 |
Published: April 17, 2007 at 11:59 AM
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor
WASHINGTON, April 17 (UPI) -- In 1943, a child known only as Frederick W. became
part of the first medical report of a strange new disorder. Frederick was Case 2
of 11 children whose behavior differed "markedly and uniquely from anything
reported so far," wrote Dr. Leo Kanner, the psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins
University who introduced the syndrome to the world and named it "autism."
One of the children "spun with great pleasure everything he could seize upon to
spin." Many of the children flapped their hands; flew into unpredictable bouts
of rage and aggression; spoke in inexplicable ways if they spoke at all,
sometimes referring to themselves as "you" and others as "I"; showed remarkable
abilities like keen memory and perfect pitch but abject inability to perform
simple tasks; obsessed over objects but ignored human beings.
They appeared to inhabit a universe of one.
Kanner didn't know why the children, all born in the 1930s, acted that way but
noticed the parents were college-educated and career-oriented: lawyers,
psychiatrists, scientists. He wrote, "In the whole group, there are very few
really warm-hearted fathers and mothers," and later speculated, "emotionally
refrigerated" parents might play a role in causing the baffling disorder.
"Most of the fathers are, in a sense, bigamists," Kanner wrote. "They are wedded
to their jobs at least as much as they are married to their wives. The job, in
fact, has priority."
Now, Frederick W.'s father has been identified by this reporter as a scientist
named Frederick L. Wellman, and new information has been unearthed that suggests
Wellman's career might indeed be a clue -- though not the kind Kanner detected.
The Frederick L. Wellman Papers fill 18 boxes in the Special Collections
Research Center at the North Carolina State University Libraries in Raleigh. The
first item in the first folder in the first box is dated Spring 1922, when the
senior Wellman was working toward his doctorate in plant pathology at the
University of Wisconsin. Faded with age, the report is titled "Hot Water and
Mercuric Chloride Treatments of Some Brassica Seeds and Their Effect Both on the
Germination of the Seeds and the Viability of the Fungus Phoma Lingam."
In layman's terms, Wellman collected cabbage seeds infected with a common fungus
and dunked some of them in a solution of mercury salts and hot water. "The lots
treated with mercuric (chloride) were shaken vigorously at first to get thorough
contact with the solution," he wrote. His faculty adviser at the time was
concerned about an epidemic of cabbage fungus that was wrecking havoc on
Wisconsin farms, and he enlisted his student Wellman's help in researching
solutions.
By the time his son was born 14 years later, in 1936, Wellman had graduated to
advanced plant pathology work at the U.S. Agriculture Department's main research
center in Beltsville, Md., just outside Washington.
In a résumé, he wrote at length about his experience there with fungicides. On
cabbage seeds, he reported, "organic mercury compounds were found to be most
satisfactory disinfecting agents." For tomatoes, "proprietary organic mercury
dusts also gave good results." All three of the fungicide sales brochures in his
archive were for organic mercury compounds -- two of them containing ethyl
mercury, which was introduced in commercial products just a few years earlier.
Ethyl mercury is also the active ingredient in a vaccine preservative called
thimerosal. A maverick minority of scientists and a larger percentage of parents
blame thimerosal -- which is 49.6 percent ethyl mercury by weight -- for the
rising autism rate, up ten-fold in 20 years to one in 150 8-year-old U.S.
children, according to a report in February by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some parents say they watched their children become physically ill and regress
into autism soon after they got shots that contained the chemical -- a link
public-health officials call coincidence, not cause and effect.
It might be just another coincidence that the father of autism's Case 2 was
working with new ethyl mercury compounds seven decades ago when his son was
born. Or it might not.
Coincidence or otherwise, similar echoes emerge from cases 1 and 3 in Kanner's
original study. Case 1 grew up in a town called Forest, Miss., surrounded by
logging camps, lumber mills and a national forest being planted by the Civilian
Conservation Corps. Forest is 50 miles from the sawmills where ethyl mercury
fungicides were first tested in the United States in 1929 to preserve lumber, a
practice that quickly became widespread; that child was born in 1933.
Case 3 was the son of "a professor of forestry in a southern university," Kanner
wrote. That university has now been identified as North Carolina State -- the
same school where Frederick L. Wellman ended his career as a visiting professor.
Case 3's father began research on Southern pines when he joined the N.C. State
faculty in 1935.
