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Shot down?
By Jessica
Werb-contributing writer
Five-year-old Kieran Stark
lives with his single mother, Cynthia, a psychology
student, in a cramped unit of UBC student housing. In
many ways, he's like any other pre-schooler. He can
count to 12, sing the alphabet and name all the colours.
He's also learning his way around a computer, and will
gladly show off his talents. With his elfish grin and
tousled blond hair, he's the apple of his mother's eye.
But there's another side to
this affectionate, cheerful boy. He still wears diapers.
He drinks from a bottle. He speaks in sentence
fragments, and doesn't know how to play with other
children. His eye contact is fleeting, and he often
avoids it. Sometimes, he'll be gripped by rages and bang
his head against the wall.
Little Kieran is trapped in
the mystifying, isolating world of autism. And while the
medical establishment still says it doesn't know why, or
how, autism strikes certain children, Stark believes she
knows exactly what caused her son's retreat into
darkness. The culprit, she says, is something that was
meant to keep Kieran strong and healthy: vaccines.
It's not a view many
Canadian doctors will entertain, never mind endorse.
Nevertheless, Stark is just one of thousands of parents
across North America and Europe who argue the
coincidence is overwhelming: within weeks or even days
of receiving the DPT-Diphtheria, Pertussis (Whooping
cough) and Tetanus-and MMR-Measles, Mumps, and
Rubella-shots, their previously normal children lost
many of the developmental milestones they had attained.
"We noticed after his DPT
shot that he was doing strange things, like arching his
back and screaming," Stark recalls. "He had a very bad
vaccine reaction, but the doctors kept telling us he was
normal." Following this first set of shots, Kieran got
his MMR jab, at the recommended age of 12 months.
Before the shot, Stark
says, he could speak about 20 words and was walking.
After the shot, he became very sick. "I remember it was
the day before his 12-month birthday, and we had to drag
him out of bed at noon. He sat there being really sick,
and then we put him back to bed at three. He was
projectile vomiting for two months... He didn't respond
to his name, and if you tried to call him he would act
like he was deaf. We were doing things like dropping
pots behind him to see if he reacted, and he wouldn't."
A hearing test at 13 months
ruled out deafness, and seven months later, Kieran was
diagnosed with autism.
Startlingly similar is the
story told by Keith Gallicano, a bioanalytical
researcher in White Rock. He and his wife Cathy are the
parents of five-year-old Giselle, who was diagnosed with
autism at age three.
Before Giselle had the MMR
vaccine at 13 months, says Gallicano, she could say her
ABCs, count to 15, sing and talk in three-word
sentences. "She was very social and had at least a 50 or
more word vocabulary. She had very good eye contact."
Gallicano said he and his wife noticed Giselle losing
speech at around age two. She began to withdraw from
interacting with other children. "My low point was when
I would come back from a conference and she wouldn't
even look at me. She couldn't understand the concept of
love."
Giselle and Kieran are just
two of an ever-increasing number of children globally
diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Across
Europe and North America, the rates of ASD are
escalating exponentially. Twenty years ago in Canada,
the rate of ASD was estimated at one in every 10,000
births. Now, the Autism Society Canada puts the rate at
one in every 286 births, with some areas of the country
showing even higher rates.
B.C. doesn't keep a central
registry of children diagnosed with autism disorders,
but figures from other provinces, such as Saskatchewan,
give insight into what is being called, by some, an
epidemic. Saskatchewan Education figures show an 80 per
cent increase in students with an ASD condition from
1998 to 2000-from one in 500 in 1999 to one in 333 in
2000.
Until recently, the
increased frequency of diagnoses was dismissed by most
mainstream health professionals as the result of better,
and more widely applied, diagnostic criteria. This past
October, however, researchers at the University of
California's Children's Hospital finally gave credence
to the view that something else was to blame. A
$1-million U.S. study funded by the California
government and the Medical Investigation of
Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at the University
of California concluded that the exploding numbers of
children diagnosed with autism in the state could not be
explained by population growth or broader medical
accounting.
California, widely
recognized as having the most accurate and
longest-running ASD registry in North America, has seen
its ASD figures increase by an average of nearly 400
every three months. From 1983 to 1995, the state's
autism caseload ballooned more than 200 per cent,
although the population only increased by 20 per cent.
Researchers have speculated
that environmental factors have contributed to the
phenomenon, but have stopped short of blaming vaccines.
Upon the release of the California study, Margaret
Whelan, executive director of the Geneva Centre for
Autism in Toronto admitted: "We sense there has been a
real increase, but like everyone else, we don't know
why."
One theory traces the rise
in autism spectrum disorders in California to the
Silicon Valley, where Asperger's syndrome-a milder form
of autism that affects social functioning-is more
prevalent. Bill Gates, for example, is widely suspected
as having Asperger's. Socially awkward but possessing
analytical and organizational skills, computer
programmers working in Silicon Valley may carry a few of
the genes which contribute to autism. When they have
children with other programmers, there's an increased
chance of these children being autistic, so the theory
goes.
