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Published: May 17, 2006 at 1:33 PM
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Science Writer
WASHINGTON, May 17 (UPI) -- In 1942 a 12-month-old child named Richard M. got a
live-virus smallpox vaccination that triggered a fever and diarrhea from which
he recovered "in somewhat less than a week."
We know about Richard because he is Case 3 in psychiatrist Leo Kanner's landmark
study, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact," which alerted the world to
a condition that differed "markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far."
Autism.
Kanner's paper appeared in 1943 in the quaintly named journal The Nervous Child.
Kanner believed autism was "inborn," present from birth. But if any of his
detailed case histories suggest otherwise, it is Richard M.
There is no mention of "going backward" by the parents of the other 10 children,
making Richard the first plausibly regressive case of autism ever described in
medical literature.
Thirty-eight years later, in 1976, an article appeared in a German medical
journal under the title "Autistiches Syndrom (Kanner) und Pockenschutzimpfung."
Translation: Autistic Syndrome (Kanner) and Vaccination against Smallpox.
The English abstract reads:
"3-4 weeks following an otherwise uncomplicated first vaccination against
smallpox a boy, then aged 15 months ... gradually developed a complete Kanner
syndrome. The question whether vaccination and early infantile autism might be
connected is being discussed. A causal relationship is considered extremely
unlikely. But vaccination is recognized as having a starter function for the
onset of autism."
U.S. health authorities emphatically reject the idea of any such "starter
function" -- they cite multiple studies that have found no cause-and-effect
relationship whatsoever between immunizations and autism.
But as outlined in earlier articles in this series, several parents of children
6 and under in the Washington state capital of Olympia are concerned about just
such a connection. They point to an association between unusual chickenpox
histories in families clustered in one Olympia neighborhood; close timing of
their child's live-virus chickenpox and measles-mumps-rubella shots, and the
onset of regressive autism.
Two of the children were in clinical trials of Merck & Co. vaccines that
involved investigational chickenpox formulations. One of those vaccines, ProQuad,
was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last September. A combined
chickenpox-MMR immunization, it contains about 10 times more chickenpox vaccine
than the standalone Merck chickenpox shot, Varivax.
Several of the autistic Olympia children, coincidentally or not, got physically
sick soon after those vaccinations, pointing to possible problems with their
immune system's handling of the attenuated (weakened) live viruses.
A striking case in point is Ryan Boe, who at age 18 months got four shots at one
office visit including Varivax. (Ryan got his MMR shot two months earlier.)
Ryan's mother, Lisa Boe, had an unusual case of chickenpox as a child, with only
one "pock" appearing rather than the typical chickenpox pattern. But she
definitely has had it, because she now tests immune.
Ryan's father, Eric, has a sister who was diagnosed with shingles when she was
19. Shingles, the reactivated form of the chickenpox virus, painfully inflames
nerve endings under the skin. It typically affects older people and those with
weakened immune systems.
Like Richard M. 63 years earlier, Ryan got sick right after his shots. Like the
"pockenschutzimpfung" child in Germany 30 years ago, Ryan's behavior began
changing within the month.
"Before we could leave the office he had an allergic reaction where he broke out
in hives on his legs where they'd given him the shots," Ryan's mother recalls
about that day -- Nov. 3, 2003. "And then I think it was about two or three
hours later after leaving the doctor's office that he started running a fever.
"It went up to 105 and it lasted for five days. We were giving him Tylenol and
Motrin, and as soon as those two things would run out he would spike right back
up. He was very lethargic.
"Within a month after that is when you could look at pictures and start seeing
him have no expression," Lisa said. "We got pictures of going to look at
Christmas trees and we had them developed right at Christmastime and my mom
said, 'There's no expression.'
"I remember we went down for Christmas and I started saying to my mom, 'Wow,
he's just different.'"
On Christmas morning, the only toy that interested Ryan was a Thomas the Train
windmill. "He picked it up and just spun it. That was all he wanted to do. We
have all these pictures and he's just staring at the windmill."
"At the end of that vacation, Christmas break, my mom said, 'You need to go back
to the doctor, something's really wrong here.' And people who hadn't seen him
since that summer said, 'Whoa, he was just the happiest baby, and so much
expression.
"'And look at him -- he looks so, just, lost.'"
Because autism is usually first noticed in the second year of life, it's easy to
mistakenly connect it to childhood immunizations given at that age, health
authorities say.
The American Academy of Pediatrics refers those with such concerns to the
National Network for Immunization Information, which it helps fund. Under
"Vaccine Safety: Cause or Coincidence," the NNII Web site (immunizationinfo.org)
states:
"Many vaccines are given to children at the ages when developmental and other
problems are being recognized for the first time. Because something happened at
about the same time that a vaccine was given does not mean that the vaccine
caused the problem. ...
"Although vaccines have saved millions of lives around the world, some have
blamed them for causing conditions that are not completely understood despite
the fact that there is no scientific evidence that the vaccines caused the
condition -- for example, asthma, autism, diabetes type 1, multiple sclerosis,
and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) among others."
Parents are also told that signs usually were present from birth but that they
missed them.
Lisa Boe said the idea that something was even subtly wrong with Ryan in his
first year of life is nonsense, as confirmed by the observations of other family
members and friends. After Ryan's diagnosis, experts began telling her that
subtle clues probably had been there all along, "and you get used to how your
child is now, and so you think OK, well maybe he has been like this.
"But then I start putting away toys and I think no, he used to play with this,
appropriately," Lisa said. "He was riding his horsy around.
"And so I started finding out more about autism and the shots, and looking back
at when we started seeing the problems, and I was like, well, those are the
shots that he had, and that's when we started seeing the problem.
"After the shots, he was gone."
This series on the roots and rise of autism welcomes reader comment. The entire
series can be accessed at theageofautism.com. E-mail: dolmsted@upi.com
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