Autism Causes .info

2010-10-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this website is to provide material supplementary to the update review (not yet published) of my 1993-published theory paper. All the posts here serve that purpose in one way or another, but some are more worthwhile or necessary than others. So I shall put this brief guide to the contents here.

My entire thoughts about whether there is a relationship of vaccines to autism can be found by clicking here.

"Skeptical" people will generate plenty of supposedly clever reasons for rejecting the whole basis of the antiinnatia theory. That's despite the fact that any such "skeptics" must therefore be instead gullibly taking seriously one of a handful of utterly absurd alternative theories as I explain in the update paper. Such is life's irony!

My answer to one of these "skeptical" notions is this one about being supposedly impossible for mercury to get to the DNA. And this one about supposedly the history of Pink Disease (acrodynia) proving that mercury doesn't cause autism. But perhaps you're a sheep?

And there will be even more myths told about this update review than were told about the 1993 paper, because autism research is now becoming heavily distorted by corruption. And this distortion directly affronts the truths to which this theory relates. One of the leading sources of extreme misinformation is the book by Paul Offit, which is being distributed free to parents of victims via the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The myths:

that there has been no autism increase,
that elevated mercury is not associated with autism, and
that removal by chelation cannot help,

are all addressed in the articles linked above and therefrom (and more fully in conjunction with the update review paper).

Turning to less militarised corners of the autism research field, I'll first point out that theories are often not in conflict even when they superficially may appear to be.

And there is only one autistic/ASD/etc syndrome, not several or many "autisms".

You can find the link to the spectacularly-predicted Purgatorius video here, along with some further evidence relating to my explanation of the hand-flapping.

Some other peoples' excellent graphs of the increase in the US can be found here, particularly the ones with multiple differently-coloured curves. They basically confirm my interpretation of the California DDS data as essentially a simple exponential-shaped increase.

Here is a link to my comment on close-spaced pregnancy findings of Keely Cheslack-Postava, Kayuet Liu, and Peter S. Bearman.

I've added yet another amazing new prediction, that the Flynn Effect (rising IQs increase) affects non-human animals as well.

Mitochondrial dysfunctions could be caused by antiinnatia (both within and without the brain), or they could be a non-antiinnatia "side effect" of mercury toxication. They could be part of some processes whereby antiinnatia affects neuronal function. So the reports about mitochondria appear to give neither support nor challenge to antiinatia theory.

Data on a "photoninthedarkness" blog leads me now to thinking that the increase has involved some diagnostic substitution, but not in the way that is assumed by pro-vaxxers. More later, but I reckon when there was a rapid real increase of autism c. 1985-1995, much of it was incorrectly diagnosed as non-autistic retardation. Thereafter the diagnoses substituted to the correct autism diagnoses. This leads me to suspect that the autism increase actually stopped increasing about ten years ago and since then it's just been an artifact of substitution.

“We’re finding that the immune system seems to function at a lower level in autism,” says Hertz-Picciotto. Which could be because the dental mercury that caused the autism increase is well-known to also impair immune functioning.

July 2011: Powerful yet further evidence of mercury involvement in autism - 6-fold increased autism in children whose grandparents survived Pink Disease.

(I'll continue work on this intro menu in due course, so be sure to check back later.)

Some important silly myths about autism

2010-10-29T03:19:00.000-07:00

(....besides the tragic delusion that the increase was caused mainly by vaccines in some way or other....)

At many websites, in innumerable leaflets, in the "introduction" paragraphs that adorn almost all journal papers, and even in the book "Autism: The Facts" by Simon Baron-Cohen, the reader is liable to get misled by some of the statements. This is partly because some of these authors think it useful to provide a dumbed-down idiots' guide explanation for people who are supposedly too busy to spend a little more time learning a proper understanding.

Firstly, the myth that the human race can be divided into those who "have" autism and those who do not "have" autism. Or as they alternatively put it, those who are "on the spectrum" and those who are not. Or those who are autistic and those who are neurotypical. In reality there is no such distinction, it is merely the human races' obsession with sorting people into categories operating here. It is no more sensible to say that someone is "on the autistic spectrum" than it is to say that a person who is 6 ft 1 inch tall is therefore "on the biggism spectrum", or "has biggism". Rather we are all on this "spectrum" together to greater or lesser extent.

Secondly the myth that Aspergers is distinct from autism. This distinction arose merely because Kanner and Asperger simultaneously came up with these ideas in separate countries. Sixty years of research has since failed to establish any clear distinction but instead a huge amount of commonality.
(Review of Asperger's/Autism relationship by Tony Attwood.)

Thirdly the myth that autism is properly described in terms of a "triad of impairments". On the contrary a whole collection of characteristics of the autistic syndrome was long ago listed in the table of Wing 1976, which you can also find in my 1993 paper linked at the top here. When researchers can't explain some fact, they tend to prefer to just forget about it, and so this pseudic simplification took on a conveniently flattering life of its own.

Fourthly, if a person prefers to be alone, prefers reading a book to going to a party, and is lost for words on meeting a person they want to speak to, this does not mean they are even slightly autistic or Aspergeric. Rather they may be just be very introverted. And introversion is entirely different from and unrelated to autism etc.

Why you are a brain-dead sheep (or not?)

2010-10-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

Some people have expressed a very (and very nastily) contemptuous attitude towards the antiinnatia theory and its author. Their confident contempt is based on the notion that after so many years, the textbooks have never even mentioned this theory, and nor do any of the "leading experts" (in the context that Bernard Rimland can be ignored as a candidate for "leading expert" status not least due to being helpfully dead now). It follows, these people "reason", that therefore the theory has failed, is a proven dud. And they assert that it follows that they do not have to themselves point to any fault of reasoning or evidence damning the theory, because there is "obviously" "no case to answer" anyway.

Those who say this are in effect saying exactly the same as "Hello, I am a mindless herd-following sheep. I've noticed that none of the rest of the herd is heading your way, so I fail to see any reason why I should either. Baahh!"

Indeed, why think for yourself when you can just let others do your thinking for you instead?

"~Independent-minded~"? -- Baahh!

(See also description in Anna Karenina chapter 3.)

The evidence of the corruption of autism research

2010-10-29T01:23:00.000-07:00

The evidence has now grown to the point where any reasonable person can conclude that autism research (in the US, UK, and their commercial allies) is being severely distorted by corrupt motives. The corrupt agenda is (1) to hide the fact that the true cause of the increase was dental amalgam mercury, and (2) to hide the fact that removal of the mercury by chelation is the most effective treatment (indeed cure), so that the victims can be forced instead onto patented quack pseudo-treatments that Big Pharma hopes to roll out at immense profit in due course.

There's a popular myth that corruption in science consists mainly of people falsifying their data, like hitting the delete key and substituting some false numbers to fit the required conclusions. But from studying many papers over the years, I have concluded that such outright fabrication is actually rather rare, at least in a field such as autism research.

Instead the corruption works in ways that are more subtle, but also more solidly demonstrable. Instances of these more subtle distortions can individually be pretended to be mere misunderstandings or mistakes. Thus any particular case cannot alone constitute proof of corruption. It is only when a pattern of such "mistakes" begins to show up that the conclusion of a trend of corruption becomes clear. That's what is happening now.

The techniques of this subtle corruption include:
-selecting methods which are well-known to be incorrect;
-making agenda-convenient errors in one's calculations;
-avoiding and even preventing proper studies being carried out which would provide the honest answers;
-misrepresenting the literature by pretending into non-existence the truthful evidence while prominently trumpeting the worthless studies as supposedly sound evidence; and
-deploying false arguments (including attacking of "straw man" positions).

The great thing about these techniques is that only people with sufficient knowledge and understanding can see through what is going on, and they are usually the same people who are career-compromised by being stuck in the corrupted institutional setting. This corruption thereby sucks in and corrupts honest people too.

One way to produce misleading false negative results is to select tests which are well-known not to work. It has long been known that blood and urine levels are useless as tests of chronic mercury poisoning.

In this connection I draw to your attention this quotation from 1964:

“Those investigators who have studied the subject are in almost unanimous agreement that there is a poor correlation between the urinary excretion of mercury and the occurrence of demonstrable evidence of poisoning.”
‑‑Goldwater LJ, Ladd AC, Jacobs MG: Absorption and excretion of mercury in man. Arch Environ Health 9, 735-741 ( 1964)

and also this joint statement of the National Institute of Dental Health and the American Dental Association in 1984:

“The distribution of mercury into the body tissues is highly variable and there appears to be little correlation between levels in urine, blood or hair and toxic effects.”
—NIDH/ADA Workshop on Biocompatibility of Metals, Journal of the American Dental Association 109, September 1984.

Even my general practitioner was able to tell me this in 2006. It is the reason why Holmes used hair mercury and Bradstreet used chelation challenge instead of just measuring blood or urine. Hertz-Picciotto et al. (2010) used this well-known-useless blood mercury measure and found no difference between autistics and controls. Meanwhile DeSoto and Hitlan (2010) have shown that the other two studies that supposedly show no mercury-autism connection, Ip et al. (2004) and Soden et al. (2007), were flawed to the extent that they actually show the opposite. Those three very misleading studies have since been cited by certain senior experts as the supposed proof that there is no involvement of mercury in autism.

