A Daubert motion: a legal strategy to exclude essential scientific evidence in toxic tort litigation.
Melnick RL.
Environmental Toxicology Program, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA. melnickr@niehs.nih.gov
In the US Supreme Court's Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc decision, federal judges were directed to examine the scientific method underlying expert evidence and admit that which is scientifically reliable and relevant. However, if a judge does not have adequate training or experience in dealing with scientific uncertainty, understand the full value or limit of currently used methodologies, or recognize hidden assumptions, misrepresentations of scientific data, or the strengths of scientific inferences, he or she may reach an incorrect decision on the reliability and relevance of evidence linking environmental factors to human disease. This could lead to the unfair exclusion of valid scientific evidence, particularly that which is essential to a plaintiff's case in toxic tort litigation.
PMID: 16030335 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Links
What has a decade of Daubert wrought? [Am J Public Health. 2005] PMID:16030340
Trial and error: the Supreme Court's philosophy of science. [Am J Public Health. 2005] PMID:16030341
Scientific inferences in the laboratory and the law. [Am J Public Health. 2005] PMID:16030327
Law's knowledge: science for justice in legal settings. [Am J Public Health. 2005] PMID:16030338
The perils of relying on interested parties to evaluate scientific quality. [Am J Public Health. 2005] PMID:16030346
Maybe there is a judge in Maryland that needs a little correcting. Boyd Haley's knowledge of chemistry has been unfairly excluded in the courts. Why don't you do something productive and work on marketing the need to reform standards in the courts as relates to science?
Prof. Haley didn't do the plaintiffs any favors when he told the judge that the FDA and CDC should be held criminally liable. That's not something that lawyers want to hear from their "expert" in a Daubert hearing. Judges are interested in facts, not spittle.
My main interest is reforming standards of science as it relates to media coverage of autism.
Media coverage and the collective conversation are quite broad social exercises, you are not even noble in your quixotic endeavors to influence debate that is already suppressed in mainstream national media outlets. If fact, even the artistic expression of screenwriters is now coming under attack from the AAP (semi-fascist now isn't it, frankly UN-AMERICAN): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/pediatricians-abc-and-ce_b_83472.html
It is interesting that the only science you allow to go unnattacked is weak industry sponsored epidemiology, which is creating the comfortable myth that the greatest arm of pediatric medicine is flawless.
Maybe you should go after this media coverage. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8018389843054855330&hl=en I love how at the end, there is an personal example of someone deeply committed to improving the sloppy science of vaccination with her own use of titer checks after first round vaccinations-which is an idea plastered all over this website that you can't seem to deal with scientifically.
I read you recent piece on the proposed fictional ABC series on a vaccine injured child in some sort of legal drama linking it to autism. http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/LettertoABC.pdf Surely, vaccines are one of the greatest health care innovations ever-right up there with the advances of modern medical imaging and modern sanitation. In your passionate defense of vaccines for the sake of maintaining confidence (important of course) you may have forgotten something. You state that "No mercury is used as a preservative in routinely offered childhood vaccines."
That statement is untrue, as many of the flushots delivered in the U.S. on this very day contain it as a preservative and are recommended by the CDC to 6 month old children. See list below and note the multi-dose vials which are commonly preferred for convenience sake: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/vaxsupply.htm#table
A select population of children is not being helped by vaccines, they are the 0.5 - 1% who need to be screened out of this universal mandate as they are not equipped metabolically to handle the frontlines on the war against disease. Please, quit drafting them, improve the situation by putting the best and brightest in biochemistry onto how we can screen these kids metabolically at an early age who are at risk for environmental insults that are generally innocuous in most others.
I hope you don't mind me pushing you to do better on a really great paradigm in medicine. Your specialty has pushed mine in getting the word out on the risks of oncogenesis in pediatric radiation imaging, and the dose of radiation to each child on each exam is decreasing as CT manufacturers and radiologists have responded by adjusting practices; adjusting vaccine doses in at risk children for neuropsychiatric and autoimmune phenomena should occur as well.
Please look beyond the politics and help me advocate for where this needs to go, Edward F. Fogarty, III, M.D Chairman of Radiology University of North Dakota School of Medicine
Metabolic screening ideas . . .
