Gradual regression notably in line with the theory's gradual causation

It has this month been reported that the regressive form of autism does not tend to have an abrupt start (as commonly perceived, especially by those blaming vaccines for causing a sudden start of the condition). Instead the condition develops gradually from age 6 months up to 3 years (and possibly onwards as the study stopped there).

This is of course very compatible with the causation proposed in the update review of the antiinnatia theory, because that causation itself does not strike suddenly (like a vaccination shot) but instead builds up gradually with the infant's cumulating constant inhalation [breathing in] of the mother's dental mercury vapor.

The accompanying observation that parents tend to under-perceive their child's abnormality can be simply understood in terms of the universal natural reluctance to believe bad news. Which for a parent who already has an autistic child, is even badder news.

Flawed study of adult autism in UK

The NHS has recently published a study of the extent of adult autism in the UK ("Autism Spectrum Disorders in adults living in households throughout England - Report from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2007").

It supposedly shows that there has not been any real increase of autism over recent decades. This is the same NHS that's just made a huge scare-campaign in support of the swine-flu scam, and that gives its endorsement to the fraudulent SCENIHR report as supposedly proving the safety of dental amalgams, even despite numerous people pointing out the falsities of that report.

This autism report is also unacceptably flawed. Some of the flaws are detailed at this campaigning website (at which some of the other content is itself flawed wishful-thinking):
http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/uksurveyautismlink/.

I myself had dismissed the NHS report for the simpler reason that there is no way indicated of establishing comparability of a test applied to children and a test (even if the same one) applied to adults. Update: You can see in the later published Arch Gen Psychiat version that the diagnostic procedure was a very subjective one (dependent on extended group "training"), rather than a mechanically objective box-ticking or bean-counting exercise. This is reflected in how they went to considerable lengths to assure the reliability of the diagnostic procedure. And yet they did nothing to ensure the (infinitely more important) validity of comparability with others' finding at different ages and different decades. And that's because with a non-longitudinal study it is impossible to establish that. It follows that the survey is evidence of nothing, but only leaves the question open of that comparability.

Oh, and they found that none of the adult "autistics" had previously been identified. Which would not be surprising to those who can have a pretty firm guess that they weren't really pathological cases anyway, in shocking contrast to the deluge of cases now constituting a very un-overlookable national emergency in capitalist-corporate-dominated countries.

I welcome the additional critiques raised by childsafetyhealth. Another critical review can be found in issue 34 of The Autism File. It's a shame that taxpayer money only gets wasted on producing and promoting such worthless rubbish as this NHS/ Leicester univ study, when there are plenty more competent people and ideas around.

Lisa Blakemore-Brown

There aren't many heroes in autism research but Lisa Blakemore-Brown is certainly one. (part 2 here)
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Why Bernard Rimland made just one mistake

Bernard Rimland's contribution to autism research has been unequalled. To him belongs the credit for debunking Bettleheim's theory of "refrigerator mothers", and replacing it with the modern understanding of autism as genetic/biochemical in nature.

He had much responsibility for the discovery of the benefits of vitamin B6 and magnesium. He was one of the first to discern that autism was increasing. And he recognised that mercury was involved in causing it.

He made just one mistake (as I see it), namely taking the view that vaccines were the cause of the autism increase [note: cause of the increase]. I think part of the reason for that mistake was a situation of having one's nose too close to the grindstone, so-to-speak. This is liable to lead into that other metaphor of the frog not bothering to jump out of the slowly heating water.

Given the assumptions that:

• autism was increasing;
• mercury was involved;
• the increase was in second-year onsets;
• vaccinations were the only noticeable input of infant mercury;
• vaccinations had increased at ~sort-of~ the same era as the autism increase;
• parents were increasingly reporting autism onset "immediately" after vaccinations;
• the only other notable source of mercury, dental amalgams, had been in use for 150 yrs before the increase, and not in infants anyway;
• the medical establishment were engaged in their usual conspiracy tricks, publishing misleading studies about vaccines, hiding their Simpsonwood data, and persecuting those who challenged them;

Given these observations, it was not unreasonable to become convinced that vaccinations were the cause of the autism increase.

Myself? As a fatigue-disabled person, struggling to just survive, and with much wider interests than Dr Rimland's focus on autism, it was not within my capabilities to keep up with all the details of the dispute about the increase. And as my "excellent" "fine work" 1993 paper had been totally pretended into non-existence by all but a tiny elite anyway, there seemed little point in taking such an interest in a dispute of no practical importance to myself.

