A Fair Article

The angst I always feel before reading a vaccine article in the mainstream press dissipated after a few sentences here. I am glad Julie Deardorff is approaching this on the level: it's not supposed to be "parents vs. the medical community." This vaccine issue is about parents learning about real information and growing concerned that our medical authorities aren't being straight with us. We deserve better.

Here is Julie's artice as printed in the Chicago Tribune today:

The AAP gets tough on vaccine dissenters
The American Academy of Pediatrics is growing so concerned about the climbing rate of vaccine exemptions--and the possible affect on community health--that it recently formed a group called the "Immunization Alliance" to address the growing refusal of some parents to vaccinate.
In a letter sent to members, the AAP identified the following as problems:
"Parent-to-parent spread of myths."
"A public that does not understand the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases."
"Unbalanced Internet and media exposure."
"Decreased trust in the government and health care providers."
"Slow response to negative news coverage."
"Increasing calls for philosophical exemptions."
But here's a problem the AAP missed: The sheer number of recommended and mandated vaccines is freaking parents out. And new combo shots that contain a stew of four or five different vaccines aren't going to help matters.
In 1982, The Centers for Disease Control recommended 23 doses of 7 vaccines for children up to age 6.
Today, the CDC recommends that children get 48 doses of 12 vaccines by age 6. That's a lot. Toss in flu shots for all infants and children and it boosts the number of recommended vaccines for children to 69 doses of 16 vaccines by age 18.
The two new combo shots approved yesterday by a federal advisory panel don't change the schedule; they just reduce the number of individual shots. GlaxoSmithKline's four-in-one shot offers protection against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and polio. Sanofi Pasteur's five-in-one shot is for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio and illness due to Haemophilus influenzae type b, or HiB.
But parents who are already asking doctors to unbundle the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine because they want their child to have individual vaccines aren't likely to embrace a five-shot cocktail. The new shots are also likely to raise questions, concerns and storage issues.
And how does the AAP plan to handle it? The organization will not talk about choice or informed consent, issues that should be raised with any medical procedure that carries a risk.
Instead, the AAP suggests in a sample letter to pediatricians, that physicians tell parents who refuse to vaccinate that they have a "self-centered and unacceptable attitude" since your child is getting protection from others who have chosen to vaccinate.
And if you absolutely refuse to vaccinate your child despite your physician's efforts, you could be booted from your pediatrician's practice. The sample letter to doctors from the AAP recommends saying:
"We will ask you to find another health care provider who shares your views. We do not keep a list of such providers nor would we recommend any such physician."

What does the CDC say about not vaccinating?

Taken from a PDF document found on this page under "What if you don't immunize your child?":

We strongly encourage you to immunize your child, but ultimately the decision is yours. Please discuss any concerns you have with a trusted healthcare provider or call the immunization coordinator at your local or state health department. Your final decision affects not only the health of your child, but also the rest of your family, the health of your child’s friends and their families, classmates, neighbors, and community.

Without immunizations, your child can infect others.

• Children who are not immunized can transmit vaccine-preventable diseases throughout the community. Unvaccinated people can pass diseases on to babies who are too young to be fully immunized.
• Unvaccinated people pose a threat to children and adults who can’t be immunized for medical reasons. This includes people with leukemia and other cancers, HIV/AIDS and other immune system problems, and persons receiving chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or large doses of corticosteroids.
• Unvaccinated people can infect the small percentage of children whose immunizations did not “take.”

Reading this brochure puzzles me and even insults my intelligence in a few ways. First of all, they use the label "unvaccinated people," when what they really mean is "sick people." Being "unvaccinated" does not make a person the carrier of a disease! Being sick does. An unvaccinated person is not the same as a sick person! And vaccinated people can get sick too, because vaccines do not necessarily confer immunity.

In fact, many times it is the vaccine itself that makes that person sick. While our society believes that smallpox and polio were eradicated by vaccines, if you look at the actual numbers, people got sick from these inoculations, with disease rates increasing after mass vaccination programs started. Many sources (doctors and historical records) say that these diseases declined naturally, having been on their way out before vaccination even began.

Which brings me to the second thing, and that is that when we are vaccinated, it is possible to "shed" the germs from the vaccine (I've read about this in vaccine package inserts and various articles). So really, those dangerous "unvaccinated" people are sometimes the ones at risk of catching disease from the vaccinated ones, not the other way around.