1: Toxicol Appl Pharmacol. 2006 Jul 15;214(2):99-108. Epub 2006 Jun 16. Porphyrinuria in childhood autistic disorder: implications for environmental toxicity.
Nataf R, Skorupka C, Amet L, Lam A, Springbett A, Lathe R.
Laboratoire Philippe Auguste, Paris, France.
To address a possible environmental contribution to autism, we carried out a retrospective study on urinary porphyrin levels, a biomarker of environmental toxicity, in 269 children with neurodevelopmental and related disorders referred to a Paris clinic (2002-2004), including 106 with autistic disorder. Urinary porphyrin levels determined by high-performance liquid chromatography were compared between diagnostic groups including internal and external control groups. Coproporphyrin levels were elevated in children with autistic disorder relative to control groups. Elevation was maintained on normalization for age or to a control heme pathway metabolite (uroporphyrin) in the same samples. The elevation was significant (P < 0.001). Porphyrin levels were unchanged in Asperger's disorder, distinguishing it from autistic disorder. The atypical molecule precoproporphyrin, a specific indicator of heavy metal toxicity, was also elevated in autistic disorder (P < 0.001) but not significantly in Asperger's. A subgroup with autistic disorder was treated with oral dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) with a view to heavy metal removal. Following DMSA there was a significant (P = 0.002) drop in urinary porphyrin excretion. These data implicate environmental toxicity in childhood autistic disorder.
Doesn't matter its part of the fib and if US radiologists, surgeons, pathologists, and internists had been the ones to evaluate the data at Simsonwood there would be a much different debate today-one focusing on which schedule is the safest and how to manufacture safer vaccines.
Another study debunking the Thimerosol myth. I will copy the article below from Medpage. This is so new that "Pediatrics" does not have it online to allow a link. With ABC very irresponsinbly running a fictional piece (emphasis fictional!) on a mother of a child with Autism winning a judgement against a drug company due to thimerosol in their product, it is more important than eve to talk about real science. Again...thimerosol has not been used as a preservative in infant (less than 3 years old) vaccines in Missouri and most other States for years. And...as this study suggests, it is cleared 10 times faster than previously thought and did not cause "mercury poisoning" even when it was in use. Here is the article: Mercury from Vaccines Clears More Quickly in Infants than Anticipated By Crystal Phend, Staff Writer, MedPage Today Published: January 30, 2008 Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco Michael E. Pichichero, M.D., University of Rochester, N.Y. ROCHESTER, N.Y., Jan. 30 -- Ethyl mercury from the controversial vaccine preservative thimerosal is excreted by infants faster than had been anticipated, without accumulating between vaccinations, researchers found.
Blood ethyl mercury levels peaked at no higher than 8 ng/mL shortly after vaccination and then returned to prevaccination levels within weeks, reported Michael E. Pichichero, M.D., of the University of Rochester here, and colleagues in the February issue of Pediatrics.
Half of the ethyl mercury was cleared within 3.7 days, about 10 times faster than had been shown for adults consuming methyl mercury from food, they said. Action Points
* Inform interested patients that the study suggests vaccines containing mercury from the preservative thimerosal did not present any long-term toxicity risk.
* Caution patients that medical information that is portrayed in fictional television shows is not held to the high standard of scientific accuracy as are data published in peer-reviewed medical journals.
The findings represent still another blow to concerns that thimerosal could cause autism or other pervasive developmental disorders, Dr. Pichichero and colleagues said. The data should be reassuring to parents whose children were vaccinated before 2001 when thimerosal was largely eliminated from vaccines in the United States and Europe, they added.
However, the American Academy of Pediatrics expressed alarm that parents might be swayed nonetheless by the television show "Eli Stone."
Previews of the premier episode set to air Thursday on ABC present a mother's argument that thimerosal caused her child's autism. Media reports suggest the episode will include a lawyer supporting her case in court against a pharmaceutical company.
The AAP called on ABC to cancel the episode. It said the show had the mother winning her case.
The message could "undermine the years of efforts by the AAP and public health community to persuade parents to vaccinate and protect their children," according to a statement from AAP president Renée R. Jenkins, M.D., of Howard University and George Washington University.
