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Complete Current Issue of the Newspaper Edition (PDF) Recent Articles The Two Faces of Bill Richardson,
The "Clean Energy" Governor's Nuclear Ties The Corporate Prison
Boom, Immigration and The Law What is a Culture of Peace? Diplomacy the Watchword, Gary
King: "We Are All Constituents" Holocaust or Hoax, The Global Warming
Debate Heats Up The Hunting Fallacy Impeachment Limerick “Powerbrokers” (Legislative
Leadership and Lobbyists) in Control of Conference Committee NM Senate Joint Memorial
to Begin Process of Prohibiting Production of New Nuclear Weapons in
New Mexico Legislature is a “Brain
Trust” to Accomplish All We Need in New Mexico |
Autism
Has Its Day in Court "The number of American children with chronic illnesses has quadrupled since the time when some of their parents were kids, portending more disability and higher health costs for a new generation of adults, a study estimates. An almost fourfold increase in childhood obesity in the past three decades, twice the asthma rates since the 1980s, and a jump in the number of attention-deficit disorder cases are driving the growth of chronic illnesses, according to researchers at Harvard University in Boston. The report is published in a this month's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association focusing on children's health..... In 1960, just 1.8 percent of U.S. children and adolescents were reported to have a chronic health condition that limited their activities. In 2004, the rate rose to 7 percent, researchers said. `"We will see much greater expenditures for people in their 20s than we ever saw before, and no one is thinking how we should prepare for that,'' said James Perrin, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the report's lead author, in an interview. "We call it an epidemic. It's certainly worrisome and we look at it as a call to action.'' - Angela Zimm, Bloomberg News Service, June 2007 "A new, privately funded survey finds vaccinated U.S. children have a significantly higher risk of neurological disorders -- including autism -- than unvaccinated children. In one striking finding, vaccinated boys 11-17 were more than twice as likely to have autism as their never-vaccinated counterparts. The telephone survey of parents representing a total of 17,000 children appears to be the first of its kind -- and contrasts starkly with several government-backed studies that have found no risk from vaccines. "No one has ever compared prevalence rates of these neurological disorders between vaccinated and unvaccinated children," said J.B. Handley, father of a child with autism and co-founder of Generation Rescue, which commissioned the $200,000 survey conducted by SurveyUSA, a respected marketing firm. "The phone survey isn't perfect, but these numbers point to the need for a comprehensive national study to gather this critical information." - Dan Olmsted, UPI, June 2007 In June, the results of two studies were released which supports several decades of mounting evidence that an epidemic of chronic brain and immune system disorders has developed among American children in the past quarter century and that the use of multiple doses of multiple vaccines given to children early in life may play a major role. These two new studies, one conducted by researchers at Harvard University and one conducted by Generation Rescue, reinforce findings of an asthma study conducted by researchers at University of Illinois, Chicago published in 2005. All three studies validate the repeated warnings since the early 1990's by parents of vaccine injured children that over-vaccination of infants and toddlers may be contributing to increases in learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, asthma, diabetes and autism among older children. While the Harvard study confirmed the existence of a chronic disease and disability epidemic among American children, including a prevalence of six percent of all children with ADHD and nine percent with asthma, it was the $200,000 private funding of a west coast telephone survey by Generation Rescue founder JB Handley which revealed a much higher risk of neurological disorders in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children that deserves special attention and immediate follow-up. The survey found that "Among more than 9,000 boys age 4-17, vaccinated boys were 2.5 times (155 percent) more likely to have neurological disorders, 224 percent more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 61 percent more likely to have autism." This evidence reinforces information published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2005 that there are marked differences between the incidence of self-reported asthma in vaccinated and unvaccinated children by parents, with a finding that parents of unvaccinated children were "11 times less likely to report asthma" and "10 times less likely to report hay fever" among children with no family history of either condition. NVIC staff worked for four years with researchers at the University of Illinois to design and implement the study entitled "The