Third, this brochure uses the word "immunize" to mean "vaccinate." Technically, the terms are not interchangeable, even though the vast majority of medical texts use them like this. The word "immunize" literally means to make immune. Vaccines are an attempt at making us immune, but they do not guarantee immunity. Even this brochure hints at that when it says, "Unvaccinated people can infect the small percentage of children whose immunizations did not 'take.'"

I am sure there are truths in this brochure as well, but I am somewhat distracted by the way it misleads. Here, the reader is led to believe that unvaccinated people are dirty and can't be around the rest of society because of the risk they pose. It's things like this that make me now question almost everything the CDC says. It shouldn't be like this! I'm just a layperson, and I shouldn't have to question public health expertise like this. I just want the truth. I just want to know what real health problems have resulted from vaccination, and I want real numbers. I'm tired of feeling like I have to figure this out for myself.

Oh, so you'll see I added the CDC Vaccination home page to my sidebar. This is for research purposes for anyone who wants to see what they have to say. But personally, I can't help it if I read their site with the proverbial grain of salt.

Oh yea, and I still haven't heard back from them regarding my phone message about Prevnar (I called about a month ago to ask why Prevnar vaccine is not tested for carcinogenicity, mutagenic effects or impairment of fertility). Since then, I've found a few other vaccine inserts that state the same thing - they aren't tested for these things before they're mandated for our kids. And the CDC has yet to tell me why not. If you want to call them, I'll tell you that number again: 404-639-8256. Have at it, and let me know if you get any answers.

Shingles Booster Recommended by CDC

The CDC is recommending shingles booster shots for anyone over 60. Shingles is the more serious form of the chickenpox virus and can be dangerous in adults.

The more I read about epidemiology as it relates to increased vaccination, it seems that diseases just find new ways to work their ways into the population. Vaccines do not confer lifetime immunity the way getting the disease does, so we are told we need booster shots, and we can never be 100% sure we are immune. For example, mumps, one of the classic old childhood diseases, now occurs at higher rates in the older populations as the vaccines wear off. So, what you have are teens and adults getting it instead of school-age kids, and these older populations are the ones who are actually more susceptible to long-term damage (such as sterility in males). (This phenomenon was cited in Neil Z. Miller's Vaccine Safety Manual and Dr. Robert Mendelsohn's How to Raise a Healthy Child ... in Spite of Your Doctor.)

Natural chickenpox immunity, which (in my understanding) would have remained steady in the adult population because most adults had it as kids, is now collectively wearing off. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny explains in her DVD, Vaccines: The Risks, the Benefits, the Choices, that our adult immune systems sort of need our kids to get chickenpox so that we can get exposed to it again --- this re-exposure actually helps our immune systems "remember" the virus and bulk up again. But instead of allowing this natural course to go on, we've just vaccinated against chickenpox and now, as a population, we are becoming weaker at fending it off. Dr. Tenpenny cites a CDC publication (the July 12, 1996, MMWR) that says the incidence of developing shingles within 10 years after vaccination is occurring at a rate of about 1 in 5,000. And so, instead of adults getting natural "immune boosters" from their kids being left alone to get this normal childhood disease, kids are getting shingles from the vaccine (!), and adults are getting shingles from their kids.

Thus, the advent of a shingles booster for adults, and more cash for the pharmaceutical industry yet again.

According to the journal Vaccine, there is a real threat of a shingles epidemic due to mass vaccination against chickenpox (as cited by Dr. Tenpenny).

I'm just a layman, but to me this seems illogical. It seems healthier for our population just to get the chickenpox and let natural immunity occur, rather than going around inventing ways to circumvent nature. I know I didn't mind the little itchy bumps, and as my husband said, remembering his long excuse for days full of video-gaming, "Those were the best two weeks of my school career!"

Examining the CDC's "spin" on measles

Thanks to Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center for a helpful article on recent news about measles. Read it here.

When I wrote about measles the other day, I didn't even think until afterwards, "How can the CDC and media say that all those measles cases were because of people not vaccinating?" I had not had a chance to look into it, but Barbara's article is insightful:

Only one fifth (14) of the cases were American children whose parents claimed a religious or personal belief exemption. This fact didn't stop CDC officials from trying to blame the measles "outbreaks" on the exemption-takers by stating "These cases and outbreaks resulted primarily from failure to vaccinate, many because of religious or personal belief exemption."