She said a report linking the measles vaccine to autism in England prompted a decline in vaccination leading to the death of several children in the worst outbreak of measles there in two decades.
"ABC will bear responsibility for the needless suffering and potential deaths of children from parents' decisions not to immunize based on the content of the episode," Dr. Jenkins said.
Preview of "Eli Stone" Source: ABC.com
Thimerosal was widely used as an antibacterial agent in multidose vaccine vials before the Environmental Protection Agency announced in 1999 that the cumulative dose of ethyl mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines in childhood might exceed safe limits based on estimates from oral intake of methyl mercury.
However, it continues to be used elsewhere with the support of the World Health Organization, Dr. Pichichero and colleagues said.
They studied mercury excretion among 216 infants born at a hospital in Buenos Aires, where thimerosal is still routinely used in vaccines. In the prospective observational study, children had their blood mercury levels tested both before and after receiving routine vaccinations at their newborn, two-, or six-month checkup. Stool and urine samples were likewise collected.
Newborns received vaccines totaling 12.5 to 32.5 µg of mercury via intramuscular vaccination. The two-month-old and six-month-old groups received a further 37.5 to 57.5 µg of mercury. The cumulative dose of ethyl mercury was 112.5 to 162.5 µg.
Blood mercury levels were relatively low but peaked soon after vaccination when tested at 12 hours in the newborn group and at 24 hours in the two- and six-month-old groups.
The highest level detected was 8.0 ng/mL in a newborn 12 hours after receiving the birth dose of a hepatitis B virus vaccine containing 32.5 µg of mercury.
Blood mercury levels largely returned to baseline within 11 days and appeared to exit the body in the stool rather than the urine.
The mercury did not appear to cause renal toxicity because no clinically significant elevations of urine gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase levels were seen.
The half-life of blood ethyl mercury was substantially lower than the 44 days previously reported for methyl mercury. The researchers estimated the half-life after vaccination to be 3.7 days for newborns, 2.0 days for two-month-olds, and 2.2 days for six-month-olds.
Dr. Pichichero said these findings suggest the assumptions made in the late 1990s that ethyl mercury would behave the same as methyl mercury were incorrect.
The researchers noted that their measurements may have overestimated the amount of blood mercury contributed by ethyl mercury from vaccines since both methyl and ethyl mercury were present in the blood of some children.
And although the study was limited by lack of 24-hour sample collection and could not determine the ultimate fate of mercury after it left the blood, Dr. Pichichero expressed confidence in the low toxicity risk found in the study.
While "the importance of blood levels of ethyl mercury for assessing toxicity is unknown," the researchers said, " the low levels of mercury detected in this study suggests relatively low risk for toxicity from this exposure."
ANB-not a huge conspiracy, its just very easy to make thimerosal look great in people who are good conjugators of mercury. My whole point all over this blog keeps getting missed on you. It is clear you are not that stupid, but rather spend all of your time blog-trolling to make thimerosal look completely benign (which it really is in nearly all non-pregnant healthy adults and a majority of children who can detoxify it quickly). It really speaks to your dignity and humanity that you are promoting vitamin "T" so much when there are many better ways of vaccinating and better preservatives or approaches to maintaining sterility of multi-dose vials than this Depression-era toxin.
Really, the big picture is that multi-dose vials are all about convenience and saving money anyway. I find it quite ironic that I can get an individually wrapped burger and my kids can't get individually packaged, thimerosal-free flushots. I can have it "my way" at a restaurant but get sold misinformation from the AAP? Where is the truth in labelling and advertising that is so staunchly applied to fast food joints but not to the AAP or CDC? Ironic isn't it-maybe you can address that on you blog too, or at least keep sending people here to read my comments. Your "science" in journalism crusade only seems to swing one way, as a marketing trick for Thimerosal.
