From MedPageToday.com

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, has given credibility to “strong evidence” of a link between autism and thimerosal in childhood vaccines. He cited “divided scientific opinion” on the matter.

“It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children,” McCain said in answering a question from the mother of a boy with autism at a town hall meeting. “The question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.”

The Arizona senator said there’s “divided scientific opinion” on the issue, with “many on the other side that are credible scientists that are saying that’s not the cause of it.” His remarks were first reported by ABC News.

Asked today whether McCain’s statement, made last Friday, was carefully reasoned or should be considered an off-hand remark, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Ph.D., a senior policy adviser to the McCain campain, commented:

“Sen. McCain understands there have been numerous scientific studies that haven’t found a link. He also recognizes there are many people who’ve raised concerns about a possible link. He isn’t taking sides. Until we better understand the root causes for the rising number of diagnoses, all concerns won’t be put to rest. He’s advocating greater research.

“He had expressed sympathy for the woman’s concern. His position is to pursue sound science. He has a broad interest in this phenomenon that isn’t restricted to vaccines or preservatives.”

The CDC, FDA, World Health Organization, Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Pediatrics agree there is no evidence linking autism with thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative that is no longer used in many childhood vaccines.

Since the preservative was removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001, the apparent occurrence of the disorder has continued to rise.

A study of California Department of Developmental Services data published in January indicated that there was “an increase in autism in California despite the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines” (See: Autism Diagnoses Rise After End of Thimerosal in Vaccines).

If thimerosal causes autism, the prevalence of the disorder should have declined as the chemical was removed from vaccines, researchers said. No such decline occurred in this study, or in Canada, Denmark and Sweden, where thimerosal was removed during the mid-1990s.

“If Sen. McCain believes there’s a link, he’s clearly misinformed,” commented Paul Offit, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“There is no debate within the medical community,” commented Dr. Offit. “There’s never been a single epidemiological study showing a link. To suggest otherwise is extremely irresponsible.”

Nonetheless, some parent activist groups and attorneys have claimed that thimerosal causes autism. Environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that public health officials conspired with drug makers to “poison a generation of American children.” The anti-thimerosal campaign is supported by lawyers who have filed more than 4,800 suits against vaccine-makers.

Dr. Offit and other researchers worry that unfounded reports about vaccines and autism could discourage parents from getting their children immunized. “McCain may think he’s helping by reaching out to parents of autistic kids. But he does them a tremendous disservice and can unnecessarily scare the public about the safety of vaccines,” Dr. Offit said.

McCain’s remarks were applauded by National Autism Association president Wendy Fournier. “We completely agree with him and hope he continues talking about this subject so we can get to the bottom of what’s causing this epidemic.”

Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton announced in November that she would spend $700 million a year on autism research, teacher training, and support services. Barack Obama’s health plan has a section on autism. He’s supported federal spending on autism research on “root causes and treatments.”

I write this entry as I prepare to dictate my office note after seeing a 17 year old autistic child brought to our clinic from New York.

This child was happy, bright, interactive, and fully conversant until his last MMR immunization after which his speech development suddenly arrested and then ceased almost completely. That was 14 years ago.

It is heartwrenching that the status quo of medical practice in this country denies the relationship between immunization and autism. I see autistic children on a daily basis and this relationship is a story related to me by devastated parents all too frequently.

So, I offer a plea to practioners. Let’s stop denying that immunizations may be related to autism, even beyond the question of mercury preservatives. Let’s get to work and determine a safer way to immunize as opposed to bombarding the immune system with multiple immunizations simultaneously. We all see what can happen - and it is bad medicine.

A state study suggests two farm sprays may raise chances of having a child with the disorder

From Los Angeles Times

Women who live near California farm fields sprayed with organochlorine pesticides may be more likely to give birth to children with autism, according to a study by state health officials to be published today.

The rate of autism among the children of 29 women who lived near the fields was extremely high, suggesting that exposure to the insecticides in the womb might have played a role. The study is the first to report a link between pesticides and the neurological disorder, which affects one in every 150 children.

FOR THE RECORD:

Autism link: An article in Monday’s California section about a new state study that found that exposure to two pesticides may make women more likely to give birth to children with autism said it was the first study to find a link between pesticides and autism. Italian scientists reported in 2005, however, that pesticides known as organophosphates could cause neurological changes that lead to autism.