So what motives does the CDC have? Are they gearing up for putting an additional MMR shot on the pediatric schedule, as Barbara suggests? Are they stirring up fear of disease to encourage society to look down on those who don't vaccinate? Are they trying to prove (by lying about the facts) the validity of vaccine programs and hush all questions about vaccine safety, especially in light of Hannah Poling's case? Your guess is as good as mine. But the CDC's jab at non-vaccinators seems to me a calculated PR tactic in making excuses for an unproven vaccination program that is under increasing public scrutiny.

Measles outbreaks in U.S.

A friend sent me an article from FOX News.com about measles outbreaks occurring in several states. So far, CDC reports 64 cases in nine states. An additional eight occurred in WA last week. They say 63 of those folks were either not vaccinated or it was unknown if they were. Fourteen people have been hospitalized, but no deaths have occurred.

I found this document which explains measles at length. Certainly some information to consider. (Click here to read an earlier post I wrote on measles.)

When I read about the complications of measles, for me, I always want to compare it to the risks of the vaccine. Again, the CDC says the risks are minimal. But the CDC has NO RELIABLE SYSTEM for monitoring risks. They say right up front that their adverse reaction data is unable to prove causality or provide accurate numbers (click here to read their full-page disclosure on the unreliability of VAERS). So do we really know if risks are rare?

And why isn't the CDC as vigilant with their vaccine adverse reaction data collection as they are with their disease outbreak data collection? They're our experts, yet they can't figure this out? Or they just won't?

So we have about 70 cases of measles in 2008 all over the U.S. Seventy out of 300 million U.S. citizens, in four months. Every time you read an article about disease/vaccines these days, the author points out that people must be scared to vaccinate because they think vaccines cause autism. (Understandably, parents are concerned for their children.) They then always have to point out that "no studies" have proven vaccines to be linked to autism. But let's recall that Julie Gerberding (head of CDC) herself said on CNN that vaccines CAN trigger autism in the presence of mitochondrial disorders.

Either they do, or they don't. The CDC needs to figure it out. (If they don't know already - many in the autism circles believe they've known for over a decade. Do a little reading and you learn about SV-40, a cancer-causing virus that government officials knew was in polio vaccines back in the 60s, yet they kept using them. That virus is still showing up in tumors and human tissues today. Is this a system we can trust?)

But vaccines are a sacred cow in this country. Question them and you will see. Want to see a doctor commit career suicide? Google "Andrew Wakefield" and you'll see what happened to the man who listened to parents when they said their child's MMR caused them to regress. What you find people are saying about him won't be pretty. Check out also the Autism Research Institute to see what research is still happening today.

By the way, it's not just about the autism. There are many other things to consider before vaccinating. Many, many ugly health problems have arisen from injecting little pieces of bacteria, viruses, animal and human tissues and preservatives into our bloodstreams. How could they not? Get yourself a good book on vaccine risks and benefits. I personally am reading Neil Miller's Vaccine Safety Manual right now and it is incredibly helpful and well-documented.

We need to educate ourselves, by being willing to consider what the medical journals and researchers not particularly "respected" by the CDC are finding. The CDC, in my opinion, has a vested interest in controlling the information we are allowed to hear in the media, because they need our trust more than anything. If we don't trust them, they can't do their jobs. They need us to believe them to continue waging their war on infectious disease. They need injured people to be swept under the rug. They need to cover up what is really going on.

Some may think people like me are making a mountain out of a mole hill. What is more likely is that the CDC is making a mole hill out of a mountain of evidence that vaccines are not as safe as they say.

Think when you read, or "Mother, should I trust the government?"

Unless you sit around listening to Pink Floyd albums all day, you might not be in the habit of picking apart patronizing government statements like the one the CDC issued after Journalist David Kirby zinged them for not answering vaccine safety questions in March. But if you want to see how it's done, click here to read Ginger Taylor's response to the CDC statement. (And no, I don't mean to infer that Ginger listens to Pink Floyd :) )

Ginger's son has autism, and not only has it forever changed their lives, but it flung her headlong into the "rabbit hole" of fighting for truth in the vaccine-autism-other-injuries debate. If you don't yet read her blog, you should!

By the way, Mr. Kirby wrote a book, Evidence of Harm, all about mercury in vaccines, to which the CDC said they would reply about 3 years ago. They have yet to do so.

Hepatitis B --- No Child of Mine...

... is EVER getting a Hepatitis B vaccine again. Ever! My firstborn got it, and I pray he will not succumb to any of the proven complications. [EDIT: This vaccine is given at the hospital after birth, at one month and at six months.]

