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News : British Boy Dies After Chelation Therapy for Autism
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Posted by sylvia on Wednesday, November 09, 2005 (09:47:01)
Med Page Today August 2005
By Katrina Woznicki
The death of a five-year-old British autistic boy who went into cardiac arrest after undergoing chelation therapy here has placed the controversial alternative treatment under an international spotlight.
There were scant details on why Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the son of a physician, died Tuesday at Advanced Integrative Medicine Center. The child's family brought him here from England for the chelation treatments, and he was undergoing the third of a series.
Roy Kerry, M.D., who was in charge of the chelation therapy, has not commented. A few physicians across the country have tried to treat autism with chelation to remove mercury, which they believe is the cause of the condition. The source of the mercury, they allege, is childhood vaccines.
British press reports said the boy came to the U.S. for the treatments with his mother, sister, and grandparents. His father, identified as Rufai Nadama, M.D., a specialist in respiratory medicine for Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust, stayed home.
Neighbors said the family went to great lengths to deal with the child's condition. "They found out that treatment was available in America," according to a nurse quoted in the Daily Telegraph.
The interest in chelation therapy as an alternative approach to treat autism has been gaining ground among parents, and even some physicians, who subscribe to the notion that autism is associated with a heightened sensitivity to environmental toxins, including mercury used in vaccines. However, recent data have suggested no vaccine-autism association.
"There are some theoretical reasons to imagine the possibility that heavy metal intoxication is effective in reversing many of the symptoms of autism, but there are no data," said Dena Hofkosh, M.D., a developmental behavioral pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, 35 miles south of Portersville.
She added that there are no data that treating heavy metal intoxication is effective in reversing any symptoms of autism.
Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., director of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, asserted that chelation is an appropriate treatment for autistic children.
"It's extremely benign because you're not adding anything to the body that's toxic," he said. "You're removing toxins from the body. Chelation is extraordinarly safe." Dr. Rimland said there are no known deaths associated with chelation therapy.
Most children receive chelation orally and from a transdermal gel, Dr. Rimland said. Nadama was receiving chelation intravenously.
Whether the administration of chelation had any role at all in the child's death is unknown, but Dr. Hofkosh said because intravenous treatments are more direct to the bloodstream, they can pose a greater risk than oral or transdermal.
"We would rarely use intravenous chelation even for a child who was lead intoxicated," she said. "I don't know what the child reacted to or whether he had an allergic reaction, but certainly there is a higher risk to using medication intravenously."
Dr. Hofkosh said she has had families ask her about chelation therapy and she refuses to use it.
Current recommended treatments for autism, she said, involve intensive behavioral therapy that can be time-consuming and is an approach that doesn't always produce immediate tangible results. "It's very tempting for parents to look for explanations and treatments that are relatively straightforward," she said.
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News : Tourette's children 'given asbos'
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Posted by sylvia on Tuesday, November 08, 2005 (18:02:52)
BBC August 2005
By Jane Elliott
Asbos were designed to curb the behaviour of the anti-social and troublemakers.
But should a child with uncontrollable health problems, whose condition makes their behaviour unmanageable, be given an Asbo?
A children's charity claims that increasingly these are the very children who are being hauled before the courts and given Asbos, or anti-social behaviour orders.
The British Institute for Brain Injured Children (Bibic) has details of more than 15 examples where children with Asperger's, Tourette's Syndrome and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were given orders, and says there are many more cases.
Orders
In one case, a 12-year-old autistic boy was punished for staring over his neighbour's fence; another boy with Tourette's Syndrome was given his order for constantly swearing.
Because Asbos are regarded as civil matters, they are dealt with by an adult court, rather than by a justice panel especially designed for children.
This means that if the children breach their Asbos they do not have the same rights to social and mental health reports as 'criminal' juveniles (aged up to 17).
The Home Office says rules are in place to ensure children with medical and social needs are properly assessed, and say they have asked for Bibic's dossier.