Bill-as for the Pichichero study, it just shows that thimerosal leaves the bloodstream quickly in 216 infants. It doesn't really show where it goes, what percent is sequestered in the brain? In my estimation in that group there may only be one or two infants who might handle thimerosal quite differently. Maybe one in 216 kids tested here will turn out to be autistic: "The highest level detected was 8.0 ng/mL in a newborn 12 hours after receiving the birth dose of a hepatitis B virus vaccine containing 32.5 µg of mercury." Do you think they are going to follow-up on that child? Hep B vaccine with vitamin "T", which in the French Courts has been ruled as a causative factor in Multiple Sclerosis and by tireless work of many little guys in medicine and science is understood as one of the most dangerous vaccines; yet this got into a baby at day one; if the child was normal without that exposure how would we ever know? They would appear "born" autistic and not even have a chance to regress down the road. BTW how many horrible blood draws were done on those 216 kids-where is your outrage that you had a few posts back for blood draws to titer check kids so that that they are not vaccinated without evidence of need for a booster?
Bill get a copy of this paper and actually read it: RAPID BLOOD TO BRAIN MOVEMENT OF [203Hg]-THIMEROSAL:Gasset et al. Tetratogenicities of Opthalmic Drugs. Arch. Opthalomology 93, 52-55, 1975.
Do you know what a teratogen is? Why would you advocate its use in pregnant females-which is implicit in your defense of this even though some really brave legislators pulled it out of Missouri despite vicious attacks by people like you in medicine who seem to want to bring it back? Now that its so safe why don't we bring it back in the ways I have advocated on this blog-all kids born oon odd days get TCVs and then see how odd the lot of them are versus all the kids born on even days-simple, stupid right?
Bill you are really looking like a free PHaRMA pawn, so trusting of MDs who are getting paid to do this junk science like Pichichero; thats the beauty of coercive culture in medicine-so many trusting smart fools who don't do their homework.
IN THE END PROTOCOL COMPARISONS ARE GONNA MAKE EVERYONE IN MEDICINE DO AN ABOUT FACE HERE. Just a matter of time. . . do it in the high risk and really see a difference fast.
See my other posts throughout this blog for those who are interested and on the fence, there are better ways to vaccinate and they will prove the weak associations of vaccines to neurodevelopmental delays but "bona-fide" researchers are afraid to do them, they would be biting the hand that feeds them. The easiest protocol comparison will be to pull HEP B off the schedule until age 5. Then see the 5 year olds who fall in the ID war and will have good video evidence for vaccine court, but at day one who knows what is happening, where are the ethicists on this? How does a major immunostimulant get dosed out on day one for a disease that is primarily transmitted by adult behaviors?
EVERYTIME I MENTION PROTOCOL COMPARISONS, PEOPLE IN MEDICINE DEFENDING VACCINES AS 100% SAFE GET SCARED-WONDER WHY?
Bill did you look into the conflicts on interest Pichichero has? Let me list them for you as he did in this paper: Pichichero ME. Acute otitis media: part II. Treatment in an era of increasing antibiotic resistance. Am Fam Physician. 2000 Apr 15;61(8):2410-6. Review. PMID: 10794582 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] "The author has received research grants and/or honoraria from the following pharmaceutical companies: Abbott Laboratories, Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Eli Lilly & Company; Merck & Co.; Pasteur Merieux Connaught; Pfizer Labs; Roche Laboratories; Roussel-Uclaf; Schering Corporation; Smith Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals; Upjohn Company; and Wyeth-Lederle."
How many scheduled pediatric vaccines currently include Vitamin T?
It really speaks to your dignity and humanity that you are promoting vitamin "T" so much when there are many better ways of vaccinating and better preservatives or approaches to maintaining sterility of multi-dose vials than this Depression-era toxin.
14 comments:
Will you be airing corrections?
ANB, why don't you be a gentleman and list the corrections you think are in order.
Ted Fogarty, MD
1: Am J Public Health. 2005;95 Suppl 1:S30-4.
A Daubert motion: a legal strategy to exclude essential scientific evidence in
toxic tort litigation.
Melnick RL.