I just finished watching the segment on Hep B in Dr. Sherri Tenpenny's DVD, Vaccines: The Risks, Benefits and Choices, and I need no more convincing. If you want a good starting point for researching vaccines, get this DVD. You will not regret hearing what she has to say.
Dr. Tenpenny is an osteopath and put over 6,000 hours of research (yes, she counted!) into collecting vaccine information from medical journals. As she said, this information is "hidden in plain sight." .... All right, my commercial is over. (Do you think people would hate me if I gave them this as a baby shower gift? :) ha ha) Here is what I learned. Keep in mind her data comes from medical journals and the CDC.

Is my child at risk for Hepatitis B?
Considering that the virus is transferred by blood and is endemic in populations of IV drug users, prostitutes, homosexual men, and homeless persons, I kinda doubt it. If he should end up in one of these lifestyles one day, I'll talk to him about making some better choices.

How dangerous is it?

• 50% of exposed people develop no symptoms and have lifetime immunity. Sweet.
• 30% develop flu-like symptoms, recover, and have lifetime immunity. Not bad!
• 20% actually develop symptoms bad enough to trek to the doctor, where they are diagnosed with the virus. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, jaundice and increased liver enzymes.
• Of those 20%, 95% recover completely, but 5% become chronic carriers.

The CDC touts this as one of the first "anti-cancer" vaccines because they say it protects from the possibility of getting carcinoma and/or liver disease from Hep B. BUT ... that cancer/liver disease shows up anywhere from 10-30 years after the virus, and only in 25% of the 5% of that 20% above (that's a really small #!). And since those folks who got it are probably going on with their same unhealthy lifestyles, you gotta wonder if perhaps their behaviors were further weakening their immune systems and setting them up for disaster.

Is the vaccine risky?
YES! According to a study in the Journal of Autoimmunity, "There is no doubt that the new recombinant hepatitis B virus vaccine has the ability to trigger autoimmunity." (Dec. 1996) Dr. Tenpenny has many adult patients on long-term, chronic disability from Hep B vaccine, and this autoimmunity finding is littered throughout the medical journals. There was even a case of a 35-day-old baby getting Kawasaki disease (a blood vessel disorder) one day after his 2nd dose of Hep B!

Could this be the reason Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis is affecting one in four children under 16?! Type I diabetes is also an autoimmune disorder Dr. Tenpenny mentioned. (She explains molecular mimicry and how antibodies from vaccines can turn on our tissues.)

The CDC says that any "presumed risks" of Hep B vaccine should be weighed against the "expected risk of acute and chronic liver disease." Yet they are inoculating our infants as part of a U.S. strategy to "eliminate" Hep B transmission, with no proof that it is safe for infants (the manufacturer only tested on 5- and 10-year olds and testified before Congress to this fact). AND the CDC says the same size dose should be given to preemies, full-term infants, older children and adults. We don't even do this with Tylenol!

Dr. Tenpenny said that she would devote her life to getting this vaccine off the pediatric schedule if she could. (I wonder how much money that would take, to defeat the power of the billions of dollars of Big Pharma?)

I hope this information is helpful to some of my fellow concerned parents out there. Let them come after this mother bear the next time I'm birthing a baby ... I'll show 'em what it's like.

:) (gratuitous George Costanza quote)

Thanks, Shannon, for letting your buds borrow the DVD. And thanks, Michelle, for letting me borrow it from you!

Calling the CDC

The other day I placed a call to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) by using the number given on their Web site (800-311-3435). I wanted to talk to somebody about the fact that Prevnar and other vaccines have never been tested for carcinogenic effects, mutagenic effects or fertility impairment (as the manufacturer's insert states).

I was hoping they could tell me why this is acceptable to the CDC, that the vaccines they recommend we administer to our children are not tested for such things. I am genuinely curious and am not trying to be incendiary. Though, it does seem to me that these things ought to be tested...maybe I'm missing something, but I want to know this before it's shot into my child.

The woman I reached obviously worked in some sort of call center and was not going to be able to answer detailed questions that required more than a script to reply. She repeated part of my question back to me to verify what I was asking, but didn't really get the whole thing. I repeated the question (Why is it OK with the CDC that certain vaccines are not tested for carcinogenic effects or fertility impairment?) and was put on hold.