But the state scientists cautioned that their finding is highly preliminary because of the small number of women and children involved and lack of evidence from other studies.

“We want to emphasize that this is exploratory research,” said Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health. “We have found very preliminary data that there may be an association. We are in no way concluding that there is a causal relationship between pesticide exposure of pregnant women and autism.”

The two pesticides implicated are older-generation compounds developed in the 1950s and used to kill mites, primarily on cotton as well as some vegetables and other crops. Their volumes have declined substantially in recent years.

Examining three years of birth records and pesticide data, scientists from the Public Health Department determined that the Central Valley women lived within 500 meters, or 547 yards, of fields sprayed with organochlorine pesticides during their first trimester of pregnancy. Eight of them, or 28%, had children with autism. Their rate of autism was six times greater than for mothers who did not live near the fields, the study said.

Susan Kegley, senior scientist of Pesticide Action Network North America, a San Francisco-based advocacy group, said the report adds to an existing body of evidence that endosulfan and dicofol, already banned in some countries, are harmful.

“This is one of the first papers that links use of pesticide to incidence of a disease, and autism in particular,” she said. “The findings are very strong. This is a sixfold risk factor in comparison to someone who is not exposed. There aren’t too many studies that come out like that.”

Even though small numbers of children were involved, “it is still one of those things that make you sit up and pay attention,” she said.

The findings suggest that 7% of autism cases in the Central Valley during the years studied

1996 through 1998

might have been connected to exposure to the insecticides drifting off fields into residential areas. Births during those years were analyzed because children born later might not yet be diagnosed with autism.

Children with autism spectrum disorders have impaired social and communication skills. The causes are unknown, but because diagnoses have been increasing, scientists have been exploring various environmental factors, including children’s vaccines and chemical pollutants.

“The good news is we’ve used a new research technology to generate hypotheses and possible associations, so we are making progress in the battle to get more information” about the cause of autism, Horton said.

The goal of the study was to “systematically explore the general hypothesis that residential proximity to agricultural pesticide applications during pregnancy could be associated with autism spectrum disorders in offspring,” the authors wrote in their study, published online today in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The scientists collected records of nearly 300,000 children born in the 19 counties of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys. Of those children, 465 had autism. The scientists then compared the addresses during pregnancy to state records that detailed the location of fields sprayed with several hundred pesticides.

For most pesticides, no unusual numbers of autism cases were found, but the exception was a class of compounds called organochlorines. Most, including DDT, were banned in the United States several decades ago because they were building up in the environment. Only dicofol and endosulfan remain.

The autism rate was highest for children of those mothers who lived the closest to the fields and it declined as the distance from the fields increased.

There is no other human or animal evidence that the two chemicals can cause autism. But both affect nerves and the brain

and cause reproductive effects and alter hormones in animal tests. In addition, dicofol is a possible human carcinogen.

The scientists concluded that “the possibility of a connection between gestational exposure to organochlorine pesticides and autism spectrum disorders requires further study.”

A July report by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation said endosulfan can spread far from fields via the air and expose the public, based on air monitoring in Fresno, Monterey and Tulare counties. The agency is likely to designate endosulfan as a toxic air contaminant soon, and dicofol could follow. That designation triggers a review by the agency to see whether steps should be taken to minimize the chemicals drifting off fields into nearby communities.

Glenn Brank, spokesman for the pesticide agency, said officials there are “very interested” in the new autism data but say that “more work” on the potential link is needed before it can carry much weight in assessments of the chemicals’ risks.

The two insecticides are now used much less often than in the years in which the possible connection to autism was found. As a result, there is less likelihood that pregnant women are exposed today. Nearly 774,000 pounds were applied in 1996, compared with 277,000 pounds in 2005, down nearly 64%, according to state records.

“In the past couple years, the bottom has dropped out of these two,” Brank said.

Insects have built up resistance and cotton farmers have switched to new compounds.

The two chemicals are not found in household or yard pesticides. Traces are found in food, but the study looked only at possible exposure from the air. The chemicals are used most extensively in Fresno, Kings, Imperial and Tulare counties. Dicofol is mostly used on cotton, oranges, beans and walnuts. Endosulfan is used primarily in tomato processing and on lettuce, alfalfa and cotton crops.