In 1936, he assisted in the planting of pine seedlings in the university's newly
acquired Hofmann Forest. His son was born in 1937. Organic mercury fungicides,
including an ethyl mercury brand, were often used to prevent "damping off" or
fungal contamination of pine seedlings during that era.
An advocate of the mercury-autism hypothesis says the pattern in those first
three cases strengthens his concern.
"So now we have learned that Frederick Wellman handled ethyl mercury fungicides
that were first introduced to the market in 1929 and that his child was Kanner's
patient No. 2," says Mark Blaxill, whose daughter Michaela has autism. Blaxill
is vice president of the advocacy organization SafeMinds, which argues increased
mercury exposure is behind the soaring autism rate. "And we know that cases 1
and 3 grew up around the first application of ethyl mercury products. If that's
not a smoking gun, I don't know what is."
Consistent with that possibility, overlooked studies from the 1970s found a
history of chemical exposures in a "quite startling" percentage of parents of
autistic children; researchers could not isolate any one chemical as a common
factor. More recently, studies have reported a statistically significant
correlation between mercury pollution and autism rates.
A spokesman for the CDC cautions against making too much of Wellman's
background.
"I've learned from being at CDC it's often difficult when you're trying to
establish cause and effect," Glen Nowak, chief of media relations, says when the
Wellman case is described to him. "There are other things that could have
mitigated the effect, could have enhanced the effect, caused the effect. So a
case study of one, you always want to be very careful."
In 1999, the CDC and other public-health authorities urged vaccine manufacturers
to phase out ethyl mercury from U.S. pediatric vaccines as a precaution, given
the well-known toxicity of mercury in developing brains and the increasing
number of required childhood immunizations that contained it. But thimerosal
remains in most flu shots, which are recommended by a CDC advisory committee for
all pregnant women and for children as young as 6 months. Due in large measure
to reassurance from United States and United Nations health authorities, ethyl
mercury also continues in wide use in pediatric vaccines in developing nations.
"Evidence is accumulating of lack of any harm resulting from exposure" to
vaccines containing thimerosal as a preservative, according to a statement by
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services posted on its Web site. The
statement points to a 2004 report by the respected Institute of Medicine, which
discounted a link with autism and took the unusual step of recommending research
funding go to more "promising" areas.
Mercury-based fungicides were banned in the United States and many other
countries as understanding of mercury's toxic effects became more sophisticated;
they have not been on the market here since the 1970s. Such products were not a
health threat when used properly, according to a leading manufacturer.
To be sure, there is no direct evidence of mercury exposure in any of the
original cases, though Frederick W.'s mother had "kidney trouble" during her
pregnancy -- sometimes a sign of mercury toxicity. Frederick W.'s father worked
with many dangerous substances besides mercury -- a short list includes
formaldehyde, arsenic, copper, sulfur, insecticides and pesticides.
But it is also true that none of Kanner's case studies from Johns Hopkins has
been examined for such exposures, even as more researchers suspect genes alone
cannot explain the rising number of diagnoses. The Center for Autism and
Developmental Disabilities Epidemiology, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health, lists "Environmental Exposures" first among six areas
of research on its Web site. Johns Hopkins Medicine declined to comment for this
story.
Ellen K. Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Hopkins, is
currently using a $204,000 grant from the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences to test whether humans respond in different ways to mercury
exposure. The goal, according to the abstract, is to understand "preventable
risk factors for autism based upon the hypothesis that mercury compounds by
themselves do not cause autism but may contribute to the risks ... in
combination with genetic susceptibility and co-exposures to other risks, such as
infections." Silbergeld declined to comment for this story.
A recent issue of the Autism Advocate, published by the Autism Society of
America, the nation's oldest and largest such organization, focused on "the
possible link between autism and the environment." "We already have enough
evidence to make the judgments that environmental factors are critical issues
for autism," wrote Dr. Martha Herbert, an assistant professor of neurology at
Harvard Medical School. "This newer model of autism implies that we have great
opportunities to do constructive things about this challenge."
Wednesday, the Institute of Medicine convenes a two-day conference titled,
"Autism and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunities for Research."
Johns Hopkins' Medical Privacy Board denied a request for information from the
medical records of the original 11 cases reported by Leo Kanner, citing both
privacy and practicality. The first three cases were identified independently.
The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is located just
outside Washington's traffic-clogged I-495 beltway. The Georgian-style main
building is set back majestically from Route 1.
