Reflections on World Autism Day

Well, the first World Autism Day has come and gone, and there are some thoughts I've had about the coverage and what it indicates about how poorly we are prioritizing those things that need to be done about the rising rates of autism in the west.

The coverage was almost entirely devoted to the medical dimensions of autism, with a large part of it devoted to the question of thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines. I find this problematic in certain ways.

The first and most significant way this is problematic is because it is completely slanted to only one dimension of the issue that faces us; it only looks to causes, and not at what to do with the autistic people among us. It gets people to think about autism in strictly medical terms, when in fact the more important aspect of autism has to do with the educational aspects of treatment. To put it simply, the only thing that we know helps autistics deal effectively with the world is education. However, dealing with the educational aspects of autism is not something that pleases the large corporate entities, because it's not possible to rake in tons of dough for companies like Pfizer and Eli Lilly by educating people. They want to come up with a pill instead.

Another reason why the emphasis on vaccines is problematic is because it ignores many of the other potential chemical triggers that could be behind the rise in rates of autism. A little bit of background is in order, so to begin...

It's quite certain that autism has a genetic component. In short, it runs in families. However, it's also equally certain that there are many groups of genes at play, and the genes that create the potential for autism in one individual are completely different from the ones that create it in another. Furthermore, the presence of these genes do not automatically mean the presence of autism. If genetics were the sole cause, autism rates would be expected to hold basically steady. However, they're not; they're rising, and rising fast. This indicates that there is also an environmental component. The current literature basically indicates that the genetics create the potential for autism, and that environmental factors (particularly at critical stages of brain development in early life) can greatly exaggerate their manifestation.

Mercury is a well-known neurotoxin, of course, and its introduction into vaccines was at best extremely shortsighted, and possibly mendacious, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in Canada for a few years now, and yet rates continue to rise. Now, this could be due to children being diagnosed some years after the fact, but I'd like to point out some other neurotoxins that are pervasive, persistent, and pernicious.

One is the family of brominated flame retardants, including chemicals like polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and so on: a veritable alphabet soup of chemicals used to make products less likely to burst into flames. They are in almost everything that we buy and use, including goods like computers, stereos, furniture, and clothing. These chemicals are persistent and bioaccumulate, with studies in Canada showing growing levels in dairy products, meat, and fish. Many of these chemicals are also known neurotoxins.

Another is that antibacterial soap, shampoo, and toothpaste that have become so popular. You know that tartar-fighting Crest and Colgate? It contains a substance called triclosan (along with a host of other consumer cleaning and kitchen products), which is also a known neurotoxin, and which breaks down to (among other chemicals) dioxin. It is persistent and pervasive, with the CBC show Marketplace taking a sample of rainwater from a farmer's field and finding triclosan.

Another chemical found everywhere is bisphenol A. This chemical is completely safe for adults; you can literally take a bath in the stuff. However, it mimics estrogen, and at key points in the development cycle tiny quantities can have profound effects. This chemical started to be noticed in the eighties (!) when zoologists started finding tremendous numbers of hermaphroditic fish and reptiles in certain areas, especially the Everglades.

The last one I'm going to mention is polytetrafluoroethylene, better known to most people by it's use in non-stick frying pans and on certain conservative US presidents under the name of Teflon. Highly persistent, millions of tons of the stuff has been produced, and while it itself is chemically inert, when heated above app. 315° C, it fumes off some very toxic chemicals, including carcinogens and yep, you guessed it, neurotoxins.

Now, studies have indicated that there is no statistical correlation between thimerosal and autism... and this may very well be true. Those studies are undertaken under carefully controlled conditions, and can easily show that in fact thimerosal does not cause a rise in autism. However, the way chemicals are studied for safety leaves out the question of synergistic effects; just like a mickey of scotch and four valium separately will get one wiggly or mellow, but together can quite easily see you off, the effects of these (and other similar chemicals) taken together may have much stronger effects than any one of them taken individually... and yet these interactions are not studied, especially here in North America.

There has been a movement to cause these studies to be done via institutions like Health Canada and the FDA in the US, but so far the lobbying efforts of the drug and chemical industries has managed to stymie them. In Europe, their efforts to do so have failed, and Europe has recently instituted a regulatory regime that requires such testing, including testing for chemicals that were approved under older, less strict regimes. The current strategy for the chemical industries in North America as they see markets disappear has been to institute a case before the WTO claiming unfair trade practices. Nice. All I can say is, considering some of the recent lack of action on the part of Health Canada about certain revelations (like the recent announcement by the British health services that Bisphenol A exposure to infants is to be strenuously avoided) to study the issue makes it very clear to me who the people in those agencies work for... and it ain't us.

Now, on to the other aspect that is sorely missing or under-emphasized from most of the coverage... that is, the educational dimensions of dealing with autism. To be blunt, most of the money earmarked for autism should be directed at our educational systems. There are no medical treatments that have any effect on autism whatsoever. That's not surprising, because nobody really knows what causes it, and anybody who says they do beyond broad generalities (it runs in families, and the rise must be due to environmental effects) is either delusional or lying. That may (and hopefully will) change in the future, but at the moment, the medical industry are as cavemen in their understanding of autism. However, educational treatments do work, and can work quite well, especially when they are undertaken early. However, where is all the money going? It's all going to research for the causes of autism, because only that kind of research can lead to a pill upon which some large institutional shareholders of the right pharmaceutical company is going to get rich. Diagnosis gets short shrift (waiting times for diagnosis range from six months to over TWO YEARS), but this is good because it means that if you can put 'em off for long enough you can avoid having the state pay for educational treatment via the medical system. The problem with this is that it shouldn't be delivered through the medical system at all; it should be delivered through our educational systems, seeing as that's where one finds all the educators who actually, you know, do the work. I don't understand why it is that I can't take my son to a school, tell them he's autistic, and have the school automatically make the resources he needs for a successful education made available to him. It's not like it won't pay off for the society in the long run... results of early education are dramatic. However, the problem is that it's not going to make anybody rich... so there's no resources made available to our boards of education to properly deal with this dimension of autism.

So, the two main things that were driving the coverage in the media for World Autism Day mean that the real issues were avoided; the drive for a profitable treatment and the drive to avoid having to possibly impair the profitability of broad swathes of our modern industrial economy (who after all are the same entities that own the media that spent the day talking about it). If we want to improve the situation, we can do it right now before we find a magic bullet to make it all go away... proper regulatory regimes for our chemical industries with good regression testing of both new and existing chemicals in the marketplace examining not only singular but synergistic effects of these chemicals, and a proper emphasis and resourcing for the only known effective treatment of autism: education.