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Scientists, doctors, need to help debunk myths about autism and vaccines.

Date published: 9/25/2005

PHILADELPHIA--On the morning of Aug. 23, 2005, Marwa Nadama brought her 5-year-old son, Abubakar, to the Advanced Integrative Medicine Center in Portersville, Pa., to meet with Dr. Roy Eugene Kerry, a board-certified physician and surgeon. Abubakar was autistic. Dr. Kerry was certain that he could help.

For years, Marwa had struggled to help her son. But Abubakar remained distant and uncommunicative, unable to return her affection.

Now, however, there was a ray of hope. Television and newspaper reports claimed that thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative in some vaccines, had caused autism. Although thimerosal had been taken out of most vaccines by 2001, Marwa believed that its toxic effects hadn't been taken out of her son.

At around 10 a.m., Dr. Kerry gently took the boy's arm, cleaned an area of skin with alcohol, inserted a needle attached to a syringe containing EDTA (ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid), and directly injected the medicine into the boy's bloodstream.

At 10:50 am, Abubakar Nadama was dead--of a heart attack.

At the time that Kerry injected Abubakar with EDTA, epidemiologic studies performed in three continents by four separate groups had found that vaccines don't cause autism.

The findings were clear, consistent, and reproducible. Also, the signs and symptoms of mercury poisoning are different from those of autism.

If mercury in vaccines didn't cause autism, then why did more than 10,000 autistic children this year receive the same chelation therapy that caused Abubakar's death?

One answer is the media concentration on scare stories linking thimerosal to autism.

The notion that vaccines might cause autism contains all of the elements of a great story: greedy pharmaceutical companies, government cover-up, uncaring doctors, and parents fighting against all odds for their children.

But it isn't easy to promote this story. On the one hand, you had every major medical organization, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Institute of Medicine, stating that there was no link.

On the other, you had a few marginal scientists and clinicians who, in the absence of any solid, reproducible data, said that it did.

The media solved the problem by quoting one person from column A (representing the vast weight of medical and scientific data) and one from column B (representing conjecture in the absence of data).

Television producers refer to the column B guests as "the explosion factor." And it makes for great television. Giving the public bad information, unfortunately, often correlates with higher ratings.

Scientists, doctors, and public-health agencies also must share some of the blame. Although scientific studies have answered the question of whether vaccines cause autism, scientists have done little to explain these studies to the public.

Date published: 9/25/2005