Off the highway, two-lane roads thread through 6,600 acres as the bustle of
Washington yields to rolling countryside, big barns and grazing cattle. The log
visitors' center with its massive stone fireplaces was built by the Civilian
Conservation Corps in the mid-1930s. Yet even some longtime Washingtonians are
unaware that the world's largest agricultural research center lies in their
midst.
When Frederick L. Wellman began working there in 1935, Henry Wallace was
secretary of agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal was
launching initiatives to spur crop production and overcome the Dust Bowl days of
the Great Depression. That year Congress passed a law mandating more basic
agricultural research.
By then, Wellman had earned his Ph.D., wed a Wisconsin woman named Dora U'Ren,
spent a year in
Honduras with the United Fruit
Co. and, in 1930, was hired at the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry's headquarters
in Washington. He was preceded there by a colleague from Wisconsin, John
Monteith, who was one of the most active experimenters in the world with mercury
fungicides. Monteith wrote numerous papers about his tests on mercury fungicides
at the bureau's Arlington Turf Garden, now the site of the Pentagon. Monteith
and Wellman had written a scientific paper on cabbage fungus in 1927.
During most of 1936, Wellman was hunting exotic plant diseases in Turkey, Egypt
and Iran. He was, as Leo Kanner wrote, a plant pathologist who "has traveled a
great deal in connection with his work."
Their child was born on May 23, 1936. Exactly six years later, in May 1942, the
boy's worried parents brought him to see Kanner at Johns Hopkins Hospital, about
30 miles up Route 1 from Beltsville. Kanner called him "Case 2: Frederick W."
"The child has always been self-sufficient," Kanner quoted his mother as saying.
"Usually people are an interference. He'll push people away from him. To a
certain extent, he likes to stick to the same thing.
"On one of the bookshelves we had three pieces in a certain arrangement.
Whenever this was changed, he always rearranged it in the old pattern.
"He had said at least two words ('Daddy' and 'Dora,' the mother's name) before
he was 2 years old. From then on, between 2 and 3 years, he would say words that
seemed to come as a surprise to himself. He'd say them once and never repeat
them."
Kanner was an international leader in diagnosing and treating childhood mental
disorders -- he wrote the book "Child Psychiatry" in 1935 and is widely credited
with establishing the discipline in the United States. But he asserted in
"Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact" -- published in 1943 in the
now-defunct psychiatric journal The Nervous Child -- that this was something
completely different.
"These characteristics form a unique 'syndrome' not heretofore reported, which
seems to be rare enough, yet is probably more frequent than is indicated by the
paucity of observed cases," Kanner wrote.
The children just did not appear retarded. "Even though most of these children
at one time or another were looked upon as feeble-minded, they are all
unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potential," he wrote. "They all have
strikingly intelligent physiognomies."
What made them different, he concluded, was "an extreme autistic aloneness that,
whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the
child from the outside." He called the disorder autism, from the Greek word
"autos," or self, borrowing the term from a Swiss psychiatrist who used it to
describe childhood schizophrenia.
In September 1942, Frederick W. was placed in a school for the developmentally
disabled near Baltimore. His father transferred to the Agriculture Department's
international division. In early 1943, Frederick L. and Dora Wellman left the
U.S. mainland for the next two decades.
But they would return for their only child.
Elemental or metallic mercury, the slippery quicksilver that used to spill out
of broken thermometers, is made up of single atoms, No. 80 on the Periodic Table
of Elements. Mercury can combine with other elements to form compounds; these
compounds are called organic mercury if they include a carbon atom, inorganic
mercury if they do not.
All forms of mercury are toxic, but organic mercury -- which can cross the
body's blood-brain barrier and the placenta -- is especially dangerous.
One kind of organic mercury, methyl, "bioaccumulates" or builds up in some large
fish. Pregnant women are advised not to eat too much of certain fish for fear of
causing neurological damage to their offspring.
Ethyl is a sister compound from the same alkyl subgroup of organic mercury; it
has one more carbon and two more hydrogen atoms than methyl. But ethyl mercury
is man-made -- it was not present in the environment, and humans were not
exposed to it, until a Ukrainian immigrant named Morris S. Kharasch created the
first commercial formulations just before Kanner's earliest autism cases were
born.
In the 1920s, in part based on expertise he developed in chemical-warfare
research for the United States during World War I, Kharasch filed 11 patents
that paved the way for several ethyl mercury products by the end of that decade.