Rush et al. (2009) purported to show that chelation causes more harm than good, but in reality their procedure was utterly unrelated to any real-world chelation therapy. It purports an ignorance of even the most basic principle of chelation therapy (namely removing the toxin from the body) and substitutes a straw-man fallacious in-situ “detoxification” concept of its own. It is just as impossible to carry out a test of chelation in vitro (or in this case "in tissue") as it is impossible to venture out on a test drive of a car engine which is standing isolated from the car body on a mechanic's bench. When a dentist drills your tooth it instantly creates more pain than was there already. But we don't validly infer from that that dental treatment is counterproductive; because the treatment has to be evaluated as a whole.

The latest of these misleading studies, being widely paraded in triumph, is:

Cao Y, Chen A, Jones RL, Radcliffe J, Dietrich KN, Caldwell KL, et al. 2010. Efficacy of Succimer Chelation of Mercury at Background Exposures in Toddlers: A Randomized Trial. J Pediatr. Epub ahead of print. DOI:10.1016/j.jpeds.2010.08.036.

The NIH would have you believe that this shows
"Succimer found ineffective for removing mercury"
(In other words chelation supposedly can't help autistics, in defiance of all the huge "merely anecdotal claims" that it does.)
In reality, these investigators selected a useless procedure that any half-competent person would know would produce the wrong result. I explained in a previous post that there are many ways of using or misusing a chelator, some of which are sure to make matters worse rather than better. Here's a well-founded comment I found about this trash: "This trial had severe flaws in the dosing protocol - very large doses of DMSA (400mg+) were given to children once a day continuously for nearly a month along with some minerals (including iron and copper which Andy does not recommend) but without specific antioxidant support. I really feel sorry for the kids participating in this study. Unfortunately there will be some people who glance at the headline and wrongly conclude that DMSA is not a useful chelator."
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Autism-Mercury/message/288097

Meanwhile, several years on, no official trials have been carried out to test whether chelation does not work. The one trial that started was halted by the US medical authorities.

Oh, but hang on, the website of Pretend-to-Research-Autism mentions that the NIMH is running "three major trials of the chelator N-acetyl-cysteine". But NAC is definitely not a chelator. It certainly doesn't equate to the genuine protocols that huge numbers of parents have been having such success with (thus producing the "spontaneous" recoveries their doctors are now starting to report). Those same "Research Autism" charlatans place a maximum danger warning against chelation despite failing to cite a single shred of evidence of that supposed danger.

You can also see elsewhere here the abundance of consistently false arguments deployed in the supposedly-wonderful books by Paul Offit and Michael Fitzpatrick.

There's also last year's report from the UK NHS, wheeled out to pretend that there's been no increase anyway (the same NHS that resorts to so many untruths to prevent me getting treatment for the disability it caused).

So you can see here what looks to me like all the distortions I listed above being deployed in the service of a crime against the victims of this catastrophe which was caused by experts in the first place.

If the average person or even average graduate applied to become a researcher at any of these institutes they'd be laughed out the door. And likewise if they tried to get a publisher for one of those books. The people who are involved in making these "mistakes" have passed through numerous years of university education, have very advanced qualifications, not infrequently have been awarded superlative honours for their supposedly great contributions to science. And yet is it these supposedly great intellectual superiors who are producing and endorsing this trash-"science" in the service of an ongoing abuse of victims.

But I see no reason to believe that all those involved are consciously engaged in deceit (under duress or not). Many people are compromised by tendencies to suppress from consciousness any disturbing doubts, questions and facts. They eagerly "learn" "authoritative" information unquestioningly. They unconsciously avoid the inconvenient ideas and choose the personally convenient ones instead. They "sincerely" believe their falsehoods. And yet, still, there is no honour in their conduct here. Self-serving false beliefs are no more worthy for being "sincerely" believed, any more than a tiger's conduct can be classed as acceptable on the grounds that it has no sense of anything wrong with killing people.

Proof that ethylmercury does not exist

2010-10-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

People writing about mercury and autism tend to fall into one or other of two opposing belief groups, trying to convince you either (1) that vaccines are a major cause of autism, or (2) that mercury is entirely uninvolved in autism causation. Meanwhile I'm just trying to progress the frontiers of understanding yet further ahead, regardless of what others think. Any who disagree with the following (and I'm sure there will be many) are invited to explain why the ideas I present here are wrong and why their ideas are better.

The misleading notion of different "forms of mercury" all being merely "forms" of the same thing (i.e. "mercury".)

The following may be considered elementary chemistry but it may not be elementary child psychiatry so it still has a place here.

There is a lot of talk of mercury as though it is one thing, especially those such as the medical establishment propagandist Paul Offit declaring that "mercury poisoning" does not resemble autism. We could make a false comparison with some other toxic substance, for instance methanol. All methanol molecules are the same arrangement of one carbon atom, one oxygen and four hydrogens. The word specifically means that arrangement, that molecule. There are no "forms" of methanol, except in the trivial sense that a collection of such molecules could also be gas or solid.

But mercury is not a chemical arrangement, but rather is an element (that is, consists of atoms each having x protons and y neutrons)*. (*Though due to mercury poisoning I don't remember the values of x and y there.) Mercury atoms can feature as part of numerous different molecules, for instance chlorides or oxides of mercury. But those are not mercury! Not even "forms of mercury".

To clarify this, consider chlorine which is also an element. Chlorine is a deadly poisonous gas. When it is combined with sodium (which is also very injurious) it forms the sodium chloride better known as the salt that goes on your food and without which you would be dead very quickly. And if it is reasonable to talk of "methylmercury" as a "form of mercury" then it could be thought equally reasonable to talk of table salt as "sodylchlorine" and as a "form of chlorine".

However, we must now step back from making an absolute equivalence there in that analogy. That is because mercury atoms are relatively rare and have effects disproportionate to their numbers. And those other "forms of mercury" do have some practical equivalence to elemental mercury for the reason that in everyday life they function as important carriers of those same mercury atoms around to and from your body and brain. Just do not forget that the notion of these other substances being "forms of mercury" is still a significantly misleading concept.

Why there is no such thing as "ethylmercury"

A lot of people, including some I'd rate as pretty hot scientists rather than pseudoscientists, will tell you lots of ?facts? about something they call ethylmercury. They will tell you it is a deadly toxin put in vaccines and thereby causes autism and other problems. It would be nice just to say yes to all these nice people, but that's not what proper science is about.

Wikipedia is hopelessly corrupted in respect of anything remotely commercial or political, but it's quite good at basic science. It confirms that "ethylmercury" is not an element (i.e. type of atom), nor is it a specific substance (chemical compound) such as chalk or water. Rather it is a cation, a positively-charged ion. In practice charged ions don't a substance make, but instead have to be combined with corresponding negative ions. For instance sodium ions combine with chlorine ions to make common salt. Or they can combine with hydroxyl ions to form caustic soda.

It should be rather obvious that table salt is a very different thing from the caustic soda that says on the bottle "danger, do not add water" and "harmful, do not ingest". A notion that the two are one uniform substance called perhaps "sodyl" is absurd. It is obvious that "sodyl" can be extremely harmful or instead vital for life, depending on whether it is salt or caustic soda.

Just as you cannot buy "sodyl", you cannot ever buy "ethylmercury" either (or for that matter "methylmercury" or "diethylmercury" etc.). It's impossible to put "ethylmercury" in vaccines. What IS contained in (thimerosal-containing) vaccines is ethylmercury chloride. It may not have escaped your notice that adding the chloride bit to sodium in salt renders it the lifesaving table salt rather than the very injurious caustic soda. It's also well-known that the inorganic salt mercury chloride is vastly less toxic than the mercury without the chloride.

It follows that assertions about the toxicity of "ethylmercury" are rather unhinged, rather as assertions of the toxicity of "sodyl" would be.

Furthermore, the studies which purport to measure retention levels in the brain, of inorganic mercury and of ethylmercury, are studying phantoms. It is vanishingly improbable that a mercury atom or mercury ion or ethylmercury ion could just hang around for weeks in the brain without compounding with some other atoms in that brain. The question then arises of what compounds there are in that brain, not simply of how much "ethylmercury" or "inorganic mercury" there is in it.

From this perspective, a whole lot of thinking about mercury toxicity is substantially misguided. I would however not go so far as to say that this constitutes any grounds for dismissing the huge evidence that mercury in brain and body does exert majorly pathological effects. In my view it has caused both the autism increase and years of adult disability in myself. Regardless of whether it is "ethyl" or even merely ethereal.

Profs and PhDs supposedly not making sense

2010-10-28T12:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a comment from K. MacDonald to the IACC:

"The IACC seems to have extremely few committee members who understand the biomedical treatments that parents are having so much success with. Why are there no Defeat Autism Now (DAN) doctors on this committee?! This makes no sense not to involve the most successful practitioners," [....]
"As a parent who went the "mainstream route" for seven years before turning to the more alternative approach of the DAN doctors, I can say there is no comparison. I got absolutely NOWHERE with the mainstream approach, yet had almost miraculous results with the DAN approach. As a healthcare professional myself, I have to wonder what has happened to our medical integrity? Why are we not only avoiding researching treatments that seem to be helping many, but actively attacking those brave doctors who are truly trying to help? It makes no sense!"

No, K. Macdonald, it makes perfect sense.