From ScienceDaily

It’s amazing the coincidences one comes across while reporting about autism: The autism rate rises in tandem with increasing numbers of vaccines that contain a known neurotoxin, ethyl mercury. Public health authorities say that’s coincidence.Parents say their children became autistic after receiving mercury-containing vaccinations, sometimes several shots in one day. Pediatricians call that coincidence, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plants, forests, timber, the South.

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

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

Maybe that’s no coincidence.

From Los Angeles Times

Traces of a chemical banned 30 years ago cause brain abnormalities in newborn lab animals that are similar to defects in children with autism, according to a new study by University of California scientists.

Many scientists say that an array of chemicals in the environment are scrambling brain development and could play a role in children’s learning disorders.

The new study adds to the evidence by showing that PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, disrupt the auditory cortex, a part of the brain that is impaired in autistic children.

In the research at UC San Francisco, rats exposed to low levels of PCBs in the womb and during nursing had disorganized, malfunctioning auditory centers. The auditory cortex controls the brain’s processing of sounds, which is essential for language development.

“This is a red flag,” said neuroscientist Michael M. Merzenich of UCSF’s W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience, the study’s senior author. “The impact of this class of chemicals must be studied in human populations, and fast.”

The new research shows brain development is skewed when animals are exposed to amounts of PCBs in the same range as some highly exposed people. It will be published in this week’s online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This study indicates that there are chemicals out there, this being just one example, that could profoundly affect development,” said Tal Kenet, who led the research team in Merzenich’s lab while a postdoctoral fellow there. He is now a faculty member at Harvard Medical School.

Last year, two internationally known environmental scientists reported in a medical journal that industrial chemicals may be causing a “silent pandemic” of learning disorders. Dr. Philippe Grandjean of Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Philip J. Landrigan of Mount Sinai School of Medicine identified 202 chemicals

including PCBs and mercury

that could be contributing to autism, attention deficit disorders and other neurological disorders, and they urged more human studies.

PCBs were one of the world’s most widely used chemicals, their use peaking in the 1970s, mostly as insulating fluids in large electrical equipment.

Although banned in the United States in 1977, they are still among the most pervasive contaminants on the planet, and exposure is difficult to avoid because they have spread globally and built up in food chains.

Concentrations are highest in people who frequently eat fish from waters contaminated by industrial discharge, including the Hudson River, the Great Lakes and San Francisco Bay.

Many scientists say there is substantial human evidence that PCBs are among five industrial chemicals that harm children’s brains.

Researchers in the 1990s reported that children in the Great Lakes region exposed to high levels of PCBs during their mothers’ pregnancy had impaired cognitive development that led to reduced motor skills and short-term memory.

In the new study, “we linked PCBs to an area of the brain that impacts one aspect of autism, language delays or language loss,” said co-author Isaac N. Pessah, an autism researcher at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute and director of the university’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention.

“We don’t see any reason why the PCBs in human tissues wouldn’t be causing this mis-wiring of the auditory cortex too. Not necessarily in every child. We suggest that because of the mechanism involved, there may be populations of kids with predisposition to sensitivity,” he said.

The scientists compared the auditory cortex and nerve signals of unexposed rat pups to pups exposed to one type of PCB during gestation and nursing. One of the most profound disruptions from the PCBs involved abnormalities in signals sent by the brain to inhibit or trigger reactions to sounds. The brain also had diminished capacity to learn and change how it responds to sounds.

Scientists believe that autistic children have such signaling imbalances.

They respond differently to sound and other sensations, and their communication and language skills are impaired.

“The animals could hear, but their brain’s representations of what they heard was grossly disturbed,” Merzenich said.

Kenet urged human studies to see if babies breast fed by highly exposed mothers experience similar effects, particularly those with a family history of developmental disorders.

They are unsure if damage to the rats occurred prenatally or during nursing. Researchers generally have found that benefits of breastfeeding outweigh risks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in February that one in every 150 8-year-old children in 14 states had autism or related syndromes.

Dr. Perlmutter’s comment:

And where are PCBs coming from? Please see:

Renegade Neurologist -

PCBs in farmed salmon