The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic
448
The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic
448eBook
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Overview
A groundbreaking book, THE AGE OF AUTISM explores how mankind has unwittingly poisoned itself for half a millennium
For centuries, medicine has made reckless use of one of earth's most toxic substances: mercury—and the consequences, often invisible or ignored, continue to be tragic. Today, background pollution levels, including global emissions of mercury as well as other toxicants, make us all more vulnerable to its effects. From the worst cases of syphilis to Sigmund Freud's first cases of hysteria, from baffling new disorders in 19th century Britain to the modern scourge of autism, THE AGE OF AUTISM traces the long overlooked history of mercury poisoning.
Now, for the first time, authors Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill uncover that history. Within this context, they present startling findings: investigating the first cases of autism diagnosed in the 1940s revealed an unsuspected link to a new form of mercury in seed disinfectants, lumber fungicides and vaccines. In the tradition of Silent Spring and An Inconvenient Truth, Olmsted and Blaxill demonstrate with clarity how chemical and environmental clues may have been missed as medical "experts," many of them blinded by decades of systemic bias, instead placed blamed on parental behavior or children's biology. By exposing the roots and rise of The Age of Autism, this book attempts to point the way out – to a safer future for our children and the planet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429941181 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/14/2010 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Mark Blaxill was a senior partner at The Boston Consulting Group and is now a managing partner at 3LP Advisors. The father of a child diagnosed with autism, he has been involved in autism advocacy for over a decade and has written widely on the scientific controversies surrounding autism.
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He has been a journalist for 35 years and was an original staff member of USA Today and Senior Editor of USA WEEKEND and United Press International. He lives in Falls Church City, Virginia and is a member of the National Press Club.
Dan Olmsted is Editor of the blog Age of Autism. He has been a journalist for 35 years and was an original staff member of USA Today and Senior Editor of USA WEEKEND and United Press International. He lives in Falls Church City, Virginia and is a member of the National Press Club.
DAVID KIRBY is the author of Evidence of Harm, which was a New York Times bestseller, winner of the 2005 Investigative Reporters and Editors award for best book, and a finalist for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism; Animal Factory, an acclaimed investigation into the environmental impact of factory farms; and Death at SeaWorld, a scientific thriller about the lives of killer whales in captivity and the people who fought for their liberation. He lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
We believe that autism was newly discovered in the 1930s for the simple reason that it was new. The organic chemicals industry that grew out of chemical warfare research during World War I led to new commercial uses for mercury, including the introduction of an extraordinarily toxic compound made from ethylmercury. This, our research suggests, led directly to the first cases of autism. Among the parents of those first eleven cases described in 1943, you will meet a plant pathologist experimenting with ethylmercury fungicides in Mary land; a pediatrician in Boston who was an early champion of mass vaccinations containing ethylmercury; and a stenographer in a pathology lab in Washington, D.C., who spent her workday exposed to mercury fumes while her future husband, a psychiatrist, treated syphilis with mercury just as Freud had done decades earlier. Several other families cluster around the medical profession, agriculture, and forestry— the three biggest risk factors for exposure to mercury in its newest and most toxic form. Psychiatrist Leo Kanner provided some clues to the backgrounds of these early parents— such as their professions— but our investigation uncovered dramatic new details about what the parents were doing when each child was born and in the critical years before that.
By the time our research was done, we had worked our way through newspaper clippings, professional archives, city directories, cemetery records, ancestry searches, last- known addresses, and libraries from Washington, D.C., to Moscow, Idaho. We found and interviewed family members of several of the first eleven children; most memorably, we met two of those “cases” ourselves. At the end of our search, we talked with “Case 1: Donald T.” around the kitchen table in his lifelong home in the small lumber town of Forest, Mississippi. By any measure, he has fared astonishingly well. President of his college fraternity and later the Forest Kiwanis Club, a pillar of his Presbyterian church, he had a long career at the local bank, plays a competitive game of golf, and regularly travels the world. We learned how “Donald T.” went from being the first unmistakable case of autism to the first unmistakable case of recovery. He also reminds us how recent autism is— the space of one man’s lifetime: “Donald T.” turned seventy- seven in September 2010.
Leo Kanner’s original cases, linked only by this overlooked association with mercury, suggest that from the very beginning autism was an environmentally induced illness— a toxic injury rather than something inherited or inculcated. Certainly, some children were more susceptible to mercury exposure— and that may implicate genetic vulnerabilities. This is very different, however, from saying that autism is an inherited genetic disorder.
Tragically, the best and the brightest in science and medicine have missed these clues from the start, blinded first by the belief the parents were responsible and then by their ongoing pursuit of the “autism gene.” The Great Autism Gene Hunt has come up empty— but continues to drain off millions of dollars and thousands of hours that should go to more promising environmental research.
Having thoroughly failed to solve the autism puzzle, the medical industry is putting forth a new wave of epidemic deniers to claim autism isn’t really increasing after all. Simply put, this idea is nonsense; and sadly, it prolongs the epidemic and prevents the urgent response this public health crisis demands.
In tracing the history of autism, we cannot avoid discussion of what we have already acknowledged as a controversial topic: vaccines. Some critics have labeled us antivaccine for even broaching the subject. But our interest has more to do with vaccination as a risk factor, perhaps one of several. We want to state explicitly that we support vaccines as long as they are individually and collectively tested for safety, and not deployed excessively, as part of an overall policy to promote childhood health. We are not antifungicide or antivaccine or anti- anything but autism. We support progress and innovation. (Mercury was removed from fungicides in the 1970s for safety reasons after several episodes of mass poisoning.) We don’t want crops to wither, or houses to rot, or children to die of vaccine- preventable illnesses. We simply want to stop an autism epidemic whose origin we believe can be discerned from a careful examination of its environmental history.
Copyright © 2010 by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Foreword David KiIrby ix
Introduction: The Seed 1
Part 1 The Roots
Chapter 1 The Age of Syphilis 19
Chapter 2 The Age of Hysteria 56
Chapter 3 The Age of Acrodynia 84
Chapter 4 Pollution 109
Chapter 5 Targeted Toxins 137
Part 2 The Rise
Chapter 6 Germination 163
Chapter 7 The Wrong Branches 200
Chapter 8 Growing Like a Weed 233
Chapter 9 Fruit of the Poisoned Tree 260
Chapter 10 Digging Up the Roots 295
Epilogue: The Nightmare and the Dream 347
Acknowledgments 365
Appendix A Notes on the Tuskegee Studies 371
Appendix B Selected Papers and Patents of the Plant Pathology Network 374
Endnotes 377
index 407