Just over 2,000 Asbos have been issued to children under 17.
Julie Spencer-Cingoz, chief executive of Bibic and a trained psychiatric nurse, said children were being criminalised because of their medical conditions.
"It is a little like saying to somebody who has epilepsy 'do not fit'. And then when they do fit saying that they have broken their contract.
"You would not do that, and yet we are applying the same conditions to children with other medical conditions."
Welfare
She said that Bibic was not anti-Asbo and did believe anti-social behaviour needed to be dealt with, but disputed that the courts were the place to do this.
"It is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
"Serving an Asbo may well act as a lever to get the authorities to take action, and we are hearing from a number of people that this is the case, but it is putting the cart before the horse.
"We want the courts to differentiate between these children, and those who do not have an underlying medical condition."
Mrs Spencer-Cingoz said the details of their files had been sent to the Home Office.
Claire* said her son Shaun, who has ADHD and speech and language problems, was badly failed by the courts.
He was just 12 when he was charged with minor criminal offences, including theft. He was given an eight month custodial sentence and served four months.
He was then given an Asbo and, over the last two years, has been back in court four times for breaching it by breaking the curfew conditions, even though he could not tell the time.
Claire said the court was told that Shaun had learning problems and the developmental age of a child half his 12 years, but that it had made no difference.
"The solicitor had an assessment carried out by a clinical psychologist, who said that it was highly probable that he had ADHD."
She said Shaun had needed social and educational help, not imprisonment.
"He was scared. He was worried about being away from home.
Shamed
"He went off the rails when he went up to secondary school because he could not cope with the work.
"He should have received help, but he didn't get it.
"He started running with a group of boys older than him, one was 18."
She said many people in their home town had known who Shaun was.
The local papers even applied twice to the courts to get restrictions lifted so Shaun could be publicly 'named and shamed'.
Claire said Shaun, who has severe speech and language problems, is now attending a special school, but his mother said help had come too little and too late.
"He has nearly finished school and yet he has never had a proper education."
The Magistrates Courts Association said they were aware of Bibic's concerns and had met them and the probation union Napo.
The Home Office said their guidelines had been designed to protect vulnerable children.
Specialist knowledge
A spokesman said: "Local authorities have a duty under the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 to assess any person who may be in need of community care services.
"If there is evidence to suggest that a perpetrator of anti-social behaviour is suffering from a disability, learning disability, mental health problems or is vulnerable in any other way, then a practitioner with specialist knowledge should be involved in an assessment process to determine the cause of the behaviour and how it can be addressed.
"When applying for an order against a young person aged between 10 and 17, an assessment should always be made of their circumstances and needs.
"This will enable the local authority to ensure that appropriate services are provided for the young person concerned and for the court to have the necessary information about him or her."
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
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News : Mother of boy with autism takes her fight to Tony Blair
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Posted by Sylvia on Friday, May 13, 2005 (00:02:47)
Awares 07/04/05
The mother of an autistic son fighting to stop the closure of special schools took her fight back to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on April 7 – having recently tackled him on live television.
Maria Hutchings, 43, tackled Blair in February, demanding he reverse his policy of phasing out moderate special-needs schools.
On April 7, she visited Downing Street to lend her support to campaigners who petitioned all three major British political parties to stop the closure of special schools in Liverpool.
The Watergate Action Group and lobby group, Pencil, collected 1,000 signatures in protest against the proposed closures.
Accompanied by her 10-year-old son, John Paul, Hutchings strode up to Number 10 to deliver a present to the Prime Minister’s youngest son, Leo. John Paul carried the wrapped gift of a Harry Potter uniform which included a note for Blair asking him to act on her demands.