Relationship between Vaccine Refusal and Self-Report of Atopic Disease in Children." The study methodology, which included the formal Institutional Review Board (IRB) process and peer review, involved mailing of surveys to 2,964 randomly selected households of members of NVIC with children aged 3 to 18 years, a database which includes families with highly vaccinated, partially vaccinated and totally unvaccinated children. These studies follow three congressionally mandated reports in 1991 and 1994 published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences, which reviewed the medical literature and confirmed that vaccines can cause brain and immune system dysfunction as well as death. When, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, the Institute of Medicine convened another committee of physicians to examine scientific evidence that vaccines cause brain and immune system dysfunction, I made the following statement at a January 2001 IOM public workshop: "There is a compelling argument to be made that the dramatic increase in chronic brain and immune dysfunction in children, especially the rising number of reports of regression in previously healthy children, is due to an early exposure that is being experienced by all children but which is harming an expanding minority of them.... Many biological responses are at least partially under genetic control. If, for example, adverse responses to vaccination are tied to the genes responsible for predisposition to autoimmunity and immune-mediated neurological dysfunction, then it is possible that the addition of more doses of vaccines to the routine schedule in the past two decades has affected more and more children with that genetic predisposition.....Therefore, when all children only were exposed to DPT and polio vaccine in the early 1960's, a tiny fraction of the genetically susceptible responded adversely. But with the addition of measles, mumps and rubella to the routine schedule in 1979, and then HIB, hepatitis B and chicken pox in the late 1980's and 1990's, far more of the genetically susceptible have been brought into the adverse responder group." ( http://www.nvic.org/Loe_Fisher/blftes timony _iom_safety.htm) In their 2002 published report on "Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction" the Institute of Medicine stated: "The committee was unable to address the concern that repeated exposure of a susceptible child to multiple immunizations over the developmental period may also produce atypical or non-specific immune or nervous system injury that could lead to severe disability or death. (Fisher, 2001) There are no epidemiological studies to address this. Thus, the committee recognizes with some discomfort that this report addresses only part of the overall set of concerns of some of those most wary about the safety of childhood immunization." ( http://www.iom.edu/CMS/3793/4705/4432.aspx) Scientifically confirming that the repeated atypical manipulation of the immune system with multiple vaccines in early childhood is contributing to chronic disease and disability increases would require additional methodologically sound epidemiological studies as well as basic science research into the different biological mechanisms involved in vaccine induced brain and immune system dysfunction. Future studies comparing groups of vaccinated to groups of unvaccinated children and adults should include not only evaluation of all morbidity and mortality outcomes but also identify genetic variability and measure pathological changes at the cellular and molecular level in the vaccinated and unvaccinated, including changes in immune function (blood tests), brain function (EEG, MRI) and chromosomal integrity over a 10 to 20 year period. In 1982, parents of DPT vaccine injured children began urging federal health agencies, vaccine manufacturers and doctors to take seriously the reports of health deterioration after vaccination. They were begged to responsibly investigate the persistent reports by parents that healthy children were regressing physically, mentally and emotionally and being left with a variety of brain and immune system problems. Those warnings, which became more urgent in the 1990's, were ignored. Now the child chronic illness epidemic, which was predicted would occur if warnings were ignored is here. It is a sad commentary on the state of the public health that so many
American children are so sick. The stubborn reluctance of government,
industry and medicine to acknowledge the validity of reports by parents
that children are getting sicker not healthier, despite using so many
vaccines, may turn out to be the greatest medical scandal and human
tragedy of the past century. There has been a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)
in the United States since October 1, 1988. It was created to protect
the vaccine manufacturers and the physicians who administer the vaccines
from litigation. The result was that many vaccines were added to the
pediatric schedule over the years, some for the sole benefit of the
