‘Game changer’ changes nothing

Media continues to ignore environmental factors

NBC’s recent Dateline segment on Andy Wakefield ended with the unsubstantiated claim that researchers in Philadelphia had “pinpointed a gene responsible for up to 15 percent of autism cases.” Matt Lauer said this is “a find many researchers consider a game changer.”

Oh, please. These overheated announcements of genetic breakthroughs are getting monotonous. The fact is no “autism gene” has been identified, and susceptibility genes like tuberous sclerosis—conditions that raise the likelihood of autism as a co-morbid condition—account for a very small percentage of the autism epidemic. They certainly don’t account for the tenfold rise in 20 years, which is what the real story is all about.

This is a story of toxic insults, of growing exposure to autism-causing chemicals in children who are developmentally typical but genetically vulnerable. Thanks to Jill James, we already know that many such children have reduced glutathione that makes it hard to remove heavy metals. Thanks to James Adams, we already know that higher mercury content in baby teeth is associated with autism. Thanks to Raymond Palmer, we already know that living near power plants raises the risk.

What we don’t know is exactly which chemicals act separately or together (and in which children) to produce autism. Because of our gene obsession, we’re not looking hard enough for what’s triggering those genes.

Most experts are now willing to acknowledge this environmental component to autism—just as long as the component they are contributing has nothing to do with it.

Thus, on Dateline, the episode ended with a statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics: “While it is likely that there are many environmental factors that influence the development of autism, vaccines are not the cause of autism.”

The first half of that statement is true enough, but the last half is pure self-interested wishful thinking that blithely ignores the Hannah Poling and Bailey Banks vaccine court cases in which the government links autistic disorders with vaccine regression.

But let’s put vaccines aside for a second and focus on those “many environmental factors” that even the American Academy of Pediatrics now says “influence the development of autism.”

On the same day as the Dateline report, The Washington Post featured the story of a local couple’s battle to get the county school system to pay for the home-schooling of their child, who has a diagnosis of mental retardation, speech and language impairment, and autism.

And what do his parents do for a living? They are “specialists in chemical weapons for the Army.”

This chemical connection was evident from the beginning of what I call the ‘Age of Autism.’ The first child to show up at Johns Hopkins in 1935 with what would come to be called autism was the son of a lawyer and chemist at the U.S. Patent Office. Several others in that early group had environmental exposures—including to mercury.

In the 1970s, a prominent autism researcher at Georgetown University, Mary Coleman, worked with Bernie Rimland to study the parents of 78 autistic children and a group of controls. Here’s what Coleman had to say:

“In twenty families (of the 78 families) of autistic patients, an unusual amount of exposure to chemicals had occurred during the preconception period. In four of these families, both mother and father had been exposed to chemicals, mostly with the parents working as chemists. Of the control parents, there was only one family (again both the father and the mother) who were working as chemists in a laboratory.

“Since the incidence of individuals exposed to chemicals in all related occupations in the United States is 1,059,000 in 91,000,000 or 1.1 percent of the population… to find that 25 percent of any sample has had chemical exposure is quite startling. Attempts to identify a particular chemical toxin to which many parents were consistently exposed in our sample failed; the parents recalled exposure to a great multitude and variety of chemical agents with no one chemical or classification of chemicals singled out in the data. Clearly, this is an area where more prospective research is needed.”

By the 1970s, it was clear to this leading researcher that “exposure to a great multitude and variety of chemical agents” seemed to be a common factor in the background of families with autism. Yet here we are blathering on a quarter-century later about game-changing gene finds and the “many environmental factors that influence the development of autism”—factors like the ethyl mercury still in flu shots for pregnant women (the AAP’s reassurances notwithstanding).

We’re going around in circles and calling it the march of progress.