Hypocrisy of the prevention of use of OSR#1

2010-10-20T01:03:00.001-07:00

The long-experienced mercury expert Boyd Haley has developed the chelator OSR#1 with the intention of providing a superior treament for autism. Yet the FDA has forced him to stop supplying it and thereby prevented parents from obtaining it.

Some are arguing that it is only right and fair that OSR#1 should have to undergo the same testing process as any drug coming from big pharma corps. Let's for the sake of argument suppose that this supposed scientific equivalence between OSR#1 and pharma drugs is valid.

Here's a rather more fitting comparison. My update review proves that the medical agent which absolutely certainly caused the autism increase was the non-gamma-2 dental amalgams that were introduced mainly from the 1970s onwards. Those non-gamma-2 were not tested for toxicity at the time, and they have still not been subjected to toxicity tests. There have been no studies of whether they cause autism. There have been no randomised controlled trials (other than two very limited and flawed ones confined to mid-childhood ages, equally incapable of detecting autism causation as of detecting chronic adult poisoning).

So if the treatment that is so desperately needed for the medically-caused autism is to be banned from use by the victim parents and children....

....why is not the highly-toxic dental amalgam likewise being immediately withdrawn from use until safety has been proven by proper trials?

~~~~~~
P.S.: The following is a commentary from Prof Haley:
"OSR#1 was removed from the market by the FDA as they claimed it was not a dietary product even though its structure consists of a benzoate (found in apples and cranberries) and cysteamine (a metabolite made from cysteine and in the pathway to make taurine, also found on the terminal end of Coenzyme-A). Our lawyers said we would likely win if we contested the FDA claim, but that it would take a year and cost a huge amount of money. Then the FDA would have another claim against OSR, in that physicians and patients were making claims on blog sites (we never made any medical claim on our website) that OSR caused a rapid and significant improvement in their various medical conditions. The FDA has a mantra that dietary products cannot have a positive medical effect---and if they do they are considered by the FDA as drugs. Our lawyer said we would not win regarding this issue."
(See also misleading scare-publicity issued by the FDA this month.)

Fallacy of a "changepoint" in the autism increase

2010-10-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

This is my comment on the 2010 paper by Michael E McDonald and John P Paul. "Timing of increased autistic disorder cumulative incidence" Environ. Sci. Technol. 44, 2112-2118.

The authors reckon that they can usefully analyse the autism increase curve by making an approximation of it in terms of two straight lines. They then point out that the junction of the two lines, the "changepoint", at which they suggest the autism increase began, is about 1988-9.

In reality, just about any curve of roughly exponential increase form can have a couple of straight lines imposed on it such as to passably plausibly account for the entire data set. Especially if you set the time axis long enough so the increase will look like an abrupt event rather than a gradual one.

Nice correlations can be found for each line with its corresponding part of the data, and impressively high significance levels pointed out. It does not however follow that the increase is usefully understood in terms of such pairs of lines.

The paper of McDonald and Paul features remarkably small graphs of the increase, which tend to give the impression that there was no increase before their "changepoint". And they use a whopping 50-year timespan. It would be better to have larger (taller) graphs around the critical period so we can examine the end of the "level" section more closely.

I will put here this superb graph of the US IDEA data that others have kindly prepared. (Right-click it to open an enlargement in a separate window.)
(Graph provided by Thoughtful House Center for Children,
Graphing IDEA Professional 2010, Thoughtful House, Austin, TX,
Accessed at http://www.thoughtfulhouse.org/disabilities/ on November 19, 2010.)

It should be quite obvious from this graph that there was not some abrupt changepoint around 1988, and not around any other year either.

One can also see that the increase was already beginning by 1980. This is nicely in line with the update review of the antiinnatia theory in which I state that the cause of the increase was the introduction of non-gamma-2 dental amalgams in the 1970s. (Among other evidence, the world's most famous dentist, Hal Huggins, said they became the new "state of the art" in 1975-6.)

Furthermore there is a conspicuous de-steepening of the gradient at 1992-3. I expect that this was due to some minor improvement of the amalgam usage protocol, such as avoiding for pregnant women, a slightly less toxic formulation, or improved suction systems.

I would not have commented on this "changepoint" paper except that it has been cited by Andrew Wakefield and some Age of Autism people as supposedly showing that the start of increase coincided with some changes in vaccination usage. No it didn't.

What evidence there is of effectiveness of chelation for autism, and what evidence that there is no mercury-autism connection anyway.

2010-10-10T02:00:00.001-07:00

It is impossible to exist as a human with IQ above 50 or so without forming theories; for instance the theory that one should go to sleep at night, or that there's something called chocolate which tastes nice.

Those superiors who beam down their contempt for conspiracy theorising may be unduly believing in the opposite which we might call "integrity theorising". And the older I get the less and less evidence I see for any truth of such integrity theories!

Conspiracy theorising is limited in the contribution it can make towards resolving medical questions, but I think it can help. Here are two relevant “conspiracy theories” that are supported by so much evidence that I can’t even begin to present it here.
(1) Those who cause a great harm are inclined to go to great lengths to deflect blame from themselves. The medical establishment is well-aware that some of the sources of mercury exposure are from themselves, not least dental amalgam. So it has great hostility to any suggestion of mercury involvement in autism.
(2) One of the most profitable industries in history is Big Pharma. They have for numerous decades engaged in dirty tricks propaganda designed to suppress competition from alternatives to their own patented products. A million dollars spent on propaganda is peanuts to them. And just think how much more you could achieve if you had just one of those millions of dollars to deploy.

There has been a lot of misrepresentation of chelation therapy, not least because it is a whole new approach to treatment, not properly fitting into the categories of either nutrients or conventional drugs. Just as you would not lump together all pharma-drugs or all nutrients as if they were just one treatment, so you should not lump together all chelation treatments. Huge numbers have been killed by prescribed drugs, but we do not seriously argue that therefore all drugs should be banned.

There’s also been a lot of misrepresentation of chelation because even many of those who promote it are incompetent, having little understanding of what is involved.

In my experience the unequalled mercury chelation expert is Andrew Hall Cutler who worked out how to cure himself of “amalgam illness” as he calls it. There’s no substitute for reading his slightly pricey book titled “Amalgam Illness”. But you can get to the key part of it by finding it on Amazon.com (not co.uk), and clicking the “Look inside”, then searching for the word “avid” which will take you to page 201. Page 199 onwards explains the essence of competent chelation, and of why incompetent chelation can be rather harmful. It’s simply the difference between brute ignorance and knowledge of the simple principles, not some amazing rocket-science expertise or great skill.

The purpose of chelation is, as per the diagrams on pages 200-201, to remove the toxin from the body. EDTA is not good for mercury detox; AHC explicitly condemned its use in this 1999 book. For adult amalgam illness he recommends only a specific protocol of (optional) DMSA for lowering the general body levels, followed only later by the (necessary) use of ALA which enables transport out from the brain (but also into it which is why the outside-of-brain levels must be lowered first). ALA is a nutrient, an amino acid, so not really comparable to a synthetic drug -- except that in mercurised persons it has that great potential negative (as I experienced myself before I understood I was mercury poisoned; I certainly didn’t take a second tablet of it).

Elsewhere in his book AHC explains how to counteract the tendency of chelators to remove required elements alongside the toxic ones. Again this isn’t exactly rocket science, unless of course your job depends on not understanding it.

Thus you can see now why inappropriate chelation can certainly be harmful, just as you can easily kill yourself with some commonly available pills from the pharmacy. And the sensationalist propaganda anecdotes by Offit and Fitzpatrick of one death caused by an incompetent’s use of EDTA casts not the slightest light on the question of safety of competent chelation protocols.

AHC’s recommendation for chelation of autistics is roughly the same (DMSA–)ALA protocol as for adult amalgam illness, except with shorter intervals. He’s been critical of the protocols recommended by ARI/DAN people, but I don’t know the exact details (as therapy is not something I reckon to have comprehensive expertise about).

Hopefully the above has adequately explained the proper and improper uses of the widely differing protocols applied to the various chelators.

~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile, the medical corporo-establishment is hostile to the idea of mercury involvement in autism, for those two reasons of denying blame for causing it and opposing a non-pharma treatment for it.

You probably already know that it began with the thimerosal hypothesis, itself soon after Wakefield’s MMR hypothesis. These vaccine hypotheses were rightly debunked (at least as major autism factors), but once the debunkers got started they got carried away into falsely debunking everything else to do with autism-mercury -- in the context of those two prejudicing motives.

That included seeking to debunk chelation for autism. Both Offit’s and Fitzpatrick’s books deploy a number of fallacious critiques of chelation, accompanying their lurid highlighting of the irrelevant EDTA-related death anecdote. That latter is as logical as condemning the use of anti-depressants (“drugs”) on the basis of an anecdote of one death resulting from a pain-killer (“drugs”) overdose.

Meanwhile, what about the evidence of effectiveness?

Years ago the ARI instigated a whole load of carefully-designed studies which established the value of vitamin B6 in ameliorating autism in about half of cases. And then all that peer-reviewed, double-blinded, multi-replicated research was utterly ignored and pretended away anyway by the medical establishment.

Thereafter Rimland and Co understandably decided to let the “proper” scientific publishing process go to hell and the ARI concentrated on doing its own publishing via internet and conferences.

Non-establishment science faces increasingly severe obstacles to reaching the official recognition of a PubMed number. Researchers find funding unavailable; they fear having their careers trashed; and many journal editors and referees then deploy their own unsound hostilities. And then even if it does manage to get published it just gets ignored by the sheep and sheepdogs of the establishment anyway, like those B6 studies and my own theory paper.

