- Canned tuna or canned poison? That was the teaser for
a CBS 2 News "HealthWatch" Report of Nov. 22 that focused on
high levels of mercury found in tuna and the possible health risks
associated
with them.
-
- CBS 2 News reporter Paul Moniz quoted a number of
physicians,
who observed of the toxic substance that, "Once it gets into our
bodies,
a substantial part of it will end up in our nervous system, in our brains,
and it's there that it causes a variety of symptoms." A pediatrician
is quoted as saying, "We know that high levels of mercury can impair
the cognitive development as well as the growth and development of a young
child." What the report appears to be revealing is that while
overweight
Americans may flee to fish to lose unwanted pounds, too much of that tasty
tuna could reduce the IQ more than the waistline.
-
- What the critics of mercury in vaccines find provocative
about this report is the acknowledgement by physicians that the high levels
of mercury ingested from canned tuna can cause severe health risks. One
such critic, the mother of an autistic child, wonders "why everyone
gets up in arms over ingesting small amounts of mercury from fish or from
breaking a thermometer but finds it acceptable to inject an even more toxic
form of mercury directly into the bloodstream of infants. The evidence
is overwhelming that hundreds of thousands of children were damaged by
gross overexposure to mercury through vaccines [containing thimerosal]
and millions more were and continue to be put at risk, yet network news
has not addressed this in any significant way. The public needs and
deserves
to know the truth - not only about the biggest medical bungling in our
history, but also about the extraordinary efforts of both the
pharmaceutical
industry and government agencies to cover it up."
-
- A pharmaceutical and government cover-up? It is a
familiar
enough accusation, and this time the fuse was lit by yet another study
from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this
one titled Safety of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A Two-Phased Study
of Computerized Health Maintenance Organization Databases. The report
concluded
that "no consistent significant associations were found between TCVs
[thimerosal-containing vaccines] and neurodevelopment outcomes."
Critics
scoff at such a conclusion. "Sure," laughs one, "they say
you can't eat tuna because the level of mercury you ingest isn't good for
you, but there's no health risk associated with injecting high levels of
mercury directly into a newborn baby?"
-
- The CDC study, released in the November 2003 issue of
Pediatrics, seemed to puzzle news media, with most who took note of it
making at least a mention of the fact that the lead author, Thomas
Verstraeten,
was an employee of GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant and vaccine
manufacturer, when he submitted the study for publication.
-
- The first part of the two-phase study to determine
whether
there is a connection between thimerosal-containing vaccines and
neurodevelopment
disorders began in 1999 and involved the review of data from Seattle's
Group Health Cooperative and Northern California Kaiser, both large
health-maintenance
organizations (HMOs). The data used in this first phase actually revealed
a significant association between TCVs administered to infants and later
developmental abnormalities such as speech and language delays and
neurodevelopment
problems in general, such as tics and the alleged hyperactivity symptoms
of attention-deficit disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder.
-
- However, this conclusion was not included in the final
draft; it was only made public afterward when Verstraeten's notes were
revealed in another forum, according to specialists. The notes, not
published
with the CDC study, showed that the "relative risk" for autism
was 2.48 times higher for children who received 62.5 micrograms or more
of mercury from TCVs by 3 months of age.
-
- The second phase of the study in June 2000, however,
involved the Harvard Pilgrim HMO in Massachusetts - an unlikely choice,
critics say. Among the problems with using Harvard Pilgrim's database was
that the HMO was in bankruptcy and had been taken over by the commonwealth
of Massachusetts. The medical records not only were incomplete, but the
data were stored with a diagnostic coding system completely unlike that
used in the first phase of the study using data from the two West Coast
HMOs. Furthermore, the Harvard Pilgrim data, say the expert analysts, had
incomplete data on autism and did not even address the issue.
-
- Thus medical reviewers of the CDC study charge that it
is rife with data manipulation. Since it relied on incompatible diagnostic
coding to validate whether there were adverse effects from exposure to
TCVs, the effect was to sabotage the result. So, they say, it was not
surprising
that the CDC study's analysis of the Harvard Pilgrim data found no
consistent
association between vaccines containing thimerosal and the mercury-related
neurological disorders found previously in the first phase based on the
two West Coast HMOs.
-
- One of the few physicians in Congress, Rep. Dave Weldon
(R-Fla.), immediately saw the problems associated with the CDC study and
notified CDC Director Julie Gerberding. Weldon wrote, "I have serious
reservations about the four-year evolution and conclusions of this study.
A review of these documents leaves me very concerned that rather than
seeking
to understand whether or not some children were exposed to harmful levels
of mercury in childhood vaccines in the 1990s, there may have been a
selective
use of the data to make the associations in the earliest study
disappear."
-
- Weldon's letter to Gerberding goes on to observe that
"the first version of the study, produced in February 2000, found
a significant association between exposure to thimerosal-containing
vaccines
and autism and neurological developmental delays. A June 2000 version of
the study applied various data manipulations to reduce the autism
association
to 1.69, and the authors went outside the VSD [Vaccine Safety Datalink]
database to secure data from a Massachusetts HMO [Harvard Pilgrim] in order
to counter the association found between TCVs and speech delays."
Clear enough.
-
- The Florida lawmaker, who is a staunch supporter of
immunization,
tells Insight, "I don't know what's going on. It's a pretty lame study
to begin with. The way they've done it is they got some findings and
started
adding more numbers to the denominator - it's kind of a strange protocol
they followed. Then there are all these quotes from the researchers from
other documents about how you can add numbers and stratify things and get
any outcome you want. Then you consider that the lead author is working
for a drug company, didn't disclose this fact and also that it is one of
the drug companies being sued over this mercury issue. I'm just very
concerned
that we're not going to get answers as long as there are careers at stake.