But the University of
California study has also fuelled renewed discussion
about the possibility of the autism-vaccine link. Edda
West, president of the Vaccine Risk Awareness Network in
Canada, says the California study merely bolstered her
feeling that vaccines are to blame for the explosion in
autism cases.
"How is it possible that
[the medical establishment] can ignore it?" she asks.
"They keep talking about environmental factors. What is
this mysterious environmental factor? I hear the same
stories over and over again. A few months after an MMR
shot, a child begins to regress and to lose milestones.
That's kind of the repeated broken record that keeps
being told over and over and over. I see the MMR as the
straw that breaks the child's health."
Concern over the MMR
vaccine was first raised in 1998, when The Lancet
published a study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, then a
gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London,
England. In his now notorious study, Wakefield reported
finding the measles virus in the intestines of autistic
children who had never had the disease. He theorized
that the MMR vaccine was causing "autistic
enterocolitis," a form of autism that he said resulted
from an MMR-induced intestinal infection.
Wakefield later went on to
publish another report in the British journal Adverse
Drug Reactions in 2000, in which he claimed to have
identified nearly 170 cases of autistic enterocolitis.
Wakefield's research caused such an uproar, he was
eventually forced to leave his post at the hospital in
December of 2002 and now works as director of research
at the International Child Development Resource Centre
in Florida.
Since Wakefield's report,
the causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism has
been hotly debated, with the medical establishment on
one side, angry parents on the other-and a handful of
scientists in the middle producing studies to support
either side. A 2001 report from the Institute of
Medicine, a branch of the Academy of Science, that
stated the MMR vaccine had not been proven to be linked
to autism has done little to dissuade critics.
Scientists such as Dr.
Walter Spitzer at McGill University, Dr. Vijendra Singh
of the Utah State University in Logan and Dr. Bernard
Rimland of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego
have all continued to question the safety of the MMR
vaccine. The most recent study comes from Dr. Singh,
who, in August 2002, reported in the Journal of Medical
Science that his team of researchers had found a strong
association between the MMR vaccine and an auto-immune
reaction thought to cause autism.
Dr. Singh and his
colleagues analyzed blood samples from 125 autistic
children and 92 children who did not have the
developmental disorder. They found that the children
with autism who had received the MMR vaccine had higher
levels of measles antibodies than those without the
disorder. More than 90 per cent of the samples from
these autistic children were also positive for
antibodies that Singh postulates are responsible for
attacking the basic building blocks of myelin, the
insulating sheath that covers nerve fibres. Given that
the brain is made up of nerves, it's possible that
demyelination could cause brain damage consistent with
autism.
In addition to the MMR,
other vaccines have come under suspicion in recent
years, with the mercury-derived vaccine preservative
thimerosal also standing accused of triggering autism.
The Pfeiffer Institute in Illinois completed a study
last year suggesting that autism may be caused by a
malfunction of a protein that regulates metal metabolism
and the growth of brain neurons, and protects against
toxic exposures to heavy metals. "MT [metallothionein]
is a family of proteins essential for many important
processes in the body, and a dysfunction in this system
can explain most of the classic symptoms observed in
autism," said Dr. William Walsh, who led the study. "An
MT disorder may affect the development of brain neurons
and may cause impairments in the immune system and
gastrointestinal tract, along with hypersensitivity to
toxic metals."
The findings may lead to an
early infant screening test for autism predisposition,
and an advanced treatment to correct the
metal-metabolism disorder.
Thimerosal, which contains
ethyl mercury, has been used as an additive to vaccines
since the 1930s because it's effective in preventing
bacterial and fungal contamination, particularly in
multidose containers.
In Canada, thimerosal has
recently been removed from most childhood vaccines; a
hepatitis-B vaccine without the preservative became
available last year, and the DPT had it until the
mid-1990s. However, it's still found in a vaccine for
high-risk infants born to hep-B-infected mothers, and in
the flu shot. It's also used in some meningitis
vaccines, and in a number of special formulations for
pertussis only.
It was never used in the
MMR shot, but current thinking about the
vaccine-autism-link is that the DPT first impairs the
immune system with mercury poisoning, allowing the MMR
shot to prompt an auto-immune response in the child's
body. This, believes Cynthia Stark, is what happened to
Kieran.
"Basically, I haven't met a
single person with autism who can't trace it to the
shots," she says. "Our stories are all the same: 'My kid
had the DPT and he started getting sick. He had the MMR
and we thought he went deaf. We gave him antibiotics for
an ear infection or something like that, and suddenly
he's going spinning and twirling and laughing for no
reason.'You'd have to be an idiot not to see the
connection."
Dr. Jonn Matsen, a North
Vancouver-based nutritionist and author of the
recently-published Eating Alive II, devotes an entire
chapter in his book to thimerosal and mercury, which he
feels are partly to blame for autism, among other health
problems such as chronic fatigue and Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome.