Environmental Toxicology Program, National Institute for Environmental Health
Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
melnickr@niehs.nih.gov
In the US Supreme Court's Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc decision,
federal judges were directed to examine the scientific method underlying expert
evidence and admit that which is scientifically reliable and relevant. However,
if a judge does not have adequate training or experience in dealing with
scientific uncertainty, understand the full value or limit of currently used
methodologies, or recognize hidden assumptions, misrepresentations of scientific
data, or the strengths of scientific inferences, he or she may reach an incorrect
decision on the reliability and relevance of evidence linking environmental
factors to human disease. This could lead to the unfair exclusion of valid
scientific evidence, particularly that which is essential to a plaintiff's case
in toxic tort litigation.
PMID: 16030335 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Links
What has a decade of Daubert wrought? [Am J Public Health. 2005] PMID:16030340
Trial and error: the Supreme Court's philosophy of science. [Am J Public Health.
2005] PMID:16030341
Scientific inferences in the laboratory and the law. [Am J Public Health. 2005]
PMID:16030327
Law's knowledge: science for justice in legal settings. [Am J Public Health.
2005] PMID:16030338
The perils of relying on interested parties to evaluate scientific quality. [Am J
Public Health. 2005] PMID:16030346
Maybe there is a judge in Maryland that needs a little correcting. Boyd Haley's knowledge of chemistry has been unfairly excluded in the courts. Why don't you do something productive and work on marketing the need to reform standards in the courts as relates to science?
Prof. Haley didn't do the plaintiffs any favors when he told the judge that the FDA and CDC should be held criminally liable. That's not something that lawyers want to hear from their "expert" in a Daubert hearing. Judges are interested in facts, not spittle.
My main interest is reforming standards of science as it relates to media coverage of autism.
Media coverage and the collective conversation are quite broad social exercises, you are not even noble in your quixotic endeavors to influence debate that is already suppressed in mainstream national media outlets. If fact, even the artistic expression of screenwriters is now coming under attack from the AAP (semi-fascist now isn't it, frankly UN-AMERICAN):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/pediatricians-abc-and-ce_b_83472.html
It is interesting that the only science you allow to go unnattacked is weak industry sponsored epidemiology, which is creating the comfortable myth that the greatest arm of pediatric medicine is flawless.
Maybe you should go after this media coverage.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8018389843054855330&hl=en
I love how at the end, there is an personal example of someone deeply committed to improving the sloppy science of vaccination with her own use of titer checks after first round vaccinations-which is an idea plastered all over this website that you can't seem to deal with scientifically.
EFFIIIMD
Chair of Radiology at UND
As much as I respect Dierdre Imus's take on mercury and autism, I feel like I need to reserve judgment until I hear what Montel has to say.
Dear Dr. Jenkins,
I read you recent piece on the proposed fictional ABC series on a vaccine injured child in some sort of legal drama linking it to autism. http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/LettertoABC.pdf
Surely, vaccines are one of the greatest health care innovations ever-right up there with the advances of modern medical imaging and modern sanitation. In your passionate defense of vaccines for the sake of maintaining confidence (important of course) you may have forgotten something. You state that "No mercury is used as a preservative in routinely offered childhood vaccines."
That statement is untrue, as many of the flushots delivered in the U.S. on this very day contain it as a preservative and are recommended by the CDC to 6 month old children. See list below and note the multi-dose vials which are commonly preferred for convenience sake:
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/vaxsupply.htm#table
A select population of children is not being helped by vaccines, they are the 0.5 - 1% who need to be screened out of this universal mandate as they are not equipped metabolically to handle the frontlines on the war against disease. Please, quit drafting them, improve the situation by putting the best and brightest in biochemistry onto how we can screen these kids metabolically at an early age who are at risk for environmental insults that are generally innocuous in most others.
I hope you don't mind me pushing you to do better on a really great paradigm in medicine. Your specialty has pushed mine in getting the word out on the risks of oncogenesis in pediatric radiation imaging, and the dose of radiation to each child on each exam is decreasing as CT manufacturers and radiologists have responded by adjusting practices; adjusting vaccine doses in at risk children for neuropsychiatric and autoimmune phenomena should occur as well.
Please look beyond the politics and help me advocate for where this needs to go,
Edward F. Fogarty, III, M.D
Chairman of Radiology
University of North Dakota School of Medicine
Metabolic screening ideas . . .