You know there are people at the CDC who have been involved in the vaccine
program who didn't recognize the amount of mercury they were giving kids,
and now they're in the process of investigating themselves. Meanwhile a
lot of these investigators bounce to and from the drug companies. I think
it all is very, very murky and very suspicious."
-
- Weldon summarizes: "The CDC produced an article
by Dr. Verstraeten, published on Nov. 3 in Pediatrics. Dr. Verstraeten
is a former CDC employee. Since 2001 he has worked for GlaxoSmithKline
- a vaccine manufacturer. While working for the CDC in 2000, the first
version of Dr. Verstraeten's unpublished study found an association between
higher thimerosal exposures and neurodevelopment disorders, including
autism.
Between 2000 and 2003, Dr. Verstraeten and coauthors manipulated and
stratified
the data so much that each of these associations magically disappeared.
I don't know if it was deliberate, but that is nonetheless what happened.
This study has done nothing in my mind to put these concerns to rest, but
only serves to raise suspicions."
-
- This veteran member of Congress puts it plainly:
"We're
not going to get answers to these questions until Congress or some outside
group starts poring through this information. But it's very coincidental
that they added the hepatitis vaccine, the HiB vaccine and the chicken-pox
vaccine - they added all these additional childhood vaccines around the
time when the autism rate started to skyrocket. Then when you actually
sit down and do the calculations, according to the Environmental Protection
Agency [EPA], they were giving these kids very toxic levels of mercury.
I mean as a 150- to 200-pound adult the EPA says you're not supposed to
take in more than one microgram per day. They were taking little seven-
and 10-pound babies and pumping 50 and 75 micrograms of mercury into them
in one shot. That's like giving an adult 1,000 micrograms. And, on top
of that, the World Health Organization says mercury is 10 times more toxic
in children than it is in adults. It's horrifying."
-
- While Weldon and others cite huge and undeniable flaws,
a spokesman for the CDC, Von Roebuck, tells Insight that "the CDC
stands by the study." As he explains it, "We pretty much looked
into that [manipulation of data] in the sense of how the information was
presented, and we do stand behind it. The CDC knew that Dr. Verstraeten
worked for GlaxoSmithKline, and the one thing that we would want to happen
differently is that would have been known before, but the work that Dr.
Verstraeten did was for the CDC at the time the work was produced - the
work that he did for the study was done when he worked for the
CDC."
-
- Mark Geier, M.D., Ph.D., is president of the Genetic
Centers of America. He and his son, David Geier, president of Medcon Inc.,
are consultants on vaccine cases. David Geier tells Insight, "What
happened here is Dr. Verstraeten goes to the Institute of Medicine [IOM]
and says that he looked at it in one California HMO and it was statistical
and he saw the effect, and then he did it in another California HMO and
it was statistical and he saw the effect, then he went to Harvard Pilgrim
HMO and he didn't see the effect. The IOM said it's biologically plausible,
but the epidemiology is mixed and therefore we're not sure."
-
- "In my opinion," explains Mark Geier, "if
they had seen clear epidemiology they would have recommended the immediate
removal of thimerosal and hundreds of children would have been saved. But
Verstraeten went to the one state in the country where the percentage of
autism was the lowest. According to the U.S. Department of Education the
average increase in autism was 400 percent, and every state in the union
had at least a 100 percent increase. But Harvard Pilgrim had just a 10
percent increase."
-
- "We went to Atlanta," he continues, "to
the CDC, and looked at the VSD data. There is thimerosal-containing DTaP
[diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine] and thimerosal-free DTaP, so
we asked a question: Among children that got a minimum of either three
consecutive thimerosal-containing DTaPs or three consecutive
thimerosal-free
DTaPs, was there a difference in the number of autism cases in the two
groups? We found mega differences. More than 20 times higher. The rate
of autism in the children that got more than three doses of
thimerosal-containing
DTaP vaccines was much, much higher. Almost all the children that have
autism in that group were the ones that got the thimerosal-containing DTaP
vaccine. The more thimerosal the greater the cases of autism."
-
- Mark Geier says, "Believe us, there is no scientific
issue here. This is fraud. The CDC and the FDA [Food and Drug
Administration]
know what is happening. They just can't admit it because it is one of the
worst things ever to have happened to this United States. If a terrorist
had done this, we wouldn't attack them, we'd nuke them. We're talking about
one in eight children in the U.S. that currently are in special education,
and that number is going to change to about one in five. What percentage
of our young population can we destroy before we realize how serious this
is?"
-
- Lyn Redwood, a registered nurse, mother of an autistic
child and president and cofounder of
<http://www.SafeMinds.orgwww.SafeMinds.org
(Sensible Action for Ending Mercury-Induced Neurological Disorders), a
nonprofit organization dedicated to ending devastation caused by the
needless
use of mercury in medicines, tells Insight that "there are so many
problems with the study, but over time you can see how all the
manipulations
of the data slowly bring down the signals for neurological disorders. I
think they were trying to get lower numbers. It must be very hard to admit
that a program that was designed to eradicate infectious disease has
resulted
in an epidemic of a whole new kind of disease. But to think that we weren't
given a choice when the regulators and manufacturers knew these products
contained mercury is inconceivable."
-
- Redwood says with a sigh, "On a scale of one to
10, I give the CDC study a big fat zero. I think it started out good, but
when they saw the early numbers it scared the hell out of them. I don't
have any faith in the CDC doing a decent study of this matter. It's like
having the tobacco industry monitor cigarettes for safety. From a parent's
perspective and from a health-care professional's perspective it's
maddening
that we can't get products that are safe, and yet we're forced by law to
use them. They need to just get the thimerosal out. It's
barbaric."
-
- Kelly Patricia O'Meara is an investigative reporter for
Insight.
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=573542
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