She tried no less than three times to refer me to the vaccine manufacturer, but I told her I really wanted the CDC to tell me why. I asked if there was someone else I could talk to, but, according to her, it was not OK to give me any names of any CDC employees nor to give me a different phone number. Apparently, I had reached a general information line (CDC-INFO), and unless I had someone's specific name, I would continue to reach this line whenever I called. How convenient for the CDC.

After I persisted, she put me on hold again and came back to read me a paragraph about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). This was mostly useless, but one thing that stood out to me was that she actually stated that vaccine manufacturers/CDC can't know everything about a vaccine's safety until it goes to market. Great. So we really are one big science experiment! (I'm only kidding.... partly. Let's remember the long history of medical mistakes such as treating acne with X-rays and pregnant women with thalidomide. So please forgive me if I'm skeptical.)

At the end of the call I had no answer to my question, but did get a phone number for the manufacturer of Prevnar (Wyeth -- 800-572-8221) and a phone number for VAERS (800-822-7967). And a very strange sensation that I had just been subdued by the giant wall of government bureaucracy.

After a little more digging, I found a REAL phone number for the Immunization Safety Office within CDC (404-639-8256). I left a voicemail two days ago and am not sure if I will ever hear back. I'll let you know.

I also called the National Vaccine Information Center this morning to ask them some questions about pending legislation by Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Florida) and what we as simple parents can do to tell our government officials we want safer government policies. I am awaiting a call back, but will post that info when I get it.

Measles

This blog can not possibly serve to dish out all the information that exists about measles, or any other disease for that matter. But here are a few sources I have found helpful regarding the first "M" of MMR:

• National Vaccine Information Center MMR page
• Think Twice MMR page
• Book: Vaccine Safety Manual by Neil Z. Miller (I am reading the previous book, Vaccines, Autism and Childhood Disorders, but I imagine this one is much more extensive)
• DVD: Vaccines: The Risks, The Benefits, The Choices by Dr. Sherri Tenpenny
• Congressional Testimonies from doctors and parents

You can read the MedLine information on measles here.

The CDC handout from the doctor's office (PDF downloadable from http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/side-effects.htm#mmr) reveals the following risks with the vaccine:

Moderate Problems
• Seizure (jerking or staring) caused by fever (about
1 out of 3,000 doses)
• Temporary pain and stiffness in the joints, mostly
in teenage or adult women (up to 1 out of 4)
• Temporary low platelet count, which can cause a
bleeding disorder (about 1 out of 30,000 doses)

Severe Problems (Very Rare)
• Serious allergic reaction (less than 1 out of a million
doses)
• Several other severe problems have been known to
occur after a child gets MMR vaccine. But this
happens so rarely, experts cannot be sure whether
they are caused by the vaccine or not. These include:
- Deafness
- Long-term seizures, coma, or lowered
consciousness
- Permanent brain damage

(Kinda sounds like autism to me....) Here, the CDC's own literature says that they do not know if permanent brain damage, coma, seizures, or lowered consciousness are actually caused by the vaccine. My question is, if I can't rely on them to be sure, why should I rely on the statement that reactions are rare? (Not to mention, shouldn't they be sure??? Have they become that lackadaisical about public health?) The FDA and CDC know that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is flawed. Doctors are not required to report. And anyone whose child has had a reaction to a vaccine knows that it takes a lot of arm-twisting and hospital tests before a doctor will even consider that it was the vaccine.

Here is a quote from the meeting minutes taken from the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines Conference Call in March of last year (2007). I got this right off the HHS Web site:

"VAERS also has its weaknesses. VAERS is often missing data or has inaccurate data. There is underreporting to VAERS. Accuracy rates are not known. VAERS is better at detecting events that occur in close time proximity with vaccination, than events with long latency periods. There is a lack of an accurate denominator or number of people that are vaccinated. There is also a lack of a control group. All of these weaknesses result in the near inability to assess causality."
-- Dr. Ann McMahon, Food and Drug Administration (italics mine)

(Aside: It was estimated in a Journal of the American Medical Association study that reporting of adverse events may be as low as 1% to 10%. There were 128,035 adverse events reported in a less-than-five-year time span (around the middle of 1999-beginning of 2004). So does that mean that there were possibly 1.28 million to 12.8 million adverse events in those 5 years?)

The manufacturer of the MMR vaccine warns that it "has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential." (Source: Physician's Desk Reference, 55th edition, as quoted by Neil Miller) ... Not been tested for the possibility to cause cancer?

