Expert goes public to counter fallacy on autism

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Nancy J. Minshew is finally ready to take off the gloves.After years of sitting back and hoping the science would speak for itself, the director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Excellence in Autism Research has decided it's time for her to take a personal stand.Autism is not caused by vaccinations, she says, and those who continue to push that theory are endangering the lives of children and misdirecting the nation's scarce resources for autism research."The weight of the evidence is so great that I don't think there is any room for dispute. I think the issue is done," said Dr. Minshew, who runs one of nine top autism research centers funded by the National Institutes of Health."I'm doing this for all the families out there who don't have a child with autism, who have to deal with the issue of 'Do I get a vaccination, or do I not do it and risk my child's life' because they don't understand what the science is saying."By coincidence, her decision to speak out came as ABC was slated to air the pilot of a new TV drama, "Eli Stone," in which a young lawyer pursues a lawsuit on behalf of a woman who believes mercury in a vaccine caused her son's autism.The episode, scheduled to air Thursday, upset the American Academy of Pediatrics so much that it asked the network to pull the show. The Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, declined to do so, but agreed to run a disclaimer that will direct viewers to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's autism Web site.That site will tell visitors what has been known for several years -- that virtually every mainstream public-health and research organization, including the congressionally authorized Institute of Medicine, the CDC and the NIH, says there is no credible link between vaccines and autism.That has not stopped a determined group of parents, iconoclastic researchers and lawyers from arguing that there is a link and that the government and drug companies have conspired to hide the truth."Eli Stone" picks up on that theme, and while ABC asserted that the program presents both sides of the argument, the drama clearly leans toward the vaccine-autism connection.In real life, the main target of suspicion has been thimerosal, an ethyl mercury preservative that kept vaccines from being contaminated once they started to be used in a doctor's office or clinic.In the TV drama, it's called "mercuritol," and the Eli Stone character says this during his closing argument to the jury:"Is there proof that mercuritol causes autism? Yes. Is that proof direct or incontrovertible proof? No. But ask yourself if you've ever believed in anything or anyone without absolute proof. That's called faith."Adding to the aura of conspiracy surrounding the debate, the script also has the lawyer saying to the jury, "The first lawsuit alleging a connection between tobacco and cancer was filed in 1954, but it took 30 years for a jury to award a single dollar for something we all now accept as patently true."After watching an advance copy of the program at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's request this week, Minshew said she thought it was well done."It's great entertainment," she said. "If it didn't set off this whole other issue, I would think it was cute."She was particularly perturbed by the tobacco reference in "Eli Stone." The evidence of heart and lung damage from smoking was overwhelming for years before tougher cigarette regulations were enacted, but there is no such parallel in the studies that have alleged that vaccines cause autism.One of the main pieces of evidence against the vaccine theory, Minshew said, is that thimerosal has been banned from most childhood vaccines in America since 2001, and yet reported autism rates have continued to increase.Dr. Eric Fombonne, an autism researcher at McGill University in Montreal, has an even more telling example of that.In Quebec, children who got vaccines from 1987 to 1991 had about half as much mercury exposure as those in the United States; from 1992 to 1995, they had the same amount; and from 1996 on they had no exposure at all because mercury preservatives were removed. Yet the autism rates in Quebec increased steadily through that entire period, and actually went up faster after the mercury was eliminated."A key point in this debate for me," Fombonne said, "is that we have pumped a lot of money into these studies, and when do you stop pouring money into a theory which has no evidence supporting it?"There is also the very real risk that parents who are afraid of vaccines won't protect their children against serious childhood diseases and infections, Minshew said.(Mark Roth can be reached at mroth(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)