It was only by fluke that I got involved again. I began to wonder if my decades of severe disability (not autism; since age 15) had been caused by dental mercury. I now had, for the first time, increasing billions of webpages that I could search on the subject. I gradually became more informed and more suspicious. Then I read that mercury binds to DNA and thereby inhibits gene-expression at doses far lower than producing other effects. This rang a bell because it was exactly what I had said would cause autism, in my 1993-published paper. I also learnt that the type of amalgam had switched from the 1970s to non-gamma-2 which emit 30-50 times more mercury vapour into the air. Thanks to my autism theory (which everyone else was ignoring) I also knew that the process was like holding the genes hostage rather than like a shattering hammer blow. I also understood that amalgam delivers its poison through the air, and thus can be breathed in by the (post-natal) infant as well as the parent.

Dr Rimland didn't know these facts, so the idea that dental amalgam could have caused the increase would have rightly seemed daft to him. How could a non-increasing source cause an illness increase in people who aren't even having it installed in them? In 2006 I sent to Dr Rimland a draft of my update review but I got a reply from Dr Edelson that Dr Rimland was too ill to read it. I'm sure that if I had not been delayed by the callous harassment conspiracy www.2020housing.co.uk I would have been able to persuade Dr Rimland that it was dental mercury that was the main cause of the increase.

Do von Economo neurons produce bigotry?

There is occasionally a scientific paper that stands out with its joining of the dots. One such is that of John Allman et al in respect of von Economo neurons (vens):
Allman JM, Watson KK, Tetreault NA, Hakeem AY: Intuition and autism: a possible role for Von Economo neurons. Trends Cogn Sci 2005, 9:367-73.

His paper could have been even hotter if it had managed to mention how various of its elements had already been raised long ago in my 1993-published paper. For instance the idea that features that are recent in phylogeny (evolutionary history) are more liable to be impaired, and that that is what gets lost in autism (both key concepts in antiinnatia theory). And the antiinnatia theory had started out in its first minutes with the concept of "autism = deficiency of innate prejudices", which is strikingly close to some of the notions therein.

What is rather curious about his von Economo paper though, is the standard values-laden language it contains. We are told that autism is a "disorder" in which these rapid decisions about people are "impaired". I would beg to suggest that the characterisation of the vens as enabling rapid crude decisionmaking about whether or not to view people as friends is a description of bigotry. So perhaps it would be better to consider normal neurotypical to be a "disorder" and autism to involve freedom from an "impairment" which might be advantageous to the knee-jerker but harmful (in excess) to community cohesion. I guess Dr Allman would agree about this now that I have pointed it out.

More evidence on the autism increase

Uta Frith is one of the most notable names in what we might call the autism research 'establishment'. She has recently stated [1] that autism in earlier decades was usually of the classic, severe variety, whereas nowadays most or many cases are of the mild to moderate or high-functioning variety. Putting that in the context of my view that there has been a major global increase due to a certain identified environmental factor, her observation poses the question of why that environmental factor should have produced generally less extreme autism than the preceding "genetic" form did.

And that is a question that is very happily answered by my explanation of the increase. Because the cause I invoke accumulates postnatally, it only impacts at a later age, whereas the classic genetic causation would impact from long before birth. And so one would indeed expect the new causation to commonly be less severe than the earlier variety.
1. Uta Frith, Autism: A very short introduction, OUP 2008

Defeating Autism by Michael Fitzpatrick: Shallow critiques of the Holmes and Bradstreet studies of mercury

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The Holmes and Bradstreet studies have been supposedly demolished by critiques in the book Defeating Autism by Michael Fitzpatrick. In reality his critiques read self-damningly in the context of his having a whole chapter titled “Being appropriately critical”.

A widely cited study published in 2003 examined the mercury content of babies’ ‘first haircut’ samples from 94 children with autism and 45 controls and found levels significantly lower in the autistic children (and the more severe the autism the lower the mercury level)(Holmes et al. 2003). The authors interpreted these findings as suggesting that children with autism do not excrete mercury into their hair — and that the mercury burden remains active and toxic, within the bodies of children with autism. There were, however, a number of reasons to be sceptical about these findings {Institute of Medicine 2004: 133-134). Firstly, the study was funded by Safe Minds, a militant, parent-led, anti-mercury campaigning group.