Referring to the recent campaign success of the celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, she said: “I may not be Jamie Oliver or Ant and Dec, but I demand that the Prime Minister listens to what we have to say.â€
Hutchings said that the last time she had seen the Prime Minister he had asked her to go away and gather the facts and come back to him.“I have done what he wanted me to do – now I demand to see some action,†she said. “We are not asking for a single penny. We just want them to leave the special schools alone and let them get on with helping the children who need them.â€
The housewife, from Benfleet in Essex, said her son could now read, write and talk after being taught at the specialist school, Cedar Hall, in Essex.
“He is a balanced, lovely child and it is this school that has done this,†she said. “The teachers are there, the building is there, the expertise is there – just leave them alone.â€
Hutchings said the government’s policy of getting rid of the schools to create “inclusion†for disabled children was in fact simply a major money saving scheme.
“Inclusion may be fine for physically disabled children but not for those who suffer conditions such as attention-deficit disorder,†she said. “At least 90 per cent have already failed in the mainstream system. It doesn’t work.â€
She made a direct appeal to teachers working in ordinary schools to support her fight.
“I want teachers to make a stand. This is a major, major issue. Children with special needs will disrupt the class, and teachers have admitted to me that they are unable to do their jobs properly because of it.â€
Hutchings rose to prominence in February when she accosted the Prime Minister during a studio discussion in Birmingham on Channel Five’s programme, The Wright Stuff.
She stood up and declared that Blair was talking “rubbish†when he commented on the need to maintain school discipline.
She was granted an audience with the Prime Minister after the show but it was clear her intervention had unsettled the normally smooth-talking Blair.
Copies of the petition were distributed amongst all three of the major political parties.
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News : Thimerosal - the truth
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Posted by sylvia on Monday, March 07, 2005 (11:06:47)
Scoop.co.nz 07/02/2005
By Evelyn Pringle
Autism rates across the country have grown over 1000% since 1990, according to the National Autism Association. Autism was first diagnosed as a disorder in the 1950s. The symptoms described then are essentially the same as those used to diagnose autism today. They may include, limited speech, impaired social interaction, and repetitive behaviors such as arm flapping. In the broader autistic spectrum of less severe cases, children may speak but have unusual behaviors and learning disabilities, or they may have high IQs but great difficulty with social interaction.
What used to be a very rare condition has now become a nationwide epidemic. The difference in the new cases of autism is that the symptoms did not appear at birth. They appeared shortly after a child received vaccinations in the second year of life.
According to the 2004 spring issue of Mother Jones Magazine, “In 2002, an estimated 1 in 250 American children was diagnosed with autism, up from 1 in 500 in 2000, and 1 in 5,000 in the 1980s.â€
Research has now determined that the cause of the escalation is Thimerosal, a mercury-based product that until recently was added to childhood vaccines as a preservative in multi-dose bottles to increase profits for the drug companies that manufacture vaccines.
Over time, these Thimerosal-containing vaccines were administered to millions of children. In 2000, during a review mandated by the Food and Drug Modernization Act, it was determined that infants were receiving more mercury in the first six months of life than was considered safe under federal guidelines.
The review found that a twelve-to-fourteen month old child receiving vaccines under the Universal Childhood Immunization Schedule, which typically delivered four to six shots in one doctors visit, children were receiving as much as forty times the amount of mercury considered safe according to EPA guidelines. The EPA guidelines were confirmed to be accurate through an independent evaluation conducted by the National Research Council, which published its conclusion in July 2000.
During the 1990s, when some 40 million children were vaccinated, the number of Thimerosal containing vaccines given to children nearly tripled, while autism rates inexplicably increased tenfold, according to Mother Jones.
There is an indisputable correlation between the increase in autism and the increase in the amount of Thimerosal that children received during the 1990s, when the number of vaccines containing the preservative rose from less than 10 to nearly 40. Research shows that the more Thimerosal a child was given in a year, the more likely the child was to develop autism or a related neurological disorder.