1: Toxicol Appl Pharmacol. 2006 Jul 15;214(2):99-108. Epub 2006 Jun 16.
Porphyrinuria in childhood autistic disorder: implications for environmental
toxicity.
Nataf R, Skorupka C, Amet L, Lam A, Springbett A, Lathe R.
Laboratoire Philippe Auguste, Paris, France.
To address a possible environmental contribution to autism, we carried out a
retrospective study on urinary porphyrin levels, a biomarker of environmental
toxicity, in 269 children with neurodevelopmental and related disorders referred
to a Paris clinic (2002-2004), including 106 with autistic disorder. Urinary
porphyrin levels determined by high-performance liquid chromatography were
compared between diagnostic groups including internal and external control
groups. Coproporphyrin levels were elevated in children with autistic disorder
relative to control groups. Elevation was maintained on normalization for age or
to a control heme pathway metabolite (uroporphyrin) in the same samples. The
elevation was significant (P < 0.001). Porphyrin levels were unchanged in
Asperger's disorder, distinguishing it from autistic disorder. The atypical
molecule precoproporphyrin, a specific indicator of heavy metal toxicity, was
also elevated in autistic disorder (P < 0.001) but not significantly in
Asperger's. A subgroup with autistic disorder was treated with oral
dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) with a view to heavy metal removal. Following DMSA
there was a significant (P = 0.002) drop in urinary porphyrin excretion. These
data implicate environmental toxicity in childhood autistic disorder.
PMID: 16782144 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Is a "routinely offered childhood vaccine" the same as a scheduled childhood vaccine? Perhaps that's what Dr. Jenkins meant.
Doesn't matter its part of the fib and if US radiologists, surgeons, pathologists, and internists had been the ones to evaluate the data at Simsonwood there would be a much different debate today-one focusing on which schedule is the safest and how to manufacture safer vaccines.
EFFIIIMD
Sounds like a huge conspiracy. Maybe Eli Stone could clear things up.
Another study debunking the Thimerosol myth. I will copy the article below from Medpage. This is so new that "Pediatrics" does not have it online to allow a link. With ABC very irresponsinbly running a fictional piece (emphasis fictional!) on a mother of a child with Autism winning a judgement against a drug company due to thimerosol in their product, it is more important than eve to talk about real science. Again...thimerosol has not been used as a preservative in infant (less than 3 years old) vaccines in Missouri and most other States for years. And...as this study suggests, it is cleared 10 times faster than previously thought and did not cause "mercury poisoning" even when it was in use. Here is the article:
Mercury from Vaccines Clears More Quickly in Infants than Anticipated
By Crystal Phend, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Published: January 30, 2008
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
Michael E. Pichichero, M.D., University of Rochester, N.Y.
ROCHESTER, N.Y., Jan. 30 -- Ethyl mercury from the controversial vaccine preservative thimerosal is excreted by infants faster than had been anticipated, without accumulating between vaccinations, researchers found.
Blood ethyl mercury levels peaked at no higher than 8 ng/mL shortly after vaccination and then returned to prevaccination levels within weeks, reported Michael E. Pichichero, M.D., of the University of Rochester here, and colleagues in the February issue of Pediatrics.
Half of the ethyl mercury was cleared within 3.7 days, about 10 times faster than had been shown for adults consuming methyl mercury from food, they said.
Action Points
* Inform interested patients that the study suggests vaccines containing mercury from the preservative thimerosal did not present any long-term toxicity risk.
* Caution patients that medical information that is portrayed in fictional television shows is not held to the high standard of scientific accuracy as are data published in peer-reviewed medical journals.
The findings represent still another blow to concerns that thimerosal could cause autism or other pervasive developmental disorders, Dr. Pichichero and colleagues said. The data should be reassuring to parents whose children were vaccinated before 2001 when thimerosal was largely eliminated from vaccines in the United States and Europe, they added.
However, the American Academy of Pediatrics expressed alarm that parents might be swayed nonetheless by the television show "Eli Stone."
Previews of the premier episode set to air Thursday on ABC present a mother's argument that thimerosal caused her child's autism. Media reports suggest the episode will include a lawyer supporting her case in court against a pharmaceutical company.