His dual focus was evident in his "Who's Who" entry: He had been "awarded
patents along pharmaceutical lines, and treatment of fungus diseases of small
grains."
Those patents led directly to thimerosal -- trademarked as Merthiolate by Eli
Lilly and first used in vaccines by 1931. They also led to three ethyl mercury
fungicides, the DuPont and Bayer brands Ceresan and New Improved Ceresan,
marketed in a partnership called Bayer-Semesan; and Lignasan, used to treat
timber.
Wellman's North Carolina State archive, in a folder titled "Memorabilia,"
contains sales brochures for both kinds of Ceresan. "New Improved Ceresan
usually destroys seed-borne diseases either by direct contact with the spores or
by forming a vapor which penetrates every crack and cranny of the seed," the
brochure reads. It also helped protect seeds "against certain soil-borne
organisms."
The pamphlets also warn the compounds are "poisonous and precautions with all
packages must be observed. Use a dry filter dust mask or clean dry cloth over
the nose and mouth, as New Improved Ceresan is poisonous to inhale." (The third
of three fungicide pamphlets in Wellman's archive was for Semesan, another
organic mercury compound from Bayer-Semesan.)
Used properly, mercury fungicides were never a health hazard, according to
Germany-based Bayer CropScience.
"Investigating the health and environmental aspects of our products has always
been an important activity for Bayer," the division's Web site says. "Although
the correct use of mercury-containing seed treatments would be safe to the
environment even by today's standards, these pioneer seed-treatments were
replaced, at the end of the 1970s, by a new generation of mercury-free
products."
A DuPont spokeswoman, Gabriel King, says she cannot comment in detail because
"going back that far, it's the institutional memory -- there's just nothing
there."
DuPont and Bayer both referred questions to CropLife America, a trade group. A
CropLife spokeswoman says it, too, lacks familiarity with mercury fungicides.
Wellman was aware that, with mercury fungicides, he was handling "a very strong
poison."
In 1940, while at Beltsville, he wrote he had become familiar with "toxic values
of chemicals (and) injurious effects of disinfectants on human beings or animals
that might be involved." He wrote that mercury -- including the inorganic kind
he first tested on cabbage seeds as a Wisconsin student in 1922 -- can have
devastating effects: "It must be remembered that the mercury chloride is a very
strong poison, and special care must be taken in using it and disposing of the
poison solution."
Whether or not mercury affected Wellman's child is speculation, of course. Yet
there are possible clues. Frederick W., for example, was born three weeks early
by Caesarean section because his mother had "kidney trouble," Kanner wrote.
According to the CDC's toxicological profile for mercury, "The kidney is one of
the major target organs of mercury-induced toxicity." Elsewhere it states: "You
can be exposed to mercury vapors from the use of fungicides that contain
mercury. Excess use of these products may result in higher-than-average
exposures. ...
"Family members of workers who have been exposed to mercury may also be exposed
to mercury if the worker's clothes are contaminated with mercury particles or
liquid," it says.
Decades ago chemists were much less sophisticated about the dangers of some of
the substances they worked with. "There were chemists, there were chemical
assistants who would suck chemicals through pipettes in those days," says Thomas
Felicetti, executive director of Beechwood Rehabilitation Services in Langhorne,
Pa. Felicetti published a study in 1981 that found children with autism were far
more likely to have parents whose jobs brought them in contact with chemicals.
Felicetti's study was a follow-up to one in 1974 by Dr. Mary Coleman, a leading
autism expert at Georgetown University who has since retired. Her study of 78
autistic children found "an unusual amount of exposure (of parents) to chemicals
in the preconception period." Twenty of the 78 children were from families with
chemical exposure; in four of those families, both parents had chemical
exposures. Seven out of eight of those parents were chemists.
"Of the control parents" whose children did not have autism, she wrote, "there
was only one family (again both the father and the mother) who were working as
chemists in a laboratory."
In a 1976 book she edited, "The Autistic Syndromes," Coleman wrote that "since
the incidence of individuals exposed to chemicals in all related occupations in
the United States is 1,059,000 in 91,000,000 or 1.1 percent of the population
... to find that 25 percent of any sample has had chemical exposure is quite
startling.
"This is an area where more prospective research is needed," Coleman wrote. That
has never been done.