The CDC, NIMH, MRC etc have not exactly been racing against one another to set up chelation trials with the millions at their command. It appears that eventually SafeMinds etc managed to pester them into setting up a trial, but it, oh, --so regettably!-- "had to be" halted due to supposedly some safety concerns. It couldn’t of course really even possibly be just because they were in danger of getting the “wrong” result and proving that chelation cures autism.

Meanwhile, in the real world, yes there are all those many videos of recovered children, which a lot of "experts" seem incapable of even mentioning, including for instance Simon Baron-Cohen, and "Research Autism" which pretends to be a charity trying to help autistics. And the plural of anecdote eventually does become scientific evidence despite all the efforts of sham scientists. Scientific American recently suggested that 75% of parents are now using the treatments decried as life-threatening quackery.

It is very analogous to the case of adult amalgam illness (which ironically is caused by the same amalgams that caused the autism increase). Many thousands of cases of spectacular “miraculous” recovery from serious intractable illness are on record; plus there’s my own stupendous case and the official lies and evasions to prevent me getting treatment; the internet is getting more and more flooded with such stark testimonies. Amalgam’s even been banned now in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. And yet parts of the med establishment and their slimey assistants such as Ben Goldacre insist on just churning out yet more lies and patently pseudo-science reports such as the SCENIHR one.

Evidence that the real quackery is coming from the medical establishment:
their defence of mercury is demonstrably a pile of rubbish.

Senior names in the research bureaucracy such as Linda Birnbaum assert that an autism-mercury connection has been found to be lacking. The putative evidence of this lack of involvement of mercury rests on three studies, namely Ip et al, Soden, and Hertz-Picciotto et al. 2010. But the first two have been shown to be flawed beyond repair, and indeed evidencing the opposite, by DeSoto and Hitlan 2010. And the remaining study has meanwhile been shown by myself to be worthless rubbish malfounded on a most elementary error.

Oh, and now we have this further would-be contribution: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19027035, which purports an ignorance of even the most basic principle of chelation therapy (namely removing the toxin from the body) and substitutes a straw-man fallacious in-situ “detoxification” concept of its own. It is just as impossible to carry out a test of chelation in vitro (or in this case "in tissue") as it is impossible to venture out on a test drive of a car engine which is standing isolated from the car body on a mechanic's bench. When a dentist drills your tooth it instantly creates more pain than was there already. But we don't validly infer from that that dental treatment is counterproductive; because the treatment has to be evaluated as a whole.

That’s four out of four piles of rubbish constantly cited by the very-well-qualified professional defenders of mercury.

On the one hand there is that fourfold pile of rubbish supposedly showing no involvement of mercury. On the other hand the evidence that mercury is involved in autism is now so substantial as to be far beyond reasonable doubt (as reviewed in my update review forthcoming).

Wouldn't it be wonderful if researchers in capitalist countries were paid to find out the truth rather than to cover it up and oppress victims?
More pages relevant to chelation denialism are linked here.

(This post has been written in response to a question asked on the lbrb blog - search for the second comment by "daedalus".)
Two more studies apparently showing a mercury connection (though I've not read them as I concentrate my reading on things that don't agree with my current conclusions): http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a916457948 and http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/730552

Drivel-barrageing, an abuse of open debate opportunities

2010-10-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

I am here introducing the name drivel-barrageing for a phenomenon that did not exist before the internet enabled the introduction of open debate forums such as this here.

Others have already noticed this form of abuse but I forget what if any term they used to label it, and anyway I'm now here calling it drivel-barrageing.

An example of a somewhat similar phenomenon was the harassing "by right" of climate scientists by large numbers of time-wasting "freedom of information" requests.

Drivel-barragers superficially appear to be engaging in civil, reasonable, discussion. But in reality it is not reasonable discussion. They publish a barrage of sloppy questions or other challenges against their victim. They do not bother to spend the time to properly research and critically consider whether their challenges have any substance to them. Instead they put the heavy burden on the victim to answer all their sloppy confusions, to correct all their errors, as if the victim had some professional teaching obligations to them.

There is consequently a grossly unreasonable imbalance in the resulting "debate". The barrager has an easy time generating his drivel, whereas the victim has to labour at sorting out the critical thinking, the provision of evidence the barrager couldn't be bothered to find out for himself, and so on.

The drivel barrager assumes that a principle of reasonable debate is that their victim has some obligation to respond to every piece of their drivel. If the victim does not it will supposedly constitute proof that the driveller is right and the victim is wrong. But in the real world, people do have other things they have to get on with, such as survival chores and working on proper thoughtful projects and studying of their own. The driveller prevents this proper activity and disrespects the time and contribution of the victim.

I myself am very unusual in that I seek out debate with those of contrasting views. I have consequently become all too familiar with this sort of abuse, first noticing it on the (now defunct) Monbiot discussion list back in 2004. Frequently a whole load of drivellers gang up against the one victim (me).

A recent outbreak of drivel-barrageing can be seen from "daedalus" on the page linked here. It's rather normal for a drivel-barrager to be anonymous as there. You can see how he just cannot get the point of his unreasonableness and just goes on pigheadedly. He expresses concern that he cannot post comments to my autism site. I don't know why, as I can post comments easily enough myself. But actually his comments would not be welcome anyway. That's not because they would be wrong, or because I would disagree with them, but because they would be the unworthy drivel of an unrepentant, incorrigible, drivel-barrageing abuser of this opportunity for open debate.

People do not have a right to expect all their questions to be answered and re-answered ad nauseam. Respect may not have to be earned in the first instance, but that respect can rightly be withdrawn if a victim finds himself the subject of such drivel-barrageing abuse.

Autism's false prophets, Offit's false arguments, selective omissions, and chelation denialism

2010-10-06T05:31:00.000-07:00

The book "Autism's false prophets" by Paul Offit is not just yet another book about autism. Huge quantities of this exceptionally evil concoction are being handed out free through the American Academy of Pediatrics to any parents who express the wrong sorts of doubts.

It contains relatively little scientific argument, consisting instead mainly of ad-hominem muck-raking and "you can trust us" assertions of the supposedly superior authority of big wealthy institutions. But even where it strays into actual science it contains major errors.

Before examining those errors you should be aware that Offit's book uses a very peculiar system of citing which gives no citation indications on the text pages, but only in a back section. This peculiar system (which I've never seen in any other document) is ideal for when you wish to deceive readers about what is genuinely evidence-based and what is mere false assertion -- as in the following examples.

One of the errors is Offit's notion that mercury removal could not possibly enable recovery from mercury-induced injury. Offit's reasoning is that "Once a brain cell is damaged by a heavy metal like mercury, it is permanently damaged" (page 145). And so removing the mercury cannot reverse the "damage". And "therefore" chelation for autism cannot work and must be mere quackery.

Firstly, let us for the moment take as accepted Offit's false notion that "damage" of neurons must be involved in autism. Immediately after this critique of the science he presents his scare-anecdote about an utterly irrelevant case of incompetent misuse of EDTA: "And then the unthinkable happened....." (Arrgghh!!!). Curiously he gives twelve citations for that ONE utterly irrelevant scare-drivel anecdote, and yet in respect of his key assertion about damaged cells, there is no citation of evidence whatsoever. But of course that's not really a problem as it is the Infallible True Prophet Offit who is proclaiming it, in whom the reader has been given total faith by this stage; and it's a fair bet that the twelve drivel citations were padded in there to hide the non-existent evidence about "damage", for that's how such propaganda trickery always works (see e.g. the UK COT's deliberately deceitful statement against vitamin B6).

All manner of body cells have extensive systems in place for repairing themselves. They're doing it all the time. So on quite what basis does Offit assert that neurons "damaged" by mercury cannot be "repaired"? And why does he cite no evidence for this key, highly-heretical assertion?

But anyway, Offit errs more fundamentally, by making that false assumption that mercury neurotoxicity works only by "damaging" neurons, with no other neurotoxic processes involved. You will see in my 1993 paper there is not the slightest hint of it involving neurons being "damaged", nor indeed any "damage" being involved in autism causation at all. Rather autism is difference, not disorder (-- as the book's very own dedicatee "real heroes" Kathleen Seidel and Camille Clark would very much agree!). I can only guess that logical consistency is as alien to Dr Offit as is evidence-basing of his key assertions.

In reality mercury has potential to affect neurons via its pro-oxidant effect, and via its interference with all the enzyme pathways that involve zinc (in other words just about all of them). And last but not least, as my update review explains, mercury binds to DNA and thereby reduces gene-expression, which the antiinnatia theory had already indicated would cause autism.

The mechanism by which mercury causes autism therefore does not involve any damaging of neurons. So lowering the mercury levels, such that the DNA has less of it binding and inhibiting the gene-expression required for normal development, would indeed enable recovery, providing it is done before the brain has become too fixed by maturation. Offit's reasoning is therefore doubly incorrect.

[Temporary note: I am busy at the moment but will come back to add yet more false arguments his book presents against chelation. His case consists entirely of falsehoods, unbecoming of such a highly-qualified researcher.]