The AAP called on ABC to cancel the episode. It said the show had the mother winning her case.
The message could "undermine the years of efforts by the AAP and public health community to persuade parents to vaccinate and protect their children," according to a statement from AAP president Renée R. Jenkins, M.D., of Howard University and George Washington University.
She said a report linking the measles vaccine to autism in England prompted a decline in vaccination leading to the death of several children in the worst outbreak of measles there in two decades.
"ABC will bear responsibility for the needless suffering and potential deaths of children from parents' decisions not to immunize based on the content of the episode," Dr. Jenkins said.
Preview of "Eli Stone"
Source: ABC.com
Thimerosal was widely used as an antibacterial agent in multidose vaccine vials before the Environmental Protection Agency announced in 1999 that the cumulative dose of ethyl mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines in childhood might exceed safe limits based on estimates from oral intake of methyl mercury.
However, it continues to be used elsewhere with the support of the World Health Organization, Dr. Pichichero and colleagues said.
They studied mercury excretion among 216 infants born at a hospital in Buenos Aires, where thimerosal is still routinely used in vaccines. In the prospective observational study, children had their blood mercury levels tested both before and after receiving routine vaccinations at their newborn, two-, or six-month checkup. Stool and urine samples were likewise collected.
Newborns received vaccines totaling 12.5 to 32.5 µg of mercury via intramuscular vaccination. The two-month-old and six-month-old groups received a further 37.5 to 57.5 µg of mercury. The cumulative dose of ethyl mercury was 112.5 to 162.5 µg.
Blood mercury levels were relatively low but peaked soon after vaccination when tested at 12 hours in the newborn group and at 24 hours in the two- and six-month-old groups.
The highest level detected was 8.0 ng/mL in a newborn 12 hours after receiving the birth dose of a hepatitis B virus vaccine containing 32.5 µg of mercury.
Blood mercury levels largely returned to baseline within 11 days and appeared to exit the body in the stool rather than the urine.
The mercury did not appear to cause renal toxicity because no clinically significant elevations of urine gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase levels were seen.
The half-life of blood ethyl mercury was substantially lower than the 44 days previously reported for methyl mercury. The researchers estimated the half-life after vaccination to be 3.7 days for newborns, 2.0 days for two-month-olds, and 2.2 days for six-month-olds.
Dr. Pichichero said these findings suggest the assumptions made in the late 1990s that ethyl mercury would behave the same as methyl mercury were incorrect.
The researchers noted that their measurements may have overestimated the amount of blood mercury contributed by ethyl mercury from vaccines since both methyl and ethyl mercury were present in the blood of some children.
And although the study was limited by lack of 24-hour sample collection and could not determine the ultimate fate of mercury after it left the blood, Dr. Pichichero expressed confidence in the low toxicity risk found in the study.
While "the importance of blood levels of ethyl mercury for assessing toxicity is unknown," the researchers said, " the low levels of mercury detected in this study suggests relatively low risk for toxicity from this exposure."
ANB-not a huge conspiracy, its just very easy to make thimerosal look great in people who are good conjugators of mercury. My whole point all over this blog keeps getting missed on you. It is clear you are not that stupid, but rather spend all of your time blog-trolling to make thimerosal look completely benign (which it really is in nearly all non-pregnant healthy adults and a majority of children who can detoxify it quickly). It really speaks to your dignity and humanity that you are promoting vitamin "T" so much when there are many better ways of vaccinating and better preservatives or approaches to maintaining sterility of multi-dose vials than this Depression-era toxin.
Really, the big picture is that multi-dose vials are all about convenience and saving money anyway. I find it quite ironic that I can get an individually wrapped burger and my kids can't get individually packaged, thimerosal-free flushots. I can have it "my way" at a restaurant but get sold misinformation from the AAP? Where is the truth in labelling and advertising that is so staunchly applied to fast food joints but not to the AAP or CDC? Ironic isn't it-maybe you can address that on you blog too, or at least keep sending people here to read my comments. Your "science" in journalism crusade only seems to swing one way, as a marketing trick for Thimerosal.