According to Coleman's book, the idea of parental exposure leading to autism in
a child "can not be dismissed, because of the theoretical possibility that
chemical toxins could affect genetic material prior to conception."
Dozens of studies have implicated mercury in genetic damage, including
chromosome breaks, point mutations, and partial and complete deletions. One
study on hamsters (it is unethical to test toxic substances on humans) found
mercury produced more point mutations than lead, a widely recognized threat to
children's mental development.
The scientific literature is also full of evidence that fetuses and young
children can suffer long-term harm, including brain damage, from mercury
exposure even if their parents do not.
The case that galvanized world attention occurred in Minamata, Japan, in 1956,
when wastewater from a Chisso Corp. chemical plant spilled toxic levels of
methyl mercury into Minamata Bay, and pregnant women ate contaminated fish.
Children born to mothers who ingested methyl mercury from contaminated fish
while pregnant had profound physical and neurological problems, even though
their mothers did not show any impairment.
In 1972, thousands of people in Iraq ate bread made from grain treated with
methyl mercury fungicide that was intended for planting, not human consumption.
Hundreds died. A follow-up study on children whose mothers ate contaminated
bread after giving birth and who were exposed only through their mothers' breast
milk showed problems including language delay that led one parent to describe
the children as "needles blunted by the poison." Language delay is one of the
hallmarks of autism as well.
Eating ethyl mercury-treated grain led to similar poisonings in Ghana in 1967.
Twenty people died. Of those who survived, "toxic effects appeared earlier and
were more severe in children than in adults," according to a report of the
incident published in 1974 in the journal Archives of Environmental Health.
"Four children developed disturbances of speech which led to stammering and
scanning. ... Mental abnormality was observed in one boy who showed outbursts of
anger unrelated to circumstances. A girl developed encephalitis (brain swelling)
and became completely paralyzed ... (with) complete loss of speech."
The report added: "Of all the fungicides in modern use, the alkyl-mercury
compounds (which include ethyl and methyl mercury) offer the most serious health
hazards. This is the conclusion reached by many workers ... who have undertaken
many investigations of persons at risk of occupational absorption of alkyl
mercury compounds. Serious concern has therefore been expressed about the
necessary contamination of the environment with mercury, particularly from its
use as fungicides in agriculture and in industry."
Two recent U.S. studies have found a possible association between environmental
mercury and a risk of autism in American children.
Raymond Palmer and colleagues at the University of Texas found the autism rate
was higher in Texas counties with more mercury exposure from toxic industrial
releases. In the other study, researchers found children living in areas with
the highest level of mercury pollution in the San Francisco Bay area were
roughly twice as likely to have autism.
The Environmental Protection Agency now says 6 percent of U.S. children are born
to mothers with a mercury level high enough to put them at risk for health
problems.
It is safe to say that Leo Kanner was not looking for environmental exposures as
a cause of the strange new cases he was seeing.
By the time the Wellmans arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1942 with Frederick W.,
Kanner had observed a number of such children who would form the basis for his
landmark description of autism as a "markedly and uniquely different" disorder.
He believed they had something else in common.
"In the whole group," he wrote in his original study, "there are very few really
warmhearted fathers and mothers." In subsequent studies he became more emphatic,
describing "the almost total absence of emotional warmth in child rearing."
"As a rule, the parents of our autistic children are cold, humorless
perfectionists," he wrote in 1954. "(T)he emotional refrigeration which the
children experience from such parents cannot but be a highly pathogenic element
in the patients' early personality development, superimposed powerfully on
whatever predisposition has come from inheritance."
Kanner's speculation about the parents' role was tempered by his belief that
most of the children he saw had been that way since birth, and that their autism
was "inborn." By the end of his long and distinguished career at Hopkins, he had
completely dropped the idea of parental responsibility, and noted: "At no time
have I pointed to the parents as the primary, postnatal sources of pathogenicity."
Kanner was also harshly critical of the claims of Bruno Bettelheim, who blamed
autism on the homicidal feelings of mothers for their child. Another autism
pioneer, Bernard Rimland (who died in 2006), demolished the psychological-damage
idea for good in his 1964 book "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its
Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior."
Kanner made another key observation in that original 1943 study.
"There is one other very interesting common denominator in the backgrounds of
these children," he wrote. "They all come of highly intelligent families."