But so what? Almost all other studies are funded by immensely-wealthy corporate-dominated interests such as pharma manufacturers and the institutions they dominate. Applying that objection evenhandedly rather than with Fitzpatrick’s peculiar selectivity would result in there being virtually no studies at all recognised as legitimate in the last century of medical research.

Secondly, its authors included only one recognised scientist, the Kentucky [[University!]] chemist [[Professor!]] Boyd Haley, well known for blaming mercury in dental amalgam and from other environmental sources for a range of disorders, including chronic fatigue syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease. Another author, Amy Holmes, is a doctor with an autistic child; she is a campaigner against vaccination and a provider of chelation therapies. Another, Mark Blaxill, has a business school MBA.

Here Fitzpatrick employs ad-hominem insinuation, which is widely condemned by scientists as meritless, albeit being popular in the unscientific circles at which his book is aimed. And he deploys it with extremely prejudiced selectivity, because one might just as reasonably dismiss all or most professional (hence “recognised”) scientists on the basis of their money-making connections to corporatised, institutionalised and career-ised operations. Applying his argument with any diligence would leave little or nothing standing in the scientific record. And even such greats as Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Mendel, Faraday and Einstein were not “recognised” scientists, until retrospectively so recognised.

Thirdly, there were concerns about selec­tion bias: autistic subjects were recruited from Holmes’s clinic and controls via the internet.

But so what? Quite how could any such selection bias account for that finding of 8-fold difference with very high statistical significance, p&lt0.000004.

Fourthly, though the hair samples were described as ‘first haircut’, they were taken at a median age of over 17 months, rather than at birth, so the implications of their mercury content for prenatal exposures (for example, to RhoD immunoglobulin containing thimerosal, given to Rhesus negative mothers during pregnancy) were unclear.

But my own theory of the increase involves postnatal exposure to mercury rather than prenatal, so even if that objection had any real soundness it would still not apply to that amalgam theory.

Fifthly, infant exposures to other sources of mercury were not ascertained.

But again, in terms of the study being merely evidence of a mercury-autism connection, so what?

Most importantly, the authors presented no direct evidence for their hypothesis that low hair levels of mercury reflect persisting toxicity in chil­dren with autism.

But so what? Has anyone presented any evidence against that hypothesis?

A subsequent study comparing children with autism and controls in Hong Kong, found no difference in mercury levels (Ip et aI. 2007). The authors concluded that their results showed that there was ‘no causal relationship between mercury as an environmental neurotoxin and autism’.

But that Ip et al. study has been absolutely discredited and shown to actually corroborate Holmes et al. rather than challenge it: http://www.ageofautism.com/2007/12/the-ip-blip-and.html. And it anyway concerns 7-year-olds (and in the context of Dr Fitzpatrick’s own nit-picking of a mere 17 months delay above).

Though numerous anecdotal reports and testimonials claim dramatic improvements in symptoms of autism following chelation therapy to remove mercury and other heavy metals believed to be toxic, it is impossible to find independent confirmation of these benefits.

But those “numerous anecdotal reports and testimonials” are “independent confirmation”. Except that when Dr Fitzpatrick uses the word “independent” he in reality means “corporate-establishment-dependent”. And those corporate-institutionalised groups had not found any confirmation for the simple reason that they did not carrry out any studies because they did not want to find any such confirmation.

However, one study of chelation has been widely cited in support of the mercury-autism theory. In this study, conducted jointly by the Florida DAN! doctor Jeffrey Bradstreet and the Geiers, more than 200 children with autism were found to have excreted significantly more mercury in their urine than 18 controls (apparently healthy children whose parents had sought chelation treatment because of worries about heavy metal toxicity) (Bradstreet 2003). Apart from revealing a frightening willingness of parents to subject their children to chelation therapy, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this study.

That study found more than 3 times higher mercury in autistics, with a huge significance level of p&lt0.0002. But Dr Fitzpatrick indeed could not draw the mercury-acquitting conclusion he wished to from those brief numbers so he did not find even a tiddler of space for them in his book (perhaps because it was required for his closing masterclass about “Being appropriately critical” instead).

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Apart from revealing a frightening willingness of parents to subject their children to chelation therapy,

....in the context that no-one has ever been killed by DMSA chelation, in stark contrast to the lethal drugs that Dr Fitzpatrick routinely prescribes. But then his book also didn't find the little space to mention that it was DMSA rather than EDTA in the study (and this in a book that opens with a shock-horror anecdote narrative about a unique EDTA case).