Spectrum’s Person of the Year 2009

Lyn Redwood has been improving the lives of children for over a decade.

by Elizabeth McBreen

Lyn Redwood, RN, MSN, NP, sits at her desk in her rural Georgia home. She is surrounded by pictures. There are pictures of her three children and children of her fellow “mercury moms.”  They are the faces of the children whose lives she has helped improve. The pictures are there to keep her motivated, a constant reminder of what she’s working for.
    There’s something else Redwood keeps in her office: a rejection letter. Several years ago Redwood began writing a book, Mercury Rising: The Untold Story Behind America’s Epidemic of Learning Disabilities and Autism, and shopped it around at publishing houses. No one wanted it. The rejection letter from Simon and Schuster, framed and hanging on Redwood’s office wall, says that the subject matter is so upsetting they doubted that parents would want to buy a book as alarming as this one.
    Luckily for the autism community, rejection does not scare Redwood. During the last 10 years of advocacy, she has had to become accustomed to it. She has even found a way to thrive on it, out of necessity and perhaps self-preservation. She and other autism parents have been waging a monumental battle for the lives of their children for over a decade. And they have certainly not gotten the results they thought they would when they started out.
    What has made Redwood’s role in this battle even more remarkable over the past few years is that she is free to go. Her son, Will, is now recovered from autism. She could have left the autism world far behind years ago. But instead of easing her way out of the community and reveling in a “normal” life once again, she has increased her workload.
    The co-founder of SafeMinds (Sensible Action For Ending Mercury-Induced Neurological Disorders) and National Autism Association (NAA), she also now works with Autism Research Institute (ARI), Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!), and serves as a public member of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) and the Department of Defense Autism Research Program (ARP). (Try saying all that in one breath.) Redwood remains in the fight, as a leader, a mentor, and a consistent voice for vaccine injured children. For these reasons and much more, she is Spectrum’s Person of the Year.
    Will was born in 1994. During the first year of his life, he was healthy and happy. Beginning in 1995, he became severely ill several times.

Will suffered from strep (unheard of in a child his age), rotavirus, upper respiratory infections, and severe diarrhea. His illnesses became serious enough to require hospitalization and intra-venous antibiotics and steroids. Redwood, a registered nurse, and her husband Tommy, a physician, were believers in mainstream medicine. But now it was failing them when they needed it most. They were told repeatedly their son’s illnesses were caused by viruses, and cultures and tests came back with inconclusive results. Then Will began to regress. He stopped walking, talking, and eating and wanted only to sit and watch television.
    When he was 18 months old, Redwood and her husband began to fear that there was a problem with Will’s hearing. Tubes where surgically placed in his ears and he began intensive speech therapy. Six weeks later, there was little change in Will’s behavior and language skills. His doctor told the Redwoods that the problem was more serious than his hearing but never mentioned autism.
    After a series of tests administered by a pediatric neurologist, the results of which all came back normal, the Redwoods were left with countless questions and no answers. The doctors were out of ideas. “I had to know what had taken my baby away,” says Redwood. “Autism was not even on my radar.”
    When Will began a preschool program in 1998, Redwood met a mother who said that he was very much like her own son. Heartened by the thought that someone else was experiencing the same difficulties, she asked what the woman’s son had. “Autism,” she answered. A short time later, Redwood opened the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV) and realized with a mix of relief and dread that Will fit into the definition for pervasive developmental disorder – not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS).  Later Redwood found that the neurologist had also suspected autism. “It was kind of a relief. Once I had a label, I knew what I needed to go after. I couldn’t fight something that I could not see.”
    Redwood’s personal fight to recover her son began the day she found out that Will had PDD-NOS. Her public battle, one she is still waging, began in July of 1999. A member of her county Board of Health, Redwood was notified that there was concern about the mercury in vaccines. As a result, the Hepatitis B vaccine would be pushed back from birth to 6 months of age.
    One week later on a Friday afternoon in July 1999, a joint statement similar to the one made by Redwood’s Board of Health was made by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Public Health Service (PHS), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Redwood found the announcement stunning and mysterious. “The statement did not make any sense,” says Redwood. “They said no testing was necessary and there was no evidence of harm. How could they know that if they had not looked?”
    The natural researcher in Redwood took over. She began to study the effects of mercury poisoning and found that Will’s symptoms aligned perfectly with those of heavy metal toxicity. Even more startling, when she tallied the amount of mercury that Will had received in his thimerosal-containing vaccinations, she found that he had received 125 percent more than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) allowable exposure.
    After attending her first DAN! conference in 1999, Redwood began Will on an abbreviated protocol of dimercaptosuccinic acid (DSMA) chelation. He quickly began to make progress. Now, more than ever, Redwood was convinced that it was the purportedly safe amounts of mercury in Will’s inoculations that had made him so sick. Wanting to connect with others who might be experiencing the same thing, Redwood started a listserv on autism and mercury. Her group swelled to over 1,000 members in a few months.
    After reading an article by Neal Halsey, M.D., a pediatrician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, in which the doctor voiced his concerns about the levels of mercury in childhood vaccinations, Redwood wrote him a letter. In it, Redwood asked for Halsey’s recommendations for next steps and inquired about who would take ultimate responsibility for ridding vaccines of heavy metals. The letter was soon swirling around a relatively new form of communication, the internet, and when Albert Enayati (a chemist from New Jersey) read it, he knew he had to speak to Redwood.
    Enayati, Sallie Bernard and Heidi Roger, who were members of the New Jersey chapter of Cure Autism Now (CAN), had also been looking into mercury toxicity as a cause for their children’s autism. Joining forces, the four parents, with the power of the internet at their fingertips, became self-taught vaccine experts. Together, they wrote the groundbreaking paper, “Autism: A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning.” It was the first of many times during her advocacy that Redwood would bring the discussion of mercury and vaccines to the public’s attention.
    The paper draws a detailed comparison between the physical and biological symptoms of autism and those of mercury poisoning. The four co-authors submitted the paper to Medical Hypothesis in 2001, where it was published. Their next step was to knock on doors and get the paper in front of those who really needed to see it: the federal health agencies.
    Redwood says that because of the urgency of the situation, she was not at all shy about calling federal agencies. The group was determined to get their research in front of those who could bring about change. The response, however, was not what they expected. “I was naïve back then,” says Roger. “These were the days when we thought we would show them the research and they would say ‘thank you’ and take care of it.”
   

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