Bill-as for the Pichichero study, it just shows that thimerosal leaves the bloodstream quickly in 216 infants. It doesn't really show where it goes, what percent is sequestered in the brain? In my estimation in that group there may only be one or two infants who might handle thimerosal quite differently. Maybe one in 216 kids tested here will turn out to be autistic:
"The highest level detected was 8.0 ng/mL in a newborn 12 hours after receiving the birth dose of a hepatitis B virus vaccine containing 32.5 µg of mercury."
Do you think they are going to follow-up on that child? Hep B vaccine with vitamin "T", which in the French Courts has been ruled as a causative factor in Multiple Sclerosis and by tireless work of many little guys in medicine and science is understood as one of the most dangerous vaccines; yet this got into a baby at day one; if the child was normal without that exposure how would we ever know? They would appear "born" autistic and not even have a chance to regress down the road. BTW how many horrible blood draws were done on those 216 kids-where is your outrage that you had a few posts back for blood draws to titer check kids so that that they are not vaccinated without evidence of need for a booster?
Bill get a copy of this paper and actually read it:
RAPID BLOOD TO BRAIN MOVEMENT OF [203Hg]-THIMEROSAL:Gasset et al. Tetratogenicities of Opthalmic Drugs. Arch. Opthalomology 93, 52-55, 1975.
Do you know what a teratogen is? Why would you advocate its use in pregnant females-which is implicit in your defense of this even though some really brave legislators pulled it out of Missouri despite vicious attacks by people like you in medicine who seem to want to bring it back? Now that its so safe why don't we bring it back in the ways I have advocated on this blog-all kids born oon odd days get TCVs and then see how odd the lot of them are versus all the kids born on even days-simple, stupid right?
Bill you are really looking like a free PHaRMA pawn, so trusting of MDs who are getting paid to do this junk science like Pichichero; thats the beauty of coercive culture in medicine-so many trusting smart fools who don't do their homework.
IN THE END PROTOCOL COMPARISONS ARE GONNA MAKE EVERYONE IN MEDICINE DO AN ABOUT FACE HERE. Just a matter of time. . . do it in the high risk and really see a difference fast.
See my other posts throughout this blog for those who are interested and on the fence, there are better ways to vaccinate and they will prove the weak associations of vaccines to neurodevelopmental delays but "bona-fide" researchers are afraid to do them, they would be biting the hand that feeds them.
The easiest protocol comparison will be to pull HEP B off the schedule until age 5. Then see the 5 year olds who fall in the ID war and will have good video evidence for vaccine court, but at day one who knows what is happening, where are the ethicists on this? How does a major immunostimulant get dosed out on day one for a disease that is primarily transmitted by adult behaviors?
EVERYTIME I MENTION PROTOCOL COMPARISONS, PEOPLE IN MEDICINE DEFENDING VACCINES AS 100% SAFE GET SCARED-WONDER WHY?
Bill did you look into the conflicts on interest Pichichero has? Let me list them for you as he did in this paper:
Pichichero ME.
Acute otitis media: part II. Treatment in an era of increasing antibiotic resistance.
Am Fam Physician. 2000 Apr 15;61(8):2410-6. Review.
PMID: 10794582 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
"The author has received research grants and/or honoraria from the following pharmaceutical companies: Abbott Laboratories, Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Eli Lilly & Company; Merck & Co.; Pasteur Merieux Connaught; Pfizer Labs; Roche Laboratories; Roussel-Uclaf; Schering Corporation; Smith Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals; Upjohn Company; and Wyeth-Lederle."
NOTICE ANY CONFLICTS THERE?
How many scheduled pediatric vaccines currently include Vitamin T?
It really speaks to your dignity and humanity that you are promoting vitamin "T" so much when there are many better ways of vaccinating and better preservatives or approaches to maintaining sterility of multi-dose vials than this Depression-era toxin.
"Sigh"
Another weak dodge ANB? Aren't you getting tired of me making you look dumb here?
SInce there is so little real oversight on vaccines maybe Congressman Dan Burton from Indiana will get to the bottom of it-you certainly can't.
Others learning from ANBs Sophomoric Socratic method, check this for the good Rep. Burton:
http://www.nationalautismassociation.org/pdf/burtonfda.pdf
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