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Published: Dec. 19, 2005 at 1:16 PM
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor
In this -- the second of three parts recounting our reporting on autism since
the start of the year -- we revisit the first child ever diagnosed with the
disorder.
On a sweltering late August morning we climbed the stairs to a second-floor law
office in a small town in
Mississippi. We introduced
ourselves to the brother of Donald T., the first person ever diagnosed with
autism.
Donald was born in 1933; he came to the attention of the medical world in 1938,
when his parents took him to see the renowned child psychiatrist Leo Kanner at
Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore. Over the next four years Kanner saw 10 more children exhibiting the
same unique behavior syndrome, and in 1943 he introduced the disorder in an
article titled, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact."
While Kanner did not identify Donald by his full name, we were able to determine
his identity and learned he was still alive at age 71. That's what brought us to
his brother's office -- looking for clues to the roots and rise of a devastating
disorder that seemed rare when Donald was born, but now affects 1 in every 166
U.S. children.
Donald, his brother told us, was out of town. But speaking in a courtly,
deliberate manner and without any prompting on our part, he told a remarkable
story: At age 12 Donald had been living with a nearby farm couple. "One February
day, I think it was, they came to (town) with Don. He had a bad fever and was
obviously sick." His joints were swollen and stiff, his brother said.
"My father and mother took him to all various places for examination -- they
went to Mayo Clinic, brought him back. He lost his appetite and was terribly
emaciated. But anyway, my father was talking to a doctor (in a nearby town) he
happened to run into and said, 'It looks like Don is getting ready to die.'"
The doctor said, "What you're describing sounds like a rare case of juvenile
arthritis." Diagnosis in hand, his parents took Donald to the eminent Campbell
Clinic in Memphis, where he was treated with the then-standard remedy, gold
salts. "He just had a miraculous response to the medicine," Donald's brother
said. "The pain in his joints went away."
And here's the kicker: "When he was finally released the nervous condition he
was formerly afflicted with was gone. The proclivity toward excitability and
extreme nervousness had all but cleared up." He also became "more social."
In other words, Donald got a lot better. He went on to college, joined a
fraternity, worked at a bank, owns a house, drives a car, belongs to the Kiwanis
and the Presbyterian Church and plays a good game of golf despite one fused
knuckle left over from the arthritis attack.
And now, in retirement, he travels the world. That explained why he wasn't in
town -- he was off having a good time. Last stop: Italy. Favorite city:
Istanbul. Because Donald did
not respond to a request for an interview made through his brother, we are not
identifying him at this time.
Most of the rest of the first 11 children identified by Leo Kanner depended for
the rest of their lives on the kindnesses of strangers: They lived in back wards
or, if they were lucky, group homes or other sheltered arrangements.
Donald's brother told us Johns Hopkins researchers have been in touch every
decade to check on Donald, but we're not aware of any published accounts of
Donald's improvement following the gold-salts treatment -- something his brother
volunteered to us in a half hour of conversation.
Regardless, the fate of the first child ever diagnosed with the disorder seems
more relevant today than ever before. One reason: Some parents, under the
guidance of several hundred doctors who have broken away from the medical
mainstream, are trying a variety of medical interventions to treat their
autistic children.
These range from restrictive diets to cod-liver oil to methyl B-12 shots to the
most controversial technique, called chelation (key-LAY-shun). This involves
giving a child a drug -- orally, via creams or in some cases, intravenously --
that is designed to pull heavy metals, in particular mercury, from the body. The
process carries risks: Earlier this year a 5-year-old autistic child died while
undergoing intravenous chelation in Pennsylvania.
The theory behind it -- rejected by federal health authorities and most
scientists -- is that in most cases autism is actually a form of mercury
poisoning. The mercury in question came from some childhood immunizations, which
beginning around 1930 contained an ethyl-mercury preservative called thimerosal.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
the American Academy of Pediatrics and other experts say that concern is
unfounded, but they recommended in 1999 that it be phased out of childhood
vaccines in the United States as a precaution.
The questions raised by Donald's improvement are both simple and potentially
significant: Did the gold-salts treatment alleviate his autistic symptoms, and
if so, why?
Did the juvenile arthritis -- an autoimmune condition -- and the autism improve
markedly at the same time because both were responses to a toxic exposure? Did
the gold salts help pull mercury from Donald's body, and/or reduce an
inflammatory immune response in his brain? Or is it all coincidence, or a memory
blurred by the passage of 59 years?
Such questions, or course, are speculative, and some readers have criticized us
for even asking them, given the assurances of the CDC and medical groups and the
importance of immunizations in preventing infectious disease.
Wrote one reader over the weekend: "I can't morally just stand by and watch you
exacerbate a situation where children are dying because fearful mothers didn't
vaccinate. ... It is doubly sad when you consider that instead of your causing
the deaths of children, you could have used your bully pulpit to do something
good for autistic children."
But something good did seem to happen to one autistic child who was about to
die: Donald T. All we're interested in is, why?
In the new year we'll look more closely at whether chelation and other
treatments appear effective. First, though, we'll wrap up this review by
recounting our efforts to find autism in U.S. children who have never been
vaccinated.
E-mail: dolmsted@upi.com
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