While for years, Thimerosal was considered to be in the category "generally recognized as safe standard†by the FDA, when the agency conducted its own Over the Counter drug review, its opinion changed. The FDA determined that mercury used as active ingredients in OTC drug products was not "generally recognized as safe." In fact, at that time, on its own Website, the FDA stated, "lead, cadmium, and mercury are examples of elements that are toxic when present at relatively low levels."
In response to its findings, in 1999 the FDA called for the removal of all Thimerosal-containing over the counter products from the market.
However, nothing was done about the Thimerosal in vaccines. Throughout the 1990s, new vaccines continued to be added to the list of required shots for children, and the amount of mercury being injected into babies nearly tripled.
Astonishingly, as each new vaccine was added ... no one bothered to total up how many micrograms of mercury children would receive as a result. By 1999, a baby who received all recommended vaccines at her two-month checkup could be injected with up to 62.5 micrograms of mercury—118 times the EPA's limit for daily exposure, according to Mother Jones.
The magazine reports regulators “chose not to act aggressively to reduce infants' exposure to Thimerosal, and as a result TCVs mandated for infants remained on the US market until November 2002.â€
This is ironic in view of the fact that Thimerosal was removed from animal vaccines in the early 90s. Rita Shreffler, the mother of son diagnosed with a form of autism, told Mother Jones about the time she tried to explain that her son had been vaccinated with Thimerosal to Wayne Middleton, of Middleton Microbiological & Environmental Testing Laboratory, in 2001, "When I explained that a vaccine preservative called Thimerosal had exposed babies to excessive levels of mercury, he said that couldn't be true because he used to work for a lab that made animal vaccines, and Thimerosal had been discontinued in vaccines for cattle back in the early 1990s. He was sure it wouldn't be allowed in children's vaccines," Rita said.
Lawmakers Try To Ban Preservative
In 2002, some lawmakers did try to have Thimerosal removed from vaccines. On July 18, 2000 the House Committee on Government Reform conducted a hearing entitled, “Mercury in Medicine: Are We Taking Unnecessary Risks?†During the hearing, the FDA admitted that children were being exposed to unsafe levels of mercury through vaccines containing Thimerosal.
However, instead of calling for the immediate removal of all Thimerosal from vaccines, the FDA chose to allow pharmaceutical companies to merely phase out their use of Thimerosal, which meant mercury-containing vaccines continued to be administered at public and private health facilities all across the country, even though an FDA witness had testified that each of the vaccines on the Childhood Immunization Schedule was then available for use in a Thimerosal free version.
A couple months later, on October 25, 2000, Congressman Dan Burton (R-IN), Chairman of the House Committee, wrote a letter to then HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, asking her get the FDA to recall all vaccines containing Thimerosal.
“We all know and accept that mercury is a neurotoxin, and yet the FDA has failed to recall the 50 vaccines that contain Thimerosal,†Burton wrote, “Every day that mercury-containing vaccines remain on the market is another day HHS is putting 8,000 children at risk,†he said. “Given that Thimerosal-free vaccines are available, and the known risk of mercury toxicity, to leave Thimerosal-containing vaccines on the market is unconscionable,†Burton added.
“I implore you to conduct a full recall of these products,†he wrote. “If the only action ... is a gradual phase out, children will continue to be put at risk every day,†Burton warned. “These vaccines will continue to be injected in children for years to come -putting our nation's most vulnerable population ... at risk for mercury poisoning, he added.
Congressman Burton’s heartfelt pleas and warnings were ignored. Had our government acted on his advice, who knows how many children could have been saved from autism.
Other Republican lawmakers are going up against their peers and leading the charge to ban the use of Thimerosal. A case in point is Senator Roy Holand (R-MO), a physician, who presented a bill to Missouri’s legislators to prohibit Thimerosal in childhood vaccines in his state. The bill passed the Missouri state House of Representatives by 152 to four, the biggest landslide victory in recent state history.