You can also see that on page 115 (refs page 269) Offit cites the Nelson and Bauman paper but fails to give the citation of the Bernard et al which it attempted to debunk, nor any mention of the authors' later resounding rejoinder. I leave you to form your own judgement about this selective mentioning of only one side by such a highly-qualified multi-millionaire. Especially given the seriousness of the subject, potentially trying to deprive tragic victims of a valuable therapy, and Dr Offit's heavy financial interest in the question of the safety of vaccines.

Offit deploys that misinformation there in a second false argument in terms of autism and mercury poisoning being "two disorders". And yet an elementary knowledge of mercury toxicity tells us that there is far from "one disorder" that constitutes "mercury poisoning". I can only guess this heroic multi-millionaire was too busy struggling to make ends meet to find the time to properly study what he was publishing about.

A third false argument of Offit is his comparison of autism epidemiology with other epidemiology (on pages 110-111). He states that epidemiology of effects of certain vaccines was able to show up even the causation of some very rare hazards (intussusception, thrombocytopenia, and Guillain-Barré syndrome) resulting from them, and "therefore" the epidemiological studies of autism would have this same power to utterly rule out even very slight involvement of vaccines. Personally I think the autism data is too unclear to resolve whether or not there is rare harm caused by vaccines anyway, but that's beside the point.

What is the point here is that the epidemiology of autism is affected by two starkly obvious major complications which did not affect the epidemiology examples cited by Offit. Firstly, autism is very far from being something that can be clearly "yes/no" identified as can the above-named three conditions. Secondly, the autism epidemiology data has huge variance, far from all of it explained, but reasonably suspected to be caused by some changes of awareness and of diagnosis, and not least by other environmental factors such as dental mercury (as my update review will make clear).

That is, the autism data has a huge level of "noise" in it preventing hearing of the exquisite signal that Offit claims could be clearly not heard. Or in another analogy, the autism data is a very crude unfocussable lens through which to search for the tiny pinpoint he claims ought to be visible if vaccines even rarely caused autism. So again, we see a crudely incorrect argument from this highly-qualified, highly-awarded author who has made millions from touting his medical products.

(Whether Offit's legal-liability-exempt profitmaking products are a quackery scam is besides the point, but in view of all the above one does have to wonder -- and indeed it does turn out that the rotavirus that he's earned millions from has been judged unneeded by 27 of 29 nations, and was only accepted in the US thanks to himself voting it in.)
And Offit's "rotavirus vaccine may be linked to a small increase in a life-threatening type of bowel obstruction, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday..... ."

In 2009, the American Academy of Pediatrics presented the “President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service” award to Dr Paul Offit.

See also my important further article

Paul Offit betrays his serious aversion to honesty"

More about Dr Offit here. And here and here.

Important concepts about theories

2010-10-04T02:04:00.000-07:00

Far too much timewasting philoso-waffle has been written about theories, but I think that nevertheless there are a few points that are important to make clear. This article here is a work-in-progress. For now I'll just discuss a first aspect.

The illusion of conflicting of theories.

Consider the answer to the question "How did you manage to get from town A to town B in only 30 minutes?". One answer might be "I bought a bus ticket". Another answer could be "Oil was pumped up from the ground, taken to a refinery, the resulting diesel was then transported to a depot, and then pumped into the tank of a vehicle, ......" and so on.

Those two explanations of the journey look very different and yet they can both be true simultaneously. Likewise there are quite a number of ideas currently around concerning autism causation, some of which are even called theories of autism. And just because they look very different from the antiinnatia theory, it does not follow that they are all in conflict with the antiinnatia theory, any more than the bus ticket theory is in conflict with the oil fuel theory.

For instance my presentations of the antiinnatia theory had already incorporated the concept of theory of mind even before anyone else had published anything about that concept. From my perspective it was just some more of the innatons that get suppressed (or impaired) by antiinnatia.

Another instance is that some people are linking the male-female imbalance of autism cases to characteristics of testosterone (such as its potentiating the effect of mercury). My 1993 paper gave an explanation of why there was this imbalance, but in terms of natural selection. Again there is no necessary conflict here, any more than there is between the bus ticket and oil-production theories of my journey. Of the two, my natural selection explanation is the overarching one, as it additionally explains why testosterone would be the molecule it is (with that effect), or why testosterone was selected to be the masculinising hormone. The explanation in terms of chemical details meanwhile could have potential usefulness for diagnosis or intervention.

There is only one autistic/ASD syndrome!

2010-10-03T17:05:00.000-07:00

There are many thousands of autistics, and each one is unique.

But I resolutely reject the notion suggested by some, that there are "many autisms", for the following reasons.

The world has been aware of the autistic syndrome/Asperger syndrome for nearing 70 years now. Many people have spent much time trying to delineate separate subdivisions within that syndrome. The result has been a resounding lack of finding any such subdivisions. Even attempts to show any certain distinction between "Aspergers" and "high-functioning autism" have drawn a blank [as per Tony Attwood's review linked at end here].

Meanwhile there are certainly great variations in how autism manifests. And there is much reason to believe that the etiological (causal) factors can be quite different in different cases.

Years ago when I was first writing down the antiinnatia theory of autism I wrote a paragraph which explained about this. But because the paper (as published in 1993) was already rather long, I cut that paragraph out before publication. I'll now reinstate it here, in concept at least (as I don't remember the original wording).

Autism(/ASD etc) is like a tree. Just as a tree has many roots, so autism has many causes. Just as a tree has many branches, so autism has many characteristics and signs (notwithstanding the dumbing-down to a "triad of impairments"). But also, just as a tree has only one trunk, so autism/ASD/Aspergers/etc has only one central causal, definitional mechanism/concept, namely antiinnatia.

We can elaborate this metaphor of a tree by thinking of it as grounded in some rather peculiar soil. At the northwest corner there is a lot of (say) uranium in the soil, whereas at the southeast corner there is none at all. In consequence of this the leaves of one corner of the tree contain a lot of uranium while at the opposite corner there is little or none. But all are part of the same tree.

But....!
Notwithstanding the above, it would be wise for autism research to recognise various distinctions, such as male/female, and late/early onset. And another distinction I would suggest to be particularly important.

The evidence concerning this is is more fully elaborated in my update review, but I will briefly outline it here. According to my update of the theory, the autism increase has been caused by mercury (from non-gamma-2 amalgams); whereas the pre-increase autism had generally minimal involvement of mercury. (But it couldn't be zero as no-one has ever lived in a zero-mercury environment.)

It follows that within contemporary autism/ASD/Aspergers/etc we are looking at two substantially different things. On the one hand the minority (10-20%?) who would have been autistic/etc even if the increase had not taken place. These would be the "true" autism/etc, so to speak. On the other hand, those cases caused by mercury intake. These latter are very likely to have a variety of mercury-specific symptoms accompanying their antiinnatia-caused symptoms.

It follows that any research that just lumps together both these groups is liable to learn little about either. Indicators towards distinguishing between the two are likely to include: age of onset, number of maternal amalgams, level of indoor mercury vapor, results of porphyrin tests or hair mercury tests. Meanwhile, mercury levels in blood or urine are most unlikely to be worthwhile distinguishers.

It may be possible to discern the two categories in bimodal distributions and or scattergrams, getting beyond overly simple averaging of the whole autistic category.

Review of Asperger's/Autism relationship by Tony Attwood.

IQ increase (Flynn effect) predicted affects animals too

2010-10-03T17:01:00.001-07:00

My update review explains the Flynn effect IQ increase and its reversal as caused by the parallel increase of atmospheric mercury vapor over a century followed by the parallel reduction in recent decades. There is no reason why this causality should not apply equally to non-human animals, and so the theory makes a new prediction that the Flynn effect affects non-humans. This would be manifested in intelligently innovative behaviours and a certain amount of deviation from hitherto traditional innately-directed behaviours (a sort of "animal autism").

While I have not made any search for confirmation or disconfirmation, I have passively come to notice some support for this concept.

Firstly, a monkey inventing a new way of opening coconuts:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8936000/8936523.stm

Secondly a species of monkey which was well-established to be vegetarian suddenly starting to eat eggs:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8270000/8270801.stm

Plus you can hear this hilarious innovation in gibbon singing....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8150000/8150604.stm

The politics of autism research

2010-10-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

"...gene is mythical part of living structure which in reactionary theories like Mendelism-Veysmanism-Morganism determines heredity. Soviet scientists under leadership of Academician Lysenko proved scientifically that genes don't exist in the nature."
From Soviet Encyclopedia circa 1950

Huge numbers of words, including several books, have been written about allegedly unworthy deeds and motives of various people and groups involved in autism research. Depending on which side you prefer to believe, those involved in Defeat Autism Now, SafeMinds, Age of Autism, etc, are either evil profiteering quackery-merchants or else great heroes standing up to an evil profiteering medical establishment.

In my view, such conspiracy theorising does little to resolve any of the scientific questions. In my experience as a theorist, researchers almost never actually falsify their raw data (though in respect of commercially-criticial trials of therapies it may be less rare). I wouldn't have been able to so easily formulate coherent theories time and time again if that data were not founded in reality.

But I do think that anyone coming to look at autism research, and the forthcoming (non-/)reaction to my update review, would be well advised to be aware of some of the potential political factors that could be intruding to distort the science from its unbiased path. So I will just put these few thoughts here on the subject.

Some elements of the political context could be that:

Some people wish(ed) to blame vaccine manufacturers, or other medical institutions, for causing the autism of their children (and associated alleged increase). (the "heretics")
Some of those accused by the above wish(ed) to prove that there was no such causation, and or increase. (the "establishment")
Some professional researchers might conceivably wish to spin out the progress of science into false trails, so as to prolong their own professional research careers rather than resolve questions as promptly as possible. And some may fear losing their jobs if they raise the 'wrong' questions or publish the 'wrong' results. (the "careerists")
Some others may wish to falsely declare a crisis, and or falsely proclaim treatments, in order to profit from gullible customers. (the "quacks")
Yet others (the "establishment" again) may wish to falsely discredit valuable treatments as supposed quack remedies, because they undermine their own plans to market licenced pharmaceuticals for the same condition.

Malign motives can be attributed to all sides. And false claims can be shown on all sides, naturally enough given the human talent for making mistakes. And so little or nothing of the science is proven by any of the associated slime-throwing.

I'll just put below here my own impressions of how the science has been distorted in recent years, by way of enabling some anticipation of how my own update review will be misrepresented in due course. Please note that none of this is my certified testimony as to the truth of anything; please verify for yourself if you wish to take a firm view of any of it.

Firstly (see disclaimer above), autism had a most unhelpful tendency to become noticeable at just about the same age as some vaccinations are injected. And some of the heretics were noticing an increase in prevalence which aligned with increased vaccinations. Their reasonable suspicion was reinforced by the lack of any other obvious causal change, because the dental profession continues to assert that they're still using those same old amalgams tried and tested over 150 years, and so approximately no-one has noticed the huge unannounced changeover to non-gamma-2 amalgams.

The heretics of necessity tended to be rather amateurish, undertrained, underqualified and underfunded people. They naturally made plenty of mistakes, especially in the early years.

The establishment could have responded to the MMR and thimerosal theories with some sound science. Instead, some absolutely stupendously abysmal papers were published, such as Madsen in respect of Denmark. Such rubbish could be excused if it were coming from the amateur heretics, but coming from supposed leading expert scientists and published in supposedly top-rating journals any notion of good faith bungling was much harder to find credible.

The result of these abysmal publications (and the associated persecution of Andrew Wakefield) was a huge increase of distrust of the establishment. In reality there was soon enough sufficient sound science to radically marginalise the vaccine theories anyway. But now that the establishment has gained an image of untrustworthiness, that sound science is very much harder for the heretics and the general public to believe. Everything can now be rationalised away as lies and propaganda.

Associated claims from the establishment have been that the increase was not real, and that autism was almost entirely of genetic causation. Again the establishment used abysmal papers to justify its denialism. Again they unnecessarily undermined their own credibility.

It appears that those claims of no increase and no environmental cause thereof are now floundering in the face of a reality that is simply too big to be pretended away (though the NHS as recently as 2009 has published yet more rubbish in defence of that flat earth).

Which brings us to the present stage of this parade of denialisms. This is exemplified by a number of the highest-ranking research professionals touting blood levels of mercury as a supposedly useful means of showing that mercury has not been involved in autism. Any even slightly competent researcher should be well aware that using blood (or urine) measures of mercury is a great way to get the false negative that they want so as to put everyone off the trail to the real cause of the increase. Even my common-or-garden mere general practitioner (family doctor) was able to tell me back in 2004 that blood mercury is a useless test for chronic mercury poisoning. So how come these spectacularly-qualified supposedly leading expert researchers don't know even this most basic fact of what they are publishing about?
Reference for blood mercury: Mutter, Naumann, Guethlin. Comments on the Article "The toxicology of mercury and its chemical compounds". Crit Rev Toxicol 2007 37:537-549.

Meanwhile the other two papers (by Ip, and Soden) which are deployed as supposedly showing no mercury involvement have also been exposed as severely flawed, in this review by DeSoto and Hitlan.
(http://www.ane.pl/showarticle.php?art=7021)
So the case against mercury involvement rests on three papers all of which are fit only for the trashcan. Need I say more?

We can now look forward to hearing this same pseudo-expertise rolled out again as "professional" "expert" testimony to also "disprove" my update review on the pseudic grounds of a supposed lack of difference of mercury in autism.

One may hypothesise that there are malign motives at work, of (1) wishing to deflect blame from the medical establishment's endorsement of dental amalgam, and or (2) wishing to avoid identifying the real environmental cause so that these same researchers can enjoy decades of prestige and income at our expense on a wild-goose chase among any number of other non-causes of autism. One may also hypothesise (3) that some researchers are in an embarassing position, because they fear having their careers destroyed and ending up on the dole if they ask the 'wrong' questions or publish the 'wrong' answers.

Those are only unproven hypotheses. It is nevertheless difficult for me to suppress suspicion that the malign spirit of Lysenkoism is very much alive and distorting the world of professional autism research in the western world. On the other hand again, I would be wary of attributing evil to all the people involved. My observations of other "controversies" indicate that the most stupendous obtuseness can be achieved even by highly intelligent people having no possible selfish motive for their denialism (and this for reasons that were explained in my unpublished theory of neuroticism; btw, the low-neurotic can be even more denialic than the high).

Do vaccines cause autism?

2010-09-24T02:00:00.000-07:00

The following is further to my discussion in my update review paper.

I hold a uniquely "privileged" position of lack of bias in relation to this dispute. I have no personal connection whatsoever with autism, with no family or friends affected by autism. As a chronically disabled person (devastated by "harmless" dental amalgams since age 17) I have all these years obtained my income only from the Department of Work and Pensions which couldn't give a damn what I write about health. As a thus consistently independently-based researcher there is no pressure on me to go along with any particular institutional position. As a chronically mentally disabled person I had and have absolutely zilch research career prospects to exert bias on my pronouncements. (And I'm certainly no great admirer of health "authorities".) My only connection with autism is that many years ago I discovered and later published the uniquely unchallenged, comprehensive, theory of autism, long before there was any talk of an increase let alone the slightest linking of it with vaccines or even mercury. Furthermore, autism is just one of my numerous great theories, so I am not here gripped by all-eggs-in-one-basket ego syndrome either.

As exclusively a theorist, I have all my cards on the public table. The only cards I bring to this debate-table are such objectivity, accuracy and logicality as I can manage (plus perhaps a bit more "ingenuity" than most). I subscribe to the view that intellectual excellence is revealed not by dogged consistency in the face of new evidence, but rather by the flexibility to acknowledge if one has been mistaken and to thereby advance with new learning.

From this background, I and the antiinnatia theory really don't give a hoot as to whether or not any vaccine causes autism. We will just follow the facts wherever they lead us.

We must distinguish between two questions. Namely:
Have vaccines caused the autism increase (mainly or in part)? and
Have vaccines played any part in causing any autism?

We must also remember that evidence that mercury is involved in autism in no way constitutes evidence that vaccines are involved too - my theory update review shows that the mercury comes mostly (and probably all) from dental amalgams instead.

I see substantial evidence that vaccines have played at most only a minor part in causing the increase. Somewhere between zero% and, at a credibility-straining push, up to 5%-10%.

For want of any better terminology I'll use the term "vax-blamers" to indicate those who reckon there is evidence of causation.

Within epidemiological evidence we can distinguish what I will call time-series data, the familiar sort of graphs showing autism rates sloping up or down between particular years.

The vax-blamers commonly assert that time-series epidemiological evidence is inferior to clinical or lab evidence. But it depends which of those two questions you are asking. If vaccinations were a major cause of the increase, then their effects really should be readily visible in the time-series data studies, insofar as they were honestly and competently conducted. Some outstandingly defective papers were published by the pro-vaxxers, which rightly undermined people's confidence in the honesty of those involved. But as I explain in my pages about corruption, I think it extremely unlikely that anyone actually falsified the source data records or their reporting in even the most abusive of these studies. (The one exception I would make is that of Prof Brent Taylor who was accused by the late Bernard Rimland of falsifying his data, not without some reason. Taylor's data does bizarrely stand utterly out of line with all the other time-series if you plot them together in a graph. But it is not a significant part of the whole anyway.)

In my update review I make my own consolidated review of this time-series data and explain how I fail to see any impact of vaccines therein. This does not of course rule out the posssibility that a minority of cases are vaccine-caused.

Vax-blamers have also paraded various clinical and lab studies as supposedly strong evidence of causation. But I don't find this evidence very persuasive. For instance the tests of monkeys injected with thimerosal. They used a schedule four times faster than the human schedule, and yet mercury reactions and metabolism do not happen four times faster in monkeys. And the inference from one species to another is too speculative. Such data is suggestive, but not adequately probative.

Finally there is a third class of data, which is epidemiological but not time-series. I see two notable examples of this sort, both relating to thimerosal, namely the secret Simpsonwood reports and this published study:
Hepatitis B triple series vaccine and developmental disability in US children aged 1-9 years. Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry, September 2008, Carolyn Gallagher and Melody Goodman.

These have both involved substantial numbers and both shown some compelling statistical associations of thimerosal with disabilities. That's even though there is perhaps a question regarding the Gallagher and Goodman study as to how much of that disability was actually autistic-type.