The Wellmans certainly fit that mold -- Frederick L. Wellman had a Ph.D. in
plant pathology, his wife was a college graduate, and he had four talented
siblings: an opera singer; a newspaperman and best-selling author; a writer for
adventure magazines; and a painter, writer and radio commentator. Yet only the
Wellman sibling with a clear chemical connection, Frederick L. Wellman, had a
child with autism.
In Thomas Felicetti's 1981 study, there was no intellect effect, he said;
chemical exposure was the difference. One parent applied roof tar, which
contained a number of toxic chemicals.
Rimland, the researcher who disproved the idea that "refrigerator" parents made
their children autistic, pointed out in a 2002 written statement in his role as
head of the Autism Research Institute that Kanner earned his M.D. in 1919 in
Berlin, came to Hopkins in 1928, "and has been reported to have seen well over
20,000 children in the course of his psychiatric career. ... It is remarkable,
in retrospect, that none of the children were seen in Kanner's first 12 years of
practice (at Hopkins), and all 11 were born after 1930, when, as it happens,
mercury-containing vaccines were first used in this country. A coincidence? Very
unlikely."
Others, including the author of a new book, argue autism has been around for
ages and only awareness of it has increased. In this view, increasing exposure
to mercury -- or any other environmental agent -- could not be causing an autism
epidemic for one simple reason: There is no autism epidemic.
"The most important piece of evidence provided by those who believe that
thimerosal is related to autism is that rates for all the various autism
spectrum disorders have risen dramatically over the past few decades," writes
Roy Richard Grinker, a George Washington University anthropologist, in "Unstrange
Minds: Remapping the World of Autism."
Grinker, who has a teenage daughter, Isabel, with autism, argues in his book
that the "evidence" just doesn't hold up. "(T)he increase in the rate of autism
is more likely due to the result of new and improved science -- more reliable
definitions of autism and more awareness of autism among health-care
professionals and educators. Maybe we are finally diagnosing and counting autism
correctly."
Another expert who argues autism is not new is Dr. Darold Treffert, a Wisconsin
psychiatrist who has worked with autistic patients for decades.
"Autistic disorder did not begin with Kanner's description of it in 1943 any
more than Down's syndrome began with (Dr. Landon Down's) description of it in
1887," Treffert says in an e-mail message. In fact, he says, Down identified
several children who today would be described as autistic.
But the incidence could have increased due to new factors, Treffert continues.
His belief that autism has long existed "does not negate any present
investigations of the etiology (cause) of autistic disorder, including the role
of environmental or heavy metal factors."
Despite those assertions, there is a distinct lack of observed cases before 1930
-- less than a handful in the United States, each of which might have had
autistic symptoms but differ in many ways from Kanner's original 11.
A chemical connection might also help explain why Kanner, in Baltimore, first
described the disorder: He happened to be located near government researchers
working with cutting-edge chemicals. Frederick L. Wellman did advanced work for
the federal government in suburban Maryland, literally on the road to Baltimore,
while the father of Case 8 was "a chemist and law school graduate at the
government Patent Office," another Washington agency. Other cases appear to have
been local, based on the way they were first noticed or on their parents'
occupations -- one mother, a pediatrician, became a Maryland public-health
officer. Case 4 was the son of a mining engineer, which also suggests the
possibility of some environmental link. (It is unclear why Kanner, who died in
1981, arranged the first 11 cases in the order he did, which is not
chronological.)
Ricci King, a Washington state autism advocate, says she has long noticed a
connection between farm backgrounds and autism, especially in children who never
had been vaccinated. That fits with a link to fungicides, she says.
"For some reason in the back of my brain I was filing the fact that some of
these parents were farmers, or lived near farm communities," says King, who has
a 14-year-old son, Robert Hedequist, with autism and moderates an international
autism biomedical discussion group for parents and professionals, ABMD@yahoogroups.com.
"A light bulb went off for me at a conference in Portland (Ore.) in 2001 where I
met a mother of five children, all on the spectrum, all unvaccinated," King
recalls in an interview. "She was from eastern Washington, she came from a
family of farmers, and her husband was a farmer as well. All five of her
children had regressive autism. Meeting her changed the way I look at autism,
and prompted me to explore the connection."
King says her "jaw literally dropped" when presented with the idea that mercury
in fungicides could link Kanner's early cases. "It would be hard to convince me
that there isn't a connection," she says.