“As a physician, I’ve been concerned about the rising levels of autism, and the more I’ve learned about Thimerosal, the more convinced I am that it causes neurological damage,†said Holand. “Mercury has no place being injected into children.â€
Senator Ken Veenstra (R-IA), who introduced a similar bill to Iowa’s Senate Human Resources Committee, put it simply: “I’ve studied Thimerosal and talked to people on both sides of the issue. There is enough evidence I’ve seen to make it clear to me that we need to get Thimerosal out of the products we give to our children.†The Iowa senate committee voted in favor of the ban as well.
Nightmare For FDA, CDC, & Pharmaceutical Industry
For drug companies, the global market for vaccines containing Thimerosal has been a goldmine. For instance, UNICEF, the World Health Organization’s parent body, buys 40% of all vaccines used in developing countries, and Merck is its sole supplier. Merck makes Recombivax HB, a Hepatitis B vaccine that contains Thimerosal. Eli Lilly invented Thimerosal, and it has licensing agreements with drug companies in 40 countries that make the product.
However, the successful marketing of the preservative has now turned into a legal liability nightmare for drug companies, the FDA, and the CDC, since its link to autism has been confirmed.
“If current statistics hold up, over 150,000 children will be diagnosed with classic autism, and as many as 250,000 more will be diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders, and possibly 2 million more with developmental disorders, according to Mother Jones.
If vaccine manufacturers and government agencies are found liable for ... damage to millions of infants, TCV litigation could rival that of tobacco or asbestos. Currently, some 3,500 families of autistic children are slated to go before a special federal vaccine court—a step that Congress has required before they engage in any civil litigation, but one that will probably be just the first in a long legal battle, Jones reports.
“The political hurdles are the bigger problem,†claims New York Attorney Krakow, who filed a case on behalf of his autistic son. “This is so big and gets to the heart of lots of issues, like what I call the government-pharmaceutical complex,†he warns, “These kids are not going to die. They are going to live 50, 60 years and the cost will be monumental,†he said.
Krakow may be correct because records of a CDC meeting in June 2000, prove that CDC committee members knew about the dangers of Thimerosal and knew that concealing the results of a study that identified the problems could lead to lawsuits.
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News : Civil rights fears over mental health reforms
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Posted by sylvia on Thursday, January 27, 2005 (14:10:40)
The Guardian 19/01/2005
By David Batty
A committee of MPs warned ministers today that the controversial draft mental health bill would grossly infringe the rights of people with learning disabilities and autism.
Members of the joint committee on the draft mental health bill raised concerns that the broad definition of mental disorder in the proposed legislation would cover learning disabilities and all autistic spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome.
Conservative MP Angela Browning told the mental health minister, Rosie Winterton, that widening the scope of mental disorders to encompass learning and developmental disabilities was "surely a huge infringement of their civil rights" because they would have to declare themselves as having a mental disorder purely because the proposed legislation had changed its definition.
"From now on, through this legislation, all of those people will be identified as having a mental disorder," said the MP.
Ms Winterton said it was not the government's intention that everyone with learning disabilities would be brought under the powers of the bill. She said the definition of mental disorder had been broadened so that people were not excluded from its remit because they suffered from another condition.
The minister insisted that there was "absolutely no desire to single out people with learning disabilities, autism, or people with Asperger syndrome".
But the committee chairman, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlisle, said if the definition was not amended, anyone with autism or a learning disability who was asked to declare whether or not they had ever suffered from a mental disorder would have to answer yes.
The MPs also raised concerns about the new definition of mental disorder also including drug and alcohol problems. Ms Winterton insisted that people would not be subjected to the powers of the proposed legislation purely on the basis of having a substance misuse problem - they would also have to suffer from mental dysfunction.
The minister also denied claims that the definition of the bill was so broad that it could even encompass people who fail to quit smoking. She said: "I would say that clearly that is something of an exaggeration from what we're trying to achieve."
Nor, she added, would the bill cover people with physical conditions such as diabetes or epilepsy, unless they were suffering from some mental dysfunction.
The committee is set to publish a report of its findings in March.
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