At this point I have to get some of those autism jigsaw puzzle pieces back out of the box I dumped them in many years ago, because these two weighty non-time-series studies seem so discrepant from the huge weight of the time-series data.

The puzzle here is that if the results of those two studies were to be taken as meaning what they appear to be, then there really ought to be a massive visibility of the vaccine causation in the time-series charts too. And yet there is none at all.

My position on this conflict of evidences is as follows. There are improbable hypotheses, such as (1) some crooks have elaborately fiddled the official records behind those time-series in several countries, or (2) probability has played a whopping trick on us and just by stupendous fluke some very misleading results came out, or (3) at exactly the same time (and volume) as the thimerosal was upped and downed, some other mysterious factor caused an exactly opposite downing and upping, such that it ended up looking like just level. While I can't rule out these three, I consider them to be extremely improbable.

A more likely explanation is that the time-series data do give us the true picture, and the other two studies are misleading us in some way. There are indeed various very valid questions as to whether one or more confounders could have unbalanced the results. Not least there is some reason to suspect a high correlation between vaccine mercury acceptance and dental mercury acceptance.

My bottom line is that there remains a possible anomaly requiring an explanation here, but I don't consider it a very desperately nagging anomaly. These studies suggest some possible involvement of vaccines, but not compellingly enough to draw any firm vax-blaming conclusions at this time.

Meanwhile there are many parents who insist that they know that vaccines were causal because their child was fine until they immediately that same day/week/month/year suddenly became autistic. What they fail to understand is that regressive autism tends to begin at the same age anyway as when millions are vaccinated. So it would be actually expected that just by fluke a fair number of those millions would develop autism the same day and so on. Such observations have no evidential value about causation whatsoever.

P.S. Some people are claiming that some vaccine court judgments somehow prove that vaccines cause autism. Firstly, court judgments, whatever their other merits, do not usually constitute scientific evidence or even conclusions beyond reasonable doubt. Secondly, cases involving severe encephalitis such as the Hannah Poling case really do not have much in common with cases where "mere" autism results. You can cause severe loss of communication and social functioning by bashing your child hard enough on the head but it doesn't follow that head-bashing is sensibly considered a cause of autism.

A bit more of my thoughts about the vaccine evidence can be found at my page about Dr Wakefield.

Fallacy about acrodynia (pink disease)

2010-09-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

On the leftbrainrightbrain blog, "daedalus" asked:

RPC, why don’t you read up on what was called Pink Disease. It was a serious disease of children in the first half of the 20th century. It was a leading cause of death, with about 23% of child deaths attributed to it. Eventually it was realized that it was actually mercury poisoning from teething powders. Many of the teething powders that were produced and sold had a grain of mercurous chloride in them. Yes, a grain. If you don’t have the conversion factor handy, that is 65,000 micrograms per dose. Yes, 65,000 micrograms of mercurous chloride per dose, and many children were given multiple doses. Many tens of millions of doses were sold, with a single company reporting sale of 30,000,000 doses in one year.

Many tens of millions of children received many thousands of times more mercury from teething powders than ever received from vaccines. Mercury from teething powders gave many children pink disease and killed over a thousand. Where is the autism from the first half of the 20th century when children were given so much mercury that over a thousand were killed by it?

To which I reply:

Pink disease has zilch to do with my explanation of any autism causation, or the data I will be citing in relation to mercury. The key causal variable posited in my update review is constant inhalation of elemental mercury vapor. It matters little how many tons of mercurous chloride were applied to infants, as Hg2Cl2 is a very different chemical from mercury vapor. The former is a substantially stable solid, whereas the latter is a highly reactive gas. Indeed it’s well-known that chlorine (gas) strongly counteracts the toxicity of mercury gas, rendering it far less toxic to the workers in chlor-alkali plants. It does so by reacting with the mercury to produce mercury-chlorine salts such as the same Hg2Cl2 that was involved in Pink disease.

Indeed "daedalus" above states that:

Many tens of millions of doses were sold, with a single company reporting sale of 30,000,000 doses in one year.

and yet only:

over a thousand were killed by it

which indicates a death rate of something like only one in a million, not exactly the most deadly formula in history.

Furthermore, the mercurous chloride was put in the babies' mouths. It's well-known that even elemental mercury has little or no toxic effect, is neglibly absorbed, when swallowed. And furtherfurthermore, those teething powers were of course not applied except at teething age (apologies for dazzling you with this rocket science here!), whereas the causality described in my update review requires continuous sustained intake.

Hertz-Picciotto et al 2010 very misleading about mercury

2010-09-20T01:55:00.000-07:00

Contrary to widely-promoted assertions, the Hertz-Picciotto et al 2010 study does not in the slightest constitute evidence that mercury has not been involved in causation of autism.

They found no association of mercury blood levels with autism. Which is not surprising as the autism would be caused not by mercury in blood but by mercury in brain cells. It's been known for decades that blood levels of mercury are near-useless as an indicator of body burden of mercury and chronic mercury poisoning.

“The distribution of mercury into the body tissues is highly variable and there appears to be little correlation between levels in urine, blood or hair and toxic effects.” —NIDH/ADA Workshop on Biocompatibility of Metals, Journal of the American Dental Association 109 (September 1984).

Further references for the uselessness of blood mercury levels can be found in the critique by Joachim Mutter of the fraudulent SCENIHR report, and in Mutter, Naumann, Guethlin. Comments on the Article "The toxicology of mercury and its chemical compounds". Crit Rev Toxicol 2007 37:537-549.

Even my mere common-or-garden general practitioner ("family doctor") was able to tell me years ago that a blood test of mercury would be worthless for diagnosing chronic mercury poisoning.

A great way to get the wrong answers is to ask the wrong questions. A far more right question to have asked would have been whether there is an association between number of mothers' amalgams (i.e. a cause) and autistic behaviors (i.e. the key effect of interest). Some such studies have already been done and found significantly positive results. They are far easier to carry out than this one requiring going round sucking blood from children rather than just counting their mothers' fillings.

Another right question would be the association of lack of outdoor air with autism, and again significantly positive results have been found by Waldman & Adilov.

Confusion about "forms of mercury"

2010-09-19T05:09:00.000-07:00

The following may be considered elementary chemistry but it may not be elementary child psychiatry so it still has a place here.

There is a lot of talk of mercury as though it is one thing. We could make a false comparison with some other toxic substance, for instance methanol. If I've understood my chemistry correctly, all methanol molecules are the same arrangement of one carbon atom, one oxygen and four hydrogens. The word specifically means that arrangement, that molecule. There are no "forms" of methanol, except in the trivial sense that a collection of such molecules could also be gas or solid.

But mercury is not a chemical arrangement, but rather is an element (that is, consists of atoms each having x protons and y neutrons)*. Mercury atoms can feature as part of numerous different molecules, for instance so-called "methylmercury" and "ethylmercury". But those are not mercury!
(*Though due to mercury poisoning I don't remember the values of x and y there.)

To clarify this, consider chlorine which is also an element. Chlorine is a deadly poisonous gas. When it is combined with sodium (which is also very harmful) it forms the sodium chloride better known as the salt that goes on your food and without which you would be dead very quickly. And if it is reasonable to talk of "methylmercury" as a "form of mercury" then it could be thought equally reasonable to talk of table salt as "sodylchlorine" and as a "form of chlorine".

However, we must now step back from making an absolute equivalence there. That is because mercury atoms are relatively rare and have effects disproportionate to their numbers. And those other "forms of mercury" do have some practical equivalence to elemental mercury for the reason that in everyday life they function as important carriers of those same mercury atoms around to and from your body and brain. Just do not forget that the notion of these other substances being "forms of mercury" is still a significantly misleading concept.

More advanced understanding of antiinnatia; this post is not for beginners here!

2010-09-19T03:32:00.000-07:00

Don't start your reading here, first study the 1993 paper and the home page here.

It is mainly about concepts. Sound science cannot be founded on concepts alone, but science gets in a muddle if the concepts are not properly clarified. So this can be important.

The nature of the autistic syndrome.

An expression "the autistic spectrum" has become popularised. This is regrettable because it promotes a fallacy that autism variation is all or mostly on one dimension from mild to severe. A more reasonable concept is that autism, Aspergers, and related things such as dyslexia, are all part of the autistic syndrome, that is tendency to clustering together of certain characteristics. This clustering is many-dimensional, with the number of dimensions being equal(ish?) to the number of characteristics whose expression can be affected by antiinnatia. In practice, as generally found with factor analysis, there would be a smaller number of main/most important dimensions (such as predisposition to allocating attention to the behaviors of others), some mediumly important ones, and a lot of less important ones.

The inclusion of such things as dyslexia (or what might otherwise be called language disabilities) is warranted by the finding of these being found associated in twin studies, and their symptoms falling within the same theoretical framework of suppression of innatons.

The nature of antiinnatia factors

The 1993 paper indicated that both environmental and genetic factors would be antiinnatia factors. We might add that perhaps epigenetic, genomic imprinting or mitochondrial factors could also have antiinnatia effect.

In any case, there is no reason to suppose a yes/no distinction between variables that are antiinnatia factors and those that are not. Instead, like autism itself it is a matter of degree with no clear cutoff.