Again, that's speculation. But mercury, like many toxins, can linger in the
environment and could theoretically be a risk for decades via earth, air and
water. At the Beltsville center where Frederick L. Wellman experimented with
mercury fungicides in the 1930s -- and where research on their agricultural uses
presumably ended decades ago -- mercury concentrations remained up to 2,000
times the U.S. average, according to a 1995 Coastal Hazardous Waste Site Review
by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
After leaving Beltsville in 1943, Wellman became head of the Department of Plant
Pathology and Botany at the U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station at the
University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, making frequent forays around the world.
The bespectacled scientist published several books as well as dozens of
scientific papers. He founded the Caribbean Division of the American
Phytopathological Society.
His career was his calling. The first chapter in his 1974 book "Plant Diseases
-- An Introduction for the Layman" begins with a stark depiction of what can
happen without the contributions of plant pathologists.
"There are many plant diseases that have destroyed important food crops causing
poverty, misery, hunger, and, finally, the ugliest thing in all human
experience: famine," he wrote. "I have seen and smelled villages in the last
stages of famine. ... To me, privileged, fed, and protected, the sight seemed an
impossibility."
Wellman became the world's leading authority on a fungus called Hemileia
vastatrix, the cause of coffee rust disease. Again, mercury was part of the
picture. He wrote:
"Coffee seed is covered with a tough parchment-like shell and this may be washed
and disinfected with strong chemicals. Solutions of formaldehyde, strong
chlorides, salts of mercury and salts of copper can all be used and after half
an hour of soaking, the treated seed rinsed in water."
While Wellman made a name for himself in plant pathology, Leo Kanner did the
same in the field he named. Johns Hopkins became a "clearinghouse" for autism
cases from as far away as South Africa. By 1958, he had files on 150 autistic
children.
In 1971 Kanner wrote a follow-up paper on the first 11 children. "Twenty-eight
years have elapsed since then. ... The patients were between 2 and 8 years old
when first seen at the Children's Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins
Hospital.
"What has become of them?" he asked. "What is their present status?"
Frederick W. was one of just two children whose outcome he considered favorable,
Kanner said (Case 1 from Forest, Miss., was the other). In 1962, officials at
the Maryland institution where Frederick W. lived wrote:
"He is, at 26 years, a passive, likeable boy whose chief interest is music. He
is able to follow the routine and, though he lives chiefly within his own world,
he enjoys those group activities which are of particular interest to him. He was
a member of the chorus in the Parents' Day program and was in charge of the loud
speaker at the annual carnival. He went on weekend trips to town unaccompanied
and made necessary purchases independently."
Two years later the Wellmans took their son out of that institution and brought
him to live with them in Puerto Rico. Their son "picked up a lot of Spanish and
worked out a schedule of studying language lessons on records at 4 o'clock every
afternoon," they told Kanner.
Frederick L. Wellman soon retired from his Puerto Rican post, and the family
moved to Raleigh, where he became a visiting professor at North Carolina State.
"We settled into a new home and (Frederick) did his part in it," the Wellmans
wrote Kanner. "He has become acquainted with the neighbors and sometimes makes
calls on them. We tried him out in the County Sheltered Workshop and Vocational
Training Center. He took right to it, made friends with the teachers, and helped
with some of the trainees. Through his relationship there, he took up bowling
and he does pretty well."
Frederick L. Wellman retired from N.C. State in 1970. He, his wife and their son
lived in an apartment building until the elder Wellmans died in the 1990s;
Frederick W. turns 71 in May.
A man who twice answered the intercom at his current residence said it was a
wrong number. A letter sent to his address received no response.
So the last word must come from Kanner's follow-up more than a quarter-century
ago.
In 1969, Frederick W. began working at the National Air Pollution
Administration, now part of the Environmental Protection Agency, doing tasks
like running a copy machine. His boss wrote in 1970 that he "is an outstanding
employee by any standard."
Mark Blaxill of SafeMinds says the new information about Frederick W. and the
other early cases is a call to action.
"It's important not to make overly large claims from this evidence, but we need
to take seriously the early environmental clues like this," he says. "Johns
Hopkins has detailed data on the first couple of hundred Kanner patients.
Perhaps there are more clues in that sample, like an undiscovered environmental
cluster, that no one has considered before.
"I would hope that Hopkins might consider opening up those case files and,
instead of focusing on the parents, start thinking about where these families
lived and what the parents' occupational exposures might have been."
Researcher Beverly Crawford contributed to this story.
E-mail: dolmsted@upi.com
|
|