"Severe afflictions affecting nearly every body system -- blood, lymphatic, digestive, cardiovascular, immune, nervous, respiratory and sensory -- have been linked to this 'preventative' inoculation." -- Neil Miller, Vaccines, Autism and Childhood Disorders

Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, a pediatrician for almost 30 years, wrote in his 1984 book How To Raise a Healthy Child...In Spite of Your Doctor that the measles vaccine side effects included "even a relationship with Hodgkin's disease and cancer." He describes the reluctance of some doctors to even vaccinate their own children during a Los Angeles measles epidemic: "Unlike their patients, who weren't told, they realized that 'slow viruses' found in all live vaccines, and particularly in the measles vaccine, can hide in human tissue for years. They may emerge later in the form of encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, and as potential seeds for the development and growth of cancer."

Dr. Mendelsohn also noted that "in a 1978 survey of 30 states, more than half of the children who contracted measles had been adequately vaccinated." The World Health Organization has said that the chances of catching measles are about 15 times greater for those who are vaccinated than those who are not. Similar data on the inefficacy of measles vaccines is recorded by Neil Miller, whose sources are the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and several editions of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Here's why I do not think this particular disease is worth the risk of the associated vaccine for my child. (Again, this is just me; this is not medical advice.)

In 1920, 1.6% of measles cases ended in death.
In 1955, it was only 3 in 10 million.
Vaccination began in 1963.
(Source: MMWR 4/2/1999 - thank you, Dr. Tenpenny)
So the disease was already on its way out before vaccination began.

Much of what I have read indicates that measles is a pretty innocuous disease that rarely leaves behind any complications in healthy, well-nourished children. Treatment consists of bed rest, drinking fluids, and administering calamine or other lotions to relieve itching. Vitamin A has also been shown to be an important part of helping the body to fight the disease. Doctors will bring up the risk of measles encephalitis (brain infection), but I question the likelihood of this occurring in a healthy child. This is just one parent, assessing the risk for my child. (Well, and my husband makes two parents, deciding together!)

Entire books and Web sites are dedicated to the CDC/FDA/HHS/AAP/AMA-denied link between autism and the MMR. But it didn't take me much reading to be haunted forever by those three little letters. Once you start reading testimonies from parents just like you, who love their kids like you love your kids, you just can't look back. I will never look at public health policy in this country the same way.

I leave you with an excerpt from one of the Congressional Government Reform Committee meetings, that took place on April 6, 2000. The words of Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana):

"Liz Burt was one of the hundreds of parents who contacted us. Her five-year-old son, Matthew, has been classified autistic. He was developing normally. At age 15 months, following his MMR vaccine, he began to regress. Since the time of his vaccination, he’s had chronic diarrhea. This is very prevalent in autistic children. He also didn’t sleep on a regular basis for over three years. Liz took her son to numerous gastroenterologists in prominent medical facilities in the United States. with no resolution. Finally, this past November, Liz took her son to London, to the Royal Free Hospital. A team of medical experts there examined Matthew. They felt that he had a bowel obstruction. To the family, this seemed impossible since he had constant diarrhea. An x-ray indicated that Matthew had a fecal mass in his colon the size of a small cantaloupe. After the obstruction was cleared with laxatives, Matthew underwent an endoscopy and colonoscopy. The lesions in Matthew’s bowel tested positive for the measles virus."

You do the math.

[EDITED 5/2/2008 TO ADD: OK, now I see who Liz "Burt" was - her name is actually spelled "Birt," and she was a champion for autistic families. I found a bunch of information on her after her tragic death in 2005 on Adventures in Autism.]

A New Film on Autism

Thanks to Age of Autism for this information.

Thank you, David Kirby, for being just plain awesome. I love that when the CDC finally issued a statement on vaccine safety after Hannah Poling's case hit the news, they felt it necessary to try to discredit you throughout the whole thing. Do you think you hit a nerve? :)
[EDIT: If you decide to read the CDC's mantra in that statement above, be sure to read this breakdown by Ginger Taylor, M.S., who runs the Adventures in Autism blog. She nails it.]

AUTISM YESTERDAY
Available on Amazon ($20)

"At a time when Big Medicine, Big Government and Big Media are trying hard to make the vaccine-autism debate go away, along comes a quiet little film like “Autism Yesterday” to throw a wrench in the establishment’s best laid plans to stifle the pesky vaccine chatter once and for all." -- David Kirby