"We don't tell our patients
not to vaccinate," says Dr. Matsen. "What we do say is
draw the line that there's no more mercury going in your
body. Make sure that any vaccine no longer has
thimerosal in it... It's very easy to inject mercury
into the body, and it's very slow to get out." The
symptoms of mercury poisoning and autism are strikingly
similar-they include social withdrawal, loss of speech,
self-harming behaviour, colitis and low IQ.
Dr. Matsen has worked with
many autistic children, administering chelation therapy,
a controversial form of therapy said to remove heavy
metals from the body through the ingestion of sulphur
compounds. Both Kieran Stark and Keith Gallicano have
undergone chelation, in addition to sticking to a strict
dietary regimen that cuts out wheat and dairy products.
Both families say these interventions have resulted in
some clear improvements for their children. "When we
took Giselle off gluten [wheat protein] and casein [milk
protein], we noticed that her eye contact was much
better," says Keith Gallicano. "Her whole awareness and
cognitive ability was improved.
This diet is based on the
premise, proposed by Dr. Paul Shattock of the University
of Sunderland's Autism Research Unit, that many autistic
children have a "leaky gut," which allows certain
incompletely digested peptides from the breakdown of
wheat and milk proteins to leak into the bloodstream and
affect brain function.
This "opioid excess" theory
contends that the peptides leaked into the bloodstream
possess an opiate-like effect akin to heroin, resulting
in abnormal opioid compounds measured in the urine of
autistic children by Dr. Shattock.
The Gallicanos are now
planning a move to California where they hope Giselle
will benefit from greater acceptance of alternative
autism theories and research.
"[In Canada] most of the
physicians either know very little about it or don't
want to get into the field. I spent quite a time giving
them literature, articles, and helping to explain what's
going on," says Gallicano, who knows of three other
families who have turned to American physicians out of
frustration with lack of autism expertise in Canada.
"Most of these families have had some problems with
excessive levels of mercury, which they think have been
caused through the preservatives in vaccinations."
Of course, there are plenty
of skeptics who see parents like Stark and Gallicano as
well-meaning but misguided, hunting desperately for a
cure that does not exist. Dr. John Blatherwick, chief
medical officer for the Vancouver Coastal Health
Authority, has little time for questions of vaccine
safety, saying no one's ever been able to definitively
prove a link between autism and vaccines.
"People theorize and they
say: 'Well, you know, the mercury compound is found in
this,' but they've never been able to show statistically
that this is making a difference... They test these kids
for everything, but they don't find anything. There
isn't a cause found for autism, so they grasp at
straws."
Dr. Blatherwick insists
that vaccines, used in the "multiple millions every
year," are safe and effective in preventing devastating
diseases like smallpox, polio and tetanus. "In every
study that ever looks at what is the most you can do in
health care-all of the things like bypass surgery,
operations, drugs, antibiotics-the number one thing that
has the biggest bang for the buck is immunization. The
truth is that the majority of B.C. families believe in
immunization, get their children protected, and these
kids do very, very well."
He adds the sooner the MMR
vaccine is administered, the better, since the stronger
immune system of an adult is more prone to an
auto-immune reaction, with higher incidents of joint
inflammation and numbness in adults following MMR
vaccinations.
"It is much better to get
it in childhood, and if you decide that your child's not
going to get a vaccine like that, you've already decided
that your child cannot probably have a career in health
care, because it will be required, and then they would
have to get it at a time when it's dangerous."
What parents like Cynthia
Stark or Keith Gallicano will tell you is that they
never realized they had a choice over whether to
vaccinate or not, or that they had the option of seeking
single vaccines for their children.
"I'm not completely
anti-vaccine, but if I had known what I know now, I
would have been very cautious in having vaccinations
administered to Giselle," says Gallicano. "If I had the
choice, I would want single vaccinations all the way
through, rather than giving triple, or even quadruple
vaccinations."
Stark adds: "I was told
there would be an epidemic if I didn't give my kid his
shots. I would tell parents to put as much research into
immunizing your child as you would into buying a house."
Asked to imagine what her
Kieran would be like had he not been given the MMR, she
allows herself to dream.
"I think he would be able
to walk up to a friend and ask them to play, and have
them play with him. Instead, he just stands there and
doesn't know what they're saying and walks away. They
want to play and he wants to interact, and it's like
they're a different culture with a different language.
That's the saddest thing that ever happens."
Useful links
łAutism Society Canada:
www.autismsocietycanada.ca
łNational Vaccine Risk
Awareness Network: www.vran.org
łAutism Society of BC:
www.autismbc.ca
łHealth Canada:
www.hc-sc.gc.ca
łAutism Research Institute
in San Diego offers a list of practitioners who follow
the DAN (Defeat Autism Now) protocols, a set of
treatment protocols collated by researchers and
scientists: www.autism.com/ari | 