Pharma stockholders and those who hold the patents. The majority of the VICP awards that have been awarded after years of legal proceedings, have been made for brain inflammation and encephalopathy caused by the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine in the DPT or DTaP shot but awards for MMR, polio and several other vaccines have also been made. Pertussis vaccine-induced brain inflammation and measles vaccine induced brain inflammation has been documented in the medical literature: The large case controlled National Childhood Encephalopathy Study (NCES) conducted in Britain in 1981 found that "there were statistically significant associations between the onset of various neurological disorders notified and immunization with DTP vaccine within the previous 7 days and with measles vaccine within the 7 to 14 days, before onset.....it is estimate that the attributable risk of a serious neurological disorder within seven days after DTP vaccine in previously normal children irrespective or eventual clinical outcome is 1 in 110,000 immunizations.....the corresponding rate for previously normal children with evidence of persistent neurological damage one year later is 1 in 310,000 immunizations." The NCES study also found that "the risk of a serious neurological disorder within 14 days after measles vaccine in previously normal children irrespective of eventual clinical outcome is 1 in 87,000 immunizations." No large case controlled studies comparable to the methodology employed by NCES investigating potential causes of brain dysfunction in children, including the receipt of one or more vaccines in early childhood, has been conducted since NCES was published in 1981. The VICP was not originally designed to be a federal imitation of bringing a product liability or malpractice lawsuit in civil court. Compensation was to be awarded based on "presumption" in the absence of a more plausible explanation for a child's health deterioration after vaccination, not "scientific proof" the vaccine or vaccines caused the child's injury. A Table of Compensable Events included in the 1986 law listed clinical symptoms and time periods within which symptoms occur following DPT, MMR and polio vaccination to serve as a guide for presumption of causation. However, in 1995 federal health officials and Justice Department lawyers gutted the Table of Events by re-writing the definition of encephalopathy and removing symptoms and health conditions, such as residual seizures, that would automatically presume causation so that very few children would quality for automatic compensation under the Table guidelines. New vaccines, including HIB, hepatitis B, varicella zoster, pneumococcal, rotavirus, influenza, meningococcal, hepatitis A, were added to the VICP to protect the vaccine manufacturers and physicians from liability for injuries and deaths related to those vaccines but presumption guidelines were not added to the Table of Compensable Events. Therefore, today almost all vaccine injured claims are argued off-Table
and the process for obtaining compensation has become highly adversarial,
traumatic, and time consuming, with two out of three vaccine victims
turned away for compensation. The special masters have become judge
and jury presiding over combatants on an uneven playing field, not facilitators
of administration of vaccine injury claims. A federal vaccine injury
compensation program that was supposed to re-instill public faith in
the mass vaccination system has become a source of mistrust of the system. o There are many people in our health agencies, in the pharmaceutical industry and here in Congress who say that there is no the scientific evidence linking thimerosal and autism. However, during my tenure as chairman of Government Reform Committee (1997-2002), and as chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness (2003-2005), I chaired numerous hearings examining the alarming increase in autism in this country over the last several decades. In the 1980s, roughly one in 10,000 American children was diagnosed with some kind of autism spectrum disorder. Today that number has risen to 1 in 150. I believe, as do many credible scientists and researchers, that the clear correlation between the dramatic rise in the number of autism cases, and the rapid expansion of the childhood vaccination schedule during that 20-year period, points to the mercury-based preservative thimerosal--routinely used in pediatric vaccines during the period--as a contributing factor to our country's literal epidemic of autism. In fact, I firmly believe my own grandson became autistic after receiving nine shots in 1 day, seven of which contained thimerosal. In fact, Dr. Bernard Rimland--founder and director of the Autism Research Institute--testified before the committee that classic autism, (noticeable from birth) has largely been replaced by late-onset or ``acquired autism''; a form of autism in which children are born normally developing but later regress into autism in the second year of life. He was one of the first to point to environmental insult through vaccine injury as a possible leading contributing factor.
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