#407
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 14:29:38 -0500
From: "Mark J. Kittleson, PhD, FAAHB" <kittle@SIU.EDU>
Subject: Vaccine article
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For those of you who read the Robert Kennedy article on vaccination, this is a
rebuttal that the Wall Street Journal (July 14) put in.
Mark J. Kittleson, PhD, FAAHB
Professor, Health Education
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Health Education & Recreation
Southern Illinois University
618-453-1841 (office)
618-453-1829 (fax)
_____
From: Lynch, Sharon [mailto:Sharon.Lynch@CO.RAMSEY.MN.US]
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 9:30 AM
To: kittle@siu.edu
Subject: Vaccine article
Hello,
I recently began receiving your list serv articles and am happy to have learned
of your service. I believe someone forwarded chat room conversation re the
Salon/Rolling Stone article by Robert Kennedy-I learned of your web site from
that.
I am forwarding an article from the Wall Street Journal of July 14 in response
to the Robert Kennedy article. I have been asked to do so by our state health
department representatives. I hope it is OK to send directly to you-am not sure
what the process is.
Thanks for the services you provide.
Sharon
Sharon Lynch, Health Educator
Saint Paul Ramsey County Public Health
50 W Kellogg Blvd, Suite 930
Saint Paul MN 55102
651-266-2505 Fax 651-266-2593
There Is No Thimerosal-Autism Conspiracy July 14, 2005; Page A11
In reply to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s July 8 Letter to the Editor "Thimerosal,
Children's Vaccines and Autism":
What unfortunate timing for Mr. Kennedy! His letter appeared at the same time
the vaccine conspiracy group Safe Minds -- his own allies -- posted the full
transcript of the "secret" Simpsonwood Conference that he used in his article to
allege the existence of a massive conspiracy to cover up the connection between
thimerosal-preserved vaccines and autism. Far from having "no other
interpretation" than what he gave, it shows he engaged in voracious
"quote-mining" from a 286-page text, grotesquely misrepresenting the context of
his tidbits.
It's therefore difficult to simply trust him that the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the American Academy of
Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the European Medicines Agency
(whew!) are all part of a massive conspiracy on autism and are covering their
tracks.
Mr. Kennedy says IOM "joined the pharmaceutical industry to gin up four European
studies to exonerate thimerosal" because some IOM panelists had "financial
bonds" to the vaccine industry. "Those studies were largely financed by vaccine
makers, written principally by vaccine industry consultants and employees and
published in compromised journals," he says. Certainly vaccine makers have
provided much funding for thimerosal studies, thereby fulfilling their
regulatory responsibility to do so. But are the researchers who repeatedly find
no thimerosal-autism connection risking their professional reputations and
livelihoods by fudging data, knowing that countless journal editors, journal
reviewers, government reviewers, and outside reviewers can view those same data?
Yes, says Mr. Kennedy. He seems to believe Big Pharma owns everybody; Americans
from government and private groups, Swedes, Danes, Brits -- all are on the take
and all have slanted their data in various ingenious ways.
In claiming "the European studies are all flawed," Mr. Kennedy says, "They
targeted children exposed to a tiny fraction of the thimerosal concentrations
used in America." Yet even his fellow anti- vaccinationists claim U.K. and U.S.
autism rates have risen almost equally since 1954 and it's accepted that both
countries now report the same rates. If European vaccine exposure is comparable
in allegedly causing autism, it's contradictory to insist exposed children
received so little as to make epidemiological studies using them inherently
"flawed."
Mr. Kennedy also keeps misrepresenting the toxicological data no matter how
often he's caught -- even when it forces his editors to run embarrassing
corrections. Thus his pre-corrected article stated ethyl mercury exposure was
187 times higher than the EPA limit, and he told Joe Scarborough it was 400
times. It can't be both and is actually neither. The EPA has no limit for ethyl
mercury. Mr. Kennedy cannot escape these prevarications by claiming that ethyl
mercury is as bad as or worse than methyl mercury, which in any case has no
support.
The latest effort to compare the two appeared in April in Environmental Health
Perspectives, conducted by The National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences, and concurred with numerous previous studies in finding that "mercury
is cleared from the body faster after the administration of ethyl mercury than
after the administration of methyl mercury." It concluded, "Methyl mercury is
not a suitable reference for risk assessment from exposure to thimerosal-derived
mercury."
Mr. Kennedy says, "Dr. Boyd Haley is hardly a 'vaccine conspiracist,'
as Mr. Fumento charges." Actually, his specialty is mercury in dental fillings
and he simply widened his "expertise" to thimerosal. Dr.
Haley is chairman of the Advisory Committee for Toxic Teeth and claims mercury
is the cause of Alzheimer's. Right.
Regarding anti-vaccinationist darlings Mark and David Geier, recall that the
American Academy of Pediatrics condemned them for "numerous conceptual and
scientific flaws, omissions of fact, inaccuracies, and misstatements." According
to the New York Times, David Geier has testified in more than 90 vaccine cases,
with one judge lambasting him as "a professional witness in areas for which he
has no training, expertise and experience." Other judges have labeled his
testimony "not reliable," "intellectually dishonest" and "wholly unqualified."
Conspiracies exist, but it's impossible to sustain one so large and for so long
without somebody inside blowing the whistle. Mr. Kennedy apparently thinks
nobody but he and his handpicked non-expert experts can be trusted, even though
he violates that trust at every turn.
Meanwhile, the children who have sickened and died because terrified parents
refused to vaccinate their kids -- they are all too real.
Michael Fumento
Hudson Institute
Washington
What astounds me about the autism/vaccine debate is that Robert Kennedy Jr. is
given unequaled and unlimited access to the news media. He has no scientific
degree, never published a paper, and has never seen a patient. Nevertheless, he
is entitled to a media-driven soapbox to criticize the finest scientific papers
in half a century, accuse the National Institutes of Health and Institute of
Medicine of ignorance and conspiracy to injure children, tout pseudo-scientific
papers written by non-physicians, and do significant harm to the children of the
United States.
Every legitimate scientific paper done in the past decade has demonstrated that
autism is not caused by vaccines, nor by thimerosal. Those of us who take care
of patients know that there is plenty of autism in unvaccinated children and the
removal of thimerosal from the vaccines four years ago has not produced a drop
in autism diagnoses.
Jonathan D. Reich, M.D., M.Sc.
Lakeland, Fla.
(Dr. Reich is a pediatrician.)
Patricia Segal-Freeman, J.D., M.P.H.
MN Dept. of Health, ITIH Section
717 Delaware St. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55414
612-676-5003
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#408
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 17:00:28 -0400
From: Nancy Eichner <neichner@GWU.EDU>
Subject: CHHCS News Alert, July 15, 2005 -- Decline in Physical Activity Blamed
for Adolescent Girls' Weight Gains
** The Leader in Health Education-AAHE
** www.aaheinfo.org
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** Using Excel to Run Statistics
** www.hedir.org/publishing
** HEDIR Publishing Now takes credit cards
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The Center for Health and Health Care in Schools (CHHCS) News Alert -- July 15,
2005
Decline in Physical Activity Blamed for Adolescent Girls' Weight Gains:
Girls who were physically inactive during adolescence gained an average of 10 to
15 pounds more than active girls, according to a 10-year study of obesity by the
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
http://www.healthinschools.org/2005/july15_alert.asp
The Center for Health and Health Care in Schools www.healthinschools.org
Nancy Eichner
Senior Program Manager
202-466-3396 fax: 202-466-3467
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