie Steenhuysen
U.S. researchers have identified 10 locations in California that have double the rates of autism found in surrounding areas, and these clusters were located in neighborhoods with high concentrations of white, highly educated parents.
Researchers at the University of California Davis had hoped to uncover pockets of autism that might reveal clues about triggers in the environment that could explain rising rates of autism, which affects as many as one in 110 U.S. children.
But the findings likely say more about the U.S. healthcare system than the causes of autism, said researcher Irva Hertz-Picciotto of UC Davis’ MIND Institute, whose study will be released online Wednesday in the journal Autism Research.
Advocacy groups have been clamoring for treatment options and for better research to show what might be causing an apparent increase in autism cases.
Hertz-Picciotto and colleagues used a research technique that has been effective at identifying cancer clusters.
“This kind of analysis sometimes turns up clues about environmental factors,” she said in a telephone interview.
The researchers looked at about 2.5 million births recorded in California from 1996 through 2000. About 10,000 of those children were later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, according to the state’s department of developmental services.
Using data from birth records, the team found a strong link between parental education and the high rates of autism.
“In this particular case, we found 10 clusters of autism across the state of California. When we looked further, we discovered virtually all of them were areas where there was a higher level of education among the parents who were giving birth in those years,” Hertz-Picciotto said.
“We already know that people with a higher education in the United States are more likely to get a diagnosis of autism for their child. It doesn’t necessarily mean that autism occurs more frequently in those families,” she said.
