"I have to listen to my autistic son scream and bang his head against the wall for sixteen hours a day. It's driving me nuts. It's ruining my family. I once trusted the CDC and the vaccine program, but I no longer do."
The speaker is a mother from Albany, New York. Yelling, and with clenched fists, she could hardly control her emotions as she addressed a panel of Center for Disease Control (CDC) executives at an "Autism Listening Session" held in the autumn of 2004.
She was the first speaker, and things did not get any better after her. Anger and despair filled the auditorium as 21 parents spoke of their trials in dealing with the after effects of the mercury poisoning delivered to their children through the nation's mandated vaccination program.
There would have been more parents ready to speak, but this session followed upon a ten-hour day of dry scientific panels on research on autism. Many were obligated to go home to feed, bathe, and put their Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) kids in bed.
For those parents like me who didn't get a chance to speak, we wrote our questions or suggestions on 3x5 index cards and turned them into the CDC.
My suggestion was more of a challenge: The CDC should launch a study testing a pool of ASD kids versus a pool of normal children from the same age groups and same parts of the country for heavy metals contamination and essential metals (like iron and magnesium) makeup in order to compare the profiles. If all ASD kids showed mercury in their blood and/or urine, then the CDC could then focus on that clue.
At issue in my simple suggestion is the role in the onset of the autism epidemic devastating children throughout the United States¬ of the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, which is used in vaccines.
The news coverage on ASD children in the past five years has outstripped the coverage for the previous twenty years combined. Why? Because more children today are diagnosed with some deficit on the autistic spectrum than ever before. There are more children in 2006 with autism than in any year in the twentieth century. The special education records of all 50 states would bear this point out.
And so would the CDC's own studies. They just seem to have a tough time analyzing their own data to see that the explosion of autism rose in the same geometric rate as those vaccines that were added to the immunization schedule, taking a once dormant, sleepy program consisting of two to three vaccines in the 1970s and supersizing it to 24 vaccines today.
Why won't the CDC do the very simple research that would confirm in the populations of affected children the role of mercury in autism?
No "Alarm" Sounded for Parents
The failure to do this research is not an isolated case. The CDC has in general acted in a very peculiar manner in responding to the autism epidemic.
In fact, it has not even been willing to use the word "epidemic."
In May 2006, the CDC released figures from a new study on the rate of autism. It showed that the once rare disorder is now "widespread" with a rate of 1 in 175 children diagnosed as on the spectrum. The CDC used the word "prevalent" to describe the disease.
But in fact the CDC announced that autism was "prevalent" over two years before—but not to the public, not even to the parents of those infants at risk of developing ASD.
In concert with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the CDC "sent out an Autism A.L.A.R.M. to pediatricians across the country in March 2004, warning them that the disorder is 'prevalent,'" as reported by Sarah Bridges in the article "The Rise Against Mercury" in "Seed Magazine."
Why did the CDC sound the "alarm" to pediatricians two years ago, asking them to aggressively identify and treat ASD early on, but delayed the announcement with the general public until the study released in May 2006?
Parents of newborn babies and infants showing subtle first signs of delayed development are the frontline in the epidemic. The parents, however reluctantly, become the experts in the field of their ASD child—more than any pediatrician and more than any scientist who toils in the labs of the CDC.
The parents are also the ones who must bear the brunt of the extraordinary financial costs and exhausting emotional burden of dealing with autism. So why exclude them for a full two years from the warning that autism is prevalent?
The "Causality" of Thimerosal
Once the CDC admits that there is an epidemic—I mean, once the CDC admits that autism is "prevalent"—then the pressure must build for a response.
But all of the obvious ways to respond point back to the role played by the preservative thimerosal. The CDC defends itself by saying the science does not show any causality between thimerosal and the onset of autism.
But the CDC is wrong. A 2004 study at Columbia University, led by Dr. Mady Hornig, found the casualty between vaccines and autism when researchers showed that thimerosal caused "autistic behavior" in mice.
The results obtained in the lab are corroborated by data in the real world. A ban of thimerosal in California was followed by a decrease in the number of autistic cases—a drop of 25 percent since 2003—for the first time since 1987.
Thousands of parents of ASD children have found, when their children are tested, that they suffer from heavy metals poisoning, especially mercury.
Of course, not one study on thimerosal since the Great Depression has ever proven the ethyl form of mercury safe for people, let alone babies and infants.
What has been well known about mercury for a long time is that it damages the nervous system. The symptoms of mercury poisoning in adults parallel the symptoms of autism in children.
The CDC has chosen to ignore all of this evidence, just as it has chosen to ignore the testimony heard and suggestions collected at the "Listening Sessions" held around the country.
Rather than take the one simple, prophylactic step that would protect the public—banning thimerosal—the CDC merely "recommended" to the big pharmaceutical companies that they begin phasing it out.
But the pharmaceutical companies resisted. They still made vaccines "depleted" but not free of thimerosal. In 2004, when the CDC added the flu shot to the baby immunization schedule, thimerosal crept all the way back in vaccines.
Why has the CDC failed to warn the public, failed to protect the public, and, most revealingly, failed to do the simple research that would prove the presence of mercury poisoning in the victims of the ASD epidemic?
A lot of money is involved. Taking the steps demanded by the CDC's duty to the public would put at financial risk the pharmaceutical cartel in charge of our nation's vaccination program.
Moreover, there is an ever growing scandal that the CDC seems to want to wish away. With each day of inaction, the scandal of the CDC's failures grows larger. As this scandal grows, the cost to CDC of admitting its misconduct likewise grows.
At the end of the day, the CDC would rather defend thimerosal than protect our babies.
James Ottar Grundvig is the father of an autistic child.
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