And one would expect some antiinnatia factors to be "purer" (more non-specific) than others. This can arguably be seen in the social class differential graphs of my 1993 paper (graphs of table 1 added in author's reprint). The "pure" would be due to the purer antiinnatia, while the "complicated"/"organic" would be due to the less pure causing what we might call side-effects. (I discussed this variable purity of antiinnatia factors already in the 1993 paper itself.)

The numerous antiinnatia genes in combination would act as a relatively pure, general antiinatia factor, even though any one of those genes taken in isolation might have some idiosyncratic side-effects.

One would expect some grossly injurious process such as an untimely bash on the head, or a severe infective brain inflammation of viral encephalitis would have substantial side effects.

I would reckon that mercury, while a relatively pure antiinnatia factor, would be less pure than the 'portfolio' of antiinnatia genes, due to its interference with thiol-dependend enzymes, and its tendency to generate oxidative stress.

One can then go on to reasonably expect that there would be some other factors which have more or less of antiinnatia factor effect. And obviously any gene specifically related to language function is going to tend to be a factor in suppression of at least language function, and hence favour outcomes with a bit of resemblance to autism even though arguably not properly considered a true antiinnatia factor.

Abstract of the draft of the update review of the antiinnatia theory

2010-09-19T03:18:00.001-07:00

While I cannot post here the actual full paper (as that can breach the pre-publication policies of some journals), I think it will be ok to put here just the abstract (summary), as currently drafted. It's important to understand that this abstract has space only to merely assert the conclusions therein stated, but the full paper presents the evidence and reasoning through which those conclusions are reached.

The causes of autism: A theory now further supported by four predictions;
why dental amalgams caused increased autism;
and why mercury pollution caused the Flynn effect IQ increase

The gene-expression theory of autism and IQ (antiinnatia theory) is further supported via others’ findings relating to four predictions:
1. Correlation of body symmetry with IQ.
2. In autism, rationality less reduced by innate predispositions.
3. Autism being caused by molecules which erratically, dose-dependently bind to DNA and thereby reduce gene-expression (e.g. mercury).
4. Shared causality of raised IQ (the Flynn effect) and autism.
The hitherto-puzzling Flynn effect is explained in terms of varying atmospheric mercury. The Flynn effect has reversed because mercury pollution has reversed. Mercury pollution is probably causing harm additional to that currently recognised. Fetal testosterone is only a minor antiinnatia factor. Autism partially coincides with “extreme-male-brain”. The concept of “developmental instability” is unsound.
Summary of the amalgam case:
· Autistic behaviours are shown to have increased about tenfold in Western capitalist countries.
· Mercury was definitely involved.
· Mercury vapor from amalgams is the main source of mercury in the body.
· No other tenable sources of the mercury are available.
· Non-gamma-2 amalgams emit 30-50 times more mercury vapor, which is highly absorbed by lungs and infant brain.
· Exponential increase started promptly after the introduction of non-gamma-2 amalgams.
· A marked change of ratio of age of onset coincided closely with the increase. Yet the ratio remained low in Poland, where data did not show any increase either.
· Number of maternal amalgams is a risk factor for autism in the US, but maybe not in Poland.
· The antiinnatia theory had unknowingly pre-explained how mercury would cause autism.
· Accords with the antiinnatia theory causality of maintained suppression rather than knockout blow.
· The late onset is explained as due to accumulation when infants regularly inhale the vapor.
· The new ventilation prediction has already been supported by correlation of rainfall/snowfall with autism.

Abnormalities of the "resting network" and of language lateralisation

2010-09-16T01:57:00.000-07:00

In my most recent draft of the update review of the theory, I wrote:

Pisula (2010) lists numerous areas of the brain which are known to be normally (and by implication innately) associated with specified psychological functions, and which function abnormally in autism. She notes that these findings cannot be adequately accounted for in terms of “theory of mind” or “executive dysfunction” or “lack of central coherence”. But they all rather obviously fall very clearly within the concept of innatons being affected by excessive antiinnatia. So Pisula’s review can be re-read in retrospect as even further testimony to the empirical soundness of the antiinnatia theory...."

I'd now add to that list two more instances of a similar kind.

Firstly the "resting network", which in neurotypicals activates while not concentrating on a task, and becomes inactive when task-engaged. Whereas in autistics it tends to just have a similar level of activity in both circumstances. Ref: Failing to deactivate: Resting functional abnormalities in autism. Daniel P. Kennedy, Elizabeth Redcay and Eric Courchesne

Secondly, here is Dr Courchesne speaking before the ASF's 2010 meeting:
“We discovered that autistic infants and toddlers displayed a pronounced abnormality of language activation and cortical development.” “At each age studied from infancy to young childhood, most autistic subjects had greater activation on the incorrect side, namely, the right temporal cortex, compared to the left side and this incorrect activation pattern did not change or “normalize” even by 3 or 4 years of age. The abnormal pattern was strong in a substantial percentage of autistic infants and toddlers....".

Head size, simplex/multiplex autism, and IQ

2010-09-15T03:50:00.000-07:00

A number of reports have been published indicating that head size in the first year of life has been found to be several percent greater in autistics, such as this latest one.
Media report linked here.

This is important and substantially competent research by this team. But there's some room for improvement.

Like most researchers they presume that autism is a "disorder" for which they are trying to find out what has "gone wrong". And so even when something good is found it has to be labelled as "overgrowth" of the brain.

And yet a remarkably similar progression of "overgrowth" has been found to be characteristic of high-IQ children (Gale, O'Callaghan, Bredow, Martyn 2010). And the 1982 published 1993 antiinnatia theory explained that whatever in low doses causes high IQ in higher doses causes autism.

You can see a very good presentation to the IACC about this "overgrowth", by the founder of this line of evidence, Eric Courchesne (between minutes 130-162 plus discussion to 174). He explains that it involves substantially higher numbers of neurons particularly in prefrontal. And that it is characteristic of "simplex" autism rather than of "multiplex" autism (defined as autism cases occurring more than once in a family). And furthermore, the advance over normal growth comes to level off after the first couple of years and indeed may be followed by a decline to below normal.

I've not looked into this research in great depth, but would provisionally suggest the following as reasonable explanations of these findings.

Multiplex autism could usually be due to a family sharing an indoor mercury vapor pollution problem from (mainly maternal) dental amalgams. EC notes that multiplex is much more common, which is in line with my conclusion that dental mercury- induced autism now accounts for 80% or more of all autism.

So it would be the simplex autism that is more a matter of too many antiinnatia genes, that is genes for high IQ, and which would also be genes favouring large heads and more neurons, which is in line with these observations. (The larger heads and more neurons would not cause the higher IQ but would be correlated with it.)

The subsequent decline would be readily explained by two processes. Firstly anyone with even fleeting acquaintance with autism can see that it soon leads to the autistic experiencing a substantially understimulating environment compared to neurotypicals. Such an understimulating environment can reasonably be expected to lead to the brain waning away somewhat. And meanwhile, for those autism cases caused by mercury, the mercury would continue to accumulate due to the defective detoxification, and the brain would consequently lose neurons due to that neurotoxin accumulation.

Adult-onset autism

2010-09-13T04:48:00.000-07:00

In the update review of the antiinnatia autism theory I explain why dental amalgam mercury vapor causes autism in infants but not in adults. Namely because beyond a certain age the behaviours associated with the innatons become established as learnt habits, skills, knowledge, as the elaborated connectivity of the brain, and as crystallised intelligence in place of fluid intelligence.

There might be thought to be a valid objection to this in terms of three case reports of autism beginning at later ages, 11, 14, and 31 years.

It is notable that all three cases resulted from herpes encephalitis. In respect of the 31-year-old, he was in a coma for more than 14 days, and from having been a university lecturer was permanently transformed to having a mental age of less than 2 years. We can thus see that it was only in the context of an extreme level of brain damage that the characteristics of autism resulted. So we can interpret his case as being one where even the established habits, skills and so on were wiped out, by a condition substantially more severe than (for instance) mercury poisoning. (Not that mercury poisoning should be considered non-serious itself.)

Autism did not begin only in the 1930s

2010-09-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

In two weeks time there will be published a new book:
The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic
By Dan Olmsted, Mark Blaxill

I've not read it (yet) but I can anticipate that I would agree with the authors that autism has increased and involved mercury but would be unpersuaded by their reckoning that vaccinations have been a major factor in the increase.

Here I shall just comment on this first sentence of a preview extract circulated by Safeminds:

"We believe that autism was newly discovered in the 1930s for the simple reason that it was new."

But this first sentence can be shown to be mistaken. Dr Down of Down Syndrome fame had already in the 19th century given good descriptions of both infantile autism and regressive autism.
Reference: Down, J.L. Mental Affections of Childhood and Youth, 1887 originally, re-issued as Classics in Developmental Medicine, No. 5, 1990 Mac Keith Press, London

It was discussed in the 2006 Awares conference. This is a link to the paper by Darrold Treffert.

I also suggest that the concept of the "holy fool" such as portrayed in the play and opera Boris Godunov corresponds with mild autism: a person who speaks the truth that others cannot. And bear in mind that the rare autistic individuals would be likely to have had a hard time surviving in earlier ages; even mildly autisticky people might have had a hard time sufficient to prevent them producing children.

Furthermore, there is the important consideration that a rare condition such as autism pre-1970 would only come to the attention of a person once there is a sufficient level of cosmopolitanism, due to urbanisation and transport, enabling one person to "survey" a sufficiently large sample of people. Down made his observation in 19th century England after the railways were established in the world's first modernised country. Thereafter, the US and Austria started to catch up industrially and so autism came to attention there too. That's not to say that the personal links to mercury stated in the AoA book cannot be also part of the story.